Hiya. So, I have a lot of stuff that I need to be writing about. Unfortunately, I spent almost a week on vacation in the city and managed to come back with a cold that kicked my ass for the better part of a week, so progress has been slow on that. The post on Twin Peaks: The Return is coming, but there's a lot to talk about and I need to be at full strength to talk about it. Another funny thing happened on my vacation. A secret members-only forum, which had existed for 19 years and I'd been a part of for 15 of them, unexpectedly shut down. It's real end of an era stuff, and a little part of my internal landscape that I mourn, but so it goes. Then, just this morning, I remembered a thing I did on that forum. In late September 2021, just before the release of Metroid Dread, I made a thread and ranked every mainline Metroid game. I always meant to archive and repost that ranking here sometime, but the timing never worked out. Well, now that the forum is about to erode to dust, I suppose it's now or never. The style of writing is a little different than usual. Not only are we looking at words from my past self of late 2021, but it's being written on a completely different forum. The way I carry myself in writing may feel a little different, and there's some justifying for myself in a way that I probably wouldn't do if I just wrote this on the blog originally. Metroid Dread was also brand new when I wrote what I wrote about it, after all the other entries on the list, and I'd only beaten it one time. I also spoil the shit out of it, so if you've not gotten to it in that year and a half, be wary. I've still only beaten it one time, so keep all that in mind. Alright. Take it away, past me.
---FROM HERE ON ARE THE WORDS OF THE ME OF SEPTEMBER 2021---
-Mainline Metroid games only. No Prime. The Prime games are good shit, don't get me wrong, but I do not have the time to replay them or watch 20 hours of longplays to refamiliarize myself with them.
-Official games only. No, I'm not talking about AM2R in this topic.
-I am ranking the games based on least to most personal favorite. The key word there being personal. This is not an objective project in any sense of the word.
-While very good games that will be high on the list, neither Super Metroid nor Zero Mission will be #1 on the list. I temper your expectations with this now so you can accept that fact on your own terms upfront, and do with this knowledge of my contrarianism what you will.
Well then. Let's rip the band-aid off and deal with the bullshit I had to spend my morning rewriting about, because you can damn well guess what's the lowest-ranking game on the list.
#8- Metroid: Other M
Then the video game came out. People did not like it very much! Understatement of the century, I know, but it's true. I remember being unable to believe it. The new Metroid game came out and it's bad?? No no. Can't be true. A couple of months later, I borrowed a copy from a friend of mine who had played it and loved it. So it was that I delved into Metroid Other M, and so it was that I came to agree with the critical consensus. Yes, it's bad. Yes, its plot is bad. Its writing is bad. Its voice acting is infamous in ways that could have been avoided. Even its gameplay, cool-looking as it may be, manages to be bad thanks to its insistence on pointing for things like missile firing or the asinine pixel hunt segments in the middle of cutscenes. I could go on at length. Thousands before me have done so, and thousands after me will again. Let's get to the heart of the matter. The real tragedy at the end of it all, the solemn truth which has lived in my soul 11 years now.
I was actually vibing with the damn thing until Ridley. That's right. It was in spite of these flaws, certainly, but I was curious. Invested, even. There was a real sense of mystery and dread on board this game's space station. A motherfucker called the Deleter tried to kill me with a space forklift and I was excited! Oh shit, there's a traitor on board! Who is it? Who else will they pick off? How will I confront them and stop them in the end? Amidst it all, I held some glimmer of hope and investment in this fucked-up story told in a terrible way. That was my fatal flaw, my ultimate mistake. I didn't realize the game hated me. Yes, Other M hated me. It took me years to realize it, but I did. I wrote about it as soon as I realized this, and the core of this explanation is a refined version of that old blog post, but the short of it is Other M is a Narrative which undercuts its own Gameplay.
The obvious example of this is the "authorization" mechanic, wherein you have all the gear needed to be a super-powered badass but voluntarily restrain yourself from using it to try and impress Adam or something. Your agency as a player, robbed from you by the narrative, no matter how asinine the reason; god knows how much digital ink has been spilled trying to explain the gameplay clash of "a thrilling and tense hell run through a volcanic area where you're at risk of death until you get the Varia Suit" with the narrative of "Samus literally does not turn on the thing she already has to save herself from boiling alive until Adam says she can". It actively boggles the mind. The contradiction sticks in your head. It doesn't make any fucking sense. It could have been papered over in an infinity of ways, but they didn't even make an attempt. The narrative simply does not give a shit. You can poke at the authorization bullshit like this in just about every scene where it comes up, but I don't want to do that. Let's close off with the moment in which the Narrative finally murders any sense of Gameplay, repeatedly, and gives you the finger. It starts with Ridley.
