i haven’t watched this yet, but Rei was pretty bitter on twitter about this guy saying the same shot as her and getting all those views and ad revenue for it
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fwiw he directly quotes and links to rei’s essay
wait
do we know if this will get DLC besides the already known amiibo junk
oh right. he’s uh, still getting money off it though, hey
I posted the video here mainly because I was excited to see rei’s ideas promulgated in the wider games-crit sphere (I probably should have stated that upfront). Though yeah, in retrospect, I can see why the situation bothers her (apologies if I seemed callous).
I haven’t heard anything about DLC (did the 3DS CV’s have DLC?), but now that you mention it I’d probably pay for an ‘easy’ mode that just removed 1/2 to 2/3 of the enemies and the ridley battle from the game.
oh i’m keen to watch it! just thought Rei’s viewpoint was important
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bought this last night after debasing myself in public for the enjoyment of the comic con crowd, but geeze Louis do I have opinions about this piece of game software
- this type of sequel basically only happens when the inmates are running the asylum. you can tell the dudes at mercurysteam are fans of Metroid probably in a giant echo chamber of Cool Metroid Ideas which is definitely not a good thing if you ever want to take over the reigns of something creative that was mostly made by other people
more on that though - im more than 110% sure the reason things like lower norfairs themes being used for Hot Rooms (hot boys) is because of the fact that that’s how metroid prime did it and almost everything about this game is plugged into a second-hand evaluation of what Metroid primes aesthetic was.
if that last phrase is hard to parse, what I mean is the general setup of Samus Returns apes the whole coming the planet for choco artifacts through chozo ruins that the first Metroid prime did. the prime series frequently introduced other races that had nothing to do with the chozo that had their own failings and they missed a good beat to do that here but instead went for the whole samus aran is the galactic savior angle that was briefly teased in Metroid prime.
everything in this game sems like it came from people who comb TVtropes pages and make wild guesses about series canon and get upset when the series does not reward their devotion to that canon or plays with their expectation.
theres no room for any ambiguity in these games when the fans take over because theyre desperate for every single nook and cranny to be explored or filled in or pasted over if it doesn’t fit.
there are so many weird things in this meant to interlock with how creatures and environments were depicted different in fusion or had different attacks and shit (especially one boss being modeled after the fusion incarnation)
expect a super Metroid remake that makes zebes look more in step with metroid zero mission because the other thing I definitely pick up from this game is that mercurysteam (I mean, you can get the impression from castlevania b-lords f shadow) don’t know how to set atmosphere and instead change any attempt at that out for HDR bloom and vistas to look at
sr388 shouldn’t have been a planet of lush underwater lakes and forests with a giant chozo-dam complex interspersed with weird out of place looking native American inspired ruins
but those are all things that talon IV and all of the planets got in Metroid prime had and the visuals in this game definitely try to kind of stylistically be somewhere between Metroid zero mission and Metroid prime. there’s a little bit of other m in here too.
i groan every time I see a chozo statue in a weird location. the funny thing about all of the chozo stuff is for them supposedly colonizing the planet besides background ruins - the only remains of their civilization that exist are generally things that samus interacts with outside of the occasional generic pillar or bird head that spits fire.
the same thing that happened with superhero comics in the beginning of the 2000’s that runs in the bloodstream until now is going to start happening to videogames
- the more these games have samus move like an animè robot the less interest I have in moving through any of these spaces. fusion added the ledge grab and opened up a new option for environment design
but where fusion kind of played with it a little bit and used it to help the player get used to the rhythym of wall jumping this game just kind of uses it so they can put morph ball holes just slightly too high so the plaer can ledge grab and roll into them
theres just too many movement options for this to be funbecause the game is still based around samus original movement options which haven’t really changed since the original Metroid at all
I miss the slow and deliberate movement pace of super Metroid and later how Metroid fusion added to that in its own small way
samus 3D model animates weirdly in like every pose. fuck the other m model design. it looks terrible and its stupid high heel boots make samus run like a god damn early 90s platformer character ughghhhghgh
every enemy interaction is you either see them early and snipe them with samus armcannon which maybe the added the manual aim because these fuckers fucked up on the navigable geography and only the enemies crawling on the ground can be hit by any of samus’ default position
or you see them late and reflexively press the parry button and then get caught up in a stupid cutscene where you can hammer the shoot button wow I guess videogames really just were interactive toys all along
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also another thing: red doors needing five missiles is a great way of forcing the player to be kind of nervous early on in the game when they don’t know what’s behind a route and is kind of neat and when the series made them take one missile it was stupid thats all
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great respect was payed in this game to the dimensions of the original planet for no reason, there are still large enourmous spacious caverns but the addition of colored multi-layered backgrounds means the player always has a waypoint for where they are (the minimap doesn’t help as always) and catacombs and caverns are in roughly the same place and roughly of similar arrangement
but the camera is so pulled out the game loses any feeling of claustrophobia, darkness. it is the same way that Metroid zero mission turned the regular metroids general abstractness into a jaunty comic book which I guess, is the aesthetic people want every videogame to have now.
