Hello Malstrom. I am someone who got into gaming in the early 90s, when it was all about the Super Nintendo and Sega. We didn’t have a Super Nintendo though. We only had a NES. Not that I complained, I had as much fun with Zelda and Mario as the next guy. One game I simply could not overcome, however, was Metroid.
I was three to four years old at the time, and being a Norwegian it was impossible for me to understand any in-game instructions. Luckily the NES games were simple and straight-forward, letting even two-year olds play without difficulty. No Norwegian child would be able to pick up the average game for the 360 or PS3 nowadays (or Other M, haha), because they wouldn’t be able to understand any of it and would become stuck. Metroid for the NES was a different thing entirely. I was used to challenges as I had gotten far in both Mario and Zelda (I had never personally beat them until years later, when I got myself a Wii and the Virtual Console). Metroid, however, simply baffled me. I think you nailed it when you talked about how it was a game you’d watch your dad or older relative play through. Not even my big brother (four years older than me) could get very far in it. We would only see the final battle with Mother Brain when we visited a relative of mine who was much older, and much more of a game freak. The kind of person that defines game god. I don’t remember exactly what was his favorite game but I do remember he told us that Metroid was one of the defining games of his gaming experience on the NES. I wish I’d known that kind of satisfaction back in the day!
Few others that I knew had played Metroid, but it seemed as though many had heard about it. “Did you know Samus is a GIRL?!” “Who’s Samus?” “That guy in the suit in Metroid!” For ages we’d know Samus as “that guy in Metroid”. Imagine when I discovered to my surprise that she was female! I had never beaten Metroid by myself so there was no way I could have found that out on my own. Norway was always a bit late on the gaming front so there wasn’t as much talk about Super Metroid. I don’t ever remember playing it in my youth, actually. I only remember three SNES games – Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario Kart and Super Mario Land. We never owned a SNES of our own, so we made the jump straight from NES to N64. I wouldn’t even know Super Metroid existed until the Gamecube era.
My attention around Metroid would dwindle considerably around the N64 era. Metroid had been a massive challenge and left quite the impression on me, but I was much more of a Zelda or Mario type of person. I think that if Metroid Prime had been a N64 game, this could have changed. The only thing that got me from forgetting it completely was Super Smash Bros. I think Nintendo pulled a clever one by making that game, to be honest – before it I had never paid any attention whatsoever to Lylat Wars, Kirby or F-Zero.
Back to Metroid, the first Metroid game I would own for myself was Prime 3. I wouldn’t get the other 2 Primes before earlier this year, with the Trilogy. Prime 3 pretty much set the bar for what I like/dislike about Metroid today, but I can still remember the challenge of the original. Personally I enjoyed Prime 3 very much – I found the combat to be good, the controls were much better than on the Gamecube Primes, and outside of the early “Halo-like” stages it had a nice pace to it. I especially liked the part where you go and inspect the G.F.S. Valhalla, the atmosphere and music made my heart sit all the way up in my throat. Hypermode difficulty had appeal to it, for sure, but again I remember the original Metroid. Ironically, it seems that Other M is exactly what Metroid was NOT, even though they have the same protagonist and they both have Ridley and the Power Suit and all that. In the original Metroid you would never know that Samus was a woman until you beat it (and few that I knew ever managed to do that. Nowadays all you need is an online guide, but back then there was no such thing and we didn’t have Nintendo Power to help us in Norway). In Other M, it seems they can’t get enough of the fact that she’s a woman. “Don’t you know how to treat a lady?!” Random Zero Suit segments. The “beauty mark” under Samus’ lip which has oddly been missing in every other game featuring her face (some people believe it’s a detail added by Team Ninja, but it’s Sakamoto who originally talked about her beauty mark and how only he knew where it was). Metroid was a MAZE, where it was INCREDIBLY EASY to get lost (to this day I remember how I sat for six hours straight one evening with the game and I didn’t have a clue where I was going. When my brother took over he didn’t know where I was either. It was SCARY). Other M has linear corridors, more linear corridors and slightly crooked corridors. In Metroid, Samus didn’t utter a word (as was the status quo of Nintendo’s games. For some reason people keep insisting that it was the limitations of the NES that caused Nintendo to hold back on the dialog, even though games like Final Fantasy and Ninja Gaiden would prove them wrong). In Other M you will grow to hate her voice by the time you are shown the game’s title. And finally, Metroid marks the first time within the games that Samus meets Ridley, and she doesn’t flinch a bit. In Other M, she freaks out at the sight of him, even though she’s killed him five times. The “justification” for this is of course the manga.
