Reviews from

in the past


Did you know? It's well documented that first lady Hillary Clinton was an avid player of the Game Boy during her husband's presidency. However, what isn't as well documented is how she loved the handheld system so much that she bought two of them to give to George Bush and Dick Cheney before their inauguration as a symbol of goodwill among the two parties. Bush and Cheney reportedly loved Metroid II in particular so much that the game's plot about the Galactic Federation making up some bullshit about dangerous weapons and sending Samus to SR388 was what inspired the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

It’s a common joke that Samus Aran never hunts bounties. She’s always either stumbling into heroics for free by accident or hired for, essentially, mercenary work by Da Army. The only game where Samus’ work could I think be conceivably considered actual Bounty Hunting is Metroid II: Return of Samus. She’s given her hit list and she trudges down into the depths to do her job.

And what we get out of it is arguably the most ambitious Metroid game to date, clearly pushing the limits of its hardware in terms of delivering a gameplay experience that, similar to its predecessor with the NES, is just clearly beyond the ken of the Gameboy but also accidentally in terms of themes and mood. It’s not a secret that Metroid 2 has gotten the coolguy art gamer reevaluation over the years as a secret death of the author gem but that doesn’t make it work any less well as one.

Samus takes up a huge chunk of the screen. You can barely see where you’re going. You can barely remember where you’ve been. The world isn’t hostile, necessarily; how could it be hostile when you dominate it so powerfully from the very beginning? Samus is untouchable – more agile and powerful than anything she’ll face from the first second to the last as she trudges down, down, ever downward, through endless twisting corridors as she practices the tedious chore of genocide. She only becomes more durable and more powerful as her targets become fewer and more vulnerable to her weaponry.

No, the only resistance is from the world’s indifference, its ambivalence to Samus and her violence, and even then only in the few places where she cannot enforce herself upon it. The only dangers on SR388 are momentary environmental hazards, getting frustrated by disorientation, being frightened by surprise or by unknown sounds. But never by anything remotely similar to what Samus herself brings to the Metroids, to the other fauna she might encounter.

Atmosphere is king in Metroid, and narrative – explicit and implicit – is rarely given much heft in these games, especially early in the series. It’s hard to imagine that Samus, given what we know of her (with her military background, her most frequent contractor being the Federation marines, literally spending all her time with one of her hands replaced with a gun) has spent a lot of time considering the morality of her place in the galactic landscape. She probably doesn’t have to think much about it, since she mostly seems to fight, like, animals and the Space Pirates who do seem like assholes (I don’t have time to go into the absolutely batshit colonialism allegories happening in Prime 2 but that game is a weird can of worms). So I really have to wonder what’s going through her head when she’s struck by the burst of compassion that leads her to spare the last metroid. What’s she thinking about as she makes that long ascent back to the surface with a little buddy who doesn’t know that its mom just butchered its race. Does she think she’s done a kindness? Is she considering the enormity of the act she’s just failed to complete? Are these things she thinks about at all?

I don’t know. Metroid 2 is a masterpiece.

This review contains spoilers

Maybe going to write more long form about this so I'll keep it brief, but I thought this was shockingly powerful and horrific honestly. This game really makes explicit that Samus is an arm of the state, she ensures the slow methodical death of every single living thing on this planet. I'm sure there's a backstory on the box or in the manual about why she has to hunt down these metroids, but the game itself is really bare. Which makes the final moment of kindness all the more strange and haunting. It's also just scary! Seeing the metroids' abandoned shells is such an effective signpost and a little scary treat. All the horror is helped by the surprisingly expansive areas, cut down to a small frame. Exploring is not exciting but isolating and frightening. You are not here to do good work and this abandoned world treats you in kind.

The violence of the machine expressed further, dimmer now that the lights are off. Samus is no longer liberating a planet from its oppressor, she has become the cruel fascist, destroying all life. In her first outing, she did this as well - but it was all under the pretense of helping fight the Space Pirates. Here, she gives into them.

The premise of Metroid II is framed around an extermination order against the Metroid species so that they can "never be used as biological weapons again". Instead of questioning this decision, Samus relents, and we enter the torturous, sickly green spaces of SR-88. There is no joy to be had here, no pleasure to be taken in the act of killing.

