I watched someone play Zero Mission blind yesterday (because I was tired of a joyless speedrunner getting tilted), and I regret to inform myself that it might actually be a good game.
At the very least, it was nice to see the reaction of someone who hadn’t had the ending spoiled for them.
It’s a decent game. Definitely improved on Metroid1/3’s formula by sanctioning sequence breaking.
::indignant sputtering::
I think there’s a part 2 on this - the world is broadly independent of Samus, but there’s an even deeper layer, the Chozo architecture and tunnels and shrines, that is designed for her. It’s completely alien and hidden from everyone, buried in the earth and forgotten, but it’s hers and it’s where she belongs and she’s always welcome.
Zero Mission has the amazing movement of Fusion but with smarter level design on par with Super. It may not be as fun to sequence break as Super, but it’s the most fun I’ve had 100%ing a Metroid game. Possibly my favourite overall, but it’s really short.
Also Wario Land 4 might be my favourite Nintendo 2D platformer. R&D1 during the GBA era was unstoppable.
Good insight. It strikes me especially as you mention Chozo “shrines” that whenever sci-fi is infused with religious elements, for instance in Kubrick’s 2001, some version of this dynamic arises. Science distances us from our childish assumption that the world is designed for us, making our surroundings hostile and sublime. But the very deepest discoveries of space explorers to our relief make us feel the universe is not inhuman after all
this reminded me of these ancient mspaint comics about the absurdity of the space pirate base being full of morphball tunnels and switches
I’d try to find the original artist/source but like… i’m pretty sure they’re /v/ poster(s) from 2008
How do you define “smarter” level design out of curiosity?
Chozo Ruins were definitely my favourite Prime 1 area for their chill, at-home vibe baked in the lazy afternoon sun but i can’t think of how this was a factor of previous games? in Metroid 2 the sealed off weapons caches (only doors in the game! and they require missiles which makes it feel like forced entry) almost made them seem an aloof, militaristic race
Don’t read the manga that fleshes out the Chozo and ruin them for yourselves y’all
I wonder if I can cold call Retro and ask to write scan visor lore for peanuts
yeah
basically i’m tired of this dumb bullshit in my metroid and other search action titles and i kind of don’t want to play another one that doesn’t worker harder to resolve these
hilariously, the otherwise shit prime 3 did at least try to give one of the guns upgrades you steal some kind of purpose in the context you swipe it from (some kind of mining lazercrystal iirc?), i appreciated that gesture
Nintendo’s barely absorbed any of the Fromsoft design trends that would benefit a Metroid but the diegetic hooks for mechanical artifice would do wonders. Even when they’re silly (D2) it’s less ambiently annoying than tuuubes or “idk there’s two Master Chiefs in co-op and you have to be X meters from an aggro’d enemy to respawn.”
On the other hand, I do not want my search actions to just have dead/dying world as the style du jour - Environmental Station Alpha is the only one I’ve played that feels in the spirit of a Metroid teeming with life. Let us not speak of Axiom Verge’s Another World knockoff programmer guy.
Artifice in games is vastly more preferable to being beholden to sensical dreariness. If existing in weird surreal 3d spaces is wrpmg because someone didn’t spend five minutes writing an explanation for every tube, I guess I don’t want to be right.
Zero mission is a series of boring low friction tubes as opposed to Fusion’s magnificent exciting gorgeous high friction tubes. Zero mission somehow manages to combine the worst features of every previous metroid game into a boring melange of non-game until it culminates in a weird horny stealth sequence that is the only breath of life in the whole thing because of how it break’s the flow, and even then that sequence isn’t actually, y’know, good?
I’ve played through literally a dozen times because I couldn’t believe how much of a non event it was and I was desperate to find something interesting about it’s exploration.
Fusion is linear but dang, what a fun blasting through those evolving nightmare corridors is.
the higher your visual fidelity and the more tonally serious everything else in the project seems to be going for, the more jarring
once you notice it, it’s very hard to go back
The explanation doesn’t have to be sensical or dreary, I just want a hook. In Demon’s Souls I like the phantom system - explains player ghosts, summons, the HP handicap, etc. elegantly but I don’t wonder about the metaphysics of it.
For a more surreal example, Destiny 2 has a hidden 5x4 passcode system in the Last Wish raid. In the game world it was built as a way to make wishes to a mischievous shapeshifting dragon without verbal language to deliberately misinterpret. The codes can change the raid dialogue with comedic cameos, add visual or sound effects, spawn secrets to find, and teleport to checkpoints within the raid. The codes were hidden throughout the game, in the raid, other destinations, and one in a cutscene. One exists only in the API as a meta-taunt. It’s a dizzying amount of gamey artifice.
It was called “Game Genie” in development.
That’s a diegetic hook I think about all the time.
the downside of bungie’s efforts to give all things an intelligent role in the fiction is that they’ve had to lean very hard on the lore-in-the-item-descriptions thing to get it done and it’s very easy to ignore or actually miss
something more elegant is going to evade any project of equivalent scope though
Metroid also gestures at this kind of thoughtfulness where the morphball mechanisms are integrated with Chozo architecture or you use the morphball in crevices rather than tubes. They just drop it in the back half of Metroid Prime in particular instead of making the space pirate areas more hostile to your abilities and alien.
Metroid Prime 4 with a terrain deformation system for items and passages hidden in walls would go a long way. A chemistry/physics system adopted from Breath of the Wild where missiles and beams have simulated properties again would rule.
the frustrating thing is that metroid is exactly the kind of focused lonely-game title where a studio could really experiment with these options with relatively little compromise. so they should
It’s astonishing how poorly Nintendo has spread the ethos of BotW’s core systems. Imagine e.g. a 3D Metroid game with the spiderball sans tracks!
