I Hate Super Metroid - Part 2: Sea Legs

I Hate Super Metroid is an ongoing series chronicling Ryan's attempts to beat a game he never enjoyed... but apparently should.

Playtime: 1 hour

Current Location: Norfair

Current status: Not Pissed

I'd like to start off by reminding everyone that I previously stated that the first couple of hours of Super Metroid don't count. So any actual enjoyment you may read into this is completely moot, irrelevant, and shut up RJ nobody's having any real fun over here so stop giggling to yourself like a cheerleader OD'ing on adderall.

I have to hand it to Nintendo - they certainly know how to throw everything at you simultaneously. Excessive monologue aside, Super Metroid hits you with cutscenes and technology in a rather epic one-two punch. Generally speaking, it took similar "Super" sequels a great deal longer to dish out the Mode 7 image scaling power of the SNES. Super Castlevania IV didn't really hit the "wow" factor of SNES tech until it started rotating rooms two thirds of the way in. Super Mario World hit the Mode 7 crazy button towards the end as well (yes I know that Mode 7 was used from the beginning, but it wasn't eye-popping until the end).

Gotta pee gotta pee gotta pee.

Super Metroid throws the full brunt of SNES graphics potential in your face from the intro. Stereo sound, scaling, parallax scrolling, and all 32,768 colors get cranked out to show you Samus Aran's pleasure cruiser completely blasting by you on its furious race to save the poindexters at the Ceres Space Colony. Honestly it was pretty easy to space out a bit during the "quick preview of Metroid 1 & 2" unskippable monologue. But as soon as the music stopped and the huge "Vrrrroooom" echoed, Super Metroid suddenly got my full attention.

And so, we're off to the races. Monologue is done, and thankfully that's the entirety of it. We're on the Ceres Space Station sprinting merrily by from left to right, passing corpses and broken technology pieces. Again, Nintendo cranks up the tension and storytelling abilities with the "evil eye" intro of Ridley and the baby metroid.

I thought the battle with Ridley was an interesting take on the "intro to your weak protagonist" that was done perfectly in earlier SNES titles. With Mega Man X, X is utterly incapable of defeating Vile in their first encounter, whereas with Super Metroid, Samus can actually "defeat" Ridley. The end result is, of course, the same. Ridley flies into the camera, Bowser-style, and the classic Metroid self-destruct sequence starts.

Cheese it! It's the fuzz!

A few more Mode 7 "wow" cutscenes and we're on Zebes, the setting of the original Metroid. I've just about gotten the hang of the controls now, though the "use X and A to do your primary two functions" gamepad scheme is a little wonky. Yeah, I know I could customize it, but I felt that playing "the way Nintendo intended" was a good idea. Maybe not. The diagonal-aim offered by the shoulder buttons is pretty handy at keeping me from mistakenly running into things too, but again it's taking me a little getting used to. The Ceres Station helped by giving me a whole lot of nothing to shoot at.

But here we are on Zebes, with a big blank map of nothing and... Samus is posing on her ship. No help, no howdy-doo, just "here's a planet". Here's one of my points of contention with RJ. I enjoyed Metroid Fusion tremendously as it represented the Metroid shooter flair with some direction. The AI would plonk a point on a blank map as an indicator that you should probably go somewhere in that area. No real turn-by-turn navigation, just a general idea of what forward progression should look like. The Elder Scrolls series performed similarly by giving you a compass that said "that way". You didn't have to, but you at least knew where you stood with the game designers' idea of advancement.

Oh, come on. Now you're just being mean.