The game is repetitive and numbing, with no end in sight to the slaughter of a life form. Right up until the very end, where Samus finally grows a conscience after executing a Metroid's mother right in front of it. This moment, where the baby begins to follow you back out of SR-88, is odd in its juxtaposition. It's calm but also anxious. There's a tension here: why did Samus grow a conscience now? Why is the act of walking past all those she killed so relaxing?

And so a perpetrator of systemic violence is allowed to choose which are "worthy" to survive. She is allowed her "moment of conscience." The cycle begins anew.

This is better than I remembered. Everything is right in its place. Disregarding the obvious inherited aspects of the original (lack of a map, floating jump mechanics, only having one type of weapon at a time) that work just as well here, the changes reshape the meaning of the experience. The close camera to represent a dark cavern where watching ahead is difficult, the repeated tiles to simulate the feeling of getting lost the more one enters into labyrinthine places, and the black-and-white coloration that strengthens the limited vision. In a sense, you can interpret these elements as the developer's way to put the player in Samus's perspective, and they help as well to give thrill to the anticipation of an encounter. Even if the game is linear, it's easy to stop having track on where to go if you don't pay attention, and even if the game has some modern conventions such as save points and healing spots, it's not nearly as bad as modern works because they're hidden, more dispersed across the world, and require effort to get there. So even if the game isn't as radical as its predecessor, the modern conventions it applies aren't nearly as disruptive to the experience as later games.

The only real major drawback however are the Metroids themselves. They are fittingly aggressive and non-deterministic in their behavior, which contributes to close, even personal brawls, but their lack of solid damage output in combination to the game's floating physics allowing maneuvering over them made them non-threatening, and the fear of facing them diminishes once the player realizes that merely staying healthy for the fight suffices to engage them. It's an exploit in the design, but one that doesn't make the experience of facing them ring false.

The most beautiful aspect of the game for me however is in the little spaces that Samus can enter. Paths in the ground that lead nowhere, but exist as an extension of the landscape. These places, which have no purpose, are representative of the developer's intent to create a wild planet, a place not built for the player but to be an habitat to its fauna. Or edifications in ruins, abandoned long ago that tell the history of the planet with just their existence. And the feeling you get by navigating through them is to be in virgin soil, untouched by human hands, even sacred, through mere abstraction. And this feeling, unique in any game I have seen, is why Return of Samus is one of the vital games of 1991.


If there ever was some good to come out of the NSO service, it would be the new opportunity to find out just how much Game Boy games rule. After enjoying Wario Land 4, the Japanese app's catalog planning to include the never localized The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls was the kick I needed to finally find it on the information superhighway, and it was a blast too. The misadventures of the Prince of Sable (Note that hurts me to write: the Assist Trophy guy that turns into a frog) got me thinking about how the console's library tends to stick out from a lot of Nintendo's usual lineup. I was originally going to write something longer about that game itself, pointing to how Game Boy games having a smaller technical scope, and perhaps a looser leash than their console counterparts, could enable them to explore more unique narratives. In particular, the role of the protagonist is oddly subversive across the library. The aforementioned and often incompetent Prince of Sable, the way in which the Mario Land series was supplanted by its own antagonist, or even the bittersweet nature of Link's quest in Link's Awakening. But I could never really get beyond that thesis statement. Sure, I could point out how telling it was that the Prince had to buy his own transformation items, but nothing ever came together in an interesting way.

Well, the latest game for the system that I played, Metroid II: Return of Samus, turned out to be the final piece of the puzzle I was trying to construct from my previous thoughts. This comes in part from how cruel and callous the whole journey felt, distorting the role of a video game hero well beyond the lighter satires of Mario and Zelda I had checked out before. It's a game where the only goal is to exterminate the whole species of the Metroids, a fact that even the UI makes inescapable with the everpresent Metroid counter. The act of fighting these bosses should characterize the whole experience, and the game chooses to make them rather static and predictable fights in which you blast them apart with missiles. Especially as I found the Varia Suit, these creatures who were supposed to pose an unknowable threat in the last game devolved into a pretty mindless chore. The original Metroid didn't have particularly interesting bosses, but the likes of Kraid and Mother Brain at least put up a fight. Here, what you would expect to be the highlights of the game end up being a curbstomp, and I think that's telling of the kind of story they were going for.

