Super Metroid

"The best game I demoed when it came out and finally got to play 13 years later!"

The Nintendo logo shows up, then fades into a scene showing parts of a dark lab of some sort. At regular intervals, the words "1994", "Nintendo", "Presents" and "Metroid 3" are shown briefly, one by one. Then, the camera closes in on a baby Metroid trapped in a glass tank (the kind you see strange biological specimens in in most sci-fi works) and pans away to show the entire lab, the phrase "Super Metroid" appearing across the top at the end. All the while, the music mixed with the Metroid's small cries helps to create the chilly feeling that the player will come to experience for the entire game. That's right: Super Metroid is a fun and exhilarating experience from the moment one puts the cartridge in and pushes the power switch (or the equivalent on a Wii or ZSNES - not that I condone ROM usage) until the dramatic finale, keeping the blood pumping until the very last moment.

The atmosphere presented in Super Metroid is brilliantly presented and maintained. For a game that isn't survival horror, every little element succeeds brilliantly in combining to give the player a constant feeling similar to what it must be like to trek through a rainforest at night (though I suppose that would be way more horrifying than any video game). The game is all about exploring the unknown. Any foolish straying into what looks like a solid wall may very well yield a nice weapon upgrade or health tank. Shooting at random places and trying to find everything is encouraged. Be sure to check everything, even if you've just gotten an upgrade. There might be another upgrade just beyond! You even have the Power Bomb and the X-Ray Scope as last resorts (or quick fixes)! It's all a big maze, and you never really know what's around the corner. It might even be a boss, which makes those boss fights just that much more epic. You have only the one goal - save the Metroid larva - and the player can go about that however he or she pleases. I even forget the main goal half the time.

The game's protagonist, Samus Aran, has a hefty repertoire of different skills and weaponry that give the player the opportunity to explore what combination of techniques will get Samus to the next room or kill the enemy attacking her in an efficient manner. It also isn't so big that it's overwhelming. The other thing is that the player gets to disable any of the weaponry Samus has if he or she wants a challenge or a certain passive ability is detrimental to successfully completing whatever objective the player has in mind. Another aspect of the game is that it blocks progress to certain areas using the lack of an upgrade that Samus needs, prompting the player to find it! For example, Samus might run into a wall that only a Power Bomb can destroy. A couple of abilities are completely useless for completing the game, like the wall jump, but they help to speed up the process and are just so fun to use! The clincher is that Samus is just so responsive to everything, and no move is more than five Select inputs away. Try to speedrun this game and it gets even more exciting due to the sheer number of ways the player can go about doing stuff.

The graphics are awesome. There's really no other way to say it. From a literal standpoint, they're not that great, but the developers took what they had and made everything absolutely stunning. From the whole area itself to the intricate details, everything just comes together. There are also very distinct themes for different sections of the planet, which is a good way to figure out when Samus is about to enter an entirely different area filled with who-knows-what. The animations are also so very fluid, on Samus as well as the whole cast of foes, the kind of thing one might expect from a 3D game but certainly not from most games not using the Super FX chip. Only the beams have anything remotely close to giving a cheesy feel, and a very minuscule amount at that.

The music is yet another part of what makes this game great. The sectional themes apply to the background music as well as the graphics. The tracks almost give each area its own personality, and yet they all manage to maintain the overall atmosphere of the game. They're catchy but not too catchy; they're eerie but not too eerie; and the boss fight tracks are absolutely epic.

I'm a strong believer in stories revealing themselves through gameplay. The story and the gameplay are intertwined such that the gameplay can practically tell the whole story. This is what happens with Super Metroid. As I said before, your only forced objective is to save the Metroid larva, but the search does most of the talking. Each of the flora and fauna trying to kill you tells its own story about how it interacts with its environment and how it defends itself. The boss fights really show that you don't need words to make a good story, especially if you employ a particularly "cheap" way of killing a certain boss. Near the end, the story begins to tell itself a little more (still silently), and it handles itself very well, telling the story of each character without any words (no need for your typical final boss lines) right up until the final twists. It really is something.

The game is at just the right amount of difficulty, as well. Even if the player finds everything in the game, it's still not too easy even the first time around. The player can also forgo the challenge of exploration and make the actual killing spree quite difficult. That means you can potentially give yourself whatever balance of exploration difficulty vs enemy difficulty you like, though I guess most people will go for either extreme.

Long story short, Super Metroid is just plain fun. Everything comes together beautifully. I found myself playing the game - not even starting a new game, but playing on a file where I've almost beaten the game - frequently for weeks just for the hell of it. I was immediately inspired to play another Metroid game, though Fusion turned out not to provide the same experience. When Gunpei Yokoi decided that this would be the final Metroid game, it may have been because he suspected that he couldn't top his own masterpiece, because that's just what this is.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 05/21/08

Game Release: Super Metroid (US, 04/18/94)