I'm here on Zebes. Being an English-speaker and right-handed I can only assume my "left-to-right" progressive tendencies are ingrained in me culturally. Then again, maybe it's because that's how the Ceres Station was designed. But here, go left to right and you hit a wall. OK, this is the first time, fine, but overall this is how Super Metroid "guides" you - by slamming you into impossible-to-navigate scenarios, forcing you to backtrack. To me, backtracking in video games is a four-letter word. It's a process of frustration and it doesn't encourage me to explore. It encourages me to bee-line to the next area while I'm still on a roll. If I'm missing these walls and impassable vertical corridors, I feel like I'm doing well, but in retrospect I'm missing huge chunks of the game. I'm not a completionist by any stretch, but I do feel like I've lost out on the bigger picture when your design revolves around forcing me to follow annoying gaming no-nos to progress.

Got the morph ball, got some missiles, got the bomb, and I've taken down the first boss - the walking bird robot called Torizo. Honestly I almost bought it on the first boss. He moves quick and his attacks take a hefty amount of damage. Fortunately I realized that a.) Missiles do far more damage, and b.) The bombs that Torizo spits out give back energy in spades.

 

Ok now I can go to the right of Samus' ship. Blasted through the first wall - yay for me - but there's still nothing of any value there. Time to backtrack again. I'm onto the second boss - the swinging garden testicle. For what it's worth, it (he?) was challenging in its simplicity - requiring me to use the morph ball to safely dodge instead of Tony Hawking it and bouncing off the walls.

This is more disgusting than I thought.

By the way - wall-jumping? Bullshit. Somersault to the wall, tap the opposite direction, then jump. The move is very unforgiving and requires some serious timing to pull it off right. Mega Man X at least gives you a half-second of hang-time before the backslide. If I wanted to play thumb parkour I would have picked up Mirror's Edge or something.

So the Jolly Green Giant's left nut has been vanquished and I'm feeling that previously-mentioned vibe of "I must have missed something." You get the super missile after beating this thing, which then makes a 3rd type of door (of 4, I believe) available to you. Again, this is reinforcing the "need" to back-track. I'm walking by green (super missile) doors and brown (super bomb) doors. These doors aren't marked on the map, so I get to trek back later on for whatever-distance and hope that I have the right ammo for the right door. If not, too bad. For an exploration game, I'm seeing an awful lot of familiar sights.

Dawww aren't you just precious?

So how do you see new sights when you don't have a door to go through? You carpet-bomb for the one indistinguishable secret tile, of course! I'm in Maridia heading towards Kraid, aaaand I'm stuck. I'm pretty sure there is a secret here somewhere. The game itself didn't tell me (like it would in Fusion), so I'm running on ancient memory and gut instinct. Once I clear the room of baddies, I'm just inching along in ball form and bombing every pixel I can find. This isn't clever. This isn't some sort of puzzle that rewards critical thinking or ingenuity. This is work. This is akin to counting from 1 to 1000 in an effort to guess what number I'm thinking of.

The music's changed to something ominous. This is another one of those chuckle moments where you throw the tiny Kraid a beating, assuming he's it because he's the same size of Kraid from the NES Metroid. Then, two rooms over, you're greeted by the big mamma jamma himself. I get vibes of Low G Man for the NES when I'm fighting this multi-screen Kraid. Like the spore boss before, Kraid doesn't put up too much of a fight, but fights just enough to be entertaining.

Sweet merciful crap! Not precious at all!

As I'm writing this while watching the replay, I'm starting to put a face to the nature of my dislike for Super Metroid. It's not the story, the music, the combat or the bosses. It's the "stuff" that fills in-between these great moments that really grinds against everything that would make Super Metroid a must-play for me. Each major battle lasts only a few minutes, stretched out by two to three times as much time dedicated to "Oops, wrong way. Oops, wrong way. Gah, garbage trick jump required here. Oops, wrong way". Sure, if Super Metroid was just a boss run this title would be exceedingly short. However, if the boss fights are a highlight and only consist of, say, 10% of the gameplay, then isn't there a problem in the design that should be rectified? A little less "maze", and a little more "action", maybe? Metroid Fusion resolved most of this for me. Exploratory, yet still action-oriented and not frustrating.

I'm not hating life yet as I descend into Norfair. But I fear I soon will be. The mazes are getting more... maze-y.

Current status: