#Metroid II: Return of Samus

[nintendometro]

Varia Suit 'Metroid II: Return Of Samus' Game Boy, Japanese Manual Support us on Patreon

[vixivulpixel]

6. Metroid II: Return of Samus (Switch NSO)

6/10

(While we’re not gonna include a ton of repeat playthroughs and rewatches in this media thread, we figured enough time as passed between now and the last time we played Metroid II back in like, 2012.)

It's a much better version of the original Metroid. Yes, that's a back-handed compliment.

It's a decent enough Metroidvania Lite with how linear and easy to 100% it is. It's got a thick atmosphere drenched in the isolation feeling with how inescapably far down into dangerous territory you get. That definitely makes its presentation its biggest strength.

It's just a shame it's still a game held back by a lot of clunky movement. Old Space Jump, as usual, doesn't work very well, and as much as the crunched screen is good at emulating the feeling of being in a dark, claustrophobic cave, they have a tendency to place annoying lil enemies just barely out of view of jumps and it gets annoying.

The fights against the Metroids try to have variety in the rooms they reside in, but this hardly changes the fact that they ram into you at speeds Samus can't really react to, so they feel more like stat checks than actual fights. Also Zetas are more dangerous than Omegas for some reason.

We give Samus Returns a lot of shit for missing the point of Metroid II so hard that it becomes milquetoast, but yeah. It fixes two of this game's biggest annoyances in having better controls and Metroids that are at least more interesting to fight.

Back to Media Masterpost

[g4zdtechtv]

Cinematech's Trailer Park - Game Boy & Game Boy Advance for NSO

True Portable Power.

[moonymaren]

come play metroid we have blob thrower

[megadan94]

Yeah, it did make some steps forward, but it's structure is so un-Metroid.

My biggest gripe with Metroid ii on game boy, besides the modern QOL adjustments it really would have benefited from (teleport pads, maps, switching between beams on the options screen, etc.) is that it’s frustratingly linear. Metroid Fusion also struggled with this, but I think it’s worse in this game because of how you unlock new areas. Typically, in metroidvanias of all flavors, new areas are accessed via upgrades you obtain. Double jump, grappling hook, lava-proof suits, the usual. But here, the only way to progress to a new area is through defeating every Metroid in the previous one, which drains the acid in your way. I’m sure speedrunners have found ways to sequence break, but for the typical player, even if you’re brave and curious, you’re not going to be able to get anywhere the game doesn’t want you to go. The upgrades you get throughout the game, like the spider ball and space jump, ultimately don’t feel as cool or powerful because their usage is still highly constrained. The backtracking is minimal, which isn’t a bad thing here since some areas can be confusing and same-y, but feels extremely weird in a metroidvania. There’s no secret power ups you’ll find by going back to a previous area with new abilities. I’m just disappointed it was so railroad-y for a game with zero dialogue (it’s all in the manual, baby!) and a metroid game. However I admit I’m slightly biased because before I realized the Metroid kill count was linked to progression, I was backtracking quite a long ways to try and find new areas I could access, and upon learning what I was doing wrong I bashed my head against the wall.

[samusu-aran]

Metroid II Return of Samus (1991)

[devileaterjaek]

Metroid II: Return of Samus, via Nintendo Switch Online

[maburito]

Omg this is so cute 🥺

[spinningbuster98]

And we're back! Yes this is indeed Samus' second adventure involving the Metroids. Absolutely. There was positively nothing in between.

So Metroid II is a bit weird to me, not the game itself as much as the fandom's reception of it

Back when I joined in 2012 I...never saw anyone talk about this game, and when they did it was usually with a big "Eh, it's the black sheep (after Other M)"

So it was particularily jarring to me when this game suddenly saw lots of fans come up and present it as some sort of misunderstood masterpiece in later years, like some sort of secretly genius jem of a game that pushed the limits of the gameboy! This was mostly around the time AM2R dropped and especially after Samus Returns, when people would prop up the original game in order to shit on the remake for all the things Samus Returns did wrong.

Not gonna lie I use to resent this game: I used to think it was fucking boring and dull as hell, so seeing people praise it to high heavens just to shit on SR (as flawed as that game also is), and the subsequent clusterfuck that the Metroid fandom was between 2016/17 and 2021, kinda soured me on the game

But looking at this game in an unbiased way (or at least as much as possible)....this game isn't that bad, not as much as I thought (though it definitely is an acquired taste) nor as much as people used to say

...but it's far from great

But let's start with the positives: this game controls comparatively better than Metroid 1.

