'To understand Samus & Metroid is to understand how a key activates a lock.'
**I only played this game recently, and I'm not part of the NES generation. I grew up with N64.
**I'm reviewing this game as part of the series of Metroid, and commenting on it in relation to the other games and also which games influenced it. I'm not comparing it unfavourably to contemporary games; it's obvious in which areas the game has aged, just like all the millions of other 8-bit games.
Introduction
Apparently Metroid was intended to be different from Miyamoto's game designs. However, it borrows from his designs to create this difference. The story goes that they crossed the platforming of Mario with the adventuring of Zelda.
Stylistically, the game was perhaps influenced by Japanese anime, 'The Guyver', and the western film 'Alien'. These films were very popular and influential at the time (1986).
I guess the film 'Metropolis' might also have been an influence too. But the Japanese robot suit design is probably deeply-rooted in the Japanese otaku psyche.
Metroid executes almost immediately, beaming main character 'Samus Aran' down, 'Star Trek' style, this happens each time you switch on the console, but after that you are left alone to wander the alien world. Samus herself is like a cross between Guyver and a walking spacesuit.
The mission is to destroy an evil organic super-computer called 'Mother Brain' who intends to use the 'Metroids' (floating jellyfishes with plasma balls inside, and fangs; and they suck on your upper body like 'face huggers' from alien) to destroy the universe. Sounds pretty generic, but don't worry because you don't have to think about any of that until the last rooms in the game.
Level design and mechanics
The game is basically a large map of interconnected rooms and corridors that are organized into areas and sub-areas, with transitions between.
The areas are distinguished by different colours & patterns, room layouts and monsters, but also by varying difficulties. Areas will typically be of a certain dominating colour; e.g. purple, gold, blue, grey. Inside these areas are sub-areas with different coloured rooms and curious details, my favourites are the transparent bubble rooms, with little flickering flames inside them that reappear animated in super metroid.
The game's space is mostly taken up by long horizontal and vertical corridors. The smaller rooms usually hold power suit upgrades and always come at the end of a horizontal corridor; in super metroid I think there are item rooms at the top of vertical corridors as well.
The long horizontals open up like a Japanese scroll, the player uncovering and exploring the narrative screen by screen (scene by scene). Yes, even though the corridors are a single 'room', they have a lot of detail inside, enough for a few different screens, so as an example, in the first horizontal, after samus appears, you are on the first screen of the corridor, then you can move left or right, if you move left, the screen transitions into another part of the room, the 'second screen', where you acquire the 'maru mari', a curiously-named upgrade to the power suit.
The power-up, represented by a ball, gives samus the ability to curl up into herself and roll through crevices, but also spin in the air. The 'maru mari' can be used to dispense bombs, and eventually becomes deadly when combined with the 'screw attack' later on in the game, turning samus into a spinning weapon.
The maru mari is the most important upgrade to the power suit and a very original video game invention. It allows samus to reach areas that a normal person couldn't, shrinking into spaces inside walls and falling into pits. It creates a lot of the build-up in the excitement of discovery of finding a new area or item.
I really like that room in the green sub-area of the gold corridors where you reach a dead-end and have to shoot the wall to reveal a secret passage, and then crawl through to a sand-pit area that transitions into a mechanical platform with a flashing energy tank in the centre of the screen. I love the way it flashes but also its retro shape. This is the excitement of finding secrets, this is metroid.
So generally the horizontal corridors will contain maybe four or five screens max. When you reach the end of the corridor, a bulbous blue 'door' awaits you. These doors are key to the identity of the metroid series and important in creating a real sense of adventure and secrecy.
To understand samus & metroid is to understand how a key activates a lock. Samus's arm cannon blasts the doors open by shooting them. Immediately the player is reminded of the scene In 'Alien' where one of the characters is crawling through the Byzantine-like ducts above the ship with a flame-thrower, hunting for the alien.
There is a shocking camera-like lens of an opening that slowly scrapes and screeches open, but looks like it could take your head off if you put it through. Metroid's distinctive bulbous blue doors open similarly, like a flower blossoming from bud to petals, like opening up a parcel and discovering you got a new area.
Aesthetics aside, the doors are important to the design because they create much of why we call metroid an adventure (I think it's actually a platformer at heart, but more on that later). If the doors weren't there, the speed at which samus moves and the shooting elements would be more noticeable. The whole map would be like one big room, and it would feel more like an arcade shooter.
The door transition, taken from 'the legend of Zelda', sucks samus up into the door, and then spits her out into a new area when the automatic transition ends. I really think the door was considered as important to the story, because even if the door graphic wasn't there and the screen transitioned like in Zelda (which would work), samus wouldn't be opening up the area; she wouldn't be disovering the area.
There are plenty of examples where shooting in the game is subordinated to platforming and adventure, even if you spend a lot of time blasting. For example, I mentioned that I consider metroid a platformer at heart, and this is because the game reminds me a lot of super Mario brothers. Mario has lots of horizontal and vertical platforms with disappearing blocks and if the platforms weren't there then there would be very little game left (N.B. I'm talking about the actual platforms inside rooms, and not the rooms themselves).