It makes me a bit irritated to go on sites and suddenly find Sakamoto’s favorite kinds of fans – the fans who say “you need to read the manga!” – on forums and message boards where you honestly wouldn’t expect them to pop up. My last encounters of such fans were on two Zelda forums I frequent. Even worse, these are people that were happy to harp on Twilight Princess for linearity and easyness, yet they will go to great lengths to defend this Tribute to Sakamoto’s Fictional Girlfriend. “It makes sense if you read the manga.” “Well, you can’t know what she was thinking in Metroid Prime or Metroid Prime 3! She could have been secretly terrified to see Ridley face to face!” They’re just concerned with making sense of it all, instead of looking at whether the concept is GOOD or not.
Other M should never have been made as a game. Sakamoto should have gone to a manga artist and had them create it for him, and Nintendo could safely declare it non-canon. That way he would be able to “share his vision”, he could obsess over her “beauty” as much as he’d want, Nintendo could continue making Metroid as they please, and Samus’ character would remain intact for the rest of us who never cared about maternal instincts and who can safely say that they frown at anyone who cried at the end of Super Metroid. Mangas can have stupid plots and inconsistencies all they want, because no-one would ever hold the manga to the canonical standards of the games. And there would be no voice acting. I promise, if you were to play through this game, you’d think Pit’s voice acting in the new Kid Icarus would be perfectly fine by comparison. How they managed to screw up Samus’ voice so much is beyond me.
I’m not sure if I want to see more Metroid now. I don’t trust Sakamoto to suddenly retire and stop trying to shove his “visions” into our faces. I think the series needs someone else – maybe Retro again – to come and deliver a game that can shut Sakamoto up once and for all. As it stands now, Nintendo doesn’t even consider the Prime games as a part of the Metroid timeline. They’re just “side-projects”.
I definitely agree that a game like the original Metroid would be amazing to see on the Wii. I’d highly anticipate such a game, maybe even as much as the likes of Zelda and Super Smash Bros. Brawl (the game that had the biggest launch of the Wii, until Mario 5 took its crown). Unfortunately Sakamoto has stated that he was going to be turning to the Metroid Dread game after Other M, so I can’t look to Dread for comfort at this point.
Translation to above commercial:
Introducing Metroid II, the action game that’s causing waves in America! As metroids increase in power, find all the items. With countless enemies and bosses to destroy along the way, it’s the ultimate in game excitement! (ekkusaitingu!) Now on Gameboy: Metroid II!
What interests me is how Samus being a woman wasn’t advertised in Metroid II. And guess what? No one cared. And that Metroid game didn’t have a touch of Sakamoto in it. The fact that Samus Aran is a girl got old back in 1986. Sakamoto must have missed the memo as every Metroid he is behind keeps rubbing that she is a girlin our faces. I love your description of M:OM as ‘Sakamoto’s Fictional Girlfriend’. Isn’t that the truth!
I’m glad you can remember how NES Metroid commanded awe and wonder from all gamers. It was as if it was the game for the master player. Younger relatives would look up in awe as they might be able to beat Super Mario Brothers, but not Metroid! Despite the huge difficulty Metroid had, it didn’t hurt its sales.
One thing I strongly detest about Sakamoto cultists is how in order to raise Sakamoto up, they must tear down everyone who has worked on Metroid. For example, Gunpei Yokoi, who was the producer of the first three Metroids, is ‘torn down’ by saying he had absolutely no involvement, that he was asleep the entire time or something. More common is that the other developers were not really developers. Why, they were engineers.
While listening through the cultist’s nonsense, a thought occurred to me. NES Metroid really does feel like the fruit of many engineers working on it. Just the way how the game was designed is very intricate and really does have that engineer’s touch in things. For examples, the constant mazes, the radically gameplay altering items such as the ice beam (which could not have been easy to program in), to things like hidden energy tanks in ceilings, in the lava, and all are really something you would get from engineers going wild. When you get a ‘designer’ to go wild, you get awful narrative and awful characters. The intricate mazes and little touches on the gameplay really shows up in NES Metroid and even in the two Metroids following. After that, it seemed as if Metroid suddenly became more of a puzzle game with bad cutscenes and ninja boss battles.
It is very difficult to communicate to people in such high regard the original Metroid was during the NES era. We already know about how Mario and Zelda were regarded. But Metroid was regarded differently. Metroid was not highly regarded because of its game world or aesthetics (as the sci-fi staples were in almost every other video game at the time). Metroid was like the mythical labyrinth made by master engineers which everyone tries to get through but very few can make it. Every step is scary. Every monster in it is scary. You easily become lost. Metroid was a game unlike any other.
I’ve been trying to think of other reasons why Metroid was special. Aside from the fierce difficulty and awesome engineering it seemed was behind the game (and how freaking mysterious the game was! The mystery, reader! The mystery! We thought there were hidden worlds in NES Metroid!) there was something I call context shifting.
