nickavv

the daikon games guy

I'm an indie game developer, software engineer, and friendly fella. Always trying to learn/grow and be a good person.

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Daikon Games


SaberaMesia
@SaberaMesia

i promised* this a while ago, so let's go

the title screen of metroid ii: return of samus, in grayscale
grayscale isn't authentic to the original game boy but it does look better

okay the first thing to know is that i'm a huge fan of the era of weird experimental sequels

super mario bros 2 (the doki doki panic one, which is way more interesting and fun than lost levels don't @ me), castlevania ii, zelda ii, snake's revenge (as hilarious as it is bad), etc.

metroid ii is, specifically, a prominent game boy sequel to a hit nes game, which carries its own baggage, because the game boy:

  • only has four colors to work with
  • has a mostly less flexible sound chip, except for the addition of stereo sound
  • has a smaller resolution (only slightly more than 1/3 of the available pixels!) and a pretty different aspect ratio compared to the nes

so how did the developers work with these changes? they leaned way the hell into them. let's begin

sound

the game boy sound chip has four channels, compared to the five of the nes.

both systems have:

  • two square wave (pulse) channels
  • one noise channel

the nes chip additionally has:

  • one triangle wave channel
  • one pcm channel for playing back samples

in contrast, the game boy's chip contains one relatively small programmable wave channel

the first of the game boy's two pulse channels has a frequency sweeper on it that makes it very good for sound effects, and it was often reserved for that purpose. metroid ii in particular makes heavy use of pulse 1 for its sfx

the game boy's stereo sound is somewhat limited, it can play full left pan, full right pan, or center pan which is just both audio channels at 100%. still, having stereo sound means that it can create delay reverb effects in some circumstances, provided you have two audio channels available to both fade and pan on.

a major upshot of these factors is that metroid ii doesn't really feature constantly-playing, mood-setting music. it mostly relies on atmospheric soundscapes. sometimes an area transition is punctuated with a few small stabs, or a short tune that gives way to ambient sounds for a long time before a repeat. there is music for metroid encounters--it is largely dissonant and mostly concerned with conveying that a screeching alien is trying to murder you in the face, and it is immediately cut off by a short victory fanfare when you defeat your prey

most of the audio information to take in with metroid ii is the environment itself--sound effects from the enemies, corrosive liquid dripping from ceilings, your own actions in the space--your footsteps, jumps, shots, the sound of morphing

it's often quite empty, and to absolutely fantastic effect

visuals

speaking of the environment, compared to the zebes of the original metroid, which felt pretty wide open and had good visibility and color to distinguish areas, sr388 is designed to feel claustrophobic, disorienting, and scary.

in metroid 1, samus is about 32x21, depending on animations and including her gun. in metroid ii she is roughly 37x26 pixels, a huge difference, especially considering how much smaller the game boy display area is!

because there is little color information to use, the reuse of room layouts in metroid ii, held over from its predecessor, often makes it difficult to discern where you are. some of the tunnels in later areas even loop around on themselves in confusing, non-euclidean ways! you are mostly left to rely on contextual clues such as what enemies or hazards are in a room to figure out where you are, and there's no map or minimap, unsurprisingly for the time

again, despite the smaller resolution of the game boy, pretty much everything is more detailed than metroid 1, the camera is essentially zoomed in, really leaning in hard to the sense of you being alone in a world of mostly narrow, dark passageways.

every metroid is still bigger than you, even the somewhat tame alpha metroids, and this plays really directly into their scare factor

from left to right, an alpha metroid, a gamma metroid, a zeta metroid, and an omega metroid
seriously, these are terrifying. the zeta is a little bit cute though

all in all, the limited viewport, grayscale color palette, reused room layouts, and increased zoom factor really helps sell the anxious, lonely feeling that metroid ii aims for

gameplay

metroid ii is largely comprised of small, self-contained traversal and exploration sections, dotted with mini-boss metroid fights

i specifically call them mini-bosses because:

  • there are a lot of them
  • there is no direct reward for winning these fights except that they are required to progress

this is pretty different from kraid and ridley in metroid 1:
for one thing, kraid and ridley were, more or less, unique enemies, but also you got a direct, tangible benefit for defeating them in the form of an immediate grant of 15 missile tanks. on top of that, each boss had an e-tank waiting for you to collect when it was safe to proceed

the metroids in metroid ii have no such benefits. sometimes there are energy and missile recharge stations hidden in the boss arenas, i think there may be a missile tank or e-tank here or there, but in general, aside from being required for progression, there is no direct, tangible benefit to killing any metroid in metroid ii. they don't specifically guard items, they don't individually control whether a nearby door is locked or unlocked, you just have to kill them all

"if they don't guard items," you might ask, "why do you have to kill them?"

