Toward the Verge: Super Metroid

I am hyped for Axiom Verge.

I am going to wait til the summer sale to pick it up, even if it's not on sale, since I have like $50 in cards to sell and they go faster during the sale. But I am hyped for it, or at least what passes for hype for me, and since it's a "loving homage" to Metroid, I thought I'd go play some Metroidvanias to refresh myself on the very concept. I googled a list and I've scribbled down a couple I'll need to emulate and one I own but completely forgot to play through. Derp. I might give La Mulana a try, but somehow that game never really grabbed me.

First up: Super Metroid, and a brief discussion of this god damn classic that everyone should try at least once in their life. To be honest, I played through the original Metroid as a child and fairly recently on a DS or GBA or whatever one of the Nintendo portable consoles, so I don't really want to give it a replay. The interesting thing is that I was always anxious about replaying the super version, not because it would live up to my nostalgic memories (spoilers: it does) but because of two things: Wall jump and charged jump. Argh! This is so tricky! Push the button then unpush the button before you push the other button?? how do i...

The original Metroid is nowhere near as difficult as people imply it is - you basically just need to take time to figure out enemy patterns and refill your E-tanks as you go. Interesting to note that the game does have, in a roundabout way, the whole avatar strength thing that later gaming is so latched onto. If you spend more time hunting for secrets, you will find more E-tanks and missile pods to have an easier time of the later fights. For a NES game, much like Castlevania, it's really neat looking game. It is very early in the NES' lifespan but I like the almost surreal, strange pixel artwork and how it influenced them to make such weird looking designs.

I mean, look at this cropped shot of a chunk of the map. Lots of different colors, bizarre looking blocks and aliens, the whole of it just immensely strange. When you go for photorealism, you don't get that.

One of the things I've noticed as gaming moved more and more toward the photorealism era is I would increasingly find it difficult to like, not get horribly lost. And yet, even without the map, after a while Metroid became easier to navigate. Look over at that picture again, it's strange realizing those wildly different shapes and colors make the rooms much easier to remember. Free from photorealism and the limitations of 3D texturing, you're allowed to make some truly bizarre stuff that sticks in the brain.

The original Metroid has five-ish sort of zones: Two "boss hideouts", Norfair, Brinstar and Tourian. Due to the limitations of the NES, you can't really say much for them as distinct places, other than the fact Tourian looks very metallic and Norfair appears to be on fire, or at least the vaguely reddish pixels communicate that idea. They all look very distinct from each other, but they don't look especially distinct from, I don't know, a fever dream.

Super Metroid has two additional real zones, and then "Crateria" a sort of generic term for crap you do on the surface. Due to improvements in the SNES, all of the zones are very distinctive but also very distinctive as you transition through them. Visually Super Metroid is a total treat, there's a lot of stuff here that pixelretro in the modern day either doesn't or fails to replicate. Maybe it's nostalgia, but the way water and lava are done in Super Metroid just please me, even as I'm cursing their presence. The game layers things pretty carefully, and backgrounds have enough detail to notice but not to distract. You get little things like long veins of bio-energy pulsating, or weird abstract underwater ruins that wobble from your perspective (since you're underwater) or the scorching heat being expressed in a shimmer of hot. There's just so many beautiful details and such a distinct, constantly varied color palette. The game references the original a ton, but it also expands them out. I could gush about it for days.

No, nothing in Super Metroid really makes much more sense or looks like much of anything beyond the aforementioned fever dream, and while I do prefer game design to look like places, Super Metroid gets around this by making everything distinct and transitional. Brinstar, on the most part, slowly shifts from rocky to covered in vegetation to the final weird dead end where its boss lies in weight. CUZ HE'S SO FAT. Norfair grows hotter as you go, and so forth. It is a little weird to me that on the most part your enemies in Super Metroid appear to be like, random lifeforms you run into rooms and slaughter. Other than the two varieties of space pirates, most of them are just little blobs or goofy crab things.

As I said, it's an abstraction rooted in how the NES could basically not visually display a person. I mean the space pirates, as they're shown in the SNES, aren't even in the NES game. But when you step aside for a moment and look at the game you go like, wait, I'm killing what appears to be a tiny crab monster who has two heads and he's dancing?

The control scheme in Super Metroid is pretty good, although this is before wheeled selection became a thing, so selecting from your specials is a little tedious. You hit select to go through them one at a time, but there's no back button, only a cancel. You could actually do a proper selection wheel with the SNES controller, but they hadn't really thought up stuff like that, so whatever. You basically only ever use the charged shot, once you get it, and super missiles. I'm pretty certain that missiles do less damage than a full charged shot, though they do have higher DPS so I guess I did use them here or there.

It isn't much of a shock to discuss, since every classic game from this era has it overs its peers, but the music in Super Metroid is just so good. It really sets the tone and just sounds fantastic. The game's sound, on the other hand, is a little odd. Everything in the game makes me think of birds, which doesn't quite click. Birds and the weird clicks the squirrels in my yard make when birds hit them in the head. The weapon sounds aren't great either, you'd think missiles and power bombs would have a bit more audio punch. The power bomb sounds kinda like you're flushing a toilet.

