2D Platformers / Metroidvanias

Over the past few weeks/months I took a deeper dive into the Metroid games, replaying and re-evaluating those that I played before--and actually finishing 1, 2 and Prime which I abandoned early on before. I felt I needed to finally rectify that, being such a Super Metroid fanboy (which also happened to be my first experience with the series almost 30 years ago--my bias towards it will be hard to miss). Thought I'd share my experiences, thoughts and judgements in a mini-series here, starting with Metroid 1.

When I talk about how I enjoyed the games and give them scores, it's from today's perspective, from someone who's played Hollow Knight and Symphony and all that. How fun I found them playing today, not how fun they may or may not have been at the time of release. Most Metroid games easily hold up with the best to this day, however spoiler alert, not all of them.

I've finished Metroid 1 once each in 3 different versions, not counting Zero Mission. If you consider ZM a version of Metroid 1 (which I find debatable), I think it's clearly the best one, but I'll cover it later together with Fusion. For now, just the original and 2 versions that are close. Of these, Metroid Planets was the first I finished and I think it's the best, especially for newcomers like me. But let's start with the original.

Metroid (NES)

Let's get the good out of the way first, because that's the short part. I like how it looks and sounds, having a soft spot for NES aesthetics and chip tunes. The black void "background" doesn't bother me at all, actually I like the purity and simplicity of it. The music is pretty good, I especially love the Kraid's Lair theme. The action, while never great, can at times be somewhat entertaining in a simplistic twitchy retro way. And I like that it's Metroid. That said...

The first time I tried it I tried the old-fashioned way with no help. No guides, maps, savestates or anything, pure exploration on my own only using my memory. Big mistake, that way I immediately ran into the game's biggest issues. Having no map whatsoever is in itself a huge problem in a metroidvania. That could be mitigated a little if the rooms and areas are distinct enough to be memorised easily, but sadly it's the total opposite here. The game tries to cram a big map into a 1 MBit cartridge (that's half the size of Mega Man 2), and inevitably does so by reusing rooms and assets so aggressively that everything looks the same over and over again all over the map. Everything being the same and not having a map is such a deadly combination that I found it impossible to navigate. I wasn't the usual metroidvania-lost, but totally, utterly, blindfolded-lost.

But it didn't end there. Dying respawns you at the beginning of the current area with only 30 health, no matter how many energy tanks you've found. Again this is bullshit enough in itself, and again the game doubles down by giving you no other way to refill your health than to kill hundreds of enemies for those tiny health pickups. Utter fucking bullshit. This game was such a miserable experience I just gave up on it.

I later decided to give it another try, with oldschool pen-and-paper map drawing. I quickly ran into another problem with that, because it is so difficult to keep track of how many screens you've travelled through in those long horizontal rooms and especially the endlessly repeating vertical shafts. What I mean is, e.g. in Zelda 1 it is easy to draw a map to scale because screen transitions are explicit. Metroid doesn't have that, so I always ended up with having drawn too little or too much so that nothing ended up in relation to each other as it should. And even so I'd easily get lost because I lost track of where I was on my map because everything's the fucking same! Another miserable experience, another quit.

So before I recently finally finished it, I'd already finished the two other versions (both have a map), and I was using a full online map anyway (as probably most players do), and allowed myself savestates to cope with the 30 health issue and all the other jank the game throws at you. At least it was playable now. Somewhat.

The exploration may have been a standout feature at the time, but honestly, playing it today I feel that makes the game worse, not better. There isn't anything interesting to explore, secrets are mostly of the bomb-every-single-same-looking-tile kind (in rooms that look exactly the same as a dozen others!), one dead end sub-area contains nothing while another similar one has 5 missile tanks next to each other, it's just... eurgh.

If only the action was good. As I said earlier, at times it works ok, but the game increases the challenge not by interesting, well designed encounters, but simply by spamming you with jank. Now even this could work if movement and controls were reliable, but sadly they're not. The game eats button inputs like there's no tomorrow, Samus shoots in the wrong direction, doesn't jump when you press jump, can't shoot upwards when falling/hopping off a platform, and the Screw Attack... oh my God the Screw Attack.

