You've heard it all before. In the 80s, there weren't a whole lot of female protagonists in games. Then came Metroid on the NES in 1986, and rumours wildly circulated about who was under the armour, until someone finally managed to beat the game with a good enough time to unlock the ending, and bam; we'd been playing as Samus Aran, the bad ass female bounty hunter who'd come to end the space pirates.
I guess to reiterate further, Metroid has seen a hiatus of sorts. Before Metroid; Samus Returns, we hadn't really seen a 2D Metroid game since Metroid Zero Mission in 2004, a remake of the NES game. It's been kind of a dry spell... Well, not for me personally. See, I actually didn't have much investment in the franchise until recently. I liked Metroid Fusion, but I hadn't actually beat it, I only got about 70% of the way through with a rather low completion percentage. I had heard about the genre-defining Super Metroid and had seen some cool speedrunning tricks, but I didn't really understand much of it. Metroid was like this little pocket in the sphere of media that I knew deserved my attention, but other things just kept pulling me away. Life is busy. It's hard to spare a minute to invest yourself in an entire new franchise. But then Another Metroid 2 Remake dropped. I snagged a copy, knowing Nintendo Nintendon't want me to get my grubby little hands on it. And I kind of it didn't enjoy my first attempt at playing through the game. And I guess, maybe I hadn't earned it. There were plenty of videos analyzing and deconstructing AM2R, but I couldn't really relate.
But the other day, I sat down and beat Metroid Fusion.
My hands ached, after beating Neo-Ridley. I was sore after beating the SA-X. Now, it was just the Omega Metroid.
And there it went.
It caved rather easily but considering the death to my hands that the SA-X was, an easy final boss was pretty welcome if a little anti-climactic. So now what? My playthrough was clocked by the game as four hours and twelve minutes long... How could that be? It felt like such a full, complete adventure? I immediately needed more.
Metroid Zero Mission went down much faster, clocking in at three hours 18 minutes. Kraid was a little too easy for my liking, but Ridley posed a decent challenge. Mother Brain came, and her stupid circle lasers killed me on my first try. Okay. Fine.
I went in, and bam. Spamming Super Missles took her down with ease. And that was it, I thought BUT THEN NO AND WHAT AND OH MY GOD
I'm not going to spoil the end of Zero Mission, since it was almost spoiled for me, but it just... That's how you reboot a game. My expectations were subverted and the immediate juxtaposition in gameplay was such a trip.
And then when I picked up AM2R, I beat it within two days.
The immediately apparent thing was the quality of life adjustments AM2R made, on top of being a damn good game, on top of being a damn good Metroid 2 remake. People aren't kidding when they say DoctorM64 and crew made a better Metroid game than Nintendo have in *years*. It's not immediately apparent when you pick it up, but if you've been playing Metroid for any length of time, I can only imagine what a fresh breath of air it must have been. Going in with no experience with Metroid versus going in with two games completed under the belt was like playing an entirely different game. Sure, I wasn't pulling off any crazy wall jumping tricks or shinesparking sequence breaks, but damn, when I lined up a shinespark perfectly to get that one item hidden in the wall, that was pure bliss. There's a section where you need to charge a shinespark, do a screw attack, then uncurl and shinespark mid-air. It's nothing compared to the crazy tricks I've seen done before, but being able to pull off something that felt so high-level was just an amazing feeling.
That's what makes Metroid special.
Metroid isn't about the first trip. I'd even say the first trip is the most tedious. I picked up Metroid Fusion and Castlevania; Aria Of Sorrow at about the same time, and I dropped Fusion, but have since finished Aria Of Sorrow a total of 4 times now. I love both games, but I knew which side of the debate I fell on.
Until now.
Now, the line isn't so clear any more.
I still haven't played the quintessential games of both franchises (Super Metroid and Symphony respectively) but I had a clear idea of which I'd enjoy more when I eventually did pick them up.
Now I have no idea.
Maybe the lack of the Ledge Grab from Super Metroid is going to be the deciding factor, and maybe some of the more antiquated design choices of Symphony is going to swing me towards camp Samus. But my god, I'm excited to play both in a way I haven't been for a videogame in a while. Where I had no desire to pick up indie darling Axiom Verge, I now would like nothing more than to add it to my steam library and immediately complete it. I looked at Momodora IV as a soulslike metroidvania, but now I look at Momodora IV as soulslikeMETROIDvania. The influences are so much clearer to me now. I get it. I understand.
There's a moment when you're playing Dark Souls where the game just... Clicks. It's a quiet moment where the pieces line up and you see the game for what it is and you can honestly and sincerely say, "I get it."
That was what it was like diving back into Metroid. Just after the SA-X fight, I remember the click. All because some guy liked a kinda jank gameboy game so much he decided to give it the remake Nintendo didn't think it deserved and in the process, not only made Metroid relevant again but introduced hundreds, maybe even thousands of gamers to a franchise so buried in obscurity they may not even have heard of it until now, a franchise suffering a death so undeserved it's almost criminal.
The release timing of Samus returns is suspect to me. It kind of looks like Nintendo saw the hype a fan project got, DCMA'd it, outsourced a quick remake of their own and just reaped the rewards. Yes, they're in their full legal rights to do so but it just stinks of moral bankruptcy.
Overall, Metroid is important. It's a cultural milestone for gaming. And if the story behind the first Metroid seems outdated or irrelevant, we have an entire category on steam for Female Protagonist, because we're so tired of playing as generic white dude with scruff on his face
Metroid is important. For me, it's a breath of fresh air that practically sparked a gaming revolution. But it's also just a set of great fucking games. I had recently itched to play something, something different. Something gripping.
I didn't expect to be power gripped.
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