Mythinks #1
The Last Metroid #1 - Metroid - This Game is Good, Actually
The Metroid series is easily our favorite game series. While there's plenty of games we enjoy more than individual Metroid games, so long as we count a whole series as a collective cohesive unit, Metroid's got every other beat, in our eyes. There aren't nearly as many Metroid games as there are Zeldas, Marios, or Kirbies, but I would argue it has a stronger track record than all of those series. There's only 16 countable official Metroid titles, but there's only a couple games we would call outright stinkers. So we're gonna start a review series where we discuss every single one, why not?
While we did find the Prime games as a child, and they're very much what we would consider our home when it comes to Metroid, we did eventually get into the 2D games, and have gotten to this point where there's only two Metroid games as of now that we have yet to beat, and the original NES Metroid was one of them. In fact, for a while the NES Metroid was part of why we didn't like 2D Metroid for the longest time. We first played it as the unlockable bonus feature on Metroid Prime, and played it for about an hour, and then bounced the moment we died.
And believe us, we have tried numerous times to play this game and just couldn't be bothered after a bit. All of our play attempts for it have been about the same. We'll get all the major items at the start of Brinstar, move on to Norfair or Kraid's lair, and then die, farm our health back up on an insect dispenser, before dying again and just deciding this is too much trouble. But this article series forcing us to suffer through it has honestly helped some of us to appreciate it a little better. Maybe even enough to say I, along with popular consensus, have been too harsh on it. Maybe not all of us on the Mythinks crew are won over; Luna and Iono both with basically rather play anything else. But Jinx, Celeste, and I have a somewhat higher appreciation for it.
Now, we should preface this by saying we have used outside tools to offer us assistance to help relax the parts of the game we find mind-numbingly tedious. Namely, we were fairly liberal with savestate usage. Not enough that we were save scumming, but at least every few rooms I put a state down so that if I just got my ass kicked somewhere in the next few rooms, it was easy enough to just start that section over and try again. And sure, you could argue that alone could invalidate the opinion hike, seeing as it's circumventing the game a bit. To which we say, sure. Anyways.
Okay but seriously, it's undeniable that this definitely factored into me enjoying Metroid 1 more this time around, as it helped cut back on some of its worst aspects. We're just also of the mind that, so long as you're playing a single-player game, it's open season to customize your experience however you see fit to make the game more enjoyable to you. And because of this, we managed to finally beat Metroid for the first time, WITHOUT having to fall asleep grinding on bugs. Mostly.
We know bringing up the feeling of isolation is almost kind of a cliche when it comes to critique of Metroid games, but we feel like for Metroid 1 here, it's one of the games that most carries its atmosphere on that feeling. When you first spawn onto Zebes, you are given no direction. You might be enticed to go right, since that's where you usually go in side-scrolling games, but if you go that way, you'll quickly find a tile-high gap you can't go through. With no way to progress, you may turn back and eventually find the Morph Ball, a Metroid staple that'll allow you to roll through these tile-high holes. This is a quick way to set up the Metroid precedent, that some areas will be completely inaccessible unless you have the proper piece of equipment.
JINX:
i appreciate how directionless this game starts. apart from the manual giving a very basic map and the general objective of "find and kill kraid and ridley, then return to tourian to kill mother brain," you have very little to work off of. because of this approach, it's very possible to wander into areas you're ill-equipped for. it's an encouragement to take your time and watch out for resources like missile packs and energy tanks, as they'll prove invaluable. i can also appreciate the boldness that comes with not offering a well-defined ingame map, as it encourages you to take your own notes and figure things out on your own. it's completely and totally up to you to find the way to your objective, which can be any old way you make it. which feels like a far cry from many of the metroid games going forward, but that's getting ahead of ourselves.
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VIXI:
All things considered, the map of Zebes in this game is not gigantic by any means, but it's still very labyrinthian and confusing to navigate, not helped by the swarms of aggressive enemies that'll jump you if you're not careful. It wasn't so vexing that we couldn't find our way around, but we certainly weren't immune to getting lost, either.