In games, combat often empowers and uplifts the player by having them overcome obstacles, marking your proficiency and domination over the game's systems. The Metroidvania genre in general loves to use your ever expanding arsenal to facilitate a power trip in locations where you once struggled. However, Game Boy games, running on hardware far less suitable to twitchy action than the contemporary SNES, often deemphasize the role a player has in fighting through their play space. Wario, for instance, does not get damaged by enemies at all in his second and third outings, as an effort to alleviate the problem of enemies bumrushing your small screen in the likes of Super Mario Land 2. Without the stakes of violence inflicted upon him, enemies often serve as minor inconveniences or puzzle solutions rather than something to gain instant gratification from besting. Likewise, the Prince of Sable's cartoon dustcloud slapfights are purely automated, doing more to characterize him as feeble yet well-meaning than as to reward the player. In Samus Aran's case, the rote boss fights deglamorize the violence she is committing towards the Metroids. It takes relatively little effort to blast these creatures out of existence, all the while hearing their singular cry of pain. The fights in the game's 3DS remake would contrast this simplicity, obscuring a lot of this violence behind complex aiming challenges and flashy cutscenes. Meanwhile, the barren fights of the original leave no room to hide the brutality of your hunt.

If the Metroids can't stop Samus, then nothing else stands a ghost of a chance. The wildlife of the planet are often just weird and in the way, and it's almost trivial to rip most of them to shreds. Even outside of the creatures, the whole space of SR388 feels incredibly disposable. Part of this owes to the linear structure, where you rarely have any reason to look back unless you're in dire need of a recharge station. Beyond that, though, SR388 itself is characterized as being irrelevant. Outside of long decayed Chozo temples, there's no culture that can be deemed as significant. There's hardly any backgrounds either, further decreasing the vibrancy of this world. Even the name is based on the convention we assign to (presumably) uninhabited celestial bodies in real life. Each bit of this design contextualizes this planet as an empty husk to run over in pursuit of your mission, with no need to regret anything caught in the crossfires. Sure, the Metroids seem to be relatively sustainable predators on the food chain of SR388, as most life does just fine staying out of their nests. But yet the political tensions of completely separate planets necessitate that this natural equilibrium gets demolished with no regard for any consequences. From what I've learned of this series through cultural osmosis, that will probably not go so well in the future.

Outside of the violence represented through gameplay, one thing that stands out about this adventure is the soundtrack. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say soundscape, as when leaving the overworld theme, much of the songs devolve into discordant beeps. As these weirder tracks play in the areas more inhabited by the Metroids, they enhance the unease of hunting them down. The low health sound also stood out to me as having this unbridled annoying smoke alarm energy, droning on constantly and even warping in pitch based on health. I can't even put into words how these sounds get so... invasive in my own thoughts, the kind of thing that just makes me think way too much about what's going on. Even the ever sudden return back into the overworld track functions more like a gasp of fresh air than simply getting back to a better tune. It's certainly a hard sell, but I can't think of a better way to capture the soul-crushing mundanity of Samus's mission.

And that's probably how I'd describe Return of Samus as a whole. The Game Boy's low fidelity works full throttle to wipe away the heroics you would expect from most Metroid games, leaving you on your own to think about how it feels to go along with this extermination. I finally understand why there's been so much discussion of this game on the Internet, as it leaves so many interesting ideas up to interpretation. Even the final twist of sparing the baby Metroid feels so open ended as to the motive that it's hard to pin a particular meaning to it. It's no wonder that a game that accomplishes so much in such a small form factor stuck with people enough to be remembered so many years later, to the point of getting remade twice. That being said, I kind of doubt the ability of either successor to replicate the sorts of emotions I got from this game. While the work on both is admirable, I've already expressed my issues with Samus Returns, and AM2R seems to play much more in line with the sort of thrills you'd get out of Super Metroid. Throughout the years of the Metroid series and the discussion surrounding it, Metroid II: Return of Samus remains a one of a kind beacon of the Game Boy, and reflects everything I find special about the console's lineup.

You know what? Overwriting my previous review, as I was completely wrong. AM2R and Samus Returns are great, but they don't necessarily replace this. Metroid II is still a solid game, it just needs a map! Since the Game Boy original didn't include one, I kept one open while playing and had a lovely time! Better than the first game by far.

