Last week, things ended on kind of a cliffhanger. After exploring the desolate, blown-out ruins of the Space Pirate lair, players find themselves re-exploring the starting area of the original Metroid now retro-fitted with robotic security, but still no sign of life. After obtaining the handy morph ball and powerful missiles, it's time for the player to return to those destroyed ruins and explore new areas, while trying to figure out what it is out there that's watching them.
The first subtle thing players might notice upon returning is that the background of this elevator room is a different color than it was their last visit. It now has a pinkish color, a stark contrast to the grays of the foreground, and looks more bright and active than the previous dull color. This is just a slight change that some players might pick up on, but the small details like this help sell the game's mood. Last article, we saw a transition in mood, and in a way that mirrors what we saw in the game's opening area two weeks ago. Ceres station started out dark and quiet as you descended it, and the planet Zebes too was completely lifeless until you triggered the security guarding the morph ball. You short foray into Brinstar was meant to feel disconnected from this mechanical area you're now returning to, making it so there was plenty of time for changes to happen there and you would have no idea what went on.
With the potential of something waiting, you're don't really have anywhere to go but through this door back into the old final boss chamber from Metroid 1. And when you dare to venture through it... you're met with an anticlimax.
There are a bunch of space pirates in this room waiting for Samus! But that's really about it. They don't do anything very threatening and all die in one hit to your blaster. They don't do anything scary to build on all the tension that was just created; they're just... there.
Admittedly, this moment is where Super Metroid kind of drops the ball a little bit. While the game does a lot of things very well, it wouldn't be a true analysis if I just praised everything it did, and this is one of those moments where I feel that it misses a step. Everything that happened previously all works very well to establish a very slow and deliberate mood. First, you explore the silent, barren planet, looking for any signs of life. When it seems like you're all alone, you find the ruined mechanical fortress the space pirates used last game, but still nothing. It feels like you're completely alone on this planet, until you find out the space pirates have been working here when you uncover the remodeled bits of Brinstar from the last game. Then you find out you're not near as alone as you thought when you activate their security and begin being watched. It means you're not alone, just that whatever is out there is hiding and waiting. So once you return up the elevator to the mechanical area you're expecting something, the activating of the security marks a change that has taken place, and returning up the elevator marks your return to where things have most likely changed. So after all this eerie buildup, suddenly the space pirates are just there. It's kind of surprising at first just with how sudden it is, but that's all it is.
The developers kind of worked themselves into a corner with this. At this point, so early in the game where you haven't even fought a real enemy yet, there isn't anything legitimately threatening they can introduce that would still be fair. Even if the space pirate appearance was all the only option the developers had for the climax of this suspenseful opener, there are still better ways it could have been handled to make this a bigger moment. Just something like seeing the shadows of creatures dart along the foreground while riding the elevator up, or having the space pirates suddenly jump in on you when you're halfway through this room would have given this part the dramatic oomph it really needed. But it is what it is, and we're gonna look at the game for what it is, not what it could possibly have maybe been.
So anyways, this space pirate "ambush" functions as your first real bit of combat. Ridley in the Ceres Station acted as a place to get down aiming and moving and shooting, but now you have real, kill-able enemies that won't stop attacking once your health gets low. The space pirates can crawl on walls, jump around, and shoot lasers. It only takes one shot from your trusty arm cannon to cause them to... explode, for some reason, so they aren't really much of a threat, but that's to be expected from early game enemies. The tight corridors of this room make it hard to maneuver, so some damage might be a little hard to avoid, feeling a little cheap, but it's not a lot of damage and that's the sacrifice one has to make by putting new enemies into a room that wasn't originally designed to hold them.
Once you beat all the pirates, the door leading to the outside of this room finally unlocks meaning you can now return to Crateria proper and see what all has changed. The only thing standing between you and that now is that giant vertical shaft you went down way earlier. Based on literally every experience we've had with climbing vertical areas you originally descended, I wonder if you can guess how this is gonna go...