this could have been a game that used the limited hardware of the 3DS to make a world steeped in grime and decay and darkness set on a ruined, dying planet being drained of life and hollowed out into oblivion. a testament to the vanity of a race that primarily worshipped themselves as the saviors of the cosmos and forced a little girl to follow in their footsteps but - well, that’d be asking for anything other than nothing.
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so is there any room for tasteful lore/scanning in any continuance or reinterpretation of the series, or is it played out beyond consideration?
i dont think its played out but itnwouldbe interesting to see it used for an angle that is meant for more than just chozo lore and space pirate / samus drama
All scanlore in Prime 4 must be manually deciphered from Al Bhed.
Really though, I just want the omniscient third-person perspective of scanlore to be gone (AM2R was pretty bad about this (AM2R is good (counterpoint))). It can make it feel more like I’m reading a writer’s bible or fan-wiki article rather than something written in-universe.
(…now my brain is comparing SR and AM2R and wondering how SR’s lack of written lore might have affected its relative reception, which is annoying since my metroid-obsessed brain has been going back to that boring topic a tad too frequently.)
hrmm…
…you know how the NES got surprisingly-faithful-yet-still-unplayable bootlegs of SNES titles like Mario World, Zelda 3, Contra 3, Aladdin, etc.? How come Super Metroid didn’t get one of those? What was the decision-making process for picking titles to pirate? What kind of janky weirdness are we missing out on in our timeline?
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Yeah I mean, insofar as we like to say that one of the big things we like about Metroid is that it feels like interacting with a mostly oblivious alien environment, why not make scanning actual, like, scans? Objective scientific data interpreted by a suit AI to give plausible biological / geological / technological explanations for stuff found in the world?
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I was v. chuffed to learn the SuperMet any% WR had been broken at last this week
Metroid database has a full size image of this
that made me realize that samus’ suit articulates completely different than I ever thought it did on the upper torso and really makes me hate the slimmer suit design of this game so much. she really is a walking tank through and through which gives even more credit to the idea that her slower deliberate movements from super Metroid and Metroid II (and also the first prime) fit a lot more.
heres some other cool samus shit that makes me hate the death of the fansite even more: some woman did a kind of fan fiction of a bunch of comedic dreams samus had for the Japanese strategy guide as an omake
http://www.metroid-database.com/sm/fortune.php
also cool:
seeing some of these early designs for samus suit in the first Metroid that were used for all of the promotional stuff. these would be hella cool to see the series revisit in some form as some kind of proto power suit oh god im turning into one of those fans
(those are from Nintendo power, these are from the official illustrations I think)
early sexism: why the armor gotta have a booty
this may also be the only example ive ever seen of her arm cannon turning into some cool Michael Jackson glove whoah
if you can’t tell there is something I really like about samus’ early suit design that the later designs are obviously cool as shit (except other M) but this just has…something.
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also here’s something I didn’t notice till recently
the powersuits original art (I think this is the western idea of what it looked like from NP maybe, or half between)
has actually a lot in common with the immediate next appearance of the yellow powersuit that she wears w/ the scalloped shoulders in Metroid II
and again in super Metroid (man these artists really were nailing the trapper keeper / and later comic book art aesthetic early on)
but later all versions of the suit would look like this after Metroid prime, already starting to make the design slimmer. I actually think the suit I’m about to picture may be my least favorite iteration of the core power suit and I really miss how the original design mixed organic and geometric lines
really realize how much the powersuit had to be slimmed down for three D’s (DDD: Give Me A Slim-Job)
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think its also important to note that Metroid fusion is an effective game because one of the things it does is kind of how Super Metroid plays with you with introducing the minor kraid enemy and things like that, Fusion sets you up expecting to give you the regular heavy powersuit with Samus’ tank like movements and relatively impenetrable defenses from Super and prime and then gives you this
which is so much slimmer than the previous suit it leaves a distinct impression with how it moves and controls. I like to imagine the whole reason this suit had the ledge grab for navigation was its actually just easier to pull off for the person inside. samus’ other power suit is a fortress compared to this
which is why the SA-X is so effective at being spooky scary when it first appears in fusion: it has the whole arsenal of that suit at its disposal and all of the protective capabilities that samus lacks. regular missiles don’t even work on it!
okay thanks everyone that’s all my Metroid thoughts
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girl love orb
Cool!!!
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