I am trying very hard to ignore the cutscene before this fight. You know it, I know it, we're not talking about it. I'm not even talking about the fight itself, which is an adequate fight for the game it's in I guess. No, it's what comes after. A chain of events that removes any and all agency at behest of the Narrative, both for Samus as a character and you as a player holding a Wii remote. Your buddy got killed by Ridley because you froze! Well, at least you and Samus will get catharsis later in the game when you rematch Ridley and get your revenge! Oh, Ridley was killed offscreen. Well, there's that Deleter who tried to kill you with a forklift and murdered some of those squadmates of yours! We can get him back for that and expose his crimes! Oh, he was killed offscreen. Ah, an entire sector of super-Metroids! Time to go in there and take them out! Oh, Adam shoots you in the back to blow it up for you with a brave sacrifice. The game literally and figuratively shoots Samus/you in the back. Even the final boss battle amounts to fucking pointing at her so a cutscene can defeat her for you. The only thing you get to kill yourself in this segment is a Metroid Queen, and even that pulls some last-minute horseshit where you die over and over until you suddenly realize the game unlocked your Power Bombs for you without telling you. I am honestly surprised MB doesn't show up to steal the final kill to complete the trifecta.
That's Other M. That's the game I played, the evil game. The only Metroid game I actively dislike to this day. Amidst its cacophony of other flaws, that's what it did to me. It let me struggle to vibe with it before kicking my chair out from under me and taking it all away. It is a video game that had active contempt for me playing it, and did everything it could to undercut me playing it. In a way, it's almost like one of those self-aware genre-critical games a la Undertale or Spec Ops: The Line. Say what you will about those games, but at the very least they had a point to calling you out on how you played them. The points were simple stuff like "hey maybe don't choose murder right out the gate" or "war is bad", but they were there. They exist in the text, you can grapple with them or debate them or analyze them. Other M fucks with you for no reason other than it wants to tell the story of Samus being fucked with and having all her agency taken away. It could easily have worked in harmony with that in some respects, but it didn't even try. It just said "no, fuck you" and pissed everyone off at once.
This isn't a game, it's a goddamned book. And a shitty one, at that.
#7- Metroid: Samus Returns
In light of all that, Nintendo gave us an equal double whammy in summer 2016. The one-two punch of "hey we're making Metroid Prime 4 for Switch" and "HEY MOTHERFUCKERS WE GOT OUR OWN METROID II REMAKE COMING IN THREE MONTHS". Well, holy shit. I bought it in fall 2017, played it, and really enjoyed it. Gave it a glowing sort of review at the time too. I had fun with it! It's a good video game! I replayed it about a year or two ago, and well... A lot of its luster had waned now that it wasn't shiny and new, hence it being this far back. What's left is a functional and neat Metroid game that kind of does its own thing in some places, but not one of my favorites.
Remaking Metroid II is a tricky balancing act. It's a game not without its flaws, but it has its unique charms and I'll be talking about them at length soon enough. It's not a game, I feel, you can just slap a big old lathering of Super Metroid onto to "Make It Like One Of The Good Ones" without losing something in the process. Samus Returns, then, does a surprisingly decent job at avoiding this pitfall. It does it by making its additions unique charms of its own, charms you can't get by just firing up Super Metroid again. (I say unique charms, but it's looking like Dread has borrowed a couple of them for its own, so one wonders how well this statement will age.)
The big three new additions are free aiming, melee counters, and the Aether powerups. The latter of those are just interesting new toys to play with to make new obstacles to overcome and explore and get powerups through, and the scanning one is also a real help for hunting stuff down. Again, it's not quite like another Metroid game, so it's welcome. Free aiming and counters completely re-textualize the feel and flow of the basic Metroid II structure. No longer are the numerous Metroid forms you hunt down just missile sponges you have to fight over ground whose levels of evenness are determined by how much of an asshole the map designer was being that day at his computer. They're little boss battles in and of themselves that you have to learn, get the timing of, and counter to deal the damage you need to win. I dig it!
The problem comes with the reliance on that mechanic. On my replay I wanted to get the best ending. I didn't make the time, partly because I didn't have the map memorized, and partly because the counter system just slowed the early game down for me. It isn't just the big Metroids who need to get smacked by your arm cannon to deal a decent bit of damage; it's all the little enemies along the way. In the early game, half the enemies just beeline for you and you don't have the offensive power yet to take them out before they bonk you. You practically have to counter, and that just slows shit down. It was a pain in the ass, but not an intricate pain in the ass that accentuated the experience. It was just a pain in the ass.
Then there's the final boss. The Metroid Queen's a solid and cool boss fight, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about Ridley showing up out of nowhere right at the end. I'm of two minds on this. Since it's here, it is a difficult fight that puts your powers to the test and has some real dynamic phases and all that. It is cool. At the same time, I feel actively pandered to by this. It feels like shoving a square peg in a round hole, correcting Metroid II for its lack of Ridley. Oh, It's A Metroid Game, We Have To Have A Ridley Fight In It! If there's one thing that drives me up the wall in media, it's the sensation of something forcibly trying to light up my memories in reverence to reference. So, as cool as the fight was, that personal pet peeve put me off.
