Pretty much the no. 1 best thing about Prime, yeah
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prime was filled with so many cool little touches like that
Was kind of hoping that Echo thing would have a go at picking up the Metroid baton but nah
i like how if you just stand around sheâll have a lil look around, look at her hand, lower her cannon eventually
and the way you can see her handbones if you have the x-ray visor on is a nice touch, but also whatâs her suit made out of if x-rays are penetrating it??
Papier mache, thatâs why little critters can hurt you despite wearing head to toe armor
Everything @GlamGrimfire said about this game is correct. It is soulless and confused.
But Iâm stil having a fun time with it and Iâm kinda glad itâs not too much like the original because it feels like a different game pretty much. Plus it explains the whole lava lowering thing, that always bugged me.
okay the fuck you slime that doesnt let you spiderball everywhere is bullshit
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iâm completely confused about this threadâs purpose. samus returns is the exact opposite of soulless and confused, is one of the few ways you can reasonably do a metroid ii remake, and is also somehow totally different from basically every other metroid game (and a good different at that, so people canât just call âmore of the sameâ and run off). the string at the top of the thread was clearly written by someone who had every pixel of METROID II: RETURN OF SAMUS, ONLY FOR THE GAME BOY SYSTEM carved into their soul. iâm not sure anything that isnât a straight remake would satisfy such a person.
their other posts in the thread arenât really helping. especially the bit about the chozo âworshipping themselves as saviorsâ and âforcing samus to follow in their footstepsâ, what kind of terrible metroid timeline is that from? the chozo are just some scholarly race that liked to explore stuff. they had weapons because the universe is dangerous. Science Rules is their motto. you had the whole luminoth (âsibling raceâ) thing in prime 2 and it was just great. itâs every other race that worships the chozo, which they probably found kinda silly. samus was saved by these people and she feels indebted to them, so running across chozo ruins again and again probably fucking hurts.
sakamoto fucked up 100% with other m, but thatâs no reason to kick him off a cliff about everything else he did. with samus returns and prime 4, he has clearly shown that heâs willing to listen to reason⌠or someone bullied him, which absolutely should have happened. samus returns with all of its prime stuff, plus the prime 4 announcement, tells me that the noj prime producer guy has sort of âtook overâ the series. thatâs good. heâs a cool dude.
i really like am2r but iâm pretty sure sr is the better game.
(the mini kraid in super is just a cute jab at m1âs kraid)
(m1 doesnât play anything at all like super and onward)
(iâm just very confused by everything iâm reading in this topic, itâs like iâm reading about some other dimension where the entire metroid series âhappenedâ completely differently)
(especially the dislike of the lore bits, which is literally half of the joy of prime for 99% of the people who played it)
(help)
thereâs nothing wrong with the lore in Metroid Prime but what gets unbearable over time is how much of the central series lore Is meant to take place in an ever expanding universe that samus is meant to explore, but the chozo colonized or had a base on every planet in the universe made the expanding setting actually feel smaller and smaller
the series growing dependence on ridley really drove this home that the developers had a specific idea about what a Metroid gam needed
still think Metroid samus returns is soulless and hollow
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Or theyâve played it just a couple of times and remember it well? I donât think we need to characterize anyone with a positive strong attachment to Metroid 2 and remembers its structure and design principles well as an obsessive nut whoâs replayed it a million times and ideologically cannot accept adaptations.
I think some of the tensions here are explicable in terms of what you got out of the original game and thought was worth carrying over, if a remake needed to happen at all. Some people like the grim, matter-of-fact self-criticality that can be read into the original game, and wish that had tonally translated over.
Most of the peeps here who liked 2 also really liked Fusion (though usually not as much), so itâs not as though folks arenât amenable to different takes on the Metroid franchise. In fact, the way I read the thread (having not played the remake) is that the problem with the remake is specifically that it doesnât take enough license, it condenses the weird and wonderful qualities of 2 into some kind of default canon-friendly Metroid Game that probably never actually existed until Zero Mission maybe.
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The more I play this, the more I dislike it.
I dislike having to go back with new powers to get stuff you saw before. One of the things I liked about M2 is that if you saw it, you could get it before leaving. And itâs way worse here because there isnât a good world flow like Super. Lucky they just threw those fast travel things all over the place.
I dislike all the elevators. Like a lot of stuff in this game, it feels like something just added to make the game feel more like Super. It also feels like a lazy way to link all the areas, instead of doing natural transitions.
I REALLY dislike the game throwing that goo all over the place so you canât spiderball everywhere because the designers couldnât be bothered designing around that. It also leaves the mark of the designers way too much.
Also a bunch of other things that irk me.
Iâm still enjoying it and donât think itâs a bad game, but it really does feel soulless and confused, not sure about itâs identity or what it wants to be. I think the people behind it would have made a much better game if they didnât have to remake one, but I also wouldnât want them to make a new instalment in the series either.
Also I really love Metroid Fusion.
iâm scared and confused. iâm still not getting the âsoulless and confusedâ part, but iâve never really understood that kind of criticism for pretty much any game. that aside, i think i know why i donât get it for sr specifically. m2 isnât really all that weird and wonderful, neither is fusion. this isnât zelda ii or anything. really, there isnât much of a specific âformulaâ in this series except âexplore stuffâ. the non-linearity/linearity debate is something else entirely.
i will definitely agree that the reliance on ridley is odd. even kraid and mother brain get a break.
