More 2D Metroid thoughts: Super, Fusion, Zero Mission, and AM2R

I have now finished playing all of the Nintendo-developed 2D Metroid games in release order! Hot on the heels of my posts about playing the original 8-bit versions of Metroid and Metroid II for the first time and discovering what things those versions have to offer over their remakes, here's what I had to say after replaying the rest that people actually generally like. To cap things off I also finally checked out AM2R, the fan-made Metroid II remake that people like so much that it basically gets treated like an official entry in the series. I just had to see how that compared to both the original and MercurySteam's official remake.

Plus, stick around for my current personal rankings of the whole series at the end!

Super Metroid

Original Backloggd review here.

I won't bother writing as much as I did for the first two games. It's Super Metroid, it's one of the greatest games ever made, we all know this and can list a dozen reasons why.

I will say that playing this hot on the heels of the first two games (in their original forms) is a great experience and makes it a satisfying conclusion for the Original Metroid Trilogy. All the callbacks to the first two games are very cool, giving this sense that things have come full circle and we're returning to where it all began to settle things with Mother Brain once and for all. But I also think that playing this after the originals rather than the remakes makes Super feel that much more... well, Super. The remakes backported so much from this game to the preceding adventures that this one almost risks coming off as just another Metroid game. The whole series now has Super Missiles and Power Bombs and the Speed Booster and the Gravity Suit and huge, exciting bosses. But coming off of the 8-bit titles it feels like a much bigger deal, like Samus is facing her biggest threats yet and has to become stronger than ever before to save the day.

I'll also say that one thing I hope future 2D Metroids like Ravenous can take from Super, it's letting the game open up so that there are points where you can go make progress and get major upgrades in multiple areas at once, or for there to even be fairly major upgrades that are completely optional. That's still one of my favorite things about Super, and it makes exploration so much more satisfying when it feels like you're charting your own path to some extent and finding huge upgrades like the Plasma Beam that you could have missed entirely, rather than simply following the intended progression and only diverting for extra Missile Tanks and whatnot. Every time I bring this up people counter that the other games have sequence breaks, both those intended by the developers and those enabled through glitches. And sequence breaks are really cool! I love seeing the wild shit speedrunners do in these games. But the ability for expert players to break the mandatory critical path is a totally different experience from there simply being less of a strictly defined critical path to begin with, especially for first time players and those taking their time and exploring and reveling in the atmosphere (like I tend to do). That greater freedom to explore is what makes games like Super Metroid, Symphony of the Night, and Hollow Knight all timers for me.

Anyway I beat the game faster than I ever have before but half an hour too slow to get the best ending, and I'm so tempted to jump right back in and optimize my routing a bit better to do it faster, but I've got other things to play at the moment. But it really is one of those comfort games for me that I can just keep coming back to forever. 

Metroid Fusion

Original Backloggd review here.

Fusion was my introduction to the Metroid series as a kid (though I never beat it until I was an adult because some of those bosses are damn hard), so I'll always be a bit biased towards it. I'm far from the only one, so I don't think saying Fusion is one of the best Metroid games is as hot of a take as it once was, but still.

I don't love its strictly regimented structure quite as much as the more open exploration of Super, but Fusion isn't trying to be Super Metroid 2. If anything, it acknowledges how large that legacy looms, literally turning an alien mimic of Super Metroid Samus into the main villain stalking you as you struggle to reach that same level of power again. But what it lacks in freedom Fusion makes up for with a newly nimble Samus who's an absolute joy to control, a bunch of awesome bosses, and a really cool story.

I love the way this game tells a sci-fi horror story about Samus being trapped on a space station with a bunch of alien parasites, and she has to keep running around putting out fires as the situation constantly worsens and the threat evolves. The SA-X obviously steals the show and is one of the coolest things in the whole series, but I also love little things like the ways level visuals will change due to story events. Or how about the way health and ammo pickups are recontextualized as the X-Parasites' true forms, which you have to absorb so they don't fly off and regenerate as new enemies? Which then leads to the part where cold blue X-Parasites start throwing themselves at you, since Samus is now weak to the cold as a human-Metroid hybrid, and then you get the Varia Suit and can absorb them safely for big heals, and you get a few rooms where they're still flying straight at you until they get the memo that they don't hurt you anymore and start fleeing. It's great!