...but I do really want to go finish AM2R now...

The original metroid on nes isn't the most flattering game out there, it has its rough edges but I can ultimately appreciate what it goes for and it's place in gaming history. So, it was a shock to my system that the metroid game on gameboy (essentially a portable nes) was actually a considerable step up from its console counterpart.

I know its odd to call a gameboy game atmospheric but Metroid II finds a way. The faint hints of music sounding like the organic life of this alien planet, the fantastic spritework and art direction, and the black and grey color pallet of the gameboy pocket really elevate the feeling of exploring deeper and deeper into the depths of an underground cave.

This is all just to say that Metroid II is a survival horror game. Encountering a metroid borders on being a jumpscare, with the mutated aliens making their presence known with their harsh and sudden theme contrasting brightly with the atmospheric tunes prior. The metoids' freakish mutations as you delve further into the caves of SR388 also don't let up and can kill you at a moments notice if you aren't on your toes. Just like a good ol' classic survival horror!

This may be one of the most linear metroid games, if not the most linear. However it's linearity encourages exploration as you explore left behind ancient ruins and hunt down every single last metroid hiding in the caves. It feels like every single nook and cranny rewards your exploration with some goodies. The constant stream of abilities you gain all feel meaningful towards further expanding your moveset, and are fun to experiment and play around with. The exploration ties beautifully with the gameplay, which is a significant step from Metroid I. Finally being able to crouch and shoot in more direction feels like a relative breath of fresh air combined with the tight movement.

Overall, Metroid II is a classic example on how you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. "How good can it really be? It's just a gameboy game after all," I foolishly thought before playing. But Metroid II proves to be a great time throughout, despite some annoying Metroid moments™ here and there.

While I wouldn’t consider it as great as future installments, and while it is definitely outshined by its remake, the original Metroid is still a classic of the NES library, and it still holds up somewhat to this day. And of course, Nintendo being Nintendo, after seeing the success of the original Metroid, they went right ahead to developing a sequel. Unlike the sequels to Nintendo’s other games, however, this one would be released after a five-year gap of no games (which, let’s be real, Metroid fans are pretty used to at this point), and it would be developed for exclusively for the Game Boy. Makes sense, considering the producer of Metroid 1 and 2, Gunpei Yokoi, was the main creator of the system in the first place. So, after plenty of time, Nintendo then released Metroid II: Return of Samus.

As a follow-up to the original Metroid, as well as the first handheld title in the series, it manages to do a pretty damn good job at improving on the formula of the original, as well as being a great game all in its own right. Sure, I wouldn’t say it is too great, as certain problems still linger, along with new ones popping up in this installment, but it is still a pretty good continuation for the series.

The story is similar to the first, while also changing it up to where it feels unique, and makes the player want to dive right in and eliminate every Metroid in sight, the graphics are Game Boy graphics, but the sprite work is some of the best that the system offers, and it holds up extremely well, the music (and by that, I mean like the two to three real music tracks in the game) is not only pretty good, but also provides a great sense of atmosphere that not too many other Game Boy games can provide, the control is pretty good, even if it still feels a bit stiff, and the gameplay improves upon the original while keeping the same style and flow as the original, which I appreciate for a game like this.

The game follows a pretty similar formula to that of the original Metroid, where you travel through numerous caverns in the planet SR388, defeating enemies and bosses, taking out every Metroid you can find, collecting new items and upgrades to make yourself stronger, with minor beats of storytelling also present to keep the player intrigued as they keep going, such as Metroid carcasses lying around the environment, as well as the many different mutations that the Metroids can take. The selection of items this time around is pretty good, bringing back a lot of the same powerups from the original, as well as adding more that will become staples in the series, such as the Space Jump, the Spider Ball, and the Varia Suit, and with these new items and upgrades comes new changes to Samus herself, which are a welcome change from the original. Not only is her suit upgraded to what would become her most iconic version, but also you can now crouch, aim up and aim down in this game, making taking on enemies MUCH easier, and more satisfying overall.

In addition, the bosses this time around are also pretty memorable. While there aren’t that many, with the Metroids taking center stage for most of the game, the few that we fight are fun to fight, while also providing a good amount of challenge, especially with the Queen Metroid at the end of the game, with her design being the best in the entire game. Alongside her, the many different Metroids that you fight in the game are definitely the highlights of the game in terms of designs, which are amplified with you being able to witness them “evolve” into these forms as you encounter them, making them a more menacing and memorable threat.

