Super Metroid Part 10 - Interesting Curves, and Some Less-Interesting Norfair

<< Previous Article


         Last week, we took a look the lair of the miniboss Kraid. The area's tight corridors and linear path served as a good foil to the open exploratory areas we had been through so far. With the Varia Suit in hand, we can now explore some further into Norfair and see what awaits in the fiery depths.


          The Varia Suit provides immunity to the heat-damage rooms we came across before. However, since we have only ever seen two of them so far, getting the suit doesn't really feel that major. In fact, it only opens up one pathway, making it overall feel pretty useless. It's an artificial upgrade that only unlocks one lock, and in fact, it seems quite arbitrary. You're exploring Norfair when you obtain the high jump boots. Then you have to return to Brinstar to use them to gain entrance to Kraid's lower. Once you reach the end of that area, you then have to backtrack through the entire compound, and return to Norfair where you originally started. It seems more ridiculous when you look at the map and see just how back-and-forth it is.

         It seems interesting that the developers would design this part of the game to flow like that. It seems meaningless to have your player, in the middle of Norfair, go on a side-quest to get a new item, and then return right back to Norfair. One could argue that since the developers were busy inventing the Metroidvania genre, they didn't have the experience to know how much players dislike backtracking. I think that's definitely part of it, but I also think that the developers did this because they ended up working themselves into a corner. To explain what I mean, I need to explain Interest Curves.


        An Interest Curve is a way of measuring how engaging the general structure of a game is. To make one, all you have to do is plot the games moments on a timeline, and give an approximation of how interesting they are. As an example, here is a popular interest curve someone made for the first Star Wars (spoilers ahead, if you somehow don't know the plot of Star Wars)

        Notice how it is all bumpy, having large peaks and then lesser valleys. Each peak is a climactic moment, and then the valleys give the audience time to relax a little and get prepared for the next climactic moment. The peaks get progressively higher and higher as the movie builds up to its most intense moment: the climax. The same kind of curve applies to video games, and it is important for games to keep their audience engaged with similarly exciting curves. I went ahead and drew my interpretation of what this part of Super Metroid would look like if we didn't have the Kraid fight:

        Notice how after getting the Super Missiles, things reach a kind of lull and don't really go anywhere else. There is just a lot of quiet exploration, with only a couple little diversions. We don't want our curve to flatten out like that, players would lose interest. Notice what the curve looks like with Kraid:

         Suddenly, our curve gets a lot more interesting. The fight against the epic and giant Kraid gives our curve some much-needed variety, especially since it is our most climactic and spectacular encounter yet. The developers most likely noticed that the game's interest curve had gone a little flat, and decided that now would be a good time to fight the game's first (and most visually impressive) boss. I'm sure that the developers had the vision for this immense, giant-sized Kraid fight well before now, and they knew that the player needed the high-jump for their vision of the fight to work. So that is most likely why you need to do the little backtrack dance with the High Jump Boots to go fight Kraid. And as we see what comes ahead, it will be increasingly obvious why the game needed something big to recapture the player's attention right here.


         Now that we better understand some of Super Metroid's structure, it is finally time to explore it further. Returning to the only hot room we can progress in, some quick bombing will reveal the way forward.

         

         For a bit, you just progress through linear challenge rooms that introduce you to lava and all the threats that come with it. Imagine this game's water physics, except you constantly take a lot damage as long as you're in it. Despite the challenge, things are still, literally, straight-forward, until you reach a room with a very different look.

        This room alone is a bit of an enigma, it has an upper level just out of reach of your jump, and the ground level here has all sorts of weird twisty tunnels. Some bombing can reveal a path to a cleverly hidden missile tank, and you can also find a way down through the tubing.

       This whole room, feels a little tricky and twisty, and it sets a really good precedent for what's to come. From the moment you enter this room you can feel lost, due to its multiple dead ends and the fact that it has no direct way forward. Super Metroid begins to show some of its true colors in this moment, because there are multiple paths out of this room, and they all branch and dead end in different ways. It is really easy to get lost in the following section, simply because of how many dead ends you run into. They aren't conventional gaming dead ends though, just gates you don't have the power to pass through yet. It results in a section where the player feels overwhelmed, which is pretty intentional. Despite this, it is still pretty hard to get stuck due to the constant dead ends, so it works as a pretty good illusion, tricking the player into thinking they are getting lost and turned around, without ever letting them stray off the path.

        Eventually, you'll end up where you need to be. In this case, it is a long hallway full of crumbling blocks you have to run over. We see the game pull a familiar trick here. Odds are, you will first try walking over these blocks normally, only to end up falling into a pit. Once you climb out, you will be reminded that you have a run button, and then proceed to use that to cross this room. This little segment serves to remind the player that they have a run ability, and remind them of what its power level is.

       And the reason it's doing that is because...

        Immediately after, the game gives you the speed-booster. Once again it reminded you of your current power so you could feel the increase given by an upgrade. However, once you get the booster here, the room starts to flood with lava. You have to run out, and then run back along the straight hallway back to the door before the lava gets you. As you run, you'll notice Samus is starting to go faster and faster, until she's flashing blue (not pictured here), with speed trail of ghost images behind her.

        The lava is perfectly timed so that running with the speedbooster let's you outrun it just barely. It makes for a really cool set-piece moment. More importantly, though, it is a really clever tutorial. The speed booster is tricky to teach, because unlike the rest of the items, its use depends on the environment. You only activate it if you run long enough down a stretch, and how do you convey that to the player? Here, it is set up perfectly. The first run the long hallway teaches you to sprint down all of it. That sets up the moment so that when you see the rising lava, you know you have to hold sprint all the way down to get back. The lava forces you to. And when you do that, the speedbooster kicks in and you get to see exactly how it functions and figure it out. It's a really clever moment that combines spectacle with tutorial, and makes a moment players won't likely forget.

        

         That's all this time, so until next week, here are some key points from all of that.

Key Takeaways:

• An interest curve is a way of measuring how engaging a game's structure is
• An optimal curve is not a straight line, nor one that continuously increases; it's one that has peaks and valleys
• Moments of quiet and inaction give the player time to think and unwind, but make them last too long and that begins to shift to boredom.