I can abide the rest of your criticisms, but not this.
Wall jumping feels so fluid and freeform and just so so nice to get right. I like it much better in SM than in any of the dozens upon dozens of games wherein its a explicitly necessary part of the game.
Though yeah, I’ve played it so much that I have very little idea what it must be like for a first-time player. The map is so burnt into my brain that I can barely remember the last time I’ve gotten lost, so much of the game’s mechanical minutae is second nature to me, and the supposed unnerving atmosphere is just chill ambience to me now. I feel like I literally can’t judge it on a scale of recommend/don’t recommend.
Anyhow, I replayed it the other day (after spending a couple weeks catching up on various rom hacks that have come out in the last few years (I should make a post about those)), and I’m kind of annoyed at myself with how much I struggle to finish the game in under an hour (in-game time). The game is normally very easy, but playing it fast entails going into so many situations underequipped (or rather, not overpowered) that it’s legitimately nerve-wracking.
Certainly merit in the reading of it. I’m getting a lot out of it! I think it just lacks merit when assessing it as a book without the accompanying context. I don’t mean to disparage its associated religion but reading it requires a lot of work that doesn’t pay off in the intended way. I think part of the issue is that this would have been received very differently amongst a pre-literate culture that is referenced heavily in the text.
I really enjoyed Super Metroid’s atmosphere and sense of exploration but I didn’t get on with some of its more opaque elements that others are raising here.
It’s hard to have a coherent narrative when you’re essentially an anthology of best of collections of essays from 4000+ years of history across like, a dozen related but distinct subcultures and then further filtered by a completely different group of people who actively hated the group that wrote most of it.
I think the best comparison for Super Metroid and Link to the Past are like the original Star Wars: Mainstream refinements of older ideas compiled in a work that refines many aspects of their forebears, even mixing new ideas into the fold, becoming massively successful in such a way that their true merits are obscured by what the masses believe the merits to be rendering the original work as it existed incapable of existing as the cultural monolith it now represents.
And like the original Star Wars, I’ll go to the mat and saying they’re excellent, but the discourse from their fan-base is usually vile and I can’t defend the fanbase.
(I’ll defend the jumping in Super Metroid straight up though: it makes Samus feel extremely physical in space in a way that very few similar platform games do).
i really enjoy the various forms of jumping and overall feeling of movement in Super Metroid but it is very particular so i can easily see it not gelling with everyone. It’s how controlling Samus “should” feel to me — she’s in a heavy power suit, it gives her great mobility but still feels weighty. i like the big slow arcs of Super Samus’s jump better than the more nimble Fusion Suit (which is retconned to just be Samus’ normal mobility in Zero Mission)
Hmm well as someone who played through Super Metroid for the first time recently, I liked it well enough. It definitely doesn’t have a particularly strong sense of mystery, and I would say “space” too because of just how arbitrary so much of the enemy placement/locks that fill the world are.
But I also feel it does do a good job of placing you in the environment, of making every element of your interface exist within that environment, and of insisting that you pay careful attention to your surroundings because there’s a clear interplay between you and them (the light-creating enemies, ammo obv, the alien in Meridia you have to keep alive to clear a path) which probably reaches the moment that felt most clever (to me, anyways) where the aliens teach you how to super/wall jump.
I also don’t think the “wall-digging” is unfair at all, might be if you’re the kind of person who wants 2 ensure that they’ve found it all, but otherwise most of the time they read (to me) as more like little puzzle/tests to see how well you’ve been observing the environment.
Like, oh I noticed that this one block is out of place. That there’s a hole here that isn’t normally. The whole game is about acclimating you to a certain language and pace of design & space in a very guided way (that tries to seem hidden but…cmon) and then asking you to figure out where exceptions are. Which feels fair because of that focus on reading/staring at your environment.
It also makes this feel very modern by tying progression much more to the upgrades/secrets than ever actually asking you to get better at the combat/movement, etc. Which I think is fair since the question is more, ‘how many of these little mini-puzzles can you solve’ more than “how skilled are you”. Although with skips & all that it seems like there’s a fluid interchange between those two poles.
If you go back and read the original Empire Strikes Back reviews from 1980 every newspaper critic dismissively pointed out it was boring nonsense just like the previous one, and only conceded any positive qualities in backhanded faint praise. Nowadays if someone tried that with a marvel movie they’d get canceled on Twitter then have to go in hiding due to the death threats
You can tell this thread is almost at the 5,000 post limit because the takes are getting hotter and hotter until this thing just goes supernova and dies