In the end, it's fine. A good game but I'm a weirdo and if I were feeling the urge to go back to the Metroid II Experience I'd likely pass this one up, slap in the old black and white Game Boy game, and deal with it as it is. Nevertheless, I appreciate its interesting innovations. I'm especially interested in how such things are ported over to Dread. Dread is looking, for all the world, like a fusion of... well, Fusion (hah) and Samus Returns, with even more new and wild shit thrown in to innovate and interest. I look forward to it, and can't help but thank Samus Returns for bringing some of those to the table in the first place.
Oh, and Diggernaut? More like FUCKERNAUT--
#6- Metroid II: Return Of Samus
A little while ago, a friend of mine was telling me about the Gus Von Sant remake of Psycho and how it was worse than the original and added in extra bullshit like masturbation scenes. Far be it from me to suggest that the Metroid II remakes equate to jerking off, but it does raise an interesting thought about how, even with the lavish attention to detail and recreation, there's an essential something about the original film that can't be captured in a remake no matter how much it tries to literally match its predecessor. That's kind of how I feel about Metroid II. There's something trapped in this old black-and-white Game Boy game, like a fly trapped in amber. What is it? Let's see if I can pinpoint it personally.
This is the first game on the list that properly has atmospheric horror elements. Other M is just a hot mess that can't entertain, let alone scare. Samus Returns is remembered in my mind as more of a majestic ambiance, not unlike a Prime game. Its SR388 is pretty and lush and colorful. The SR388 of Metroid II is not that. SR388 is a monochromatic hellhole, a maze of twisty little passages all alike. If you're playing it on a Game Boy Color or something then you get deep blue caves, sure, but this place isn't pretty. It's a dark cave. You're spelunking throughout this whole game, a bug hunt inside an ant's nest except the ants are the deadliest creatures in the galaxy and they're fucking evolving into new forms to shred your face.
Metroid has always worn its Alien inspiration on its sleeve, what with Ridley and all, but this game is the closest it comes to being Aliens. Yes, superficially it's a bug hunt like that movie, but the game more closely resembles that bit from the movie where the Marines first land on the planet and are exploring to figure out what the fuck happened before the aliens attack and all hell breaks loose. It's one of the most tense parts of that movie, it really leans into its horror roots as opposed to the horror/action hybrid of the rest of the movie, and I love it. As you're exploring this dank cave, you never quite know when you're going to encounter a Metroid. The game will warn you with discarded husks and put you on high alert, but you never quite know if the path you're on leads to an upgrade or a monster.
When you do find a monster Metroid, another strength of the game shines through; the sound design. The game does have a jaunty little tune when you first start out, but it plays its hand as soon as you turn on the Game Boy and just get ambient pings. When you finally do encounter one of the 40-odd Metroids in the game, the musical stings become straight-up jumpscare levels, just a shrieking that can hardly be called music anymore. It's just noise howling at you with inhuman beeps and boops as some fucking nightmare creature tries to kill you. The deeper you go into this cave, the more the music descends into hellscape booping. It's unnerving, unsettling, and goddamned terrifying.
A simultaneous strength and weakness of the game, then, is its scope. This game's way the fuck bigger than the original, which kept itself to straight shot corridors scrolling in one of two directions. Metroid II expands this with a vast underground, caverns that are several screens high with all sorts of ledges and nooks and crannies. As it expands this, it shrinks down since it's only 160x144 pixels. You are but a tiny square in a massive space, and you have no in-game map to help you. Even if you have a map, some of the internal space of this planet doesn't make any sense. The introduction of the Spider Ball, while a neat conceptual power-up, also means you are going to have to crawl every inch of these massive cave walls. It wears you down after a while! It gets dangerously close to being a pain in the ass like Samus Returns and the counter reliance in early game, but at least you have the option to just Google a map or something in this day and age.
In the end, this is the first game on the list I am really beginning to vibe with. It scratches my atmospheric horror itch without forcing me to play an actual survival horror game. As a child of the Game Boy, I'm inclined to have a nostalgic love for games of this particular style and vintage. This is even, technically, the first Metroid game I ever played, though at the time I just remembered it as "that game with the caves". There's something about the way the whole package comes together that still manages to surpass the attempts to modernize it, and it remains a key lynchpin in the Metroid series, both plot-wise and gameplay-wise. It's a good video game, is what I'm sayin'.