It's...still not great because Samus still feels clunky and too floaty, but now she can crouch and shoot and also shoot downwards while falling, which helps a lot

The sprite work is also a FUCK ton better than Metroid 1, with stuff being a hell of a lot more detailed, especially Samus.

Granted it's....got its issues (and I'll get into them more next time) but I'll give credit where it's due

Enemy placement is also far better, with enemies being placed far more reasonably except when you're dealing with the screen crunch and not as incessantly spammed as before. They also tend to do much less damage

The game introduces the series' trademark save points which sure beat Metroid 1's password system or even the Famicom version's save system which still spawned you at an area's start and with minimal health

Of course the game still doesn't have a map (in 1991 this was already pushing it) but given the game's more linear nature it's less egregious...but not completely so because most areas still look samey partly due to the gameboy's monochromatic color pattern and also because, despite the game's better overall spritework, most locations still look really samey, either being generic caves, generic Metroid nests (except the Omega's, that one is pretty cool) and generic building ruins that all look pretty much the same as far as architecture goes

And then we have the music

Yyyyyyeah uhhhhhh

The game certainly has some good tunes, the title theme is delightfully creepy and minimalistic, but with a really nice hopeful part. I like the main caverns theme, the credits theme and especially the Metroids' nest theme

Unfortunately you'll be spending a big chunk of the game listening to beeps and boops that wanna pass off as an atmospheric, minimalist ost

Now look: it....sorta works. When you're going through dark spooky caves and only have these atmospheric...weird sounds to keep you company it can absolutely give you a sense of loneliness and creepiness.....but the game overplays its hand with it way too much

These tracks play every time you visit one of the game's main areas and when you're outside of their buildings, meaning this is pretty much gonna be all that you'll hear of this game's OST for about half of your playtime.

I often see people claim that this game pushes the gameboy's limits and yeah in some ways it does, but in this case I'd say it plays against its limitations rather than within them: the gameboy's simple sound font can't easily create minimalist atmospheric tracks without them sounding way too basic or outright boring, or at least the composer wasn't able to, yet the game doesn't seem aware of this and just spams these tracks throughout most of the game, tracks that barely sound any different from each other and just end up blending in.

I think they jumped the gun way too early with this. There is merit in creating tracks that are incredibly simple and un-melodic but that can still give you the creeps. Just compare this to this

As it is Metroid II's soundtrack, at least most of it, makes the game just sound boring and uninteresting which....well isn't helped by the monochromatic pallette and some gameplay aspects though that's for next time

[glyptolite]

Futuristic katakana.

[thecurioustale]

Taking a Few Minutes to Gush About Metroid II

This YouTube review of Metroid II: Return of Samus (1991 – 1992 on Game Boy) by The Geek Critique is great! It's a remake of a review they had done many years prior, and think it's the closest I've seen a review of this game come to encapsulating the objective truth of the game while also acknowledging the extraordinary inspiring power it had for some players.

This game meant a lot to me as a kid. It is incredibly creepy, with its alien worldbuilding, tight camerawork, ever-retreating acid levels, the decrementing Metroid counter, continual health management problems, crisp sound design (especially for the Game Boy), Metroid jumpscares, and its unstable soundtrack alternating between some of the most beautiful melodic themes in the entire series and minimalist electronic noise. More so I think if you were a kid in the '90s, when the video game hardware capabilities of the day were lower than they are now, and people were impressed with / willing to play along with less.

It was extra creepy for me because I got to the Metroid nest at the end, where the Metroid counter actually jumps back up from 1 to 9 amid that eerie music, and then I didn't know you had to use the Ice Beam to defeat those larval Metroids, so I spent weeks trying to beat them with Screw Attack and Missiles. And then I lost the game cartridge for a long time—what I remember as two years, though it may have been less. So the game's ending had a long time to steep in my imagination before I found the game again and got the Ice Beam info from a classmate in middle school. Then the game was easy to beat, but the best part was yet to come: The epilude!

Eschewing the first game's "escape immediately before the place blows up" ending dash (which would become a staple of the series in subsequent games), Metroid II has a completely peaceful ending that my childhood self experienced as this extraordinary catharsis from all the tension and fear, while my adult self has admired as the most beautiful storytelling in the history of the series, as Samus, who came to Planet SR388 to exterminate the Metroid species, very nearly succeeds but then leaves with the Metroid Hatchling in tow.