Above: Like the Negative World in Super Mario Brothers, glitches only added to the imagination.
When Metroid begins, like most games you begin going to the right. But, alas, you come to a wall with a small hole at the bottom that you cannot go through. So you start to head back the other way. Going past your starting point, you find the morph ball. You can become a ball, but so what? It wasn’t until you get back to that wall again and see the little creeper guy walk underneath it that the idea comes to your head to use the morph ball to squeeze through the hole.
People will look at this and go, “Aha! The Metroid formula is to get X item to pass X obstacle.” But this is totally not what Metroid is. Adventure games that date far before Metroid was using the X item to get past X obstacle.
What occurred was a context shift. The gameplay, in the player’s head, was that of a typical action game with Samus running and jumping around. But, suddenly, she can become a morph ball and move around to places she normally shouldn’t. It altered the basic core of the gameplay.
Let me use a better example: the ice beam. The ice beam was a huge context shift to the game. Suddenly, enemies which you only responded to blowing up were now platforms. And you could freeze them in place to make going through rooms easier. Those invincible guys in the vertical passages, which were so annoying, were now extremely valuable. The core gameplay had a substantial change.
Another good example are bombs. Bombs totally shifted the context of the game. Suddenly, you were bombing everything to see if there were any holes anywhere. Your bombs would pop your morph ball up (this is definitely an indicator of good engineers). Your bombs could be used against enemies.
What about the screw attack? Throughout the game, you tried to not spin jump because it wasn’t as accurate as the regular jump (and face it, in NES Metroid, one misplaced jump means falling into the lava of death). Now, suddenly, you want to only spin jump.
Metroid had a very difficult but very solid core gameplay of platforming and shooting. And items would shift that gameplay into entirely new contexts. Despite NES Metroid not being a very large world, it FELT large because there was so many contexts the player went through. Content is, after all, only in the player’s head. We even thought the glitches were some untapped secret of Metroid we had to figure out. Remember that this game was filled with illusionary walls, fake bosses, vertical corridors everywhere… Metroid was not just hard on the reactive skills of platforming and shooting, it was hard on the mental skills of figuring out the mazes and the new contexts the items put on you. I cannot think of any platform game that has come close. Games like Zelda 2 had the ‘Find X item to pass X obstacle’ but there was never any context shift. You got the hammer to get past the rock, you got the flute to get past the spider, you got the raft to get to the other continent, etc.
The best items of Metroid are the context shifting ones: morph ball, missiles, bombs, ice beam, screw attack, grapple beam, spider ball, space jump. The bad items of Metroid are ones that do not perform any context shift: super missiles, power bombs, high jump, gravity suit, and so on. NES Metroid did some funky things like the long beam and wave beam (to shoot through objects) which were godsends during the game but I’m not sure if they qualify for context shifting. Same for the Varia Suit.
There hasn’t been any great new context shifting items for Metroid for a long time. Let me give an example of one. Say something like ‘gravity boots’. These would allow Samus to walk on walls. This, alone, would totally change the context of vertical corridors. But it would take an engineer’s touch to pull this off in the game world design. You would have to additionally design the game to account for the player to walk on walls. This is why I think engineers really made Metroid as Metroid.
One of the great joys of Metroid was getting a new context shifting item. Metroid was full of them because it was the first game. Metroid II had a few such as the Spider Ball (walk on ceilings) or Space Jump (you’re literally flying). Super Metroid had some more like the grapple beam (who didn’t just spin around and around in Maridia on the flying blowfish?).
One of the reasons why I think Metroid Prime was successful was that the move to 3d was a context shift for pretty much everything. The morph ball was completely different in Metroid Prime and felt almost like Marble Madness. Moving through 3d rooms felt very different than in 2d Metroids.
And this could be part of the reason why M:OM failed. The quasi-first person view and the ‘2d view’ wasn’t exactly context shifting. When in 2d view, you wonder why it isn’t as good as 2d Metroid. When in 3d view, you wonder why it isn’t as good as Prime. The cutscenes also didn’t shift any context because cutscenes have nothing to do with the core gameplay.
It is really sad that Nintendo is going the Other M path. It would be so nice to play a 2d Metroid that would kick your butt and when you got that new item, it would totally transform the gameplay before your eyes. And you’d be “Wow!” Instead, we get nothing but the same exact items as before, no difficulty, poor 3d to 2d translations, horrible cutscenes, and more atrocious character development.
The Metroid gamer on the NES was the ‘best of the best’, seen as the most skilled player of all, and looked at with a sense of awe. The Metroid gamer on the Wii is now someone whose skills are worse than Super Mario Brothers players, who thinks bad anime is Citizen Kane, and is laughed at by all other gamers. Thanks for destroying Metroid, Nintendo!
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