#5- Metroid Dread
It's a strange beast, this game: simultaneously Metroid 5 and Metroid: Samus Returns 2. That dual sense permeates the whole thing. It is at once a followup on Fusion and a followup to Samus Returns, both in plot and in mechanics. Saving the plot for now, let's talk about those mechanics. In 2017 I appreciated the uniqueness of Samus Returns, with its free aiming and countering, even if I felt the countering slowed the game down a bit as it made every enemy beeline for you before you could kill it with a beam in early game. Dread feels better about it, and I think part of this is because I played with a controller instead of teeny 3DS buttons, so using the middle of my thumb to hit X in a pinch felt better. More to it, you really can just beam the beeliners early game if need be. Mid-to-late game is when countering becomes more of a needed skill. I appreciate that upgrade.
Overall, the switch to Switch works better for Mercurysteam Metroid. This game just felt a little better than I remember Samus Returns being... to a point. Before I complain, more praise. I got lost in this game. It doesn't have waypoints or a CPU telling you to go here. I had to parse out where I hadn't explored yet, remember shit, and go there with my new powerups. I appreciate that freedom to let me get stuck, lost in these twisty passages. That's peak Metroid to me. Also peak Metroid is being scared out of my fucking mind at spooky bullshit, which brings us to the EMMI. Fusion took an entire game and made it about being chased by an unkillable badass who can murder you in a second before you defeated them cathartically at the end. Dread plays this cycle out seven times for each robot, and it just about works. Stealthily dodge the robots, run from them while screaming, get upgrades, find the Gun That Kills The Robots, and blast their fucking heads off. Rinse and repeat seven times for a wild cycle of fear and catharsis.
Even so, parts of this cycle pissed me off. The robots catching you, for one. The penalty's ways severe, with two counter QTEs that may as well be frame fucking perfect. Yeah, you got me, time to pray to God I hit X exactly right. The checkpointing is forgiving, but it still doesn't feel good to mess this up. I nailed the second QTE exactly twice over the whole run. It's that tight. The whole game is pretty goddamned difficult. Recency bias may be at play here, but I'd call it the hardest Metroid game in terms of combat. Mixing Fusion and Samus Returns results in bosses you really have to learn the timing windows for, because they melt your health if you touch them. To say nothing of the final boss, who's on the middle range of Hard Fucking Video Game Bosses, and also plays into that story a little. Oh God. Let's talk about that.
I do like the move back to mostly silent protagonist for Samus, of course. She has one voiced line in the game and it's in Chozodian. The game takes an action speaks louder than words approach for Samus, and you can tell what she's feeling and thinking by her body language. Then we have the whole Chozo warrior angle. This is Mercurysteam following up on the added seeds they dropped in Samus Returns, but it has the unfortunate side effect of making that fannish erasure of the original Game Boy game kind of canon. Metroid 5 is following up on shit they added in the remake. The remake's the canon tale now. That upsets me, even if canon is just made-up bullshit. As for Raven Beak, our main antagonist... he's Samus's dad. He's Samus's shitty bird dad. No word of a lie, his Chozo DNA's in Samus and he calls her his daughter. There's a scene right before the last fight where you think you're talking to computer Adam but it's really Raven Beak, where he says "follow my orders, disobedience will not be tolerated" and Samus replies by shooting the computer in the face. It almost feels like a piss take at Other M, and yet Sakamoto is in the credits. IS this wishful thinking?
ANYWAY THEN YOU TURN INTO A FUCKING METROID, SUCK YOUR SHITTY BIRD DAD'S SOUL OUT OF HIS BODY, AND MELT HIS CRONENBERGIAN X-INFECTED MONSTER BODY WITH A FUCKING LASER. Holy shit. The original game's Metroids were a mysterious nightmare monster that posed a threat to the universe. Now Samus is the last Metroid, a blood-soaked beast in the shape of a woman with a Cronenbergian Metroid suit of her own. Some deus ex machina at the end from your good bird dad fixes this, but wow. Metroid Dread is some interesting shit. Mechanically, it's pretty good. A refinement of Samus Returns, and a return to form. It's not afraid to bare its monstrous teeth, though, both in plot and story. The one horrific thing it does at the end though, at least for a fan of the janky originals like I am? A montage of cards for the mainline series thus far. Instead of Metroid 1 and 2, it's Zero Mission and Samus Returns. The remakes have been canonized, despite Nintendo pushing you to play the original on Switch Online. Metroid Dread has made those original beep-boopy pieces of jank I love so much into historical curiosities, dead and buried.
Happy 35th anniversary.
#4- Metroid Fusion
It's kind of darkly amusing how Fusion sits at the heart of this cycle of good and bad within Metroid's imperial phase during the '00s. It kickstarted things along with Prime, and Other M being a prequel to it shunted us right into Metroid's dark age of the '10s. Dread is honest to God invoking it again as a sequel, and we'll find out how that goes down in a month. I'll grant that Other M has stained Fusion's legacy just a bit, in the way any bad prequel or sequel will do for the original in some capacity. Merely a passing thought of "eugh, Christ", though. The actual game itself is one I really vibe with, and it's my job to tell you why after this clever segue.