Moreso than Metroid, which has limited item based gating - Heck, I can't even remember if the Varia was necessary to do Norfair - Super Metroid has something like 8 or so "gate" items and much of the game is a constant progression of back tracking and trying to figure out what you missed. Water and "hot" rooms that burn you alive are two of the most visually obvious, and you get a sense of weight and peril to such things just looking at them. There's also a bunch of weapon upgrades and grappling hook and speed booster and most of it is pretty limited use outside of opening up rooms or areas.

The speed booster especially is sort of hilarious. A quick look at the level maps will lead to an almost instant conclusion that almost nowhere in the game allows you to get the running start you need. The thing I find funny is, well, they could have easily put "fast travel" in the game using a mechanic almost never works. And they didn't.

The game does suffer a bit for simply having a bit too much in this category. The powerbomb, for example, is gotten pretty early and generally operates as your 'does this room have a thing' detector. It, and the super missile, only very rarely get involved in combat, with the same extending to the grappling hook and the speed booster. It's pretty neat to have them available, but all they really end up doing is granting the developers more way to hide away some extra missile pods or whatever for the item completion score at the end. I also sort of wish they'd gated more stuff behind high jump / space jump, but whatever, the game is 20 years old.

Another, albeit even more minor complaint, is that while the "original" zones are really awesome and even quietly feel like the original game's splitting of them in half, the two new zones are kinda weird. The Wrecked Ship, a totally weird 60s sci-fi zone, feels completely out of place both thematically and just like ... In all ways? It actually feels sort of like a Sonic the Hedgehog zone. Like, Wing Fortress or whatever from the second game? Maridia, the "underwater" zone,  lacks the punch of the two major zones and ends up just feeling kinda naptime. It's especially weird to me since the "sand" reminds me of playing Sonic, but the physics are just awful and really frustrating to fight with. Then you get the space jump and you don't really have to touch the ground.

The game is also a bit frustrating in terms of whether or not you can access certain things past item gates. Not everything is immediately obvious in terms of mechanics, and while it does add to the exploratory tone of the game, it can be a little annoying to think you can get something in Brinstar, trek your way back, only to discover the combination of items you've gained isn't quite a solution to what you're looking for. The secrets in general do suffer a little for an effect I haven't quite coined a term for, but this weird realization you're getting more missile pods or powerbomb slots just to have them. None of them really have much of an impact on the game, and I feel like Super Metroid is a little weaker than the original in this regard. The addition of all the weapon power ups make the basic missiles feel rather pointless.

I think this problem was talked about in egoraptor's thing on Super Castlevania, where simply expanding out mechanics and itemization leaves earlier elements in the dust. Super Metroid is nowhere near Super Castlevania in this regard, but it's still something of a weird issue that weakens the collecting. I understand that avatar strength has an impact on how players interact with the game and that feeling is sort of the crux a lot of later game design is built on, but it's a little jarring if you've played and remember the first Metroid.

The game isn't perfect by any means, but it does very well without making a lot of the later concessions made in the genre. I'm really not a big fan of fast travel, especially when it takes the form of teleporting. Super Metroid isn't actually that big a game, but it feels big because you have to move through the world at a fair pace. It could still hold to this size without being quite how it is. I feel like somewhere in design they transitioned from Crateria being the hub to Brinstar being the hub, so they're both sort of half hubs and you end up taking "the long way 'round" from time to time. It is nice though, as I said, Super Metroid is very distinctive and once you've been in an area you tend to have landmarks that remind you where you are. It would be better, however, if the designers hadn't laid the game out quite how they had.

What I mean is, the game's progression goes from Crateria, down to old Brinstar (referencing the first game and old Tourian) then you go back up to Crateria, then to new Brinstar (which in a surprise twist has plants because whoa! the super nintendo can display things that look like plants), then you get to the first half of Norfair, back to Brinstar to go to the boss hideout, then back ... You get the idea. It works really well, but when you keep building extensions onto the zone without really building a central hub, you end up with a lot of kinda boring backtracking. I'd rather not have fast travel, since it makes the game small and inverts the dimensions as less "that is a place you go" into "that is a place far from the fast travel, I don't wanna". There is also, mind you, this weird thing in a couple of the routes where they have one-sided doors that lower each time you visit the screen. I'm not really certain what the deal is with this is, it mostly just makes you waste time. I was also very anxious about replaying the game over the wall jump, but I don't think you ever need the wall jump in the entire game... Which is odd?

One thing I want to note is that Super Metroid is just not very hard. It's a bit tricky in parts, and the potential to speed run is definitely there, but it's not a difficult game by any stretch of the imagination. I died on some of the bosses, which is fair, since it takes a bit to figure them out and enemies do shred through your life total very quickly when you don't have things figured out. But it's a lesson to all those indie "metroidvanias" that yes, the original Castlevania was hard, but Metroid wasn't that difficult and Super Metroid absolutely wasn't. These games sold better twenty years ago than any indie Metroidvania ever has. You can say a lot of things like "well it was a..." but it looks better, sounds better, has more talented thinking and plays better than any of those games.

So, obviously, if you've never played Super Metroid I recommend it. Seek it out. It's still good.