2D Platformers / Metroidvanias

My god I fucking loved VVVVVV. I remember lying in my bed playing it on my Vita, spending so long on Veni Vidi Vici. That joy when I mastered it was unreal. I bet I could still do it now. Pure muscle memory.

Loved VVVVVV too, a great display of how minimalist you can get while still making an awesome game. I adore the "oh no!" sadface and sadsound of characters, so good.

Celeste is strange to me too, I should like it but it just never clicked. Gave it several tries but never went further than an hour or so.

Bill in the rain The sections that see you constantly bounce from top to bottom?

Oh, yeah I get you, I was thinking of the section with two horizontal flashing lines and you constantly bounce up and down.

Celeste you're going to need to chain 6-12 air dashes in succession, making sure to hit the recharge orbs because you only actually get one air dash.

After a while I just put all the assist modes on, get on with it!

Metroid Fusion & Metroid Zero Mission (GBA)

God knows how, as a Super Metroid fan looking for good 2D metroidvanias, I missed that there were two actual Metroid games on the GBA, acclaimed ones at that. I guess it's just not a system that's usually on my radar.

Metroid Fusion - 8/10

First, the one issue I have with Super Metroid is its floaty and clunky movement physics. It can be pretty frustrating how the game keeps slowing you down when you're trying to keep your forward momentum. Metroid Fusion fixes this and I love it, that's what I always wanted. It's just so quick and snappy and intuitive in comparison, greatly increasing the action platformer qualities of the game. Space Jump is still somewhat unreliable, but much less so than in Super. My only (minor) letdown is that they nerfed the wall jump so that you can't climb up a single wall anymore and generally there's much less opportunity for those acrobatics that I loved in Super.

Fusion also ups the difficulty a little, which is welcome as I find Super a little too easy. There are a few frustrating difficulty spikes, but for the most part it's very good.

Sadly, it introduces a new gameplay mechanic that I don't like at all--how health and ammo "pickups" are now some sort of virus or whatever that fly away while you're trying to catch them, and even worse, they keep respawning/upgrading enemies if you don't catch them quickly. It's annoying, it makes the game more hectic than I'd like Metroid to be, and it can just go to hell.

My other "complaints" are mostly a matter of taste, but sadly they diminish the game for me even more than the mechanic mentioned above, I'm talking about the changes in tone, structure and storytelling. I'll probably sound like a conservative knob again who opposes any change in my games, but classic Metroid has such unique style and atmosphere that I don't get anywhere else, so yeah if I don't get that in a Metroid game I'll be disappointed.

So firstly, I love classic Metroid's caverns/alien ruins/depths of hell setting. Fusion takes place on a space station instead, a completely man-made environment and the theme is more one of technology and bio-experiments gone wrong than one of mysterious alien ruins and lava caves. Not bad in itself, but it just doesn't do it for me like that.

Another thing I love about Super is its radical "show, don't tell" design in terms of both gameplay and storytelling. After the short intro, no word is spoken in the entire game. Whatever you encounter is not explained and left to your imagination, and all this together gives it such an absorbing isolated and mysterious atmosphere. That's gone in Fusion, with computer dialogue telling you what's going on and what you need to do, Samus "sharing" her thoughts while riding elevators and so on. Again not bad in itself, but another thing that made me love Super is gone.

And then structure. The levels are built more linearly, more "on rails" compared to Super's very open world. What's more, the computer always gives you a map, tells you where to go next and gives you an objective marker on the map. Again not something inherently bad, but again a core component of classic Metroid removed. That sense of being lost and having to figure it out on your own, gone. Granted, it could be a bit much because you could get truly lost in that huge world when you didn't know where to go, so a little guidance might have been helpful at times, but Fusion takes it too far imo by basically giving you orders and directions.

But even so, I got completely stuck a few times and had to look up how to proceed online, something I think I never did in a Metroid game before. The issue being that you need to find a secret passage to proceed on the main path and there is no hint whatsoever where that might be. There's just an invisible passage behind a random wall somewhere, or a destructible block somewhere without the slightest visual clue. Which means, I spent a lot of time trying to bomb every single wall and floor and ceiling block in numerous rooms in the general vicinity and it sucked. Basically, what used to be an obscure spot where you could find a missile tank or whatever is now an obscure spot you need to find for main game progression. This is the closest thing in this game I get to claiming that's objectively not good.

Still, Fusion is a very good game and absolutely worth playing, and if it didn't have the Metroid name I'd probably complain less. But it does and while playing I always miss some of the things that made Metroid so special. If only there was a game with the same mechanics but it's classic Metroid...

Metroid: Zero Mission - 9/10

And here we go. This is exactly what I wanted. Mechanically it plays like Fusion (but refined... it feels even a little snappier, some controls have improved, wall jump is back in all its glory, Space Jump is almost 100% reliable now), but it's a determined remake of Metroid 1 of all things. As in, Metroid 1 but enjoyable. In a great nod to that game, you even start with a short-range blaster--it's not as bad as in Metroid 1 and you quickly get the upgrade, but it's such a great way to make it unmistakably clear what this game is.