Shit, the paragraph broke, now I'm on the spot. Okay. In a lot of ways, Fusion is a culmination of the Metroid games that came before. It inherits a little bit of everything from its predecessors. Mechanically, it plays like Super Metroid and naturally follows up on the finale of that game. It being portable and a little more linear makes it like Metroid II, and it also takes the plot of that game and straight up shows the consequence of Samus bug hunting all the Metroids to death. Oops. We fucked up. What, then, does Fusion take from the original Metroid? Interesting question, as I've not talked about the NES classic yet. Let's answer it.
Pants-shitting atmospheric terror. That's the answer. There's a bit of Metroid II there as well, but the main point I'll be making when I get to writing about Metroid classic is how damn haunted that game is. Fusion ratchets that up to 11. It may be the scariest Metroid game Nintendo, or anyone, has made. It's just you and your computer against another monster foe, but this monster foe has sentience. It's thinking and what it's thinking about is killing you the fuck dead. The X Parasites are trying to kill you in a much more proactive way than any foe we've seen in the series thus far. They multiply, they adapt, and they plot. They anticipate where you're going to go next and fuck with it to stop you. They know your weaknesses and adapt to exploit them; look at the frozen X which deliberately home in on you, knowing that cold will hurt you. You're not just fighting crab aliens, a space dragon, and a brain in a jar. You're up against the Thing crossed with the Borg, and it's your worst nightmares. Oh. No, sorry, your worst nightmares are even worse than just that.
It's you. The SA-X belongs right up there in the annals of survival horror history with Pyramid Head and... Nemesis? I don't know, I don't play much Resident Evil. What I do know is this thing is going to make you shit your fucking pants when you see it coming. From that first introduction where you see it shitblast a hole in the door and look at the camera with soulless dead eyes, you know you are utterly fucked. Your gut tells you to run, the computer tells you to run, hell, my friend who I chatted with as I played the game on emulator way back when told me to just get the fuck out of there. I didn't listen. I thought I could take it. I was wrong. You can't. This thing will shred you in three seconds flat, and multiple times the fucking inhuman dark mirror of you will be chasing you as you try to find a Morph Ball hole, a ledge, anything to get the fuck away. The single scariest moment in the game for me is the implication that there's more than one SA-X. Jesus tapdancing Christ.
Even the criticism of linearity and being led along a fixed path isn't enough to ruin the game. In the first place, Nintendo proved it could have been way worse. They put out Other M. Even without that, the X fucking with your route as you plot it means that you aren't following a straight line to the big blinking spot on your map. You've got to find alternate routes, crawl through the guts of this station, and go off the grid. You don't know where you're going, so you have to explore and find your way. You know, like Metroid. It's right there, in the game! Just because you can't sequence break it like a speedrunner doesn't make it shit! All of that, combined, makes one hell of a Metroid game. It's just shy of the top three because the other games I find really fucking good, but Fusion is pretty fucking good. Spooky as fuck, intriguing plot with some twists, and it also really leans into the horror by being kinda hard! The X hit you like a fucking truck in this game, so you really feel underpowered and uneasy for the early to mid game. God, what a mood. What a game.
#3- Super Metroid
We've talked in the thread about the different approach to atmosphere and mood in these games. The Prime games favored a lush and immersive atmosphere, whereas Fusion leaned more on terror and dread. You'd think the prior games, then, would focus on one or the other. Super Metroid manages, in the first 10 minutes, to perfectly balance both of these. From powering on the console to getting the bombs, it's a masterclass of combining both. The spooky nothingness of Ceres Station gives way to Ridley and an escape scene, before going back to spooky nothingness with empty Crateria until the reactivation of the Space Pirates and the damn fake Chozo statue. It's masterful.
The first half of Super Metroid goes on like this, balancing bombast with nothingness. Going from green Brinstar to red Brinstar, down to Norfair, and then up to Kraid's Lair where they play around with the fake Kraid gag from the original as a fake-out and then HOLY SHIT HIM BIG. It's even more of a cool back and forth down in Norfair again, leading to Crocomire and an honest-to-god jumpscare in a Metroid game. So it goes until you get up to the Wrecked Ship, which delineates the switch between this pre and post-boss fight. The Wrecked Ship is spooky nothingness until Phantoon, then it's bombastic spookiness with robots and atoms and shit as you go to get the Gravity Suit.