While it's a bit patronizing to be told where to go by Adam at first, this pays off with the ways in which his directions are subverted. The X-Parasites will catch you unawares at several points, after which Adam's warnings that the SA-X might be near will carry extra weight, and it's really fun how over time you'll start to go places and get upgrades you weren't told to get, disobeying Adam's orders. I also have to love how Samus never speaks to Adam, keeping her thoughts to her inner monologue for most of the game, until near the end when she learns what the Federation has been breeding more Metroids and now wants to control the SA-X, too, and she decides enough's enough, she has to speak up and say that they're out of their damn minds.

It is kind of annoying that it feels like there's a toooooon of items you can only get at the very end of the game, though. You'll think you're being really thorough and then you see that there are actually two UI rows' worth of Energy Tanks. I settled for finishing with a paltry 59%. Still, Fusion's always a great time overall. 

Metroid: Zero Mission

Original Backloggd review here.

I've said before that I'm not all that crazy about Zero Mission, which is perhaps my second hottest Metroid take. (The first is that my favorite Prime game is 2.) Time to expand upon that a bit more.

Zero Mission isn't a bad Metroid game, of course. I don't hate it. It's fun to play, it's snappy and responsive, the room layouts are more interesting, there are some neat new puzzles, and the new epilogue chapter where Samus has to evade the Space Pirates without her armor and then gets her fully upgraded suit to blast her way out is pretty cool. It makes for a good Baby's First Metroid, being the first one I managed to beat as a kid, and I get why it's recommended to newcomers as a starting point. I've beaten it three times before and will undoubtedly beat it several more times in the future.

The problem is that I don't think it captures the feeling of the original NES Metroid very well at all. It takes a game about getting lost on a hostile alien planet and makes it almost impossible to get lost and makes the world less hostile and alien.

Adding a map and save points, sure, that's fine. That was inevitable, especially for a handheld remake where asking players to draw their own map is a way bigger ask. But then on top of that Chozo statues generally show you where to go, hidden passageways are telegraphed way more obviously, and new obstacles that require specific abilities are scattered all over the place to keep you closer to the critical path, which now presents a pretty strict sequence of upgrades you need to follow in order unless you're actively doing speedrun skips. Samus's newfound freedom of movement and aiming make the combat and platforming much easier than they used to be, as do the free health and ammo refills, and that's even before you hit the bosses that go down in mere seconds with a trivial amount of missile spamming. It's a completely different experience from the NES game, where I was fighting for my life in a maze-like world where every upgrade found was a huge boon. And, yeah, part of that is because Metroid 1 was weird and jank and clunky and archaic and full of bullshit to artificially extend your playtime... but, like, that was the game! Whether it was the intent or merely a series of compromises due to hardware limitations and age, at the end of the day that's the experience of playing Metroid 1! And rather than find a new way to express the feelings that game evokes in a more modern way, like most of the rest of the series does, they instead smoothed all of it out.

What we're left with is a hodgepodge. It's Metroid: the theme park ride, a frictionless greatest hits compilation in the general shape of a Metroid 1 remake. It plays like Fusion—annoyingly including a ton of collectables that you can only get for 100% if you turn back and explore the whole map again right before the final boss. (The Power Bombs exist just so you can run around and find more Power Bombs at the very end of the game.) It backports most of the new upgrades and several map regions from Super. And the Chozo ruins and their prophetic murals feel very Prime. It doesn't feel like it has much of an identity of its own, aside from the Zero Suit section at the end and the out-of-place comic book backgrounds leftover from when the game was going for a different art style. They changed Samus's sprites, but you can still feel the echoes of that cartoony direction. Fusion was bright and colorful and had clean pixel art but still found a bunch of ways to be scary, but Zero Mission is just a jaunty adventure all the way through. Even the stealth portion isn't tense at all.

