When Defender came out in the arcades, it was predicted that the game wouldn’t sell. The game was insanely hard and had many buttons. This was the opposite trend at the time of making games ‘friendlier and gentler’ with less buttons and more saccharine for the ladies. To the surprise of the ‘industry’, Defender became a huge hit and ultimately… a classic.
Young men, especially, like difficult games because it feels like an achievement beating them. People really like games that reward skill.
I know I’m probably the only one on the Internet saying this (which is actually good as it separates me from the pack), but I keep saying that Super Metroid was not the peak of the Metroid franchise but the first major indicator of a decline. This doesn’t mean that Super Metroid wasn’t a great game. It was fantastic. It introduced many new things. But it just didn’t have the same impact as the original Metroid did.
Why do I keep calling Super Metroid a ‘comfort game’? I do so in the sense that the game never makes you feel uncomfortable, that the game is extremely easy and like a nature walk compared to NES Metroid. I’ve also said that the enemies in Metroid would easily rip you apart while in Super Metroid, they feel like nonthreatening things placed there only to slow you down as you go from one item to another item. NES Metroid was a game consumers would chew on and battle for months if not years. Super Metroid was a game that was easily beaten within a rental.
One difference between gamers today and the old school gamers is that every gamer today feels entitled to beat any game if they just put in the time. Back in the day, no one expected to beat most games. The fun was in playing games, not completing them. You could spend endless hours with a game and still get nowhere in it if you didn’t have the skills. Shmup games were notorious for this. I guarantee you many people were unable to beat Gradius but that didn’t stop them from playing it.
Due to JRPGs and adventure games, gamers today think that if they just put in enough time, they are entitled to beat any video game. This is why the language of gamers has changed over the last couple of decades. Before, it was, “I finally beat level 5!” Today, it is, “I am thirty hours into the game.” Or to be more precise, when first impressions came with Other M, someone would say, “I am five hours into the game…” You could not possibly say that with old school Metroid. Five hours could mean you going in circles and going nowhere. This is also why I think the New School Gamer will describe a game like NES Metroid as ‘unplayable’ because there is the assumption that a game must reward time investment rather than skill. Instead of admitting they don’t have the skills and do not desire to develop them to play the game, it is easier to declare the game broken. We see New School Zelda fans do the same for the NES Zelda games for example. (When Nintendo looked at the mechanics of SNES Mario Kart to revitalize Mario Kart for the DS incarnation, its sales began to go through the roof. Mario 5 which was seen as ‘too difficult’ by some during the development sold gangbusters. And a game like Wii Sports can only be defined by the skill of the player and not the time invested into the game. You either learn how to bowl or not. A gazillion gutterballs does not earn you medals.)
For my demonstration, I am going to show a compare and contrast of Kraid’s Lair for the Metroid NES and Kraid’s Lair for the Super Metroid SNES. For the record, the player of NES Metroid has played through NES Metroid before. However, he is using a keyboard (which impacts his playing) and is using constant save states (which is saving his mistakes). You will see the player getting lost and getting torn apart by enemies. If there is any flaw of the original Metroid, it is the monotony of refilling your energy and weapons. But remember, this game came out in 1986, twenty four years ago.
After seeing how terrifying and difficult Kraid’s Lair is in Metroid, how is Kraid’s Lair in Super Metroid?
Imagine you have been living and breathing NES Metroid for eight years. What would your reaction be when playing Super Metroid? You’d be disappointed. The game doesn’t require any skill to beat. And the enemies are like fluffy bunnies to slow you down compared to the heartless monsters in NES Metroid that eat you alive. While the sound and visual improvements of Super Metroid are very impressive, and the new weapons like the grapple beam were very sweet, Metroid definitely lost something in Super Metroid.
One element I wish to return that Metroid did, as did the older Zelda games, was they had a very dangerous world. You could get access to later parts of the game but you would die because it was so dangerous. In both Metroid and Zelda, you could upgrade your armor and weapons which made the game much easier to play through. The beginning monsters got easier and the later monsters which were impossible were now possible. You felt powerful. You didn’t feel like you were the pawn of someone’s script.
