Super Metroid - Racclog #6
“…Really? Super Metroid??” I hear you ask. “Of all the games you could be playing and reviewing in 2025?” Ah, but you forget, dear reader. This is my blog and I do what I want. This is also a blog about reviewing games as I pluck them from my ever-expanding and impossible-to-clear backlog; it doesn’t matter whether the games are from 2024 or 1994.
Also, a friend really wanted me to play it, and RetroAchievements is pretty bangin’.
Super Metroid
But look, man, the real reason is that I oughta play some more older games every now and then. For shits and giggles I started putting a top 100 favourite games list on Topster recently and the only game to make it on the list from pre-2000 was Spyro the Dragon. Absolutely not good enough. I’ve been on this planet for nearly 32 years, I call myself a game critic, and I still haven’t played one of the progenitors of the Metroidvania genre? Disgusting. Sickening. I will henceforth be deleting all content from my YouTube channel and starting over as a clickbait drama farmer, or one of those channels that solely does “Top 6 Boys Being Boys Moments” where they stop at number 2 and the list has to cover the screen for some reason.
For real though, as a lover of games like Hollow Knight, Ori and the Blind Forest, Guacamelee! and one of time’s most forgotten Metroidvanias, Scooby Doo! Night of 100 Frights, I want to appreciate the genre’s origins a little more, in the hope that it will allow me to enjoy the genre as a whole even more. I have played Metroid Prime Hunters before as a teenager (my right hand never fully recovered) and I did knock out Metroid: Zero Mission sometime last year, which for the most part I really loved, even the titular zero mission (forced stealth is fine when it’s in the context of a platformer, actually). But now is as good a time as any to check out one of the earliest examples of a proper Metroidvania, spew my largely glowing thoughts about it, and maybe make a few people mad that I’m not madly in love with every little aspect of it. Most of it, though!
Super Metroid takes place after Metroid II: Return of Samus on Game Boy, which basically makes Metroid the first Kingdom Hearts if you think about it. Bounty hunter Samus Aran brings the last Metroid, a grubby little alien brain thing, to the Ceres space colony, where researchers discover the potential to harness the Metroid’s power as a sort of energy source. Samus slips away satisfied, only to be summoned back by a distress call - Ridley, Samus’ weird and kinda hot alien dragon rival thing, has stolen the metroid and killed the scientists, fleeing to the planet Zebes along with his space pirate buddies. One heart-pounding self-destruct sequence later, Samus lands on Zebes to get brain and kick space pirate butt.
Small aside but I love how they’re “space pirates” despite being grotesque and/or fat bug and/or lizard things that wouldn’t look out of place as random enemies and bosses in a JRPG, though maybe that’s just funny to me since I’m writing a webnovel featuring space pirates that look nothing like these guys. I mean, a lot of them are lizards, and one of them is kinda fat… Bah.
Beyond the sick opening and the eventual conclusion, there’s not a lot more to the story in Super Metroid, at least not in a traditional sense. The game instead relies on the player observing the environment and contextual clues to piece together what has occurred or is currently occurring on Zebes, all of which is done without a single line of dialogue past the opening. The space pirates suffered defeat at the hands of Samus in the first game, so here it feels like they’ve taken refuge and hastily built themselves back up again, haphazardly cramming their architecture into the natural surrounds as areas blend both the natural and the artificial together. Plot beats are also revealed to the player as they naturally explore the world - spoilers, I suppose, but for example, knowing that Ridley captured the “last” metroid, stumbling upon half a dozen of them mid-game in an area resembling a laboratory may come as a shock.
Unfurling the story via exploration is a killer hook and is already enough to interest me, but what helps is the incredible atmosphere. “Isolated” and “oppressive” barely do it justice. The visuals on their own sell how strange and alien the planet Zebes is, but for me the soundtrack bolsters the atmosphere at least twofold.
It’s quite understated much of the time, filled with ominous droning and low bass thrums that accentuate the cacophony of spazer lazers and the shrill cries of enemies that meet the incoming end of said spazer lazers. But it also knows when it’s time to up the ante, such as when it throws in prickly electro-funk and tribal drums when you descend into the overgrown caverns of Brinstar for the first time, or the ominous, choir-led Norfair in which the ticking clock-like percussion gives the impression that time has just about run out. Super Metroid’s ability to effortlessly switch between moody ambience and imposing battle themes without sacrificing the overall feeling of isolation is beyond admirable.