Finally, if there is one thing that I will give this game a lot of props for, it is how it guides the player through the game. While there are no waypoints or maps, the game is structured in a way to where you will never get truly lost whenever you maneuver through the caverns, and if you just dedicate enough time to exploration, you will find your way to finding the Metroids that you need to eliminate. Thankfully, this is also aided with how a lot of the upgrades and items aren’t too out in the open, so it still encourages you to search around and explore more, to benefit the most from what you could find in the caverns. Yes, it is still a bit of a guide game, but it isn’t quite as bad as the original, at least in my opinion.

Now, with all that said, some problems are fixed in this installments, and with those out the door, new problems arise, with my main new issue being the main method of progression through the game. As I have mentioned plenty of times, you need to eliminate all of the Metroids not only to beat the game, but to also explore more of the planet to find more items, upgrades, and Metroids. However, as you would expect, this gets extremely repetitive and tiring after a while. Sure, the new Metroids you encounter keep you on your toes and keep you guessing as you play, but that doesn’t stop the game from getting repetitive, even after encountering these new Metroids.

Not just that, but there is still the problem of where you cannot carry all items at once. Sure, there are plenty of improvements in terms of Samus’s arsenal, such as having the Long Beam, missiles, and the Morph Ball immediately from the start, but you still cannot hold the Wave Beam, Plasma Beam, Spazer Beam, and Ice Beam all at once. You can only have one, and considering how the entire game is about killing Metroids, there should only be one beam that you would need throughout the entire game, making most of the other beams worthless in the long run. There are other minor issues that I have with the game, such as me taking a lot of damage at once a lot of times in the game, but that is just a skill issue, not something wrong with the game.

Overall, while it does still have its issues, this is a great improvement over the original Metroid, and a great sequel and continuation of the series. With that being said though, you would still be better off playing the remakes of the game rather than the original, fan-made or official.

Game #151

This game’s music and style is #awesome. I know it was supposed to be green but my emulator played it in black and white and the screen is super zoomed in, you can’t see 3 feet in front of you and the soundtrack is just these harsh noises and beeps and screeches, there’s rooms and dark hallways with no enemies and it gets more and more frequent the more you progress and the deeper into the planet you go. I feel so unwelcome, tense, out of my depth, and on edge. Super cool af.

I hear a lot about how metroid 1’s abrasive and alien design was lost in future games and while I do like the thought of duplicate rooms, death traps, and in general just map design that is meant to trip the player up and fuck with them, (See tricks and traps from doom 2; one of the greatest videogame levels of all time.) that wasn’t what stopped me from wanting to finish metroid 1. It was just unfun to control. Moving around sucked, shooting sucked, the health economy sucked unless you were willing to grind those bug ejecting tubes for like 10 minutes, and it was huge so if you got lost (no map) you were LOST for real. This game is genuinely fun to control, the movement as well as the combat is smooth and is up to modern standards. The game is much more linear so the lack of a map isn’t as big of a deal (though, not having any colour made it hard to mentally isolate where it was you needed to be. As well as remembering all these BS normal ass blocks that you can crawl thru.) ((double also, i’m probably a little advantaged on this front cause i played AM2R))

I do feel the metroid fights themselves got old really quick and despite the mutations my strategy of just tanking it all and spamming missiles never changed. It was like the same fight but reskinned and they gradually got more and more bullet spongey. And also there wasn’t enough health recharges in the later stages cause there were so little enemies to regain hp from. I had to backtrack just for hp. Later I looked it up (AFTER I FINISHED!!) and it turns out yea that was the closest one lol

I think this game is worth playing and I had fun. At least give this one a fair try.

Return of Samus marks a fascinating and significant moment for Metroid. While the original NES title punches above its weight, Metroid II scales its ambitions to the limitations of its hardware. The open-endedness of the original is replaced with a segmented world design, a move resulting in a game that is playable without a map, something complemented with more distinctive level-design. This linear progression now builds greater tension, as you descend deeper with no "aha!" moment as you loop back on yourself.