I'm far from being able to play games like Metroid at a speedrunner's pace, and when you're not that good at the game, it can feel really overwhelming and discouraging to reach a room and immediately get ping-ponged all over the place. But I feel like this game more than any other Metroid forces at least casual players to take their time and play smarter rather than harder. Actually trying to fight a lot of enemies is a bit of a crapshoot. Their movement is erratic, and they can knock you around, knock you into lava, combo-combo you. Instead the game goes a lot smoother if you treat everything with respect. Shoot from afar when you can, use your missiles since they insta-kill pretty much every regular enemy, and for the earliest parts of the game, it honestly started feeling best to play keep-away where I can and avoid enemies rather than just straight up fight them.
Not that this is fool-proof, especially since I'm not exactly a practiced speedrunner, and enemies having a lot of "haha pranked" placement, over a pit exactly when I need a leap of confidence, and then a Rio or something swoops down and knocks me into the lava, and it can be frustrating.
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That said, we think this is easily one of the NES games that is the most interesting to look at, just visually. NES games are not shy from being surprisingly grotesque every now and then, but whenever we think NES games we tend to think of pixel art styles that are fairly whimsical, whether they be Mario, Zelda, or Mega Man. As far as mainstream NES games go, Metroid easily has them all beat in terms of being what was probably lowkey terrifying by 1986 standards.
Where Mega Man was fighting funny cartoon robots in colorful metallic cities, and Link was fighting pig warriors in a medieval fantasy, Samus was up against giant insects, inspired by the Alien movie and environments that in and of themselves feel alien and strange. There's very little abstraction needed to capture what a Goomba or Koopa looks like, but because Metroid enemies are so paradoxically detailed yet vague, that it allows your imagination to fill in the gaps. All the creatures look truly alien and unknowable, at least in their sprite incarnations that feel evocative of the retro-sci-fi esotericness of a Space Invaders sprite.
This basically goes double for the atmosphere of the game. You start out in a place that's pretty identifiably a dark cavern, but the deeper you get the more weird the environments become. Because of this, it's easily one of the creepiest Metroid games in the series, at least going by vibes alone. The weird, bubbly tileset of Norfair has such a truly otherworldly vibe to it, that it's harder to imagine this place in a 3D space. They've certainly taken cracks at it in future 2D games, but this bubble-zone just looks like it could never quite have the same weird effect to it if they were to, say, make a Prime game try to look like this.
The abilities you get in this game are essentially going to act as the bedrock for almost all Metroid games, going forward, save for the spinoffs. And we would like to have a segment over each game talking about each ability and what they add to the game.
I feel like this is the game where you start out at the weakest, at least relative to future Metroid games. You're equipped with nothing but a short-range gun that takes a while to kill anything above the most basic of enemies. Even lowly Zoomers (not those ones) take a few shots!
Like we said, starting off you immediately find the Morph Ball, called "Maru Mari" in this game. Must be Japanese or something. But of course, We'll just be calling it Morph Ball because that's what everyone knows it as. It's simple as a duck-into-small places ability, but I like how different it is. What could've easily been just the ability to crouch or crawl turned into easily the most iconic part of Samus' moveset. Because of that simplicity, it's easy to overlook it, though admittedly a lot of its applications come with other abilities that supplement it, as the series goes on.
The next and even bigger staple of the genre itself is picking up your first Missile pack, allowing you an alternate firing mode to fire powerful missiles, that'll destroy almost anything short of a boss in one hit, assuming you aim it well enough. And I say the missiles are a pretty major staple for Metroid, because missile expansions are going to be all over the place, throughout the series as a permanent upgrade to your missile capacity. Though this game in particular takes a few shortcuts. Not all of them are super hidden, in fact a lot are out in the open. And Ridley and Kraid give you a huge missile expansion just for defeating them. We guess since missiles are so required for the home stretch of the game, or something.
The other repeat pick-up is the Energy Tank, which increases your maximum health by 100 for each. Mostly. This is actually a rare Metroid game that has a surplus of these things, with 6 energy tanks being the maximum. And if you pick up one of the spares lying around, they just refill your health and nothing else. Obviously a sight for sore eyes, with how much damage everything does in these damn caves. Though each one does also inflate that "have to farm your HP back up" problem.