This game’s like, what, two megabytes? How the hell does a game pull off such rich, daunting atmosphere with less space to use than a cruddy copy of Vicinity of Obscenity by System of a Down I once snagged off beemp3 that had CD skips baked in??
Gameplay wise, well, what do you expect? This is one of the trope namers, after all. Super Metroid isn’t the first, but it is one of the earliest and best examples of a sort of open world platformer. In an era where levels and zones and locations and whatnot were sequential and self-contained, I can only imagine how people might have felt playing a game with the potential to lead them right back to where they started. It’s not seamless, of course, as areas are separated by blue force field doors you have to shoot to open, but the way the screen transitions during this animation certainly gives it a seamless feel.
The aim of the game is to track down four bosses and pump them full of projectiles to drain them of their colour until they explode, but getting there isn’t as simple as running from left to right and shooting some guys. You’ve gotta deck Samus out with all the latest and greatest in firepower and suit upgrades to be able to get anywhere. Missiles, super missiles and power bombs will make short work of colour-coded barrier doors, for example, with missile tanks increasing capacity. Samus can also use her Morph Ball mode to squeeze through gaps and lay bombs, and acquire a Speed Booster, letting her charge through certain obstacles at uber speed - among many, many other things.
The progression of unlocks and upgrades is part of what makes Super Metroid so compelling. You start off with a single energy tank (a bar of health) and little else, making you feel rather pathetic before inevitably picking up missiles, the Morph Ball and so on. Much later, you’re not only (probably) rocking around with ten or so energy tanks, a 100+ missile reserve and a three-pronged laser shot, but even after that you’re unlocking the ability to continuously jump in the air or even damage enemies with the jump itself. I love how overpowered you feel towards the end of the game, and that it makes you feel overpowered while still upping the challenge - having all these fancy tools did not make the fight against Ridley a cakewalk, not by a long shot.
Finding further capacity upgrades is half the fun of the game, too. The game will often slyly direct you towards shooting certain walls or ceilings to reveal gaps to jump through and net yourself more missiles or an energy tank, and while I wasn’t a huge fan at first, once I learned what the game was asking of me, the search for upgrades became very fun and rewarding. And all this is without mentioning the secret techniques you can learn by observing certain friendly Zebes inhabitants - through both the acquired arsenal and the player’s own observation, Samus becomes an absolute powerhouse by the end of the game, and it is so very, very rewarding.
Combat occasionally surprised me too, even if I think it’s a little lesser than the game’s explorative aspects. It’s trickier than it might seem, with some enemies moving in very erratic patterns and most punishing those who rush in all guns blazing. It’s slower and a bit more methodical than I was expecting, if not occasionally a little irksome, with Samus’ moveset not quite being versatile enough to deal with certain faster enemies. At times, damage feels inevitable, at least to a newer player like me.
On the other hand, while this is still an issue with boss battles, I think this also lends a huge degree of tension to them. Obviously there are patterns to learn to help you minimize and avoid damage, but nearly every boss encounter is a fierce test of endurance that had me, at least, making it through with less health than a Shedinja on life support. The battle against Ridley is of particular positive note (despite the long trek back to him if you die, mumble grumble), but the game’s also not content on just doing regular boss battles - the fight against Crocomire, where you’re dropped into a pit and have to try to push the boss back before he pushes you into a wall of spikes, feels particularly novel for its time, as does the fake-out phase 2 shenanigans it pulls.
Somewhat related: I had a few people tell me to try to find the “secret way” of defeating Draygon. My first instinct was to try to use the electric thingies in the room, which turned out to be the secret way. What the heck is the normal way, then?
I didn’t find myself referring to a guide all that often and when I was, it was because either a) I was a dumbass and missed something very obvious, or b) the game decided to pull a fast one on me - you get a powerup to scan the environment for hidden areas, but one late-game hurdle is hidden behind a wall that just looks like a normal wall when scanned, which feels kinda cheap and stands out like a sore thumb amongst otherwise generally good level design. (EDIT: I've been made aware that this is a bug that occurs when killing enemies that illuminate the room.) There was also a powerup I missed, and getting it required doing a full lap of the map to reach a previous area, since some doors that require specific weapons arbitrarily can only be opened from one side. Partially this is my fault, especially when said powerup was in a really obvious spot, but this was nonetheless a sour moment.