Mechanically speaking, we're still far below the standard set in the next game, but it's a huge jump up regardless. Notably, the abilities to aim downwards in mid-air and to crouch are added. One-block-high enemies in the original were more of a pain than was reasonable, and these abilities make them the trivial foes they ought be.

While all the above is nice, it's the elements outside of the core gameplay that truly make Return of Samus a unique experience. The core task of culling Metroids from existence is morally dubious. While they are scary and possess properties which could be dangerous in the wrong hands, Metroids are not evil, just predators, and the game is keen to bring this to the player's attention in a key subversive moment. The general clunkiness of the gameplay arguably complements this through-line, as the Metroids are not particularly fun to engage with.

A lot has been said of the atmosphere and environmental storytelling, and while I generally agree, I think there's a recency bias at play, with most of the great stuff coming toward the end. The shed Metroid skins are a great touch throughout though.

Despite being held back by limitations, Metroid II also works within those limitations to deliver a minimalist piece of storytelling with surprising emotional and thematic complexity. In its uniqueness, it remains one of the most significant titles in the series, as well as one of the more interesting to discuss, even if it's not best in a normative sense.

Wait, Seamus Metroid is a girl?!

An improvement over Metroid, which I feel I should point out is a game I actually like. The signposting is certainly better here; all it took was some empty Metroid husks, a Metroid counter, some screen-shaking, and a few different tile-sets to keep me from getting lost more than a few times. The two-tone color-palette and minimal soundscape are limiting, but the relative linearity of the game was appreciated.

As someone who has not played Samus Returns or AM2R, the ending took me by surprise. After the all-out smackdown I just put on the Metroids, I was expecting the usual timed detonation/escape sequence, but what I got was more gentle. Fusion and Zero Mission for NSO when?

I wish i had bad enough taste to fuel a contrarian love for this game

My favorite art game for the Game Boy.

Looking back it's easy to undersell how popular Metroid was in the late 1980s. For a series often reputed as one of Nintendo's less successful franchises, the original game didn't just make a splash, but a crater, selling nearly 3 million copies by the mid-2000s. While a sequel was inevitable, it's strange that it would be released not only half a decade later, but on a remarkably less "prestigious" system. While both titles were developed by Nintendo R&D1, Metroid II: Return of Samus seems to have been developed by a largely different team, which explains why it feels so different compared to its immediate predecessor.

Metroid II differs most obviously from its predecessor in one major way: linear level progression. Linear should be used lightly, because you are still likely to get very, very lost if you are not paying attention. Unlike the original game, where you can largely explore most areas to your heart's content, Metroid II gates its areas behind progression, meaning the game feels much less free-flowing. Do not confuse this for the game turning into a standard platformer, as the bug hunt the player must undertake still requires active exploration to find all of the hidden metroids. As innovative as Metroid 1 is, Metroid II one-ups it in terms of refined game design, removing much of what could often make the original game very annoying. The gamet/geega/zeb enemies which were such a pain in the original game, while present, are far less unforgiving and never encountered in areas where they can end an entire run even in a worst-case scenario. The game's power-ups still require some searching, but they're never in areas that I feel the player wouldn't be able to discover on their own, unlike the original game's varia suit for example. Newer abilities such as the spider ball allow for greater navigation and it turns the entire environment into your playing field. The progression of the metroids from smaller creatures to beings that could tear you limb from limb with the flick of a wrist is an appropriate scale of challenge, but the last evolution in particular is perhaps too wasteful to take down (and yet, still entirely mandatory). This leads to a far more refined experience which, while perhaps not as creative or innovative as the original game, fixes a lot of its flaws and isn't nearly as frustrating. Nintendo hasn't quite nailed down the formula yet, though, as there are still some rough spots that hamper the experience. Some of the levels are a bit overly large, and while you don't exactly get lost per se, it takes far longer to traverse them than it should. The final area also requires grinding if you weren't an expert with your missiles beforehand to defeat the strongest metroids, but the missile drop rate hasn't actually been increased so you just spend a lot of time moving in between screens repeatedly to spawn them back in. Despite these rough spots, it's still largely a positive direction for the series and easier to come back to in the modern day.