If you guessed that climbing the shaft would now be a platforming challenge, but with some new element incorporated, you'd be right! This time, the challenge is dealing with space pirates now lining the walls of this platform-filled shaft. This of course means you have to try to avoid enemy fire while defeating space pirates and jumping up narrow platforms. It's not a terrible idea in theory, but the concepts of "avoiding enemy fire" and "jumping up narrow platforms" don't combine well together, especially when you factor in knock-back. If you get hit by a space pirate laser, you'll most certainly get knocked off whatever platform your on, and because of the strange way the platforms are spaced out, you could end up falling multiple screens down before finally landing on something. It can be frustrating, but since space pirates will stay dead once you kill them and it only takes one shot to end them, it isn't a ridiculous difficulty spike. The vertical nature of the room and the pirates on the walls also give players room to learn about diagonal aiming and jumping in order to line up their shots, since the tutorial area didn't have much space to teach them that. This also serves as the final challenge before you make it back to the collection of previously inaccessible rooms on the surface that are now yours to explore.
Make it back up, and you'll discover that now all of Zebes has awakened. No more dark storm sound effects and dark empty caverns, now there's music and familiar Geemers crawling along platforms. What has just occurred is something in Metroidvanias I will refer to as "The Return" in these articles. You went to a new area, got trapped there until you reached a certain point of progression, and when you return to where you came from, things are different. Usually its your character that's different, with new abilities available, making the world your oyster, but in this case both you and the world has changed, you have the missiles and morph ball, and Zebes has dropped the facade of being empty and dead, meaning that now, the game has started for real. The concept of the Return is a powerful one because it is based entirely on the two strengths that make Metroidvanias inherently enjoyable: becoming more powerful and exploring new areas. Before your Return, there all sorts of areas you can see but can't reach, just gnawing away at your desire to explore them. In this case, it was all those rooms lined up on the walls of this cave shaft. Once you enter the area that houses the needed upgrades, you can find a whole bunch and be able to do all sorts of new things, so that when you finally emerge, you feel so much more powerful, and you feel like there is nowhere you can't reach. This Return here is very small of course, it's literally just three doors you couldn't pass before but this won't be the game's last time using this structure and this section let's us understand the basics so we can understand future iterations of it.
Even though it is a small thing in the grand scheme of things, the player will still feel very empowered after this Return. The awakening of Zebes signify the fact that the game is starting full-speed now, done with the slow suspenseful mood-building it has been doing so far. And because the areas you have explored have been so limited and tight, the fact that you can now progress through every door you have seen so far means that you're gaining a whole lot of new territory relatively speaking.
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| (All map pictures courtesy of snesmaps.com) |
For the sake of saving words and picture space, and because I think it makes the game a lot more understandable, for exploration segments like this I'll use maps of multiple rooms edited together and simply label each room so there's no need to screenshot each one.
The first room you can now explore is that one early that had a wall you couldn't pass due to the fact you weren't small enough to fit under it. Luckily, now that you have the morph ball... you still can't pass it.
There are some blocks blocking your way in the morph ball passage, and since you can't shoot in that form, there is nothing you can do to break them. It foreshadows a potential new upgrade, but besides that its a bust for the player.
The beauty of the Return, of course is that there are all sorts of paths, so let's check what's behind door number two. Right of the bat it shows more potential, it pits you in a hallway with a new type of enemy.
These guys will fly high above your range, swooping down at you when you com close, and almost requiring diagonal shooting at this point. After dealing with them and making it to the next room, you'll find something strange.
This room obviously seems to be one of important, with a strange machine as the centerpiece. So naturally, you do what any sane person would do with an unknown piece of alien technology and stick your arm straight into it.
