Super Metroid's "Animals"

King of Posters
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So, something I’ve been mulling over that turned into a bit of an essay…

One of the innovations of The Witness that I most admired is its fully knowledge-based metrovania structure. You can access almost the whole island from the beginning, but areas are gated behind mysterious, complex puzzles whose rules you cannot hope to deduce. In order to progress, you must find “tutorial panel series” that demonstrate rules from the ground up. It’s a brilliant solution to both lock-and-key structure and player training (making each tutorial a prize you’re pleased to discover, instead of a chore).

This feels satisfying and fresh partly because the traditional Metrovania structure has become ossified – some have even degenerated into a thin papering over of a linear structure. An example offender is Axiom Verge, which largely has the structure of single-path-traversable with one barrier visible to an unreachable area -> powerup lets you reach that area, rinse repeat. Another is Zero Mission, by far my least favorite Metroid (at least Fusion was relatively honest about its linearity).

So I’ve long felt that sequence breaking, or at least the possibility of it, is key to a great Metrovania. Sequence breaking is typically associated with glitches: the clever or accidental defeat of the designer’s intent. Axiom Verge was trying to draw on that mysterious, sinister vitality of glitches with its “glitch”-themed powerups. But it felt hollow when they amounted to ordinary weapon and movement abilities.

At first my reaction to Axiom Verge’s failure was that the problem is fundamental – it must be impossible by definition for a game designer to intentionally introduce a sequence break. But lately I’ve been thinking the most important aspect is not the thrill of rebellion, but the fact that it’s a soft knowledge or skill barrier rather than a rigid lock-and-key. For example, Spelunky’s ball-and-chain-based trick to carry an eggplant into Hell became no less satisfying when the devs promoted that interaction from glitch to officially supported mechanic (fixing the artwork but not the behavior). Likewise, Dark Souls’s Master Key sequence break – literally based on a key – is completely unsatisfying, whereas attempting to rush through Catacombs or New Londo, enemy immortality be damned, is very satisfying.

Another essential part of the appeal of glitches (sequence break or not) is the impression that the game is made out of laws of nature, interacting emergently together, and that these laws are deeper and higher than some designer’s narrative arrow of destiny. This order of precedence is in better tune with our 21st century understanding of how the real world operates (Newton > Hegel, we mostly agree), which Derek Yu calls in his Spelunky book indifference. And this connection between glitches and scientism comes back to a theme of The Witness.


So, as for this thread's title. Thanks to its complex movement physics, Super Metroid is known for its great variety of glitch-based sequence breaks -- including "machball", "short charge", "gravity jump", "CWJ", and "ice clip" (non-exhaustive list). Not only can you sequence break in SM, each given gate typically has at least two ways to glitch through it. So Super Metroid's legendary sequence-breakability appears to be an accident of coding. In part there's no doubt that's true -- missile doors, wrecked ship moat, and Lower Norfair entrance were definitely intended to be completely impassable, among others.

However, that can’t be the whole story – infinite bomb jumping is actually demonstrated in the title screen demo reel, which the devs couldn’t have failed to realize allows sequence breaking. In general the open plan and almost-reachable placement of many gates tells me the designers wanted to at least tantalize players with the possibility of sequence breaking, and were tolerant of the possibility that some might even succeed. What’s more, I realized that the famous cute “animals”, best known for being optionally rescuable after beating the final boss, are very close to an instance of The Witness’s knowledge-based lock-and-key, right there in the genre’s prototypical game. The main reason the animals are in the game is to teach the player how to wall jump and how to shinespark, two mechanics which do unlock additional areas (albeit, mostly optional ones).

Another way of phrasing it is that Super Metroid’s guiding principle is the player’s gradual discovery and mastery of Samus’s powers – with new areas to explore as the reward – and this was conceived to emerge from not only powerups, but also the discovery of secret mechanics that were there all along. So I might go so far as to claim that those “Animals” have been the hidden key to what makes this genre compelling all along.

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I’m skeptical that this can be considered an innovation. You can access basically every area of Riven right from the start, with the only limit being your own knowledge and intuition. The Witness’s puzzle panels and heavily isolated puzzle zones (with only two zones and a few isolated doors being the notable exceptions to the otherwise hermetic separation of puzzle types) feels comparatively crude to interconnectedness and organic puzzle design of Riven.

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it’s too late for me to be cogent rn but I feel like in a way dark souls 2, despite its many flaws, kind of has something to say about this matter

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ladies and gentlemen, tonight, for one night only…

dachola and the motherfucking etecoons!!!

