Super Metroid Review

While I don't dislike Super Metroid by any means, it did do a lot to shape the Metroidvania genre as we know it today and I do think it holds up better than SOTN, but at the same time after replaying Super for the first time in almost 10 years, I can see why I was never *that* big on it.

What I like about the game at least at first is the level design, the way the game starts off and how it bottlenecks you but at the same time, gives you enough freedom to look around to find new upgrades and the first few hours of SM can be pretty enjoyable because of that, the game never tells you where to go and the level design's initial charm of giving you information but just enough where it feels like you are finding upgrades for your suit and missile upgrades can feel rewarding and makes me feel pretty cool for finding them, it manages to hit the sweet spot of feeling guided but just enough that it feels like I'm finding things on my own.

Then there are parts where it feels like the game has soft locked you when in reality it's more of a puzzle to progress later on in a section, it is rather clever how it feels like I'm getting softlocked but it's actually a challenge I have to overcome.

All that then becomes diminishing returns since so much of this game expects you bomb and shoot every tile to progess, even power bombing them won't make a difference since I used them so many times and it doesn't lead to me finding anything, then there was this one part where you were supposed to power bomb a glass tube but I would never know that playing the game the first time, and there is no crack to indicate that I should power bomb it. After a point, I was starting to get lost since it felt I just had to look at specific spots to progress.

Then I get the Freeze Beam and then later the Spazer Beam and pretty much everything goes downhill and this is where the difficulty of the game becomes borderline non existent. 95% of the the enemy roster of Super Metroid are weak to this combo, every enemy will be frozen and the Spazer has such a wide spread to the point where moment to moment enemy encounters will barely put up much of a fight. Metroid Prime, Samus Returns, Dread, AM2R, never had this problem where with Super once you get to the Freeze and Spazer Beam combo, moment to moment enemy encounters will forever remain braindead easy and it's hard for there to be any tension during the exploration parts.

The platforming has been stated many times to not be that great and it isn't. I think my big issue with it is that doing the vertical jump and the horizontal sommersault jump require different button presses and movements of the d pad, and this isn't bad during moment to moment platforming but it's infuriating during bosses.

Speaking of bosses, they fare slightly better in that they are immune to the Freeze Beam, but this leads to my second issue:

The controls for selecting missiles. In order to do it in Super Metroid, you need to get your hand off the d pad, and press what is the stand in for the middle button on the SNES controller, this can be rather cumbersome since you need to move around to avoid the bosses' attacks but you will spend a good amount of time, cycling through missiles, super missiles and later power bombs, the grapple and x ray vision just to start attack the bosses and by that point they would've gotten some hits in while you are looking above to see if you selected what you wanted.

Speaking of bosses Ridley's is the worst in the game, the camera does a terrible job at tracking him and he can attack you off screen a lot and you got to spend your time jumping while hoping the camera can track Ridley in time to hit him or dodge his attacks.

Other issues include the Screwattack having weird physics where one minute it feels like I am able to stay in the air consistently and and the I start falling the next.

And while I appreciate what this sequence did for game storytelling at the time, the part where the Baby Metroid came and protect Samus is hard to really appreciate since it was gone for so much of the game and didn't even appear towards the end which makes it hard to care when Mother Brain kills it. I'm not expecting a super deep story but outside for what it did for games' storytelling at the time, it's hard to really care for it in isolation.

Overall, while I don't dislike Super Metroid, I feel like it can be overhyped at times and is more known for it's legacy then rising above it. I'm willing to bet the game is popular to speedrun because it's the only way to get any form of moment to moment challenge. Every time I play Super, I would just much rather play Prime or Dread instead.