If it weren’t for its being an artifact out of times long gone, I could actually really use this ad, since I’m not sure if my 3DS has a broken charging cable or a dead battery.
the environments just feel like more of a clinical obstacle course. the most rudimentary metroids technologically are probably also the most convincing in spite of their limitations because the design hasn’t yet codified into “and morph ball puzzle maze #147 with a prize at the end goes here.” so metroid ii’s caverns are monotonous and blend into each other, like caverns. that pushes some people off hard but i find it so immeasurably interesting. navigating samus returns and the primes is a constant exercise in falling upon the husk of a once-solved environmental puzzle which can’t be totally separated from the environment so it just means you’re going through them over and over in really unintuitive ways—roadblocks you can never fully circumvent
returning to sr-388 to collect leftover doodads after finishing the game is really bizarre. it feels like the epilogue to something like earthbound, revisiting the places you traveled through during the game, but instead of talking to the people you met, you return to the dwellings and homes of creatures you murdered to gather up weaponry to be used on animals that are already all dead
i had a harder time distinguishing between natural formations and chozo buildings in samus returns, compared to metroid ii, because everything is so dense and cluttered and sprawling at the same time. sort of a sensory overload. it’s a lot more homogenized even within its own context
the continual increasing presence of the chozo in the presentation of the series and samus’s correspondingly more closely entrenched relation to them gives it an air like every place has been colonized by the chozo, and through that association, you aren’t intruding on worlds that are other beings’ homes but driving them out from yours and are justified in the act. it’s an insidious reframing of the whole thing
(Not written by me)
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I would say give Metroid back to a Japanese developer but even then I’d hardly be convinced these days that that would be a good idea
I wonder if, like the alien franchise itself, Metroid will end up being bad longer than it was ever good
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give metroid to puresabe
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Groan
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You mean like the last Metroid Game?
Oh damn, I forgot this was Mercury Steam, otherwise known as the team what made Lord’s off Shadow, and wow great to see that messing with franchises is just their thing I guess.
I bought the game, but I doubt I’ll enjoy it more than I enjoyed Rei’s Metroid II post from SB1 a few years back. If you haven’t read it yet, it’s excellent, and I love it very much.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150206035121/http://forums.selectbutton.net:80/viewtopic.php?t=44258
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I basically agree with these comments, except I feel much more positively about, the things that are actually positive. Playing the game is honestly an extremely dissonant experience. I KNOW the game is --wrong-- philosophically. It represents Nintendo trying to whitewash one of the most powerful and effective artistic statements they ever made, because they don’t want to be the sort of company that makes powerful artistic statements. It really doesn’t feel like a tribute to the original game as much as a diss of the original; every design decision carries an implicit statement that the original game is Unacceptable. I especitally hate how the chozo shit is everywhere, the series is called Metroid not The Adventures of Chozo Girl, the Chosen Heroine.
It’s not that the game pales in comparison to the original (though it does), but rather that the context of its creation re: the original is morally corrupt. And that’s hard to shake, even as----
—as I find the game extremely fun to play. You mention the unnecessary “density,” but I actually like the pacing. The game basically feels like an attempt to recreate Metroid Prime in 2d. The original 2d games were very fast-paced. Yes, there was “exploration,” but you never really had to stop and think about the architecture or layouts; if the path turned two directions, u basically just pick one arbitrarily and keep going, unless you suspect the other one is a short powerup room and then u get that one first. In this game, the pacing is much slower. The free aim and the melee move create a very stop-start rhythm, where I’m constantly stopping to poke at something (by free-aim-shooting a suspicious spot) or lure an enemy away from another enemy. Also, the game keeps doing this thing where it introduces a powerup back-ported from a later game, and my first response is “ugh, why do they have to do this?” but my second response is “wait they’re doing some really smart things with this that I didn’t expect, shit.”
I actually think this will be a great game for speedrunning. Idk about sequnce breaking (one major criticism is that there are way too many powerups that are --just-- out of reach, and there’s no way to finagle your way to them anyway usually), but the high level of mechanical freedom means that the skill ceiling seems really high. Being able to free aim while in the air, the fact that bullets seem to travel a long way off the screen, the tap-screen-to-insta-morph-ball, all these things are gonna open up lots of interesting options for high-level play.
What itreally all comes down to is, I love Metroid. What I love the most is the core 4 games, which actually tell a really neat story and, as I mentioned before, represent one of Nintendo’s few forays into legit artistic statement. But I also love the act of playing Metroid. I guess I like the “metroidvania” genre format in general, except Metroid games are still way better than any imitators I’ve ever played. It’s one of those series I can just “fall into;” the loop of run-shoot-poke-experiment-find thing-find a looparound-gradually expand understanding of and familiarity with world is a machine I love to wind up and let play out for 5-10 hours. So, essentially, I’m trash with no ideological integrity, and this game is an abomination but I like it a lot.
If Ridley shows up I’m gonna scream tho >:[
EDIT: I forgot the most significant (to me) thought I had while playing: this game is like the Anti Sonic Mania. While Mania is a creative act of historical revisionism, righting the wrongs of history by pretending there was a sonic game on saturn, Metroid II is destructive revisionism, with Nintendo pretending they never made a game that was emotionally challenging.
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See my post above
wait I thought you were just speculating on if Ridley shows up
I was, but I was also right. It’s very predictable Canonical Fanservice
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the most depressing punchline
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and timeline
which version of samus has the best haircut
I have seen cosplayers talk about how this haircut is actually sort of practical for being in a helmet all day if not for the length on the sides, and that ironically they’ve discovered the other m before suit haircut is the best one for being in a suit of armor all day
they gave her this haircut in the endings of Metroid fusion which I find obnoxious, but it is cool to imagine there’s more body horror here going on and samus has some degree of control over her biological anatomy after being injected with Metroid DNA. I only wish her skin was see through, cuz that’d be fuckin cool.
as far as I’m concerned there are limited alternate options available, but you can go alternate universe / more Metroid 1 inspired if you want
samus wearing a swimsuit in her power armor is a bubblegum crisis thing right
A practical haircut would be cutting it down so it’s close to a buzz
please see canonical representations only, thank you. I care deeply about the Canon of the Metroid series
Whichever haircut she has when she’s 6’3’’, 198.
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