Thankfully, your short-ranged gun is short-lived, because it's not long before you find the Long Beam. There's not much to talk about here, it just allows your shots to travel the full length of the screen. We partway wonder why they even bothered to make your shots so short-range to begin with, but we think the intention is that they wanted you to feel a pretty substantial upgrade early on, and being able to fire at a range you expect for a side-scrolling shooter gets the idea across that you'll be wanting to hunt down more of these abilities. Just yeah, not hard to see why this one is just a Samus default by now.
Morph Ball Bombs is another item that is a must for progression, as you'll need it to reveal hidden hidey holes through the harrowing hallways. It's another item that's hard to comment on, since it's more or less a key in a lot of cases, but I saw it has its fair share of combat applications just due to how much damage it deals in this game. An aspect about it that doesn't quite feel nearly AS useful in future games. For instance, it was the weapon of choice we used to cheese Kraid to death.
I will say though, in this game in particular the blast radius and how it interacts with blocks is. Strange to say the least, I'm not sure if the hit box is just especially picky, but sometimes I'll fail to blow up a block or fling me into the air in a way that allows me to fall into a hole. This is going to prove an issue later on.
And finally, as far as abilities that are absolutely mandatory for beating the game, next is the Ice Beam, another add-on for your beam weapon. It not only increases the amount of damage your gun does, but it also freezes most enemies to allow you to use them as platforms to get more height. It proved to be a pretty powerful and potent asset in keeping the swarms of enemies at least a little more controlled, allowing you to take on one thing onscreen at a time in some cases.
I think one of the cool things about this game is that there's actually a sizable amount of abilities, in proportion to how many there are total, that are just outright optional, otherwise only really used to grab more expansions or additional upgrades.
The High-Jump boots in this game both are substantial and aren't at the same time. It's one of those more passive benefits that's easy to take for granted. Which is why we second-guess if it is actually optional. But it does feel like the areas that are only accessible thanks to them are few an far between.
You can use the High-Jump Boots to get to the Varia Suit, or seemingly in this game simply called "Varia." Since there's no superheated rooms in Metroid yet, all it does is double your defense, but given how quickly damage can rack up, especially with your base suit, it's a very welcome upgrade.
Since half damage is kinda all there is to the Varia suit, fun fact: The name "Varia" is more than likely a mistranslation, seeing as in Japanese it was referred to as the "Barrier Suit", hence the double defense. In additional fact, the manual for Metroid 2 refers to it as the "Barrier Suit" even in English. Not that that's a tremendous deal, I just think it's interesting that the name "Varia" wound up sticking as a cool fictional word.
You can also find an alternative beam type to the Ice Beam, the Wave Beam, which has the same damage benefits but increases the shot's width by having shots travel in a waving pattern. And on top of this, your shots can now travel through walls. While you're going to need the Ice Beam in order to deal with the Metroids in the final area, and will likely have to re-retrieve it if you're playing vanilla, the wave beam can be a blessing for dealing with elusive enemies a little easier. Though it can also be a bit of a bane, in the off-chances the wave beam's shot just arc around what you're shooting at and doesn't actually hit them.
And finally, there's the Screw Attack, arguably the most powerful upgrade, since it allows you to jump through enemies and kill them instantly, so long as you're doing a somersault. Hard to not see how this one keeps coming back for almost every game going forward. Its symbol basically became the franchise's logo, for crying out loud.
By the time you're fully kitted out with all the upgrades and a healthy stash of missiles and energy, you can really start trouncing around the place that was once oppressive like it was your neighborhood playground, and you're one of the big kids. One of the problems just comes in actually getting to that point.
This game's starting hour or two can be extremely rough. Enemies deal a lot of damage, you only get so many missiles, and progression can very often be gated behind egregiously guide-dangit moments.