Similarly in metroid, you need to platforms to explore the world and get to various rooms; you also need them to shoot at monsters and to proceed from point 'A' to 'B'.
Other, more specific examples include the ice beam, the third most important element to the game besides the maru mari and bombs. The ice beam seems to have been created to stop moving platforms (the 'ripper' enemy). Once halted with ice, samus can jump on them and access another area. I like this idea of, 'if there aren't any platforms, make your own'.
A lot of gamers complain of the difficulty of metroid, saying that some rooms are almost impossible as they're crammed full of monsters. But I've analyzed some of these rooms and I've discovered that they are more like puzzles that you have to work through, rather than monsters you have to destroy systematically.
With tactile use of the ice beam, you can freeze certain enemies, jump on them using them as a platform, to then shoot one or two of the more troublesome monsters, and then proceed to the permanent platforms, and continue reacting only to monsters that are necessary for advancement to the next corridor. This is how it's done (I'm talking to you gamespot).
The vertical corridors offer something a little different from the horizontal ones. They range from elevators, to transition corridors, to staircases (effectively) that can be ascended and descended, with rooms at the top and bottom, and some in the middle.
At first I ended up getting beaten up by the monsters in the gold and blue verticals, and I think it was because I was normal samus. The verticals in these areas are crowded and tight, so I travel down from platform to platform using maru mari, and I hardly get hit. It's also very fun; I like that little supple bounce after contact, that allows samus to pivot onto a platform below, kind of like in a pinball machine where the ball falls down the 'platforms'. When ascending the staircases, the maru mari is used in a different way, by spinning up, again there is that slight delay that allows samus to be curled around platforms in a very satisfying way. This is the best way to play the vertical rooms.
Once you're powerful enough (i.e. once you've found enough energy tanks and missiles) you can confront the bosses in the 'boss rooms'. There are three in total, including 'Mother Brain'. The bosses, 'Ridley' and 'Kraid', look and sound like Saturday morning cartoon villains. Kraid looks like a fat hedgehog and Ridley looks like a mini kinder egg toy with a bent neck. But maybe they were good for 1986. I don't know.
Anyway, Ridley is very easy to beat and Kraid is very hard, so you kind of have to explore to get powerful enough to beat Kraid, and once you've beaten both you get access to the final area where 'Mother Brain' awaits. I guess they are like guardians or something.
The boss fights are important in adding some sort of purpose to gaining all this power, but they also are like half-way points up until the final confrontation.
Aesthetic
The Metroid series is famous for its focus on atmosphere. Playing the first iteration, you can see and feel where it all began. I consider the sound very important in this area. Most of the themes are pretty basic now, but it's worth keeping the volume up because while they're not as deep and melancholic as in super metroid, that game was heavily influenced by metroid. So the dramatic scores you hear in super metroid owe a lot to the composition style of the original, you can't just separate the two games so easily.
My one complaint with the sound in metroid is the main theme that plays in the gold and blue corridors; I feel it detracts from the atmosphere and makes samus feel like she's on a heroic mission…which I guess she is, but I've gotten used to the morally ambiguous samus from the later games, especially the prime series. Hero stories have always been Zelda territory.
Although, what is good about the main theme is that when samus enters certain rooms, such as the 'item corridors' and the 'elevator rooms', that have very eerie & minimalist sounds, the contrast between the heroic theme and the itching and scratching of the tiny sounds in those rooms creates unease and questions what samus will find next. Super metroid exploits this superbly by putting fake chozo statues that come alive when you're expecting to get an item, but the original game built the framework for that to be possible.
The theme for 'ancient chozo ruins' from metroid prime is probably the equivalent to the elevator/item room themes. It has that same feeling of bugs or little invisible creatures rustling about somewhere, albeit creating a wonderful sense of space to go with it, probably only topped by vagrant story's chilling catacombs theme.
Another contribution to the atmosphere is those black backgrounds. They might have been a technical limitation, but they do a great job of making the game feel mysterious and like it has more depth.
The black backgrounds also play on the imagination, as do the simplistic graphics as a whole, allowing the player to react more directly and subjectively to what they're looking at. While super metroid is superb, it is a different game, and because the graphics were much richer, you feel more objective to the action, the bombs look like actual bombs, samus's suit feels hard and the arm cannon is metal. But in metroid, samus feels supple and there are just a couple of colours to distinguish her. This creates a more direct feeling and affinity with the character.
Also, I don't know if anyone has noticed, but metroid is crazy about circles. Samus spins into a ball, she drops bombs shaped like circles, when destroying an enemy, they drop health in the form of a circle, she shoots circular beams, there are those red circle platforms in the game. these basic shapes create a sort of language that enables the imagination to consider the meaning of the importance of circles in metroid, which super metroid cannot offer in the same way. The physics, the animation, the graphics, the sound, all create a unique tapestry that is the identity of the original iteration.