âŚin a dark corner of the world, people would call games like m2 and fusion âsoulless and confusedâ, and thinking on things like that has always made the phrase feel super uncomfortableâŚ
I think Soulless and Confused is a great band name a shortcut to something much harder to describe accurately.
I think in this case itâs saying that the original design ethos of M2 (confusing labyrinth of narrow corridors becoming ever more hostile against a fairly weak Samus) has been discarded in favor of something more streamlined. And in streamlining it theyâve lost the âsoulâ of the game, which was what people loved. But since itâs still a remake, it has retained some of the more superficial things about the original, which means itâs also âconfusedâ because itâs not its own thing.
I have not played either remake, though.
Metroid 2 vs. Zelda 2 is actually a great comparison. Both feel like sequels from another dimension. They both took aspects of the original and focused on those, but they werenât the aspects that later games would focus on.
In the particular case of Metroid 2, the labyrinthine-ness was amped up to 11, and the general atmosphere was designed to match this. In particular, the music slowly degenerating into weird clicks and beeps and discomfiting drones was very effective, and also never remembered by any other Metroid games.
Super Metroid feels like a sequel to Metroid, in the same way that Link to the Past feels like a sequel to Zelda 1. The interim games were mostly ignored.
I honestly think that if this game was not a remake, in that it did not feel obligated to retain anything at all from Metroid 2, there would be way less criticism here. It would probably be something like âItâs pretty good but not incredible.â
Metroid 2 is beloved around these parts for being so strange and experimental, as well as perfectly suited for the Game Boy. Remaking it into an action-heavy game feels like sacrilege.
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Seems to me like youâre so intent on pursuing your angle that youâre willing to reduce the series to some indistinguishable blob so that in-series relative comments donât make any sense, making every qualitative comparison level. Why even care about the games at the point?
I think youâre spot-on with this. Like, early consoles were heavily limited, right? Game Boy games only have 4 colors, such-and-such resolution, etc. Designers understood these limits and designed games that would work and fit within these limitations. Often times, the games that resulted from these very limited conditions were powerful and beloved because of the effect of decisions made to accommodate platform limitations. So if a remake comes along and removes those limits, if it doesnât also take steps to reproduce the effects achieved while the limits were in place, it feels like it missed the point: itâs the same game as before with the thing you liked about it removed.
Itâs a bit like if somebody proposed to remake Minecraft, but they were gonna do photorealistic graphicsâexcept that to accommodate those graphics, the ability to place blocks in the world has been removed, and instead all those big-nosed merchants will trade you equipment for the trade goods you collect. This could be a good game, even! But itâs not good for the reasons Minecraft is good, and it has confused the point of Minecraft for superficial elements.
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did notch fall farther down the goblingable hole than i remember 
all villagers have the weird noses, and theyâre also all âmerchantsâ (itâs more of a trade/barter system), or at least they were back when they were added, which was shortly before I peaced out of keeping up with games. A number of changes have been added since to complicate them - baby villagers, evil outcast villager, inventories & appearances based on the âjobâ they spawned with, all sorts of things. I think most of the complicated stuff happened after Notch sold the game.
itâs really not easily construed as caricature, itâs more of a cross between a flattened witchâs nose* and an elephant trunk, lacking proper length/depth because of the way models are designed. Combined with their permanently crossed arms, it largely serves to make them visually distinct from other players, who have flat faces and visibly moving arms. Notch or possibly someone he worked with apparently acknowledged a similarity to the Spongebob character Squidwards and his bulbous nose. Personally, I suspect that after they moved away from the idea of âgoodâ pigmen as villagers, they wanted a concept that allowed for speechlessness and pointless milling around, and they subconciously or intentionally styled the villagers after generic monks. The faces were then developed to imply a sort of stuck-up intellect that doesnât need to bother directly communicating with an unpredictable interloper like the player. Maybe?
*lightning strikes in minecraft can cause fires, but if they strike near a villager, it can turn them into an actual witch. crazy shit.
Ugh, I just did the chase sequence and I think this is going to be the first 2D game I donât bother finishing. It feels like such a slog and that the designers donât respect my time. There are way too many different kinds of locks in pain in the ass locations, and blah, Iâm just not feeling this at all.
I actually like the chase sequence, mainly because it reminded me of the one from Kid Chameleon.
Granted, if you donât like the chase sequence, then something tells me that you would detest the actual fight against the thing (for different reasons).
Anyhow, I recently ran into this weird old promotional thing for Super Metroid, where it has âSamusâ talking over some gameplay footage (turn on the subtitles):
I find it interesting that rather than making Samus sound like a stone-cold action hero, they cast her as a rough approximation of someone playing the game for the first time: disorientated, confused, frustrated, trepidatious but still determined.
I thought it was an interesting departure from the usual interpretation of the character, although the actual writing in the video is pretty bad, reminiscent of Other M, sigh, whatever, etc
Really though, why are people (developers, fans) so attached to the idea of Samus being a total, unflinching âbadassâ?