IONO:
The blocks you need to bomb in order to make physical progress are hidden in seemingly random locations, with very little in the way of hints or tells, as there's no visual give-away for which tiles are breakable. It's one thing when you find an out-of-place dead end and bomb the wall inquisitively, in that case it's definitely fine to keep something a little hidden there.
What I find less acceptable are the moments where any floor tile in any room could be bombable, and you will need to find these randomly bombable floors in order to finish the game. I was reduced to bombing every single floor I could find, thinking SURELY there must be a way to go even further down from here, only for the picky Morph Ball Bomb hitboxes to not uncover the floors I thought I had bombed. Did I mention what's underneath these floors sometimes is lava that just doesn't effect you for some reason? Cause that's a thing, too.
I feel like the game would've broken me either way, since so many rooms in this game are copy-pasted hallways, and I was getting turned around every which way, only finding out a ridiculous amount of the map seemingly just exists as either filler or to be deliberately confusing. If you were to ask me to draw a map for Super Metroid from memory, it would probably be give or take 80% accurate. While I couldn't draw a map for Metroid 2 from memory nearly as well, I at least don't get lost in that game nearly as much as I do in this one.
Even in Brinstar, the starting area, there's a false floor you can reveal and it drops you into a pit that you have no way out of other than to do these weird C-jumps up a breakable block wall. I hate annoying "gotcha traps" in games like this, because it just discourages looking for secrets. It's the same psychological assault as finding a secret in Zelda 1 only for it to be a door repair guy.
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And the thing is, we could probably find all of the above problems a lot easier to stomach if it wasn't for the baffling decision to make you restart at 30 energy every time you die no matter what. An oppressive atmosphere is one thing, but this part is nothing short of incredibly tedious, because there's no energy or ammo recharge stations anywhere in the game. At least that is unless you count these insect dispensers.
A ridiculous amount of my footage recorded for this game is me standing, waiting and idly shooting at whatever will pop out of these pipes for minutes on end because I fell a little too low on health to feel comfortable. This penalty for dying is in and of itself a death sentence for this game, and the part that I consistently dread the most across all of my attempts to play it.
We promise we like this game at the end of the day, but I cannot blame anybody for coming to the conclusion that this game is hideous, because of how much it grinds everything down to a complete halt. And it's a problem that only balloons the more energy tanks you get. If you really did insist on having the player start with less than their default maximum in health, or if that was somehow a technical limitation, surely there could have been energy recharge stations. Even if they were extra hidden, we think those would've been well worth scouring the map for.
And of course, it wouldn't even be so much of a problem if combat wasn't so much of a crapshoot. The knockback is ridiculous, and it feels terrible to get dunked in the lava time and time again. And they cram so many enemies on screen that the game regularly chugs to a near-halt, at which point fighting just feels like slugging it out while submerged in near-solid sewer sludge.
And the boss fights. What boss fights? Yeah, there's boss fights in the traditional sense of an extra-tough enemy appears and you gotta beat it, but they flood the screen with projectiles that no-hitting these things feels like it must be a Sisyphusian task. We beat Kraid by spamming missiles while hugging his hitbox, and switching to bombing him to death once we ran out of missiles. We don't even know how else you're supposed to fight him, since his spikes block missiles and they're about always blocking for him anyway. But also Ridley has a comical blindspot directly behind him if you can manage to get in there.
We only wish Mother Brain was as cheesable. It just turns into Metroid danmaku, and it's just about impossible to get through it without just facetanking all the damage, seeing as the destructible doorways regenerate if you don't destroy them fast enough. It's brutal, and not in any way we dig at all, and had we not placed a save state before entering Mother Brain's chamber, we'd be sent back to the beginning of Tourian with 30 energy once again, forcing us to backtrack out of it to go grind more bugs into energy and missiles.
CELESTE:
And it really is a huge shame that the game has such overpowering issues, because it gets in the way of something that I feel could have stood alongside Kirby's Adventure, or the Mega Man games as some of the system's best. I do like Metroid 1 overall, I am just far from loving it. It occupies a space in the series that no other Metroid quite 100% recaptures, not even its own remake. Just at the same time, every other game in the series feels more polished than this. Hell, the afforementioned "greats" of the NES era feel more polished than this.
