Metroid (NES)

The Metroid series is one of Nintendo’s most well-regarded franchises, with at least two of its games, Super Metroid and Metroid Prime, routinely cropping up in discussions of the best video games of all time. With its focus on exploration augmented by the gradual acquisition of new weapons and skills, Metroid would even come to form part of the name of an entirely new genre that encapsulates that design ethos: Metroidvania. Of course, every series must start somewhere, and back on the Nintendo Entertainment System, the first Metroid game was released. Looking back on it though, this first step into a fledgling genre for a fledgling series is not quite the sturdy foundation most players would expect from such a beloved critical darling.

 

Metroid introduces us to the bounty hunter Samus Aran who has been called upon to stop the Space Pirates on Planet Zebes and foil their plan to use the life-draining Metroid species to quash all resistance in the galaxy. To put an end to their plans, Samus must first take down two space pirate leaders, the chubby dinosaur monster Kraid and the leader of the Space Pirates, a dragon named Ridley. Only then will Samus be able to access the interior of the base and complete her goal of wiping out the Metroids and the biomechanical computer Mother Brain. However, despite being specifically hired for this enormous task, Samus lands on the planet in a somewhat sorry state, her arm cannon weak, her skills minimal, and her energy reserves fairly low. Luckily for her, scattered around the planet are various upgrades to her abilities, the player encouraged to explore around to improve their arsenal so that they’ll be powerful enough to take down the Space Pirates’ top members.

Planet Zebes is a labyrinthine subterranean environment with little in the way of guidance for the player to follow. There is no map, no hint at which way to go, secrets hidden behind breakable walls, and false floors that can drop the player into an entirely new segment of the world. The world starts off somewhat closed off, Samus not able to access areas until certain upgrades are found such as the Morph Ball that will allow you to curl up and roll through small spaces and the missiles which are required to open red doors. The early part of the game will inevitably be all about feeling your way around this new world, finding upgrades to your health, missile capacity upgrades, and most importantly, finding the skills you will need to access new places and face more difficult foes. You do start surprisingly weak however, your basic beam having next to no reach and enemies easily finding spaces that you can’t aim your cannon at. While the aiming issue never really gets resolved, you do eventually get the Long Beam to up your reach, and your biggest power-ups come when you find either the Ice Beam or the Wave Beam. Unfortunately, you can’t carry both, but the Wave Beam covers more area when fired and does more damage, while the Ice Beam will freeze enemies so you can use them as platforms or ignore them completely. Once you get either of these beams, the enemies you face become less of an annoyance. Where once they serve as damaging obstacles during your platforming exploration, you can now destroy them easily or freeze them and forget them. This does make it pretty easy to notice that the majority of creatures you shoot along the way are more nuisances than interesting enemies to overcome, with even the bosses mostly being a test of how much life you have and if you can keep it while weathering damage and blindly blasting the simple foes.

 

The more annoying issue with enemies, bosses, and the hazards in the environment like acid is that death in Metroid is needlessly punishing. No matter how many energy tanks you’ve collected over the course of your adventure, when you come back to life, you’ll start at the entrance of the subsection of Zebes you were in with only 30 energy, a paltry amount that doesn’t even fill your first energy tank that holds 99 energy total. Enemies in Metroid hit hard and can even damage you while you are unable to attack during room transitions, and in later areas, some can deal 30 damage and instantly kill you again, and that’s even with the Varia Suit upgrade to up your defense. Even with the Screw Attack that turns your jumps into deadly attacks, it’s far too easy to get blindsided by enemies rushing towards you or firing at you, so Metroid hits the first real roadblock in its overall design: health and missile grinding. To survive, to take on the tougher foes and areas, you will need those reserves, and the only way to get them reliably are by killing enemies and hoping they might randomly drop what you need. Enemies are fairly stingy in dropping both health and ammo, and if you are in a hostile environment, you might lose as much as you are gaining from the opposition. There are spots you can find where you can stand in place, kill an enemy, have the enemy be replaced immediately, and then kill that enemy in a continuous loop, so there are times you can pull over and build your reserves… but the time it takes to do so is needlessly long and the drops infrequent. Samus’s adventure must grind to a halt over and over as you build up your dwindling reserves, and even speedrunners of this game know that a run can be made or broken based on whether or not these moments provide the stuff they need in a reasonable amount of time.