a decade before metroid fusion was "too linear", metroid ii hard-gated you from advancing further than you were supposed to by just shoving lava in your face.

in each stratum of the game there are a fixed number of metroids in fixed locations. the game tells you how many there are in that stratum.

you encounter them in rooms with no other enemies and fight them one-on-one. when you eliminate all of them, the lava level in the world lowers and you can progress to the next stratum, and the game tells you how many more you have to kill to proceed

very few of the game's items are actually required to win as long as you have enough missiles to kill metroids with, and you can get to where those metroids are. without the use of glitches, circumventing the lava to get to later areas is basically impossible

as you go through the game, the types of metroids you encounter shift from "alpha" metroids all the way up to the extremely vicious "omega" metroid, until finally wrapping back around in the final area to the kinds of metroids you're used to from metroid 1, which leads up to the final actual boss fight with the deadly and large queen metroid

by the time you reach the final area of the game, original recipe metroids are a breath of fresh air! they're pretty scary in metroid 1, these fast as hell beasts that you never see until the very last area despite being the game being named for them, that are totally invulnerable unless you freeze them and then pump them full of missiles

by contrast, most of the metroids in metroid 2 do not need to be frozen, cannot be frozen, and can in fact only be damaged with missiles on specific parts of their body! they are kind of like kraid but they fly at you aggressively and sometimes spit lightning or fire!

you have a limited amount of ammo for any given fight, there are a lot of fights, and some of these fuckers take a ton of missiles to kill--omega metroids take a whopping 40 hits to their stomach to kill, and they will chase you down and spit fire at you while you're trying to get your hits off

the way ammo and life drops work is different from the original too, which can make it feel like you're being starved of resources! if you're attentive, you can figure out ways to farm effectively, but if you're not, you are going to spend large portions of the game terrified to take a hit or shoot a missile. i cannot underscore enough just how much metroid ii captures this feeling of being stranded deep within a hostile world of things that want to kill you, trying to eradicate its most vicious denizens, all on threadbare resources

crucially, samus's damage output against metroids never changes. she can soak more hits, she can hold more missiles, but if you have 10 missiles to your name when you walk into the fight because you didn't know where you could restock, an alpha is almost as stressful to fight in the endgame as in the early game

so by the time you get to the end of the game, seeing the face-hugging, life-sucking classic metroid is a relief. you freeze them and put five missiles in them while they can't move. easy. let's wrap this up.

and then the queen happens.

a screenshot of samus aran standing opposite the queen metroid, from metroid ii: samus returns. the queen occupies almost 25% of the total screen space
the queen metroid is enormous

i am not going into any detail on this fight, but suffice it to say that it goes hand-in-hand with everything i have talked about so far about the use of space and the use of limited resources. i would even go so far as to say that the queen metroid is the first actual boss fight of the metroid series, though i recognize that's probably a pretty contentious assertion of what constitutes a boss fight

if you've read this far, you might understand what it is that i love about metroid ii, but you might not understand why i think am2r and samus returns both fail the original dramatically

where i think the remakes fail

am2r is i think a fine game in its own right, but i don't think it's nearly as interesting or fun as the original

samus returns... the only good thing i have to say about samus returns is that without it, we probably wouldn't have gotten metroid dread, which i adored.

i'm not going to go into a huge teardown of either of these games, but the broad strokes are:

  • both remakes are very busy in terms of their sound design, which takes away from the empty, lonely feeling that is present in so much of the original
  • both remakes add additional background music that diverts attention away from the ambience, away from the sound effects of the environment
  • both remakes feature a substantially zoomed out view of the world, which takes away from the anxious and narrow feeling the original gave so many of the game's spaces, even huge, wide open caverns
  • both remakes have a lot of brightly colored and vibrant set-pieces that clash pretty hard with the idea of sr388's interior being this dark, cramped, cavernous place and take away from the tension of the environment
  • both remakes dramatically increase samus's power level. the introduction of super missiles in both games especially hurts the tension and gravity of the many metroid fights across the game. super missiles are a huge step up in damage output, and the game is better without them
  • am2r introduces extra content that feels unnecessary. it's been a while since i've played it, but my biggest beef is the addition of extra boss fights unrelated to the metroids. they feel like padding, or pandering, or both. they don't fit metroid ii's sr388
  • samus returns introduces one extra boss fight, but also turns some of the later metroid battles into what feel like they're supposed to be full-fledged boss fights rather than the kind of mini-boss experience they were in the original. this actually kind of ends up sucking the life out of the pacing--there are so many metroids that having to stop for a bunch of epic battles with later variants is more of a drag than anything else

if i had to summarize, i think both am2r and samus returns want to be like later games in the metroid series--am2r wants to be more like zero mission, while samus returns wants to be more like 2d metroid prime

