#Metroid II: Return of Samus

[nintendometro]

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

[alligator-with-a-top-hat]

cracks knuckles okay let's get into it

Clunky gameplay: no Metroid game has truly bad gameplay. However I do think Metroid 2's gameplay feels the worst in the series. Samus is a little stiff and gets juggles to high hell by even the weakest enemies. The beam and missiles are too small to hit many enemies, including bosses, even when Samus is right in front of them, though for beams this is alleviated by the introduction of the Spazer Laser beam. The space jump's quirky movement got started here, and it's at its worst because of the low visibility (see below in a bit)

Bizarre sound design: this section needs its own post but here's the abridged version: the GameBoy was not built for what Metroid 2's music was trying to do. They were going for an avant-garde environmental sound and it hits exactly 60% of the time. There are some seriously bad songs in this game BUT they also all come closer to the beginning so that the sound design gets subtly more serious and menacing as the game progresses, almost without the player noticing. The series has only recently matched the vibe of the later areas with the MercurySteam games, but never surpassed it

Low visibility: my biggest issue. Samus is too big for the GameBoy screen and it makes it hard to tell where you are and hides enemies and paths that should be plainly visible. Exacerbates issues with gameplay and graphics. Bonus points for making the game more claustrophobic

Indistinct environments: on my third playthrough, and with the benefit of exposure to AM2R on the side, it's clear that Metroid 2's regions have different layouts and spritework to produce interesting themes for each region. However, the monochrome and too-small GameBoy screen neuters the impact of these design choices by preventing the player from taking in anything more than the five foot radius around Samus.

Repetitive boss fights: the only bosses I really have issues with are the Zeta Metroids. The screen crunch is an issue, but for the other Metroid subtypes there's ample space in the level to maneuver. I don't mind fighting the same bosses again and again because the variety increases as the game progresses.

And the main dish... Metroid 2 is a resource management game. This is something the player has to figure out on their own, as the game is advertised as an action-adventure platformer. This is only half of the truth.

There are thirty-nine items to be collected in Metroid 2, a step up from the thirty-seven in the first game. There are twenty-two missile tanks, which is more than in the original, and they each grant ten missiles instead of 5, AND Samus starts with thirty missiles, bringing her maximum missile total to 250. However, functionally, Samus has far fewer missiles available to her than in the first game. What gives?

Well, first of all, the missile cap was 255 in the first game. Despite having fewer missile upgrades than its sequel, Metroid 1 makes up for it by granting a hefty 75 missile bonus after beating both of its bosses. Secondly is an important outside factor: missile refills.

In Metroid 1, Samus can only replenish her missiles by killing enemies (and as anyone who has played Metroid 1 can attest to, the game never seems to give out the right refill when you need it. Metroid 2 alleviates this by including Missile Refill Stations. These Stations, however, are "balanced" by lowering the missile refill drop rate from enemies. And there being only six of them in the game, in a game where they are much more necessary to the core gameplay loop than Metroid 1. And them being hidden in weird places. And the respawning enemies that DO drop missiles now stop spawning after ten kills.

What this adds up to is that when (not if) the player gets low on missiles, the gameplay loop of "seek and destroy" has to be put on hold to find the nearest refill. In the later sections of the game, the missile stations are multiple areas apart. Keeping careful track of your missiles and not missing shots is much more important to this game in the series than to any other, outside of intentional low-percent runs of other games. You have to know where the missiles are, how many Metroids you have to clear per sector, how many missiles you have, and so on.

Energy has the same issue. Samus has a lower energy cap, and fewer opportunities to replenish it (five max and one spare, as opposed to the first game's six max and two spare). There are energy refill stations, but they are just as thinly spread as the missile refills. Enemies are slightly more likely to drop energy than missiles, but most of them hit for more than they'll drop, rendering grinding less useful than in Metroid 1.

The result is a dynamic that hasn't been reproduced in any future game. If you don't carefully manage your resources, you WILL be backtracking for twenty minutes. I've been spelling it out like a problem, and it's certainly frustrating to have to go hunting around for resources, but it creates a much more involved experience. Forcing the player to carefully plan out their next step is much less common in the rest of the series, and perfectly adds to the claustrophobic and dangerous atmosphere of the game. Besides that, it becomes all the more cathartic when you get it right.

Metroid 2 is a weird game. I like it a lot but there are some undeniable issues but I wouldn't trade them for anything - it wouldn't be the same game without them.