The fact that it takes so much from Super probably bugs me the most of this greatest hits approach. As I mentioned in my Super review, I think that backporting so much of Super to what is now seen as the True version of Samus's first adventure undercuts things that are cool about Super. It feels less special to return to an expanded Zebes that lets you explore new areas on the surface, fight more and bigger bosses, and get a bunch of new powerups that make Samus faster and stronger than ever before if you already did all that the first time through. For an imperfect comparison that might sound like a bit of a stretch, it's kind of like the video game equivalent of if they remade classic Dragon Ball and had Goku go Super Saiyan against Piccolo or something, due to modern fan expectations that Dragon Ball has to have Super Saiyans. It'd totally undercut the original story! That's sort of what Zero Mission does to Super to me.

All of this is why Zero Mission is, to me, for one last metaphor, the junk food Metroid game. The one that goes down easy for a quick fix of Running Around And Getting Upgrades, but isn't as filling as the best games in the series. 

AM2R

Original Backloggd review here.

I'm so mixed on this one, in a way that kind of saddens me.

On the one hand, as a freeware Metroid fangame, this is fucking awesome and absolutely worth playing. A few minor design annoyances aside, it's an incredibly polished and well put together game that oozes love for the series. It embellishes the original game with some new areas and bosses here and there, but those new sections are generally very well made. If this was a wholly original game, I would have enjoyed it with very few reservations.

But it's not an original game, it's a remake of Metroid II. And I don't want to treat it with kid gloves just because it's a fangame. If anything, AM2R has been thoroughly canonized by Metroid fans, frequently held up above the official Metroid II remake, to the point that it's even covered thoroughly on the Metroid Wiki. Many people treat this as the definitive Metroid II experience. And I think this misses the mark as a remake of Metroid II in some ways.

I'll try to avoid repeating myself too much, as many of the same problems I had with Zero Mission streamlining the experience of NES Metroid and trying to make it play more like Super are applicable here as well. For a while it did seem like a much more direct and faithful remake than that, as many areas of the game seem to have the exact same layouts. Not literally tile for tile, but damn close. It's still a fundamentally different experience by its very nature, of course, and it loses some of the mystique of the 8-bit original for me. Everything's less weird and creepy when it's in full color with more detailed 32-bit visuals (though you can turn on an 8-bit color filter in the extras), and when there's a more traditional Metroid Prime-y synth soundtrack rather than offputtingly abstract beeps and boops. It feels way less claustrophobic when the camera is zoomed way the hell out. It feels less disorienting with a map and more visually diverse locales to help you tell things apart. But it still felt about as close to the original as I could expect in many regards, especially when compared to the even greater liberties Samus Returns took.

As I got further in the game, though, it started to diverge into being more of its own thing, and at times stopped feeling like a remake of Metroid II at all. On some level I can't blame it for this. It was made during that nearly 20 year period when we weren't sure we would ever get a full-blown new 2D Metroid game from Nintendo ever again. Given that historical context, I understand the desire for it to feel more like a New Metroid Game that evokes the rest of the series, rather than a pure retread. And, again, it's a very good Metroid fangame! The new bosses are fun to fight, and the new area is really well designed.

I just think that a lot of this new stuff clashes with Metroid II. I don't think Metroid II needed shinespark puzzles out the wazoo, or a lore codex, or physics puzzles, or a mid-game escape sequence, or an expanded soundtrack, or enemies that shoot crazy danmaku bullet patterns at you. I think that being able to see a mile in front of Samus kills the jumpscares. I think that finding the Federation troopers dispatched to SR388 before Samus that the original game's manual mentioned shatters the lonely atmosphere. I think the addition of more strict ability gating kills how cool it was that almost every upgrade in the original was technically optional. I think including new bosses dilutes the game's focus on the grim task of exterminating the Metroids, and makes the repetitive nature of hunting them down stick out even more due to this new contrast with the fun and flashy "proper" bosses.