Since you can't hit floor-based enemies with anything but the Wave Beam (which I don't want because Wave Beam means no Ice Beam!), it would be great if you could jump onto them with Screw, but that doesn't work because Samus quits it before landing on the ground. Would be great if you could reliably hit airborne enemies with it, but sometimes Samus just quits it mid-air for no reason I could figure out. Very often I Screwed right into an enemy and got hit anyway. Once I got hit mid-air by literally nothing, no enemy on screen, just getting hurt in the black void and falling into the lava.

Getting chased and hit by enemies during door transitions isn't fun either. Once an enemy was trapped inside the door with me, before it opened on the other side it hit me 5 times and I was dead. Or there's just some unapologetic Design By Jank again where an enemy is placed such that it hits you as you exit a door before you can move.

Boss fights? Terrible jank, but thankfully there's only 3 of them and they're very short.

All in all, frankly I think Metroid 1 is kind of... shit. Not just by today's standards, I think it's not even a good game by NES standards. It's often said that games like SMB1, Zelda 1, Castlevania 1, Mega Man 1 haven't aged well, but imo they all have aged far better than Metroid. It's just too clumsy, janky and broken.

4/10


Metroid mOTHER

Some classic games have amazing ROM hacks, often carrying the "Redux" name, that greatly improve the experience, this seemed like one of those, so I gave it a try. This was my second playthrough of Metroid 1 before the vanilla version. Among other things it brings a save feature and a map (no automap--map is fully revealed but doesn't have any item markers), combined Wave/Ice Beam, and some cosmetic changes. 

The map is a good addition, although not as useful as a true automap because you can't see if you've already been somewhere or picked up an item. Wave/Ice combo is nice but changed the experience less than I expected. Destructible blocks are visually different now, which is nice.

Not a huge fan of the cosmetic changes, I think they feel a little out of place, as cosmetic hacks tend to do. Redesigned (bigger) Ridley is a flickering nightmare, which managed to make him even jankier than the original.

Sadly all the jank is intact, failing controls, failing Screw Attack, "indoor hits" etc. It's a slight improvement overall but the game is still too broken. I admire the effort, but I can't help feeling it's polishing a turd.

4.5/10


Metroid Planets (1.27g)

Fan recreation for Windows that can be found here.

This is the first version I finished, I think it's a great improvement in many ways, and an actual automap (including found item markers) make it very newcomer-friendly. It fixes all the broken shit: controls are smooth and reliable. Screw Attack just works. No getting hit in a door. And so on, just generally a much smoother, more enjoyable experience.

More new features include: The ability to switch between Wave and Ice in the pause screen (like in Super Metroid and later) instead of having to return to the Chozo statues, save games, better bomb jump, optional hold-button-to-fire missiles like in the GBA games (really great for the freeze/missile loop), and thank God, respawning with full health. It also has a built-in randomiser, but I haven't tried that yet.

The only niggle I have is that it's a little over-eager with respawning enemies (Mega Man-style)*, but other than that it's great.

Now staying true to the original means of course the same enemies, same map layout, same rooms, same bosses etc. (as it should). And while I praise the effort and making the right changes, sadly I'll also have to give it a score for being a game in general, and it's held back by the shortcomings of the original game's design. However it elevates it to a level where I'd say it's actually worth playing.

Remake score: 10/10
Heartless game score: 6/10

But it doesn't end there. On top of the original map (called "Planet Zebeth") it also has a completely different "Planet Novus" map. This replaces the primitive and repetitive original map/room design with one that's organic and diverse, and actually fun to explore. Essentially, what you want a metroidvania to be like, just with the oldschool mechanics of Metroid 1. That still holds it back a little compared to more "modern" games (still no shooting diagonally or downwards, antiquated enemy freezing mechanics, limited move set, etc), but it's a great showcase of how much you can get out of Metroid 1, and a unique and genuinely fun experience in its own right.

And it has 8-bit versions of the Super Metroid soundtrack. And 8-bit versions of Zero Mission Kraid and Ridley.

Planet Novus:
Improvement score: 10/10
Heartless game score: 7.5/10

Note: to play Planet Novus, you need version 1.27, it's currently unavailable in the most recent 1.30 version (both versions available for download at the link posted above).

*edit: actually this only happens in v1.27. In v1.3, enemies only respawn after leaving the room, like in Super. I recommend 1.3 for the remastered Metroid 1, and 1.27 only for playing Planet Novus. Sadly they seem to overwrite each other's config file, so you'll have to rebind your controls each time you switch between them.