Still, I think the only other contentious thing I can mention is that the controls are a little strange. I never got used to how Samus jumps, rocketing into the air by holding it then immediately losing all momentum and plummeting to the ground upon letting go (I now see where Hollow Knight gets its inspiration from). It’s a little uncomfortable to me personally, though I could also see it being some kind of representation of the planet’s gravity.
Controls for certain actions are obtuse, particularly the wall jump and shinespark, and I found the space jump enormously fiddly, constantly falling back down to the ground because I hadn’t grasped some random, ever-changing timing window. Switching weapons is also an enormous pain in the ass. Maybe I’m just spoiled by decades of playing Ratchet & Clank, where you hold Triangle and select a weapon on a pop-up quick select ring with the left stick, but cycling through weapons with the select button is about as ergonomic as using wooden stakes for lumbar support.
Thanks to emulation, I could assign this function to the L2 button, and at least you can quickly deselect whatever weapon you have equipped with the Y button so you can jump back to your pew pew laser beam, but that puts forth another question - why was the Y button not just the secondary fire button? Whatever weapon you select overrides the basic beam attack; having a button to cancel it instead of just assigning your missiles to that button is… quirky, to say the least.
Quirky controls (and maybe an ending that ties completion rate to how much of her suit Samus removes) really is the worst of it though, and if that’s the worst that Super Metroid has to offer, then I fully understand why this became such a trendsetter. Playing this after having played many metroidvanias before it is an interesting experience - I can see so much of this game’s DNA all throughout the games industry now, and not only does it help me appreciate the genre a little more, but I still can’t believe a game this ambitious, this open, and this atmospheric was possible in a year in which part of my mum’s fortnightly budget was buying me nappies and vaguely banana-flavoured goop. Super Metroid kicks just as much ass now as it did back in 1994, and I wish I’d played it much sooner.
PROS
Also, a friend really wanted me to play it, and RetroAchievements is pretty bangin’.
Super Metroid
Year: 1994
Genre: Metroidvania
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Played on: SNES (emulated)
Also on: Wii, Wii U, 3DS, Switch
My playtime: 6 hours (not including reloading saves)
But look, man, the real reason is that I oughta play some more older games every now and then. For shits and giggles I started putting a top 100 favourite games list on Topster recently and the only game to make it on the list from pre-2000 was Spyro the Dragon. Absolutely not good enough. I’ve been on this planet for nearly 32 years, I call myself a game critic, and I still haven’t played one of the progenitors of the Metroidvania genre? Disgusting. Sickening. I will henceforth be deleting all content from my YouTube channel and starting over as a clickbait drama farmer, or one of those channels that solely does “Top 6 Boys Being Boys Moments” where they stop at number 2 and the list has to cover the screen for some reason.For real though, as a lover of games like Hollow Knight, Ori and the Blind Forest, Guacamelee! and one of time’s most forgotten Metroidvanias, Scooby Doo! Night of 100 Frights, I want to appreciate the genre’s origins a little more, in the hope that it will allow me to enjoy the genre as a whole even more. I have played Metroid Prime Hunters before as a teenager (my right hand never fully recovered) and I did knock out Metroid: Zero Mission sometime last year, which for the most part I really loved, even the titular zero mission (forced stealth is fine when it’s in the context of a platformer, actually). But now is as good a time as any to check out one of the earliest examples of a proper Metroidvania, spew my largely glowing thoughts about it, and maybe make a few people mad that I’m not madly in love with every little aspect of it. Most of it, though!
Super Metroid takes place after Metroid II: Return of Samus on Game Boy, which basically makes Metroid the first Kingdom Hearts if you think about it. Bounty hunter Samus Aran brings the last Metroid, a grubby little alien brain thing, to the Ceres space colony, where researchers discover the potential to harness the Metroid’s power as a sort of energy source. Samus slips away satisfied, only to be summoned back by a distress call - Ridley, Samus’ weird and kinda hot alien dragon rival thing, has stolen the metroid and killed the scientists, fleeing to the planet Zebes along with his space pirate buddies. One heart-pounding self-destruct sequence later, Samus lands on Zebes to get brain and kick space pirate butt.