It's the mid-game where Super Metroid really shows its roots. For all that Super Metroid seems to refine things and add quality of life to make the first "playable" Metroid game, as some would have you believe, it definitely wears the hellish maze aspects of those first two games like a badge of honor. All it does is wait patiently for you to get used to it before shoving you into the deep end, literally. Welcome to Maridia. Shit's watery and confusing. Deal with it. I can mentally run through Super Metroid on a sort of autopilot in my head, until I hit Maridia. Then I don't know what the fuck to do. I'm sure people who have played the game to death have it down pat, but those first few times it really is a confusing maze.
From there you delve down into Lower Norfair and eventually Tourian, and Super Metroid's approach of non-verbal storytelling is worthy of a chef's kiss. Little things like the cracked Metroid jar, or finding that Metroid in the final run-up, or the entirety of the final battle. It's good shit! One gets mad at Other M for adding monologue to it in its opening cutscene. One also wonders if this was really the intent back then; imagine Metroid's creators as George Lucas types, presenting their true intent with the advent of more popular technology and actively fucking with the readings the fans built up via their fucked-up imperfect product. Scary thought. (INTRUSION FROM THE FUTURE: Well this sentence aged poorly, given the space movie thing I just wrote a few weeks ago.)
What's not a scary thought is this game, not really. It's good shit. I'm at a loss for words. Pretty good control, good item progression, atmosphere perfectly balanced. I particularly love when updated tilesets from the NES games show up, the bright colors making you sit up and take notice as contrast with the deep dark cave textures. For many, this is their favorite Metroid game, the peak of the series. Depressing as it may be to concede, they're not wrong. It's really damn good, and I can't deny that. In short:
#2- Metroid Zero Mission
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I played the game a shitload one summer, that's what changed. A friend of mine challenged themselves to get all the endings in the game, and since I hadn't played the thing in a while, I shrugged and slapped my copy into the GBA to follow suit. Having to play it eight times over with different permutations of speed, difficulty, and item acquisition changed my mind. If one were to be a little more objective, Zero Mission does indeed have the right to the claim of the best Metroid game. I learned to love it in all its ways, its aesthetic and design and approach to atmosphere. Crucially, however, I still love the original game it's remaking. The way I got out of my resentment contradiction was to go full galaxy brain. It's not me who had it wrong about Zero Mission, it's everyone else. Zero Mission is not a "replacement" for the original NES game. It is not "Metroid One: Good Edition". It's a companion piece, doing completely different and interesting things using the original game as its canvas. Hell, you even unlock the original game inside it after beating the thing! A cute bonus to compare and contrast, to see the merits of one and the other at the same time! That's my honest belief. Setting aside what makes Metroid One good for the final writeup, what makes Zero Mission sing?
For better or worse, Zero Mission takes the canvas of the original's stark minimalism and paints over it with the bombastic seen in one half of Super Metroid. The inky blackness painted over with bright backgrounds to pop out on a GBA screen. The simple yet iconic bleeps given orchestral flourish. The rigid movement replaced with a fluidity and grace that empowers. If you try and think of this game as a replacement, all this is horrible noise atop noise, a George Lucasing of what was there before. (INTRUSION FROM THE FUTURE: I swear to God, past me, stop making Special Edition comparisons or I will bonk you on the head through time.) If you take it as a companion piece, though, it's unique and vibrant and quite unlike any other Metroid game before or since. Looking at it like that, it becomes not unlike Nintendo's other early Metroid game remake. Both of them bring something new to the table rather than just slapping a bunch of Super Metroid on top. New paintings on the canvas. Zero Mission feels way better than Samus Returns, though. Samus Returns is a much slower game, but Zero Mission has you flipping around like a total badass from moment one. There's a danger here, though. In making you so damn empowered and strong, doesn't it undercut the inherent atmosphere and horror that makes these games so good?
Zero Mission's smarter than it. It saves that shit for its new content in the latter half of the game. After letting you power up to the nines and blow Mother Brain to bits, Zero Mission surprises you. It's not over yet, and not only is it not over yet but it's also taking all that shit away. What follows is the Zero Suit Samus section, and all that atmosphere and horror present in other Metroid games comes through here. It also gives you something sort of new: stealth. Sure, you had those handful of times in Fusion where you had to run from the unstoppable badass SA-X. Now you have an entire ship of Space Pirates who can kill you in three hits like SA-X could, and the goal is to keep out of sight so they don't shred you. It's tense, it's thrilling when you trigger them and are trying to get the fuck away, and it's good shit that hasn't really been done before! Then you're rewarded for getting through that by becoming even more of a badass and getting back at them in a really cathartic way! It's genius!