in trying to emulate those later games, they rapidly lose sight of what made metroid ii a unique and interesting game, and a game worth playing. the overbearing linear progression of metroid ii works best in this environment where moving forward is an inherently tense and confusing experience. in the face of a smoother, more modern experience, it becomes a much more tedious slog that has to be made up for with gimmicks that i just don't think work

wow, did i write all that? i'm sorry, and/or you're welcome, and if you haven't played it, i hope you will play metroid ii: return of samus. i have talked almost exclusively about what i love about it, and not about the things that are rough about it (of which there are many! it is a 1992 game boy game) but it's so interesting, and so cool, and i wholeheartedly recommend it, warts and all.

* i didn't actually promise, but here we are


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in reply to @SaberaMesia's post:

It’s still on my list of games to play— I grabbed an emulator, figured out why it wasn’t talking yo my gamepad correctly and then life got Very Busy.

Hoping to give it a real shot soon!

Metroid II is like my third or fourth favorite Metroid and Samus Returns is one of the biggest disappointments I've had in gaming. It soured me so much that I have yet to play the demo of Dread I downloaded when it came out.

this is extremely relatable to me, but i will say that a lot of the mechanical things i hated about samus returns were polished up and become fun and rewarding in the brand new context of dread

i hope that you find the will to give it a try sometime, because dread is my #2 metroid game, i think it's really stellar. you might not agree, but i genuinely think it's worth finding out

really great analysis!! i've played all 3 and while i do also love am2r, i think it is much better approached as a fangame (or even romhack, despite being a PC game on a totally different engine, it just had that vibe) than a remake/remaster. the original is absolutely still definitive imo.

I mean Metroid II was the one I speedran all those years ago, which should tell you how I feel about it. I'll be as vague as possible to avoid bringing down Metroid Discourse, but it did make me sad that people at least Had Opinions about Metroids, whereas they just forgot Metroid II existed for the longest time.

The one place where my opinion differs is that, while I agree that the tendency to re-use areas that was typical for the time combines with the black-and-white to sometimes make it hard to tell where you are, I don't know that that's necessarily enjoyable (Though it does nail the experience of being alone in a hostile alien planet where even the geography is against you).

But great post either way!

yeah, i'll be honest, it breaks my heart that so many people don't know the original, and have only experienced the remakes

i think getting seriously lost in similar passages... it's complicated, because i don't think the game works nearly as well with all the fancy minimaps and guidance, but it's definitely a very rough part of the game

i guess i don't think that it's specifically enjoyable, but it works in the context of the game's overall aesthetic

and thank you! metroid ii is very dear to me and i kept threatening to evangelize it. it's nice to finally get it out on paper so to speak

I'm most of the way through Metroid II, coming into it right after Zero Mission, and while its core gameplay is sound, it's gotten to the point where I just need to use an online map to actually have fun playing it. Also the dearth of healing spots in the back half is bugging me, I'm getting scared to progress knowing that any screwups or wasted movement will mean a lengthy backtrack to go heal or get missiles.

yeah, i think a simple automap would help metroid ii a lot, and not having it is a big turnoff for a lot of people and that's very fair.

for what it's worth, the drop system in metroid ii is such that if you find an enemy that drops health, that means it only drops health, never missiles, and if it drops missiles, it will only drop missiles and never health. since this is the only metroid game that does that, it can feel really hard to farm for resources if you don't know that, because you can end up trying to farm from something that will never drop what you're looking for

Big Metroid II fan here, and I just gotta thank you for spreading the good word! 🙏

On a more esoteric level, one thing in particular that I think M2 has over its remakes (besides better movement tech) is that the world properly exists below the acid. Speedruns take advantage of this to avoid some backtracking halfway through the game, and I think it's really neat.

you definitely should watch a speedrun!

A friend of mine (an SM player) learned the ZM, M2, Fusion, Dread, and Prime Remastered speedruns for a questionably-scoped NYE marathon recently, and he says that the M2 run was one of his favorites of the bunch. It has a lot of cool stuff, but also isn't mired in execution hell like Prime or Dread (which gave him a blister).

Yeah all of this really. Metroid 2 is really something special, even if it's very much not perfect, and neither major remake has done it justice. They're just different games that riff on the same plot.

Like 10 Things I Hate About You to Taming Of The Shrew.

Metroid 2 is just, too damn frustrating. There is absolutely zero signposting, most of the time even looking up a map doesn't help because every room looks the same so you still don't know where the hell you are, you don't know how many metroids you're looking for, when you do die you often lose entirely too much progress.

Sure, it has a great atmosphere, but when I want to rip the game pak out and throw it across the room it's hard to enjoy that.