Released in 1994, Super Metroid is the third in the Metroid series. Like all other entries, it follows bounty hunter Samus Aran as she explores a planet filled with creatures and environments designed to kill her. This time around, she’s after a Metroid infant, taken by the Space Pirates for some nefarious purpose.
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Nintendo R&D 1 (the Big N’s oldest development team until its dissolution in 2003 and responsible for the creation of the original Metroid) designed Super Metroid but it was Intelligent Systems that did the actual programming for it, working closely with Nintendo R&D 1. Development took almost three years, and when confronted on why the title took so long to make (remember this was the 90s, when game development didn’t take very long), Director Yoshio Sakamoto stated: “We wanted to wait until a true action game was needed… And also to set the stage for the reappearance of Samus Aran.”
Upon release the title received critical acclaim and like many games of its era, it’s become a Nintendo classic: part of those games constantly re-released on new consoles, as ports or virtual console, and is being played and enjoyed to this day. Also, like many other releases of this generation, Super Metroid is practically flawless – a masterpiece of gameplay, challenge, music and even story, with surprising depth for a game that never throws a single line of exposition your way.
I sadly didn’t play this game during the Super Nintendo era as I hadn’t yet discovered the Metroid series. Crazy I know, but once the Metroid Prime series got me hooked, I was desperate to play it. The moment the Wii released however, this was one of the first games I bought on the virtual console, and even now I’m hooked enough on it to go back to it every once in a while. I did after the horrendous Metroid: Other M, desperate to cleanse my palate on a real Metroid experience.
The title is a direct sequel to Metroid II: Return of Samus and its opening narrative has Samus leave the Metroid hatchling at Ceres station for study, but the game begins with her arriving at the station once more after they’ve sent out a distress signal. and It starts out strong, with the first thing you find being Ridley, the Space Pirates’ commander and one of the main bosses in the original Metroid, giving players an immediate ‘Oh damn!’ reaction.
Spikes in the ceiling, lava below you, a crumbling floor.
Ridley escapes to Zebes, the site for the original Metroid and it’s your job to hunt him down and recover the Metroid baby. It’s a journey that takes you through the corners of the planet, with the freedom of exploration usually found in Metroid, where you can revisit almost all areas of the map, something you should do considering most of them include one secret upgrade or another. On your way, you’ll fight Space Pirate forces and the native life forms of Zebes, while also finding ruins and relics of the Chozo, the original settlers of the world, one of the most advanced races in the universe, and Samus’ foster family (it’s a Chozo Powersuit she uses after all). Of course, as this is Metroid, there are times when even the Chozo ruins will try to kill you.
This game is difficult and death is always a possibility. Damage spikes from area to area, finding enemies that take much more health than others and sometimes with no way around them, forcing you to either take a hit or take your time to kill them so they don’t impede your progress in the room any longer – even though you know they’ll respawn as soon as you re-enter the room.
Even with an upgrade there you’ll be nervous about the acid below… and maybe you should be!
Difficulty is of course balanced thanks to the upgrades you find, from missile upgrades to different beams to energy tanks expanding your health. But what the game does right is never letting you feel confident in a new area, especially the extremely lethal Tourian, and falling into any pit of acid or lava will have you frantically mashing the buttons trying to survive as you see your health dwindle down extremely fast. Dangers in Metroid give you a constant adrenaline rush, the bosses especially so, where the real challenges lie.
Visually, like many games of the era, the graphics are 16-bit sprites and backgrounds and stages that look fantastic even today. They are surprisingly detailed, so much so that 2D Metroids after this game – Metroid: Fusion, Metroid: Zero Mission and even the 2.5D Metroid: Other M – maintained the same visual style, just upped the quality. On sound, the game’s soundtrack is amazing; from the eerie title screen music to the fantastic adventure-esque theme of the Zebes surface.
This shot won’t do anything, because Metroid bosses have specific hitboxes!
Like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was for the Zelda series, Super Metroid is the most influential of the Metroid franchise. It expands on the mechanics, adding some if not most of those being used to this day in subsequent releases in the series, such as the Super Missiles, Speed Boost, the Grapple Beam, the X-Ray Scope (the basis for the X-Ray visor in Metroid Prime), the Gravity Suit and most important of all, the Charge Beam. Aside from upgrades, this was the first Metroid to include recharge stations, and the only one to include a separate health station, a feature later fused with other stations, such as Metroid Prime where the save station recovers your health. It also allowed you to go into the suit’s ‘management’ and enable or disable some or all the acquired upgrades.
Aside from those, there were even techniques the player could perform that weren’t part of the standard upgrades, there in case they experimented with the game. For example, Beam Combos, special attacks unleashed by a specific beam, later heavily featured as standard upgrades in the Prime games; the charge spin, a pseudo screw-attack used by jumping with a fully charged power beam; the Shinespark, a powerful dash, either horizontally or vertically, made from ‘concentrating’ the speed boost energy and using it after a jump; and of course, the wall jump, letting you jump from wall to wall as the name suggests.
This is the Shinespark, amazing to use but it can get you killed!
Super Metroid is one of the most influential games of the Super Nintendo era and one still desperately sought by both new and old gamers, hungry for the title that defined the 2D Metroid experience in a similar way that the Prime games defined 3D Metroid. It’s a challenging, adrenaline-fueled experience that not many releases can surpass or even equal and another, like many of that era, that’s part of the Master Class of Game Design for its amazing content, challenges, controls, music and visuals.
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