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And we should probably talk about the story, very briefly. Not that a ton of it matters, because a bunch of the background material in the manual gets retconned by later games, and even less of it is directly relevant to what little plot this game has. Hell, the game's ending even "retcons" Samus' gender. Either that or something about being trapped on a hostile alien planet makes you realize you're a woman.
tl;dr, The Galactic Federation back in the Metroid 1 days was essentially a United Nations in space, being a cooperation of various space-faring races. Space Piracy becomes a huge issue, and in order to counteract it, the GF enlist the help of Space Hunters, AKA bounty hunters. One day, the Metroids, a species discovered on the planet SR-388, thought to have been powerful enough to wipe out the civilization that lived there, was being transported by the Galactic Federation, when Space Pirates plundered the ship and took the Metroids for themselves, looking to use them as bioweapons. You, obviously, play as Samus Aran, a man shrouded in mystery that has a cybernetic suit, tasked with going to the Space Pirate's fortress on the planet Zebes in order to kill the Metroids and the Space Pirate leader, Mother Brain.
Though of course, if you get a good enough ending, you'll find out that Samus Aran is actually a woman. Which is, in retrospect, such a funny twist for 1986. Back then, it was evidently done simply because it would've been so unexpected. What's a little less cool is how she takes off more and more of her clothing the faster you beat the game. Not that I'm offended by it, I just find it funny like "wow, they really did that, huh," in a "who was that for" kinda way. Who was beating Metroid 1 in under 2 hours just to get their rocks off seeing a pixelated woman in a bikini. Not hard to see why this specific aspect of the Metroid series would eventually get toned down over time.
What is peculiar and something I was surprised by is that there is absolutely no mention of the "Chozo" by name in the manual, despite their statues being present. They're just the bird statues that are holding your upgrades. The above tidbit is the closest we get to direct acknowledgement of the Chozo in this one, a funny development seeing how important to the lore they end up being later on.
At any rate, the game also caps off with another tradition-to-be, in the escape sequence. Though there isn't much to this one. It's just a long, tall shaft with one-tile jumps and a harsh fall if you mess up. No enemies or theatrics beyond the timer. Probably one of the least interesting escape sequences in the series. Meh.
Like we said. This playthrough didn't dramatically radicalize us in the opposite direction of how we already felt. But we do feel like the game owns up to some of its merits. It's a respectable spin on the Zelda groundwork while also still being very notably its own thing. A decent little start to a legendary franchise to-be, even if we feel like any of the main-series games after it are more satisfying to play in the long run. Worth a visit, if nothing else to appreciate the series roots.
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VIXI SCORE: 6/10
It's far from the series heights, but I do genuinely feel like its gotten a bad rap these days. It's primarily the respawn rules that are holding it back. It can be harsh and confusing to navigate, but in a way that feels purposeful.
LUNA SCORE: 5/10
I get where Vixi's coming from, but I think it says a bit about a game if you have to bring in outside forces to enjoy it. It's certainly a time-capsule entry in a series.
JINX SCORE: 6/10
not the most mechanically satisfying metroid game to play, but it has its moments. exploration and curiosity sometimes get punished rather than rewarded, but i do think it's got something going for it in terms of atmosphere, especially in contrast to all the other nes first-parties.
IONO SCORE: 4/10
I'm still not won over. Just about any other Metroid game is better. Zero Mission, its remake, is better in about every way in my eyes. And it's just plain not that fun. It doesn't have the same "anyone can pick this up and play it" energy as Zelda or Mario on NES does.
CELESTE SCORE: 6/10
Not sure I like it as much as Jinx or Vixi, but I see the merits there. Immaculate vibes mostly tarnished by feeling a smidge too archaic to truly stand on its own as the way classic Mario Bros and Zelda can. That said, the NES library is also largely not my thing, so finding some enjoyment in there is a mark above average.
OVERALL SCORE: 27/50
Coming up next on The Last Metroid: A marked improvement on a quaint little handheld!