Super Metroid. The name seems to inspire awe inspired looks from just about every retro gamer I've ever met, but I'd never played up until the last week! Seeing that this was a critical omission in my gaming education, I added it to my queue, intending for it to be a Metroidvania run with a few Castlevania games and Super Metroid. Unfortunately for that idea, Specter of Torment came out right before I was going to start Super Metroid, so it had to wait.
In Super Metroid, you play as resourceful bounty hunter Samus Aran. You begin the game equipped with power armor, an arm cannon, and the ability to jump. The story begins with the theft of the highly dangerous and last remaining Metroid by the Space Pirates. With the fate of the universe in your hands, you head out to the Planet Zebes to defeat the Space Pirates and take back the Metroid, which in a strange twist has bonded with Samus, seeing her as its mother.
In typical Metroid fashion, you have to proceed through a huge map, finding upgrades to make you stronger, and to allow you to get past various obstacles and enemies in your path to the Metroid. These upgrades are skillfully placed so that your exploration to find them feels free and open, but the design of the map actually is always funneling you towards the next objective.
The exploration aspects of the game are designed so that your pace is completely up to you. You can deliberately explore and fire at and bomb every wall, looking for secrets, or you can fly through the game quickly, attempting to finish as fast as possible. And speaking of secrets, there are dozens of little passages, secret items, and fun discoveries around every corner. I played the game for about 7 hours, as a complete novice, and only found 61%. I'd estimate that you need to find about 40% to even have a chance of finishing, so there are tons more that I didn't find.
The only Metroid game which I had played unto this point was that original, and I never finished that due to the crushing size of the game without a map. Fortunately for us, Super Metroid remedies this by giving you a map that auto-updates, keeping track of areas you've visited, and even adding in secret areas as you discover them, which makes the game feel manageable despite the fact that the explorable area is vastly larger in Super Metroid than in the original. This upgrade, more than anything else, reduces the overwhelming difficulty of keeping track of yourself in the world, which is vitally important in a game that puts such a large focus on exploration.
The music is tremendously creepy. It's unsettling that many tracks begin with an extended silence, making it very disturbing when you wander into an area with a new soundscape, and hear only silence at first. It embraces more of a modern film aesthetic, preferring to create moods rather than a more classically theme-driven approach. On the continuum of Super Mario Bros. to Skyrim, Super Metroid is way closer to the Skyrim side. This is particularly notable, as it's one of the earliest games I can remember taking this approach.
The graphics are fantastic, and have aged very well, The environment is excellent, enemy designs are clear and compelling, and Samus looks great. The bosses are HUGE for 16 bit sprites, and give you a real sense of challenge and danger due to their size.
For everything great and revolutionary about this game, I found some things about it to be grating. The controls were frequently wonky and unresponsive. This was particularly troubling with getting Samus to flip while jumping, a prerequisite to wall jump, or to do the almighty screw attack. Sometimes she would flip, while other times, with seemingly identical inputs, she wouldn't. This ended up getting me killed more than anything else in the game.
While revolutionary for its time, the lack of more modern introductions to the Metroidvania genre were notable, including progressively unlocking shortcuts and the ability to teleport back and forth between certain areas. For a game with as much backtracking as is required in Super Metroid, this was very annoying. I'd estimate I spent about 20% of my time just backtracking across the huge map, and that's probably a conservative estimate. Being able to pop back and forth between areas would have made the experience of backtracking to clear areas that were inaccessible prior to unlocking new powerups much more enjoyable.
I also didn't care for the end boss. While important for advancing the story, and presenting a nice twist ending, it was so very easy, especially right after the very challenging battle with the penultimate boss. Her pattern was very easy to read, and she was damaged by almost everything, making for a very simple end boss experience.
All in all, this game is both excellent, and extraordinarily important in gaming history. While it's position in history will remain unchecked, I do find that some of the luster of the game has been lost over the years due to improvements in the genre, although it was still very enjoyable. Now I just wish that I would have had the privilege to play this game at its release in 1994, as it certainly would have blown my little mind. My '94 review would likely have had this game at 9.5 or above, but some of the dated blemishes put this at a 9.0 in 2017. Well worth a playthrough, but I think that Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow represents a more enjoyable experience in the Metroidvania genre for the modern gamer (and yes, I'll get around to Symphony of the Night, eventually).
The next review will be the game pictured in the screenshot below. Good luck guessing!
-TRO
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