When you approach it, Samus will stick her arm cannon into it and apparently download map data from it. While it's real useful for the player, you gotta wonder why the space pirates didn't booby trap this machine while they were renovating the place. I mean, considering the way Samus interacts with the machine, they had a perfect opportunity to leave their greatest threat quite literally unarmed, but it is what it is I guess. Anyways, in a game where you're supposed to spend half the time getting lost, getting a map is a godsend. Except, in a game where you're also supposed to spend half the time finding secrets, it would ruin the point if everything was spelled out on a map for you, so the map you get only shows you some of the rooms of this area, and everything it does show is ambiguous and vague.
Rooms with something of import are marked with a small dot, but that dot tells you nothing of what may actually be in them, and rooms themselves are nothing but blank squares meaning the map won't tell you how to access them either. This sense of vagueness is very important for the game, because a lot of the game's fun is finding secrets. The map shows you enough to get a grasp of the area, but finding secrets will still require careful hunting for hidden rooms, and the ambiguous dots lets you look forward to obtaining something new without knowing what exactly it will be. Looking at the nearby areas, the map tells you three important things. One: the strange wall you encountered at the top of this shaft does in fact host a secret passage behind it, but you still have no idea how to destroy it. Two: the entrance to these caves that you used also holds some kind of secret if you drop down. And three: The final room you have to access in this shaft has a room marked with an S, which must mean something but you can't really tell what. You ship is also marked with an S and it is capable of saving and healing you, but the S could be for Save, Samus, Siberia, or anything. Since we were gonna look behind door number three anyways, it's probably about time to go do that.
Unfortunately, it turns out the S did stand for save, as the only thing in this room is a capsule that'll save your game when you step into it. However, considering the last time you probably saved was when you landed on this planet, a save station is very welcome. You may be wondering why the game would put a save station here, when Samus' ship can also save and it's only a hallway away. The answer to that is because there is something between here and the ship that still needs to be explored, and chances are that the player might die while exploring it. The developers acknowledged the fact that a player could very likely forget how long they went without saving, and if they had the choice of checking out a new area or walking all the way back to their ship, the player would probably choose the new area. Especially since nothing has been really dangerous yet, and no one expects the unexpected difficulty spike. So this room is here as a safety net for players, to almost force them to save so they don't lose all of their progress in what's about to come.
There is still no way to break open this sketchy wall, even though at this point you know there is something behind it. Even missiles don't do anything, so you're stuck checking the one other branching path you were shown on your map. On your way back down this hallway, you'll be introduced to a new kind of enemy: bats who hang from the ceiling before diving down. Once again, they're just fodder for your diagonal shot assuming you must certainly know how to do that by now.
Then, you're finally brought back to the first inaccessible path.This is the one I went on about how it was shoved in your face and that makes it something you'll remember to come back to. Even if you didn't remember walking over this ledge, the map also shows that there's something hiding in this room. Since the amount of world you have explored so far is currently very small, most rooms will be memorable just from the fact that you've only seen like ten of them. However, this bit is an important lesson to the player with huge training wheels on. You were immediately given access to three different rooms, but none of them held what you need to proceed. Say you somehow didn't remember this room and didn't have the map there to show you where the secret was, then you'd have no choice but to explore what you've seen until you make it back here anyways. That's how a lot of this game will work. When you gain a new power, you may need to use it on the opposite side of the map in order to progress so you need to keep in mind where suspicious rooms are so you can revisit them later. This small microcosm teaches the player that if they can't find anything in the immediate area, they need to look elsewhere in other areas. It also starts getting players into the mindset of remembering suspicious rooms so that they're be more apt to do it when they have a whole world to explore and no map showing them where to go next.
Once you roll down the pit into the area below, you'll be stuck down there with no way out.
Strange, unbreakable blocks prevent you from escaping from the right, and the ledge on the left is too high to jump back up to, let alone fit through in a morph ball. What you're about to witness, ladies and gentlemen, is the smallest version of the Return there is. You're locked down in this pit until you gain an ability that will let you break those blocks and get out. Functionally this really doesn't do much since there is nowhere you else you could go anyways even if you could freely leave this pit. The repeating structure of the Return however lets players know that they're about to obtain an ability. They know they cannot leave this area until they have a new tool in their arsenal, meaning the next upgrade is in here with them. It creates a sense of exciting anticipation that the game can play off of later. At the bottom of the pit, there's a door leading onward, meaning you're close.