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be cogent later ok

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let’s not set the bar TOO high

anyway my main thing about dark souls 2 is that it is actually shockingly non linear for a 2014 AAA action adventure game. what’s cool about it tho is that it’s not very overt about this. the closest it comes to traditional “metroid lock n key” type mechanics is with the ladder into the well, but then there are a few other options (sorcery, the cat ring), that don’t feel like overtly scripted gateways. they’re just regular existing parts of the game mechanics that serve a useful purpose. the only other “gated” area, huntsmans copse, requires you only beat one boss, and the mechanism for opening it is an incidental story thing. and the shaded woods simply requires you to have a consumable item, of which there many in each area – there’s no “mystical moment” where you’re awarded this… it’s just a commonplace (if slightly rare) inventory item. even the end goal of the nominal first zone has two different entry ways that can be accessed directly from the outset of the game, and I believe either can be skipped outright if you want.

what I dig about all this is that there’s not really a concern on the game’s part as to whether or not these areas are too “difficult” to access at any point in the game. it’s more just about whether you’re observant or determined enough to get to them early. I really appreciate the way the game kinda gently nudges newcomers towards the forest of lost giants, without overtly forcing you to go there.

beyond that, in terms of each stage, there’s a surprising amount of sequence breaking possible, skippable areas, branching paths, etc. I rambled about this another thread, but the gutter level in particular is amazingly tangled in its designed, much more so than ds1’s blighttown. you can skip entire areas if you jump off in the right point, and it doesn’t really seem like there’s necessarily one “correct” route through the area.

it does all this without any of fancy metroid like movesets… it’s all just clever level design with minimal lock and key gating. I feel like this is kind of an overlooked virtue of dark souls 2, but maybe that’s just me idk

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If I wanted to reach I would suggest this is (or was) actually an underappreciated hallmark of Japanese game design going as far back as dragon quest; virtually every jrpg is improved by trying to play through “underleveled” by making intuitive use of the game’s systems rather than using the many trivial footholds it will offer you if you play long enough.

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Super Metroid’s wall jumping is explicitly described in the game via the helper animals(well, if you realize what they’re trying to show you, and don’t just reset the game, anyway…) and honestly it is among the biggest sequence break tools. I feel like they knew, but they also had confidence that it wasn’t going to be something everyone was going to find.

Nowadays, if something’s found? Yeah, everyone on the damn Internet knows within a day. Takes a lot of the mystery out of it and, instead of people celebrating them, they get “lol look how broken this game is, you can skip all this stuff!” videos that do more to make the game look bad than to make it look like something you’d want to learn how to do that in.

It’s kind of a no-win situation for developers right now.

Metroidvanias feel to me like they’ve gotten a lot more walled off and explicit in their lock and key structure in a bad way, like the Zelda series veered towards. Nonlinearity is all in your mind and in hunting for 100%s.

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There was a rather entertaining series of videos on nico where someone was beating FF4/5/6/9 with both the minimum possible number of battle victories and by not picking up any items. Shops and items from events were allowed, but not chests and definitely not stealing from random encounters and running.

I literally had no idea how many weaknesses the developers had left in their games for the player to take advantage of; it’s actually even more impressive in retrospect that the game is fully clearable like that. (Although some parts took quite a few tries, apparently. Or in Exdeath’s case, an 8 hour battle to wait for him to run out of MP…)

Also Tents are the most important offensive item in FF9 because they 100% inflict blind/sleep to anything not immune to them for some reason.

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another interesting dark 2 wrinkle along these lines:

The gate to Shrine of Winter will open once you’ve obtained the four Old Souls and lit four Primal Bonfires. This is achieved by killing The Rotten, The Lost Sinner, Old Iron King, and Duke’s Dear Freja. (The doors can still be opened if the Dukes Dear Freja has not been killed, but when you speak to the Emerald Harold before the bridge to drangleic castle she explains that the journey will be significantly harder)

. . .

Alternatively the above requirement may be bypassed by obtaining a certain amount of Soul Memory in your current playthrough. Note this is not your total Soul Memory but the Soul Memory obtained during your current NewGame playthrough. The number required to pass through the Shrine of Winter starts at 1,000,000, and increases by 1,000,000 for each successive NewGame, capping at 8,000,000 for NG+7. For example, If you start New Game++ with 3,000,000 Soul Memory you will be required to obtain 6,000,0000 Soul Memory for the Shrine of Winter to open in your current playthrough. Consuming hard souls from previous NewGames will contribute to the total Soul Memory required to pass through the Shrine of Winter in your current NewGame playthrough.

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Well, as you said, in Riven you can use “intuition” to get around, so it’s not so much of a lock-and-key structure. (Note that I didn’t play through Riven, just going by the 2 hours or so I tried it.) You can say lock-and-key structures with any amount of rigidity suck in the first place and sucky things shouldn’t be called innovative, and I wouldn’t argue with you strongly on that one. But the idea of having clear gates, and the key to those gates being game mechanics knowledge (and, most of all, raising that idea to a principle followed consistently) is something that felt fresh and surprising to me, regardless of the many soft/partial precedents (of which the animals are one).

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I consider figuring out the rules of any puzzle panel in the Witness to be an intuitive process (except when it’s not (fuck sound puzzles))

intuition in this context is just a vaguely defined word for all the subconscious processes that get you from looking at a bunch of clouds to looking at a picture of a dick made out of clouds.

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