People say a lot of things about Metroid 2 but they're not true! Behind the clunky gameplay, bizarre sound design, low visibility, indistinct environments, and repetitive boss fights there's a perfectly good resource management game

(Part two with more thoughtful discussion to come)

[lord-rodentia]

Another silly post before my brain dialtones again on what I'm actually supposed to be doing.

[moonymare]

come play metroid we have blob thrower

[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!

[thedivinersmargaretlaurence]

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

[nintendometro]

'Metroid II: Return Of Samus' was released on the Game Boy 33 years ago today in Japan. Support us on Patreon

[nintendroid]

Metroid II - Return of Samus for Game Boy Japanese commercial.

Full commercial uploaded by Metroid Database

[lord-rodentia]

"The baby."

[hey-howsitgoin]

It’s finally finished and washed! Metroid Fusion was my first Metroid game and the Dachora and Etecoons are my favourite little guys from that game. I don’t generally enjoy horror, so young me really appreciated the cute, cuddly, friendly creatures breaking up the almost nonstop fear that game evokes. So what better way to commemorate these special friends than to make a lil 5 cm patch on my favourite shorts and embroider them onto it? If I was doing it all over again, I’d probably make the background more grey and less green so the Dachora would pop out more. The text above the patch is the name of the piece, “Save the Animals.” This is of course a reference to the speed running community’s famous phrase referring to the rescue of these same creatures at the end of the previous game, Super Metroid, which I haven’t yet had a chance to really play (I will very soon though).

Photos of the process as well as the screen cap it’s based on below the cut.

I went back to replay and complete Fusion earlier this year which is what inspired me to make this in the first place. Since then, I’ve also played & finished (not completed) Metroid: Zero Mission thanks to Nintendo Switch Online. Additionally, I have obtained and begun Samus Returns, the Metroid II remake. Now that this is finished, I’ll be playing Samus Returns a lot more so that I can move on to Super Metroid someday.

[maburito]

I beat Metroid 2!!!

[coldgoldlazarus]

Not that we need a third Metroid II remake, but given how disparate the existing versions are from each other, I kinda have to wonder sometimes what another go that tries to combine the best of each might look like.

AM2R is probably the strongest overall package and embraces the series' lore in a great way, but does feel sometimes (to me at least) like it's still going a little too far in trying to force Metroid II into Super/Zero Mission's mold, most noticeably with the cool but jarring geothermal plant sequence.

Samus Returns spectacularly misses the mark with the tone and ending, but there are also a whole heap of other things I really like the handling of in the first 95% of it. (I have a whole list, in fact, buried somewhere in my drafts.)

And the original Metroid II, for all its early installment weirdness and hardware-induced shortcomings can make for an awkward experience, it also used some of those same limitations very elegantly to create a thematic sense of darkness that neither remake really matches. (Even if AM2R does wind up closer, IMO it still falls short in some ways, in trying to solve problems that the original had turned into features.)

Realistically speaking, all three are kinda very different beasts despite their shared core, and hard to reconcile easily. Even so, I do find myself thinking about whether it would still be possible to create a marriage of the best traits of each, and if so, what exactly that would look like.

[djwhaletrain]

Okay, so I know this whole franchise just kinda tends to hand wave Samus losing everything between/at the start of games, but there's something specific I've noticed.

Samus never keeps the Gravity Suit.

At the end of Zero Mission, Samus has the Gravity Suit, but at the start of Metroid Prime (the next game in the timeline), she just has the Varia Suit.

At the end of Metroid Prime, she's gotten a new Gravity Suit, which is gone by the start of Prime 2.

Skip to Metroid II/AM2R/Samus Returns where she gets another Gravity Suit, and its gone by Super, where she gets ANOTHER Gravity Suit, which is then turned into the Gravity Feature for Other M, and once again gone by Fusion.

It's not even lost by the whole suit dissection thing, it's just gone. It's not in the intro nor does the SA-X have it.

And then, intro to Dread, no Gravity Suit, just Varia.

Sure, Samus is most recognizable with the Varia Suit, but I feel like if you're going to go through the trouble of having moments where Samus loses all her stuff on screen, she can rock the purple bling early for at least a few minutes.

IDK if there's an established in-universe reason. Maybe the Gravity Suit's physics breaking over-stresses the whole rig, so Samus keeps it off unless she knows she needs it. All her on screen item losses were due to sudden attacks, so she just didn't have time to reactivate it.