Conclusion
However, the game is not perfect. My main criticism, although it's not really a criticism is that the controls do take getting used to. It takes a while to figure out that to jump and not spin is 'A', then forward on the 'D-pad', once you're able to work between spinning and jumping it becomes less of a problem.
What I don't like though is how you're punished a lot for being hit. Samus is pushed back when hit, which often means that you might hit another enemy and take even more damage, they did this is 'P.N.03' too, but that felt necessary, while this game is quite hard anyway, even without being pushed back after getting hit.
Other criticisms include the placing of the wave beam in a really hard to reach place full of tough obstacles. Because when you're strong enough to get there, the wave beam isn't that useful (in fact, one might say it is use-less) against the metroids or mother brain. If you use it against the metroids, it has NO effect, just bouncing them away a bit, and I doubt it would be useful against mother brain. Although if you got it before you beat ridley and kraid, it might be of use. Also, I know for a fact that there is at least one energy tank that you can only get with the wave beam, because it's hidden in the wall somewhere.
The main criticisms of the game are that it doesn't have a map and it's not very well structured. Well, it true that it doesn't have an in-game map, but there is a basic map in the instruction manual that shows all the areas and where the bosses are and how these areas are connected. If the game gave you a map, then finding the secrets would be no fun, and the whole meaning of the game would fall apart. When you're doing an Easter egg hunt, you don't ask the person who hid them, "where are the eggs?" the point is you have to find them. So I'll only judge on how they hid them.
The most important items are in the statue rooms that are relatively simple to find, often branching off from main corridors, but then there are those conspicuous transitions between major rooms, where often there is a thinner ground than in other rooms. Now, I admit, the ice beam which is a major item in the game is hidden in this way and I had to resort to a map because I had no idea it would be hidden underneath there. But once I had noticed a pattern, I always checked transition corridors by shooting above and below, and In the lava area, there are clues in the architecture, for example, the standard pattern would be replaced by more of one type of tile, so it would be suspect and require investigation.
But apart from not being able to find the ice beam and the wave beam (the game also has lots of devious traps that pretend to offer a shortcut, but don't. it's almost like the metroid equivalent to "the princess is in another castle") once you get your head around the fact that the game likes to play tricks on you and it's all about finding what is hidden, you begin to enjoy it much more.
And the visual trick with the fake lava graphic is genius; a joke obviously, but it's pretty smart and creative for such an early game. I think you're offered a clue because the fake lava is a different colour.
So you are given clues, it's just about cracking the first clue to sniff out others that is the hardest. I would say that it is harder to have the patience to play this kind of game now, because our eyes are used to looking at prettier graphics with huge areas and lots of objects. But at the time metroid did have 'state of the art' detailed graphics. It's just that games have progressed a lot, graphically. I consider it unfair to grade a game down because it's smaller than other games.
Then there are the criticisms that the game has no structure and isn't well paced. It's true that super metroid is a superbly balanced game and the designers did a much better job of staggering progression, and this really helped with learning the rules of the game and then slowly making things more obscure, stage by stage, until when you reach the final areas, it can become almost impossible to figure out where to go next unless you've been paying attention and memorizing the patterns of the levels.
I would say that metroid begins with the obscure difficulty of the later super metroid levels, and that can be confusing.
I guess the question is, "how free should free-roaming be?" and metroid is very free-roaming, but I still can't see that as a problem, because it seems to know what it is. Generally speaking, the more powerful items are hidden in harder areas, and the basic stuff is discovered near where you start off.
Where super metroid does gain an advantage over metroid in the area of game balance, is that it creates a beautiful rhythm with its balancing act. There are many actions and weapons and special jumps and door lock-outs in SM, but the game balances these complicated features out, in a way that you don't have to think too much about it and can just solve the puzzle of how to tackle your environment. Metroid lacks this, but metroid contains the original DNA, and it feels as if the designers had it all figured out in the first one, but were just held back by technical
limitations.
So I see metroid as a design that is iterated upon. Metroid is the basic design, metroid 2 fleshes out more of the story, and metroid 3 perfects the formula. Metroid 4 tweaks and improves the user interface and controls, and introduces metroid to a new audience, while continuing the story arc.
My final note on the issue of the game being too 'open-ended' is the scores that gamespot give GTA. GTA is very free-roaming and that's what is fun about it. So lowering a game's score because it is open-ended is silly. Metroid was probably revolutionary at the time, the GTA of the 80s and 90s.
I did play and finish metroid zero mission, and it is a nice game, but it was too easy and lacked the atmospheric dread of super metroid. It is nice that Nintendo are trying to tie bits and pieces of the story together and integrate the manga and the prime games into the main series, but it's not necessary. I prefer the mystery of the first few metroids.
So, in conclusion, play metroid, discover what metroid is and how it is constructed. Once you find its unique identity, it will take its place. Then go back to adoring super metroid and metroid prime, and maybe you'll gain more appreciation for those games by doing so.