Somehow it manages to capture the feel of Metroid 1 and Super at the same time, all while retaining and even improving the tight gameplay of Fusion. The atmosphere is back and it's spot on. It combines the the strong parts of all games into an organic whole that works better than it should. I don't know how they did it, but I think it's an amazing achievement. It rivals Super and in some aspects surpasses it, which is a fucking high bar as far as I'm concerned.

One nice example of how it finds a good middle ground is world structure and map markers. It's more open than Fusion but not as open as Super, actually I wouldn't mind it being more open but on the upside you don't get as lost as in Super. To help you with that, sometimes a Chozo statues gives you a map marker where you need to go for main game progress, but only sometimes and it doesn't give you an objective or a map, just a marker in the middle of nowhere so you still have to figure the path out on your own. At the same time, they fixed Fusion's issue by giving visual clues for secret passages you need to find, that aren't too obvious but noticeable if you pay attention. I struggled at times but always figured it out eventually without looking it up. That's how it should be.

I don't actually want to say much more because most of it would be just praise. Sadly, the one thing holding it back is the last section. It's kind of rubbish and it's too long. I wish they'd just deleted that section entirely, it would have been a 9.5 then. But the rest of the game is great.

Another major criticism I had on my first playthrough was that it's too easy, but the first playthrough unlocks hard mode which is great. Also the game is not very long, but it's so much fun to play that it seems to have a ton of replay value. At the time of writing, I've played through both games twice, and replay Zero Mission a lot more I shall.

I love the soundtrack, but I think it suffers a little from the GBA's bad sound quality.

As for the markers, yeah I get it and I'm a bit on the fence. Maybe it's a bit too much, don't know. In general, I prefer exploration too, but e.g. say I've discovered most of the map in Super (and notably, most of Maridia) and I haven't even an idea in which region to look for where I need to go next. It's great to search everything once or twice, but after revisiting all the rooms I've seen before again and again for the 5th time or more, and I'm spending hours without progress, it gets frustrating.

I can't really remember how that was like in Super Metroid as I've been knowing it inside out for many years, but I believe I once did have a bad time spending hours without progress. What I remember better is Axiom Verge, hitting a brick wall and moving through the countless rooms of its gigantic map again and again wasn't fun. I think I looked the solution up 2 or 3 times in that game.

My main gripe here is that I'm literally not making any progress because I gain absolutely nothing on the way and at some point it feels like an utter waste of time. That's one of the dangers of metroidvanias imo, backtracking without reward. That's one thing I commend Bloodstained for, not that you get lost a lot in that game, but still it gives you so much to gain in terms of loot and shards etc. that backtracking never feels like wasted time.

Special mention for Kraid's Lair theme

I do still like Zero Mission for all the things you mentioned. I just think it's held back from being Super Metroid level by that one feature. Funny thing is, it's made by Retro, after they did Metroid Prime, which does allow you to disable its hint system that tells you where to go next. I don't know how easy it would be but a romhack that removes it would be something

I did find the solution to the Super Metroid puzzle but I know it was after being lost for a long time and just thinking 'what if' as I passed through there for the umpteenth time.

And there we go. I just got speed boots and high jump and now I'm completely stuck. I've revisited every single room in four areas 3 or 4 times so far and there's nothing I can do but repeat the same thing again and again hoping that I'll eventually stumble over the solution. I even kind of sequence breaked by getting a super missile before I'm supposed to, but it actually doesn't get me anywhere at this point. It's pretty frustrating, if I didn't have the option to look up the solution online, right now I'd be close to just giving up on the game.

Anyway, interesting videos discussing this:

I wouldn't call Metroid games open world. Open world suggests you can go wherever you want within reason. Metroidvanias do have a set linear path that is gated off behind upgrades. It's more that the way forward isn't always directly in front of you and you have to back track to previous areas to use new abilities to open previously unacceesible paths

Ideally, for the critical path, you should be able to tell when you find an area you'll need an ability for later and make a mental note (a ledge being too high, a wall that clearly needs a specific weapon to break, etc). The more obtuse puzzles should be saved for the optional upgrades and stuff

I think there's a balance and it is frustrating to have a huge area without any idea of where to start looking. In that event, it is bad game design (unless the whole game is like that)

There's that Indiana Jones style game that's kind of a Metroidvania but the whole this is so obtuse and difficult that I didn't find it fun at all

Now regardless of if we call it metroidvania or open world (I think we're talking about the same games), yes that's a core part of these games and I do like that. But if finding the way forward requires you to morph ball bomb every single block in every single room in the entire game--like in Metroid 1--that's just bullshit game design.

Take Hollow Knight, that is huge and I got lost quite a bit at some points, but e.g. I eventually walked over some shaking ground so I knew I could do that ground slam thing through there. Took me a while to find it but that's cool, that's indeed what these games are about. Now imagine the ground wasn't shaking and to find the way forward you'd have to ground slam every tiny stretch of ground and attack every piece of wall in the entire world, that would be total garbage and it would be a shit game.

edit: in the case of Zero Mission, I eventually looked up the marker online and it was a little difficult to find even with the marker. Turns out there's one room where you have to shoot through a ceiling block, with no clue given whatsoever, visual or otherwise. The marker told me that I need to somehow get up in a certain region and it narrowed it down to maybe 10-20 screens. Without that, I'd have forever strayed around the 100-200 screens I'd revealed so far, with no chance of ever finding it.