Near the end of this video is the Kraid’s Lair of Zero Mission.
After seeing the NES Metroid videos, you should be able to see just how child-like easy Zero Mission is in comparison and how much smaller the game feels. Even on hard difficulty, it is still easy and extremely forgiving. Samus even grabs onto ledges so you cannot get knocked off. How easy is that?
Nintendo was a master of irony in their games back then. The irony of Metroid’s final battle was that the last boss, Mother Brain, never attacked you. What was so different was that the final ROOM was so dangerous. Likewise, Metroid cleverly inverted the typical final stage. Instead of the final stage being extremely dangerous (with the final boss being dangerous), the final stage is extremely easy but the enemies in it (Metroids) are extremely dangerous. You don’t see this type of innovation from Nintendo anymore.
The final boss fight from NES Metroid was extremely memorable and became iconic as an example of the NES experience. To show just how heartless the game is, even once you beat the final boss and beat the game, the planet will blow up unless you get out within a certain time. How much more heartless can a game get? This heartlessness was a big element of the game’s charm.
You could make a game like Defender easier, shallower, simpler, and add in anime tropes with many cutscenes, and you would have effectively destroyed a classic. It is good that games differentiate themselves from each other. Just as Defender embraced its heartlessness and mind numbing difficulty to differentiate itself from games like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, Defender became a unique experience, sold very well, and became a classic. In the same way, Metroid embraced a type of maze-like complexity and elaborate difficulty that really set it apart from games like Super Mario Brothers and Legend of Zelda. Keep in mind Metroid’s difficulty wasn’t like the difficulty of Ghosts and Goblins. Metroid never felt cheap. Kids at the time looked up at Metroid because their father or older brothers would be able to play it while they could not (they would just use Justin Bailey cheat to pretend they were as good as their older relative). The reason why Nintendo never got the reputation of ‘casual game company’ or ‘kiddie game company’ was in due part because of Metroid. Metroid really was a test of game playing skills for older gamers. Regardless, Metroid was so popular that Nintendo chose to reprint it alongside games like Legend of Zelda.
Gamers kinda got cheated as we deserved another home console Metroid game between 1986 Metroid and 1994 Super Metroid. It is like comparing the harder original Super Mario Brothers to the easy Super Mario World with no Mario games in between for comparison.
To resurrect the Metroid series, a Super Metroid 2 will not work (as Super Metroid didn’t exactly work back in 1994). Keep the same great music and lush atmosphere of Super Metroid but have the heartlessness of the original. What you would end up with is a Super Metroid on Steroids. It would not be a game you would easily beat within a few hours (unless you have God skills). It would be a challenging game that you would wrestle with for a while and have a ton of fun doing so. Just as NES Metroid allowed one to get items and even the mini-bosses in different order, so to would this Super Steroid Metroid allow similar variation. Each game session would not be the identical ‘get item A’ then ‘get item B’ where the weapons and missiles serve as little as nothing but keys.
If anything is certain, it is time for Sakamoto and his team to stop working on Metroid. The Sakamoto storyline is nothing but anime tropes, inconsistencies, and absolute destruction of the series (e.g. Fusion Suit, e.g. the origin of Mother Brain in Other M). The Sakamoto team, including his 2d Metroid level designer, has made Metroid after Metroid that sells flat, despite the vast GBA install base, and it doesn’t get back to the awe that the NES Metroid commanded… or even the lesser Super Metroid for that matter. So why should anyone think that another 2d Metroid game from the Sakamoto team will do anything differently? It is time for them to go.
Just as with Mario 5, Nintendo should find a young member of the company who grew up with the original Metroid and understands the awe and impact it had. Give him the design responsibility for Metroid and remove all the Sakamoto garbage that has been built up over the past decade. Give us our Super Metroid on Steroids.
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