This does mean that Planet Zebes does effectively convey a sense of intense hostility, however, and the music does a good job of augmenting the tone with moments of eerie quiet or more meaty tunes that hint at the dangers lurking in this underground world. Pulling over to build up your reserves goes against that tone, but the fact you would need to at least makes Zebes feel like an alien world full of danger… but the world design undoes a lot of that work. Planet Zebes itself is mostly a series of nearly identical vertical shafts connected by horizontal hallways with repeated designs. There are unique areas to find amidst all this, but they are outnumbered by how many times you’ll be slowly jumping up a long vertical room with no meaningful challenge or dropping down it just to access long horizontal areas that the game puts little effort into differentiating. Many times, you can only really tell what shaft you’re in by the color it is, although the game doesn’t restrict itself to making sure only one iteration of a room design uses that color. Horizontal hallways can be more egregious about their recycling, sometimes forgoing visual clues that would help you get a good sense of where you are. Many times you might enter a room you thought you had already been in because of this, and while there is a gradual change of scenery for the game on the whole, in a singular area, it’s far too easy to lose your bearings.

 

These issues are exacerbated by the lack of a map, even a vague one that can just give you a hint at the place’s layout. Repeating designs and some detours that have absolutely no payoff make Zebes’s exploration hard to enjoy, and while there are map resources online to help you navigate, you have removed a lot of the appeal of Metroid by looking them up. Making your own map would be tedious and prone to error due to the deceptive design, and with so many areas already being more a matter of time investment to navigate than challenge to overcome, it drags down Metroid even further. Once you do get some abilities like the Ice Beam or Screw Attack, things do get more bearable and the lack of a map is less felt as you can more quickly navigate dangerous rooms, but it doesn’t make up for the slow crawl to get there or the major issues with death still present until your mission is complete.

THE VERDICT: Metroid’s focus on exploration of a hostile environment and the gradual growth of your capabilities thanks to the fruits of your exploration are a fine foundation for an interesting title. However, Metroid’s elements undermine that core principle with an incredible amount of tedium imposed on the player by the poor implementation of health and missile pickups and most of the navigational challenge not coming from obstacles or enemies, but from the convoluted nature of repeated room designs and branching paths that have little or no reward. It all comes down to the fact that Metroid is built up as a game that is meant to make exploring an alien world thrilling, but enjoyment is hampered when you must slog through issues with the continue system and bad level layouts before you finally are equipped enough to overcome these design flaws and can finally engage the promise the atmosphere made to you.

 

And so, I give Metroid for the Nintendo Entertainment System…

A BAD rating. I must thank the gamers of yesteryear for tolerating this title enough so that it could develop into a truly remarkable franchise. A certain allowance is usually given to older games because of their importance or the brand they help establish, but even for the genre it would help kick off, the first Metroid isn’t quite up to the typical genre standards. There is backtracking after you gain more abilities and resources, but it’s through samey environments that test a player’s patience more than their ability to execute attacks. “Can you grind your health and missile resources back to full so you can easily blast a boss away?” seems a bigger question than the actual substance of the battle, and while there are secrets to find and upgrades to discover, you have to go through a lot of basic environments to find the more challenging platform challenges. When the overly punishing death system becomes less of a concern thanks to your growing strength, Metroid does hit what stride it does manage. Still, a better continue system and a more varied and fleshed out world worth getting lost in would be needed to help turn Metroid from an antiquated starting point for the series into one worth revisiting. There is, however, already a better version of the first Metroid out there, the enhanced remake Metroid: Zero Mission, a game that manages to retool the world of this title into the game it could have been, and it is certainly the optimal way of experiencing the first mission to Planet Zebes that this title tried to create but ended up coming up short due to technical limitations and inexperience with a new genre.

 

It may seem almost sacrilege to bad mouth the start of a beloved series, but by acknowledging the flaws with the franchise’s rough start, we can better understand the appeal of the Metroid series and Metroidvania as a whole, and hopefully with that information, ensure that newer titles do not copy the missteps an early title took in developing the style. The Game Hoard’s goal is to get a greater picture of video games by looking at every single one, and in doing so, we must sometimes admit that a revolutionary title like Metroid has some glaring design issues that shouldn’t just be given a pass due to the importance of the game.