Visually, Metroid II is a step forward and a step back at the same time. In terms of graphics, the game features superbly detailed spritework far beyond what the original game could offer on better hardware. Remember how Samus was sort of an amorphous blob in the original? Now you can see the individual rivets on her sprite, and her animations look far more "realistic", too. Essentially everything has had this graphical facelift, and understanding the typical level of visual fidelity Game Boy games reach, it remains mighty impressive. My main issue is that Metroid II, somewhere along the line, lost the atmosphere that the original game had in spades. Metroid's world was very colorful, which is not exactly something the Game Boy can convey and therefore not exactly a valid criticism, but there's far less variety in SR388 compared to Zebes. While there's occasional vegetation and quite a bit of sand, SR388...just isn't a particularly interesting place to explore. Gone are the space pirate lairs, the burning pits of Norfair (although the game still has lava), the sci-fi labs of Tourian, et cetera. It's all just replaced by rock, rock, and more rock. While the general idea is that the metroids are sucking the planet dry of its fauna and flora, it means that late-game areas meant to convey this don't feel much different from the earlier areas "full of life". On the flip side, the designs for the new metroid forms are very cool and it's interesting to see the effort Nintendo put into designing an entire evolutionary tree for their fictional species.

Metroid II's score was composed by Ryoji Yoshitomi, taking over from Hirokazu Tanaka in the original game, and the soundtrack must be one of the most disappointing aspects of the game as a whole. Tanaka's score for Metroid was atmospheric and memorable, fitting each area perfectly while providing iconic melodies that worked just as well on their own. Metroid 1's score feels like a living organism, and this is something Metroid II tries to achieve in a different way, but fails. While it's not without its successes - the melancholy yet beautiful title theme is worthy of great praise and the triumphant surface theme is an ear worm - it's largely weak attempts at atmospheric sound design that fall flat due to both repetitive composition and the limitations of the Game Boy's sound chip. While there is only so much you can do with the hardware provided, the jittering beeps sound more like Samus dialing a phone number rather than the ominous murmurs of SR388's creatures. The theme for the Chozo ruins is grating on the ears, as the bumbling Abbott and Costello-esque track feels like you're slamming your head against your Game Boy. While I do appreciate the moments where Metroid II uses silence to enhance its atmosphere of a dying planet, the score itself does very little if anything to add to that, and at points often detracts from it.

Metroid II: Return of Samus is sort of a two-step forward, one-step back situation. Its further improvements and refinements to the Metroid formula are much appreciated, and the game manages to fit a more linear structure without sacrificing the Metroidvania gameplay we've come to expect from the series. It's far less frustrating than anything Metroid 1 throws at you, though it is less innovative, something the game can't really be faulted for either. Unfortunately, somewhere in that five-year transition, the immersive atmosphere that Metroid was famous for left in favor of stone corridors and cacophonous music. Despite this, Metroid II is still a significantly better game than the original, and one that is worth playing for fans of the genre.

I couldn't find out a place to put this in the review, but I will add as a postscript that I think it's impressive how Nintendo managed to give Samus some poignant character development without having her speak a single word. Her refusal to kill the infant metroid despite causing the genocide of the entire species speaks volumes about her and the fact that this was achieved on an 8-bit handheld system is insane. It's a sweet and rewarding moment for beating the game.


Samus never really returned to my childhood gaming life since the day I first met them back on the NES, it was quite a hole there between that and 2002, aka The Year Metroid Beat Everyone's Ass. Metroid II for all intents and purposes was just the cover for the box of the Super Game Boy, that was everything I knew it as. Just the front of a piece of cardboard that I saw at some store or in a JC Penny catalog maybe. It existed, that's all I knew.

I have many bones to pick with the way Nintendo treats it's back catalog of classics and oddities, but if there's any silver lining to the dripfeed of past content it's finding a reason to finally give a serious go at Samus' mission to genocide a race of beings for the supposed sake of the galaxy. The final enemies that you were once scared of back on your original adventure are now the sole focus of your mission, and as it turns out those were just the little baby forms. The nightmarish vampire jellyfish can evolve into monstrosities that could no doubt devastate many a civilization.

This is a fight for survival on both ends, it's us or them. It's not pretty.

The sprites are huge and chunky, resulting in screen space being closed in on you. This isn't just the screen, this is the darkness that Samus must traverse as she delves deeper into SR388. There's no telling what's coming up, and you're allowed just the faintest sighting of a Metroid before it spots you and begins it's attack for you to contemplate a battle or to make a strategic retreat to restock. Missiles require more and more care as the Metroids grow stronger and more terrifying as fear begins settling more and more during your first venture into this journey, and the music joins in on making your life go from disturbing to downright hellish with one of my favorite scare chords in recent memory.