Small aside but I love how they’re “space pirates” despite being grotesque and/or fat bug and/or lizard things that wouldn’t look out of place as random enemies and bosses in a JRPG, though maybe that’s just funny to me since I’m writing a webnovel featuring space pirates that look nothing like these guys. I mean, a lot of them are lizards, and one of them is kinda fat… Bah.
Beyond the sick opening and the eventual conclusion, there’s not a lot more to the story in Super Metroid, at least not in a traditional sense. The game instead relies on the player observing the environment and contextual clues to piece together what has occurred or is currently occurring on Zebes, all of which is done without a single line of dialogue past the opening. The space pirates suffered defeat at the hands of Samus in the first game, so here it feels like they’ve taken refuge and hastily built themselves back up again, haphazardly cramming their architecture into the natural surrounds as areas blend both the natural and the artificial together. Plot beats are also revealed to the player as they naturally explore the world - spoilers, I suppose, but for example, knowing that Ridley captured the “last” metroid, stumbling upon half a dozen of them mid-game in an area resembling a laboratory may come as a shock.
Unfurling the story via exploration is a killer hook and is already enough to interest me, but what helps is the incredible atmosphere. “Isolated” and “oppressive” barely do it justice. The visuals on their own sell how strange and alien the planet Zebes is, but for me the soundtrack bolsters the atmosphere at least twofold.
It’s quite understated much of the time, filled with ominous droning and low bass thrums that accentuate the cacophony of spazer lazers and the shrill cries of enemies that meet the incoming end of said spazer lazers. But it also knows when it’s time to up the ante, such as when it throws in prickly electro-funk and tribal drums when you descend into the overgrown caverns of Brinstar for the first time, or the ominous, choir-led Norfair in which the ticking clock-like percussion gives the impression that time has just about run out. Super Metroid’s ability to effortlessly switch between moody ambience and imposing battle themes without sacrificing the overall feeling of isolation is beyond admirable.
This game’s like, what, two megabytes? How the hell does a game pull off such rich, daunting atmosphere with less space to use than a cruddy copy of Vicinity of Obscenity by System of a Down I once snagged off beemp3 that had CD skips baked in??
Gameplay wise, well, what do you expect? This is one of the trope namers, after all. Super Metroid isn’t the first, but it is one of the earliest and best examples of a sort of open world platformer. In an era where levels and zones and locations and whatnot were sequential and self-contained, I can only imagine how people might have felt playing a game with the potential to lead them right back to where they started. It’s not seamless, of course, as areas are separated by blue force field doors you have to shoot to open, but the way the screen transitions during this animation certainly gives it a seamless feel.
The aim of the game is to track down four bosses and pump them full of projectiles to drain them of their colour until they explode, but getting there isn’t as simple as running from left to right and shooting some guys. You’ve gotta deck Samus out with all the latest and greatest in firepower and suit upgrades to be able to get anywhere. Missiles, super missiles and power bombs will make short work of colour-coded barrier doors, for example, with missile tanks increasing capacity. Samus can also use her Morph Ball mode to squeeze through gaps and lay bombs, and acquire a Speed Booster, letting her charge through certain obstacles at uber speed - among many, many other things.
The progression of unlocks and upgrades is part of what makes Super Metroid so compelling. You start off with a single energy tank (a bar of health) and little else, making you feel rather pathetic before inevitably picking up missiles, the Morph Ball and so on. Much later, you’re not only (probably) rocking around with ten or so energy tanks, a 100+ missile reserve and a three-pronged laser shot, but even after that you’re unlocking the ability to continuously jump in the air or even damage enemies with the jump itself. I love how overpowered you feel towards the end of the game, and that it makes you feel overpowered while still upping the challenge - having all these fancy tools did not make the fight against Ridley a cakewalk, not by a long shot.
Finding further capacity upgrades is half the fun of the game, too. The game will often slyly direct you towards shooting certain walls or ceilings to reveal gaps to jump through and net yourself more missiles or an energy tank, and while I wasn’t a huge fan at first, once I learned what the game was asking of me, the search for upgrades became very fun and rewarding. And all this is without mentioning the secret techniques you can learn by observing certain friendly Zebes inhabitants - through both the acquired arsenal and the player’s own observation, Samus becomes an absolute powerhouse by the end of the game, and it is so very, very rewarding.
