In defense of NES Metroid

This post is mirrored from my Backloggd review of Metroid.

With a new mainline Metroid game on the horizon, lots of new players are looking to catch up on the series, and with it comes a piece of advice I've been hearing for over 20 years: "Skip the original Metroid. Just play Zero Mission instead. It's objectively better in every way." I get where this sentiment is coming from. Zero Mission is way more approachable, more in line with how the best games in the series play, and far less likely to scare off series newcomers five minutes in. It's probably the right call to start there. But this sentiment that the original Metroid is a bad game that you should completely skip (reflected by the 2.8 star average rating on Backloggd) has never sat right with me. Zero Mission is so eager to sand away the difficulty and tell you exactly where to go at all times that it simply isn't a true replacement for the experience of NES Metroid.

And yet... despite feeling this way, despite respecting the original game for what it was going for, I had never played past Brinstar. It was time to fix this.

The original Metroid is an interesting experience. You have to judge it for what it is, rather than for what it isn't, because this sure as hell ain't Super Metroid. Samus feels VERY underpowered at the start. She has a dinky little blaster that only reaches a few tiles, she can't shoot enemies that are below her eye level, and she doesn't even start at full health. But that only makes each new upgrade you acquire, several of which you can get very quickly before even leaving Brinstar, feel like a total lifesaver helping tip things more in your favor on this hostile alien world. That's always been a core part of the series, but I think the original game might still give you that feeling in its purest form due to how hostile the world is.

Though, admittedly, I'm mixed on the fact that you start with 30 health every time you continue, even after you've collected more energy tanks. It does create this risk-reward scenario where you weigh whether you'd rather take your time and grind for health at an enemy spawner or risk moving forward and hope you'll get more health pickups along the way, and it does give fighting the trash mobs littering the map some additional value, and it does tie in with the ultimate goal of trying to beat the game quickly to get a better ending. But man. It's just such a pain in the ass to grind for health drops. I ended up using save states to make this a moot point. At least the game is kind enough to keep any upgrades you found before dying, which is much more generous than many of its contemporaries (and even later Metroids).

Yes, yes, there's no in-game map. So I started to draw my own with notes on things to return to later, which made exploration way more fun and engaging. It's not hard at all to map out Brinstar, though I will admit I fell off mapping things out myself midway through Norfair. The upper sections were fine, but then I explored a bit without updating my map and I just kept finding more and more similar-looking rooms that I could bomb through to find yet another layer of rooms with more missile expansions, and the idea of going back through to map all of it out became a bit overwhelming to me. The fact that the game seems to literally copy and paste rooms to save on memory gives it this surreal sense of deja vu as you're exploring. This makes it much easier to get lost if you're not paying attention, but I mean, that is part of the experience. Ultimately I ended up consulting a ready-made map to finish the game, though figuring out how to get around the world via a simple map of the world layout does provide its own sort of navigational challenge.

You do have to find hidden passageways with bombs to beat the game, but I think the age-old complaint that "you have to bomb every tile" is exaggerated. With only a few exceptions that I needed help from a walkthrough for, I generally found most of these secret passageways on my own. The game is usually good about making these points of interest look suspicious, like putting an enemy underneath what seems to be a solid floor, and ironically the repeated room layouts really help because you'll end up learning which types of rooms tend to have hidden paths in particular spots.

No, the element of navigation that really ended up bugging me was the fact that the Ice Beam and Wave Beam are mutually exclusive upgrades. I stumbled upon the Wave Beam naturally while exploring, and it felt like such a huge upgrade to have this powerful attack with a wide spread... but then I kept finding obstacles that required me to get the Ice Beam back. I spent at least an hour of my playthrough trudging back and forth between Norfair and Kraid's lair trying to figure out how much I could do with the Wave Beam before having to downgrade back to the Ice Beam. But again, because the game is built for speedruns, this mostly feels like a trap for first time players who haven't yet routed out a more thoroughly optimized run. At least the game is kind enough to let you go get the Ice Beam back, rather than soft locking you and making you play through again with smarter routing.

The other big pain point for most people is the lack of saving. Let's be real, this is a completely moot point in this day and age. You're either playing on something with save states, or you can just take a picture of the password with your phone. If anything, the password system adds a lot to the game by doubling as a cheat code system. What's less forgivable is a bit of jank that's frankly bullshit even for a game from the '80s, like the extreme amount of slowdown all over the game whenever more than two enemies are on screen, the super short I-frame period after taking damage, or the fact that enemies can continue hitting you during screen transitions. I could've done without all that.

I did it, though. I finally beat the original Metroid. It's far from my favorite game in the series, or even one of my top five, but I still think it's a unique and worthwhile experience overall. It has a different sort of friction and challenge from the rest of the series that makes every upgrade and victory feel that much more satisfying, because that victory isn't a foregone conclusion. You have to be in the right frame of mind and be willing to meet the game where it's at, but if you do so there are things to like about the original Metroid that the streamlined Zero Mission simply can't replace.