The greatest genius move of the game, though, is those multiple endings and play styles. Okay, sure, multiple endings have been in Metroid from day 1. Do it fast as shit and you get to see a girl in a bikini. Fusion had a few endings for mixing speed, difficulty, and item collection, but the linearity of that game meant you basically just made your choice on whether or not you were going to fuck around getting all the shit right at the end. Zero Mission has a shitload of ways to play it, and is actively designed around this. It leads to a real sort of player expression with how you choose to go about things, and the game's built around you doing that. My favorite example of this are the low% clears. Every item in the game gives you 1% towards item progression, and to get the low% ending you have to have 15% or less. You can beat the game with just 9 items. That last 6% is up to you. Do you go all in on missiles? Energy tanks? Mix in a defensive item to keep you alive? It's all on you! Even the level design accommodates you, with shortcuts you can find and get through thrown in so you can skip items. They require trickery and skill to get through, but the game's giving you the option! It's built in! Good god I love it!
That's Zero Mission. It's good. It may be the best Metroid game because of the specific mood it nails and the player agency it offers. I really hope Dread can offer something as good, if not even better, when it drops. Though it's the best Metroid game, it's not my favorite. I like the original better, and it's lurking in the code of Zero Mission, haunting the thing under the bright and flashy painting on the canvas. Buckle up, as next time I explain why that flawed mess is my favorite Metroid game.
#1- Metroid
Before that, let's snipe every rough around the edges bit of this game for what it is. No, you can't shoot down. Yes, there's spots where the game goes full cryptic and hides its path forward via bombing nondescript parts of the floor. No, there's no map to help you navigate so you either have to shell out for a guide or memorize/map that shit out yourself like a stellar cartographer. No, there's no beam stacking, so you can effectively completely fuck yourself over by taking the Wave Beam into the final area. (Tourian can be done with the Wave Beam, but the effort of learning how to dodge all those fucking Metroids will drive you crazy and restarting the game is probably a better use of your time.) Yes, missiles are basically really finicky keys that are a scarcity in early game and an almost never-needed plentity mid to late game. And yes, starting every fresh play session with 30 energy and farming for 10 minutes just to be able to play the game is pretty annoying. So yeah. Game's rough as fuck, an unpolished first go at a concept that would later be refined to (arguable) perfection. And I still love the fuck out of it. Why?
Before I get into that, a simple revelation. You don't need to jam this fucker into a Super Metroid-shaped round hole to beat it into homogenization. Everything quote-unquote "wrong with it" can be fixed with some simple tweaking. Hell, some ROM hackers have done just that. For my money, I fiddled with a Lua script once that did a lot of the same, and it's a fun quality of life improvement. More to the point, banging it into that shape misses something about it. For years I thought Zero Mission missed it, but it just did it in a different form. What, then, of the original Metroid's form? A lot of my love for it is subjective nostalgia. The NES Metroid evokes a specific mood, a series of emotions and feelings I just don't get from any other Metroid game. Part of that's nostalgia, and let's dedicate some time to that.
There's a paradox at play here. Metroid NES is comforting, yet uncomforting. My comfort with it stems entirely from my personal connection. Just the music and graphics alone can take me back. The jaunty Brinstar tune that makes me think of jumping up a vertical shaft on Christmas morning. Norfair's theme, a snow day where I'm actively charting my own map and finding a whole bunch of missiles. Summer vacation, wondering how in the fuck I'm supposed to bomb jump up that tall pillar in Ridley's Lair, not realizing there's another way around. And then there's Kraid's Lair. Kraid's Lair, which has one of my favorite chiptunes on the NES. Kraid's Lair, a black and grey hellscape where the music perfectly illustrates what I want to talk about next.
Metroid is haunted. Metroid is a bleak, isolating, often times minimalist space horror experience. It's just you, your reflexes, a bunch of rough mechanics, and some spooky chiptunes. You can almost galaxy brain yourself into understanding the flaws as strengths instead of weaknesses. Think of it this way. Metroid NES is a bleak and isolating game where you're all alone, outnumbered, outgunned at the beginning, and have to fight your way through deadly enemies and confusing mechanics. Metroid NES is a proto-survival horror game. If we look at it like that, suddenly a lot of those flaws make sense. Ammo's scarce at the beginning so you have to use your shots carefully. With 30 energy you can be killed in a few hits, so you either need to spend time to get health or carefully avoid the foes in your way as you explore. As you do all of this, you're exploring caves with a mix of unnatural colors and stark black backgrounds. Brinstar's blue and gold, to Norfair's purple and green, to Kraid's grey with some royal blue. It jumps out at you. It makes you take notice.
The more you explore, the stronger you get. You'll find Ridley and Kraid, and Kraid in particular can be really mean because of the fake Kraid. What an asshole move they only really took the piss out of in Super Metroid. If you beat them (and really, they're not that hard, more intimidating than anything) you get just a shitload of missiles. The Varia will keep you alive, the Screw Attack will make you a spinning death machine... Suddenly shit isn't so scary and difficult. You're becoming at home in your domain, a monster among the monstrous. Then Tourian. Then the Metroids. Good god, these fucking things. If you were in Japan they let out chittering chirps, but they just sort of gurgle here. Mother Brain is an absolute pain in the ass of pain in the asses, but it's a challenge that can be beaten with the same patience and skill you used to finish the game. That's Metroid NES.