Combat occasionally surprised me too, even if I think it’s a little lesser than the game’s explorative aspects. It’s trickier than it might seem, with some enemies moving in very erratic patterns and most punishing those who rush in all guns blazing. It’s slower and a bit more methodical than I was expecting, if not occasionally a little irksome, with Samus’ moveset not quite being versatile enough to deal with certain faster enemies. At times, damage feels inevitable, at least to a newer player like me.
On the other hand, while this is still an issue with boss battles, I think this also lends a huge degree of tension to them. Obviously there are patterns to learn to help you minimize and avoid damage, but nearly every boss encounter is a fierce test of endurance that had me, at least, making it through with less health than a Shedinja on life support. The battle against Ridley is of particular positive note (despite the long trek back to him if you die, mumble grumble), but the game’s also not content on just doing regular boss battles - the fight against Crocomire, where you’re dropped into a pit and have to try to push the boss back before he pushes you into a wall of spikes, feels particularly novel for its time, as does the fake-out phase 2 shenanigans it pulls.
Somewhat related: I had a few people tell me to try to find the “secret way” of defeating Draygon. My first instinct was to try to use the electric thingies in the room, which turned out to be the secret way. What the heck is the normal way, then?
I didn’t find myself referring to a guide all that often and when I was, it was because either a) I was a dumbass and missed something very obvious, or b) the game decided to pull a fast one on me - you get a powerup to scan the environment for hidden areas, but one late-game hurdle is hidden behind a wall that just looks like a normal wall when scanned, which feels kinda cheap and stands out like a sore thumb amongst otherwise generally good level design. (EDIT: I've been made aware that this is a bug that occurs when killing enemies that illuminate the room.) There was also a powerup I missed, and getting it required doing a full lap of the map to reach a previous area, since some doors that require specific weapons arbitrarily can only be opened from one side. Partially this is my fault, especially when said powerup was in a really obvious spot, but this was nonetheless a sour moment.
Still, I think the only other contentious thing I can mention is that the controls are a little strange. I never got used to how Samus jumps, rocketing into the air by holding it then immediately losing all momentum and plummeting to the ground upon letting go (I now see where Hollow Knight gets its inspiration from). It’s a little uncomfortable to me personally, though I could also see it being some kind of representation of the planet’s gravity.
Controls for certain actions are obtuse, particularly the wall jump and shinespark, and I found the space jump enormously fiddly, constantly falling back down to the ground because I hadn’t grasped some random, ever-changing timing window. Switching weapons is also an enormous pain in the ass. Maybe I’m just spoiled by decades of playing Ratchet & Clank, where you hold Triangle and select a weapon on a pop-up quick select ring with the left stick, but cycling through weapons with the select button is about as ergonomic as using wooden stakes for lumbar support.
Thanks to emulation, I could assign this function to the L2 button, and at least you can quickly deselect whatever weapon you have equipped with the Y button so you can jump back to your pew pew laser beam, but that puts forth another question - why was the Y button not just the secondary fire button? Whatever weapon you select overrides the basic beam attack; having a button to cancel it instead of just assigning your missiles to that button is… quirky, to say the least.
Quirky controls (and maybe an ending that ties completion rate to how much of her suit Samus removes) really is the worst of it though, and if that’s the worst that Super Metroid has to offer, then I fully understand why this became such a trendsetter. Playing this after having played many metroidvanias before it is an interesting experience - I can see so much of this game’s DNA all throughout the games industry now, and not only does it help me appreciate the genre a little more, but I still can’t believe a game this ambitious, this open, and this atmospheric was possible in a year in which part of my mum’s fortnightly budget was buying me nappies and vaguely banana-flavoured goop. Super Metroid kicks just as much ass now as it did back in 1994, and I wish I’d played it much sooner.
PROS
- A rich, oppressive atmosphere, especially thanks to the soundtrack
- Rewards players with a keen eye and the will to experiment
- A lot of really fun toys to play with
- Tense, hectic boss fights
- I love the little dragon seahorse things
- I will never get used to the jump arc
- Wall jump, shinespark and space jump controls are obtuse
- Genuinely how are you supposed to find some of this shit without a guide lmao
VERDICT: Oozing with atmosphere and greatly rewarding players with a keen sense of exploration, Super Metroid has aged remarkably well for a game almost as old as I am, and it deserves pretty much every bit of praise it gets.
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