You'll be put in a hallway with a whole swarm of the diving bug fellows. You've already dealt with a few before, so this swarm is a nice escalation of the mechanic. Earlier they were pretty isolated meaning you could learn their attacks and then deal with them easily since it's a one-shot kill. Here, however, they're packed so densely that you can't kill them all before they start diving, meaning you have to adjust your tactics to deal with that. The swarm in this room also serves a double purpose, because the abundance of enemies will leave an abundance of health and missile pickups, meaning you should be fully stocked up just in case there happens to be a major encounter in the next room...
But wait, what's this? Just an upgrade sitting there, nothing climactic at all? That's great because you were certainly looking forward to getting an upgrade so you can go rush on ahead and grab it. Although something certainly seems off about this room though, with the light fog over the bottom and, wasn't the last statue you found on a platform? Why is this one just sitting on the floor? And then why is the door raised up? It feels like you're in a pit with just you and the statue, like something should happen. But nothing does.
It's certainly strange, but you can shoot the orb and get the upgrade no problem. And you get bombs that you can set in morph ball mode. Those must certainly be the trick to getting out of this pit. But suddenly, you have a new problem, and it's getting out of this room.
The door locks behind you, so perhaps this extremely suspicious room was a trap after all. It is in fact, a trap, and as you jump around, helpless, for a few seconds, the statue begins to come to life.
Just like that, the statue becomes fully animated and thus begins your first boss fight. The Torizo Statue, as its called, will walk back and forth in the arena, attacking with an explosive swipe whenever it gets close.
While the boss certainly is interesting, the fight itself isn't really what I want to analyze. The boss' placement is much more interesting. Whereas first bosses in many games are very telegraphed encounters, this one comes completely out of the blue. While you can tell that something is off when you enter the room, you have no reason to expect the upgrade statue itself to become a boss. The sheer surprise of this encounter, and the fact that it exists in what is supposed to be a safe space sends a clear message: Zebes is a hostile place and it's up to you to take it all down. Isolation is a major feeling in Super Metroid, but it isn't just being alone that gives the game a great atmosphere, it's the sense of being all on your own against all the trials lurking inside Zebes. You'll never be given assistance or a hint, even for the game's trickiest fights and most obtuse puzzles, and that's all part of the isolated atmosphere. Metroidvanias are all about growth, and one of the reasons Super Metroid nails the feeling so well is because of how imposing it is at the start. You're never told where to go, you never meet a creature not bent on killing you, and even "safe" rooms can contain difficult, surprise bosses. This feeling is a major contrast to how you feel at the end when you've unraveled the riddles of Zebes and are powerful enough to destroy any enemy in your path without batting an eye. This is what makes Super Metroid so good at capturing that feeling of growth, because it takes that feeling of being alone and against the odds in the beginning and flips it on its head when in the end, it was you alone who conquered everything.
Key Takeaways:
- A suspenseful moment needs to have a release worthy of its buildup. A ton of tense ambiance that ends in a small surprise will feel underwhelming.
- The feeling of returning to somewhere we've been before after undergoing a change is an intrinsically powerful one and can be seen in all kinds of mediums. Games can use this to their advantage by letting the player return to old areas with either new abilities or after new events have changed the area itself.
- It's important for games to know how much information they should give the player. Letting them know everything gives convenience, while withholding everything leads to things being obtuse. The correct mix of these two things depends entirely on what feeling the game is trying to create.
- Surprises can have great impact if used in the right location and for the right location. Putting a trap in a safe zone can catch the player off guard, and will make them more wary in the future, but unless it has a purpose it's just a cheap-shot
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