The beauty of this game is often lost in a "missing the forest for the trees" situation, where, up close, you spend most of your time walking around confused at where to go next, with lots of backtracking to restore energy and missiles. I wouldn't go so far as some do as to say that the environments of the game are very easy to get lost in due to being visually similar to each other: They are pretty similar-looking for the most part, but the distinctions are more than enough to tell them apart—and for me to still have visually distinct impressions of the major areas of the game all these years later. But I'll acknowledge that it's a friggin' Game Boy game and there aren't a ton of different tiles.

This isn't my favorite Metroid II review of all time. That honor goes to an essay titled "A Maze of Murderscapes: Metroid II," by S.R. Holiwell in 2015, which is much more subjective and personal but also does the best job anyone is ever going to do of embodying just how incredible it is possible to perceive this game as being. It's one of my all-time favorite game reviews, and one of my all-time favorite essays, and there are a lot of moments in it that personally resonate with me.

The video review by The Geek Critique, however, is, like I said, easily the best Metroid II review I've seen that comes close to objectively encapsulating what the game has to offer, which includes the good and the bad. And, critically, it acknowledges that the game's two remakes many years later (one fangame and one official remake by Nintendo) completely fail to recapture the exquisitely unsettling mood, powerful mood shifts, and heart-pounding alien worldscapes of the original. I think this is a very important point: Modern game design has moved away from "Throw the player into a dark hole and let them figure it out," in favor of multiple different layers of simultaneous hand-holding. This game had no in-game map (neither a main map nor a minimap), far fewer environmental clues as to the presence of an item upgrade or hidden pathway, and way fewer gimmicks / tricks when it came to fighting enemies, which, in the original, was mostly a matter of delivering enough firepower while handling some tricky movement. And the music of the remakes just doesn't hold a candle to the music of the original, despite (mostly) using the same underlying tunes.

I think reasonable people have to agree that Super Metroid for the SNES in 1994 is objectively the greatest of all the Metroid games from the First Age of the series (the original Metroid up through Metroid Fusion), and is very likely either the best or second-best game in the entire series (depending on how you feel about Metroid Prime). Super Metroid features amazing mechanical depth that is so rich that the fandom for that game is still thriving today with ROMhacks, map randomizers, escape randomizers, and arcade roguelikes. Just last night I watched a three-hour map rando tournament race match that might be the most exciting video game race I've ever seen for any game. Thousands of people tune in to this stuff, and the game turned 30 this year! So Super Metroid is undoubtedly the better game compared to Metroid II.

But Metroid II really is, as The Geek Critique subtitles their review, "the perfect memory." And this game—with help from my admittedly subjective memory of it—has gone much farther to inspire my Galaxy Federal work than any other part of the Metroid series. I am glad that a few people still notice it.

More generally, most of us as human beings have experiences similar to this in our lives. But the sources of these experiences differ. My "Metroid II" might be your, I dunno, "Mario World RPG," or "that walk I took in San Francisco one day." The special quality of the experience is shared between the objective medium and the person having the experience, and so the experience can never truly be shared or even communicated in perfect detail. For me, this game is pretty close to my platonic ideal of the pathos of experiencing unspeakable beauty amid aloneness, horror, and desolation—which, perhaps despite what that might sound like, is a tonal and emotional region that I very much enjoy spending time in. This game, for me, I think, is a metaphor for (and in some respects a direct simulation of) being alone in a world that doesn't care, has no karma to offer you, and guarantees no inherent justice for you or anyone, and which is deeply lonely, but which at the same time is also indescribably rich, beautiful, and meaningful.

The Galaxy Federal Inaugural Novel I've been working on these many years doesn't involve spelunking through caves and the ruins of an ancient subterranean civilization on a quest to commit genocide against one of fiction's more impressively alien aliens. But it does confront those same themes I just mentioned. The legacy of Samus grows!

[nintendometro]

'Metroid II: Return Of Samus' was released on the Game Boy 32 years ago today in Japan.

[puppyrickets]

sometimes i wanna post music in all caps like every one else but like what am i gonna do post beeps n boops. and the melee ost isnt even on spotify yet

[samusu-aran]

[devileaterjaek]