Speaking of which, the Metroid fights have been "fixed" by making them a bit more mechanically elaborate, but now they're a way bigger pain in the ass to fight, which makes the repetition so much more annoying than it was in the original. It's not quite as egregious as the forced parrying in Samus Returns, but it's close. They all seem to move around in ways that makes it harder to actually hit their weak points, and even when you do hit them they now have invincibility frames before you can hit them again. And the Omega Metroids and their annoying fucking attacks that can knock Samus down on her back for a few seconds, oh my god. When opportunities to hit Metroids' weak points are rarer, getting a hit in with the newly added Super Missiles that do 5x damage becomes way more critical. But you'll only ever have a very limited supply of them, so when you ALMOST kill an Omega Metroid only for it to knock you into the next screen over and force you to restart the fight with your Super Missiles depleted... it's agonizing. If anything, the ease with which you could obliterate most of the Metroids kind of made me feel sorry for them in the original, which, you know, might be the point? But now they're so annoying that every time I killed one I was like "thank fuck that thing's dead." The Queen Metroid fight, too, has been extended into a multi-phase test of endurance. It's not super hard, her pattern's pretty fun once you get the hang of it, but it's SUCH a long fight with multiple rounds of basically the exact same behavior before you finally get a scripted moment where you're allowed to bomb her stomach, unlike the quick kill strat from the start.

I also have to take issue with the Metroid counter. A small detail, but one that really bugged me. It now only shows how many Metroids you have left in the current area, rather than the total across the map, so when you hit zero you know it's time to move on. This seems helpful in theory, but it completely ruins the awesome little moment in the original where you see the egg and the counter starts ticking up as you realize the Queen is reproducing. It's still treated as a scary moment with this horror sting in the music, but when the Metroid counter goes up from zero EVERY time you enter a new area it completely loses its impact. I have no idea why they didn't just have two separate counters for the Metroids in your current area and the total number of Metroids, which seems like such an obvious solution.

All of this makes it sound like I hate AM2R, when, again, I really don't. It's very fun, and deserves its reputation as a fangame that reaches the level of quality of an official release, and I'm glad I played it. I think I like it a little more than Samus Returns. (I don't hate that game either, for the record.) But neither is a replacement for Metroid II. If anything, AM2R just makes me appreciate the original even more than I already did. 

What about Samus Returns and Dread?

Frankly I just don't feel like playing a third version of Metroid II right now, so that replay isn't happening. Samus Returns is okay. It takes even more egregious liberties than AM2R, but on some level that also kind of makes it feel like more of its own thing. The Ridley fight tacked on at the end is stupid and the counter is better in Dread. It's whatever. When it came out it was just nice to have a new Metroid game after so long.

I'm not replaying Dread at the moment because I'm waiting to see if we get a Switch 2 upgrade first. (And also because all these Metroid games have been keeping me from starting Control Resonant long enough.) But I loved Dread, and you can already read my unfiltered thoughts from when I beat that for the first time here. I've perhaps cooled on it slightly since, but I'd still say I like it about as much as I like Fusion, which is to say "a lot."

Rankings

And finally, to wrap things up, here are my personal rankings for the whole Metroid series. Let's also lump them into tiers, because my exact rankings can get a bit fuzzy based on my mood, but which tier I'd place each game in remains pretty consistent.

The masterpieces:

1. Super Metroid

2. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes

3. Metroid Prime

4. Metroid II: Return of Samus (Game Boy)

The greats:

5. Metroid Fusion

6. Metroid Dread

The not as greats but still pretty goods:

7. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

Honorable mention: AM2R: Return of Samus

8. Metroid (NES)

9. Metroid: Zero Mission

10. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond

11. Metroid: Samus Returns

Other M:

12. Metroid: Other M

Haven't played enough to rank, or at all:

Metroid Prime Pinball, Metroid Prime Hunters, Metroid Prime: Federation Force

And that does it! Metroid is a pretty cool guy, huh? Ravenous can't come soon enough.