God, I love it. I'm doing my best to explain it, and maybe I've Stockholmed myself to the rough flaws of the game... but damn it, I like my games a little rough around the edges. The specific atmosphere, the haunting Metroid gives me in my soul, hasn't been met by another game. The other games do other things better, but they don't do it quite like Metroid. Some try to fix Metroid, but they've never managed to copy the part of it I like the most. I don't know if any Metroidvania can nail it quite like that. It makes the original a unique little thing. It makes it my favorite game in the series. Its horror and haunt have become a comfort to me, a game I can throw on if I want to kill an hour and get the good ending. There are better Metroid games, but that's why Metroid NES is my very favorite Metroid game.
---BONUS: A PIECE OF METROID FLASH FICTION I FOUND ON MY PC WHILE LOOKING TO SEE IF I'D SAVED THIS RANKING ON THERE---
The woman with the eyepatch smiles serenely, before beginning her sermon.
"There is one thing you must understand, before we begin. We do what we do not out of hate, but out of love. Without the Federation, the glorious utopia we now take for granted would not be possible. It was the Federation which brought about the Golden Age we hold so near and dear to our hearts. It was the Federation which taught us the means by which to better understand our history, to use our knowledge of the temporal to update it. Make it better. Make it palatable to our modern minds. These are the ideals we strive for, and we consider it a privilege to light the torch that keeps those ideas burning, ever onwards. Yes, we have become the enemies of the Federation. Yes, they attempted a temporal strike against our masterful design. Yes, we loathe what the passage of regular space-time has done to twist and contort the vision of the Golden Age... but we soldier on because what we are doing is right. The Federation themselves have done it. You've seen the reports on Federation Mission Zero. They themselves violated their own Temporal Prime Directive, went back to the beginning, and changed history... and they were well within their right to do it. The advances and strides of our great Golden Age, echoing back into the history of the hunt... and yet, that leads us to our problem."
You notice that, behind the serene smile of the woman with the eyepatch, there is a veneer of malice as she continues to speak.
"Hunter's Return. A paradox of its own making, thanks to Mission Zero. It both is and is not. It is an essential cornerstone in history, the stepping point which led us to the grand Golden Age we are blessed to live in. It is not a part of the Golden Age, and that jarring inconsistency keeps the devout of our faction awake at night, the paradox gnawing at them. This is what the Federation fails to realize, especially now that it has lost the path and become a shadow of its former self. The Golden Age is incomplete. Can you, my fresh recruit, understand the sheer outrage of that statement? The Golden Age is incomplete. What do we have to show for the great turning point that led us to Enlightenment? This bleak, harsh, flawed imitation of it? We might as well fling ourselves into the chronic hysteresis the Federation created during Mission Zero, their precious "archival" of how history once was. The Federation, as much as we admire them, adhere too much to their regulations. We have no such limitations. We will do what is needed to ensure the Golden Age endures. We will work tirelessly, on the fringes of history, to uphold what we believe in. The flawed paradox that was Hunter's Return will fade from the timeline faster than one can throw a piece of junk into the wastebin, and a new glorious piece of the Golden Age, made by our faction, will replace it. I do not know how it will all turn out, but there's one thing you can be sure of, my fresh recruit."
The woman with the eyepatch leans in close, good eye gazing into your own as she speaks with utter conviction, and you can feel the aura of her belief as she finishes her speech with one last sentence.
"Anything we do will be better than that pathetic old paradox."
So my son and I both beat Dread this weekend, and I vibe with a lot of what you said. The place I felt Dread bogged down was that it did a bad job at the "Fantasy of mastery" angle - that things should be hard, then you cross a milestone, and for a while, things that used to be hard are suddenly easy until you cross the NEXT milestone. With Dread, it felt like every power-up I got was met by an equal or greater escallation by the challenges I faced, so I never felt like having gotten super missiles or cross bombs or whatever was actually making me any stronger. It wasn't until basically the very end of the game that I could go back through old areas and feel the visceral satisfaction of dismissively smacking down the enemies who'd been a nuisance all game.
ReplyDeleteAlso, bits were way too damn hard.
I was interested by the Metroid Suit section, because I like the thematic consistency with several previous games giving Samus a terminal upgrade that is either outright evil or at least physically dangerous to Samus - the Phazon suit, the corrupted hazard shield, even the ice beam at the end of Fusion.
My son wished that at some point, some kind of lesser EMMIs would respawn in the EMMI zones to bring back the tension of the EMMI chase sequences in the late game.
I liked the subtle hinting that ADAM only calls Samus "Lady" in the opening, it's always "Samus" during the rest of the game, when, presumably, you're really talking to Raven Beak.