Metroid II is a milestone for gaming as a medium, it truly drives home the utter misery that is to carry out a mass killing of other living beings who wouldn't think a second thought to do the same thing to you and your loved ones. It is...dare I say, an early example of Survival Horror. I don't see this game brought up a lot, but it really leans into much of the same pillars of which that genre builds itself upon. You traverse unexplored maps, looking for either dangerous creatures that make your universal counter go down one by one, or energy and ammunition to keep yourself strong to carry out said objective with more confidence. Your little vacation at SR388 begins all fun and games, then only gets more and more visceral as it becomes apparent just how destructive the Metroids truly are with long pathways that bear little to zero life. Violence to end violence...and at the end of all the destruction, an innocent that you can't go through with the killing of....a shred of hope that peace could be theoretically achieved with these lifeforms still intact.

Peace Sells, I'm buying.

Over the course of the 2010s I used to hear a lot of hollering of this game requiring a remake. It got them, all two of them. Personally, I feel once you take the aesthetic of the Game Boy away from Metroid II it dampers the experience a smidgen and it's identity is lost. That fear isn't really there anymore and many AAA-isms get thrown in to make the experience more "epic", which puts a bit of a bad taste in my mouth when the original foundation was to be a legitimately Dreadful experience as opposed to Samus doing kickflips off an Omega Metroid and striking a pose for the camera as the cutscene does the actions for you. Maybe it's just my age showing, but considering I only got to play this seriously recently and formerly brushed it off myself, I think there's legitimacy behind it.

Give this one a go, wait for the sun to go down, close your curtains, and play this on your Switch while under your blanket in your room. Simulate that feeling of a child playing this haunting game alone with only the sounds of that experimental atmospheric soundtrack going off as you wander the caverns of SR388. Perhaps even get a worm light on a Game Boy Color to get the ultimate experience. I don't think you'll regret it. It's an experience I wish I grew up with.

Respect the originals, don't replace them. Admire them.

Once again keeping the ‘’trying to get everything in a Metroid game but then leaving two or three missile tanks behind because I can’t be bothered’’ tradition going, even in a game so different such as Metroid II, it’s heartwarming to see that some things never change, like extremely hidden collectables!

The original Metroid is, even to this day, a pretty big deal, not only because it spawned a series that in spite of admittedly quite noticeable lows —looking at the general direction of a certain Wii game whose name shall not accurse this review— has given some of the most beloved and impactful games of… well, of the entire history of the medium, but it also catapulted its entire world design style to genre-defining status, so much so that half of its name its derived from this series. Metroid may not have been the first one to pull it off, not by a long-shot, but it was the first game to pull off the ‘’Platform-Adventure’’ idea in such a well-designed, fun, and awe-inspiring way; Metroid crafted an entire world in a console that could barely run bigger than normal sprites, let alone to allow the luxury of having backgrounds, and year the planet of Zebes and its pirate infested caverns, even on its first iteration, feel alive, distinct and brimming with secrets and upgrades, by all accounts it’s a marvel, both technically and progression wise.

Metroid 2: Return of Samus not only had to follow up in what the original had done, but also do it in a console with even weaker overall hardware with a screen that couldn’t allow more than a few shades of green, and it what other conditions could this team produce anything but such a incredibly interesting and, in a ton of ways, unique game.

Metroid 2’s own nature revolves around the system is on, yes, but at the same time I think its fitting that such a different adventure is presented in such a different way; whereas Zebes felt mechanized, deeply corrupted by the pirate influence, each room calculated in such a binary way for the sake of stopping intruders and with the last bastions of nature being few and far between, the caves and passages of SR388 feel the complete opposite; no empire nor company has set afoot in these lands for a very long time, this is a land only taken by wildlife and nature, and even in a black and white world, it feels exactly like that. Not every single being in this game is out to kill you, in fact most enemies don’t have direct attacks, with the more aggressive fiends (aside of the Metroids) being the old abandoned machines, which I don’t know if there was any intent behind that, but it seems like a genius purposeful move. The landscapes of SR388 feel wild, untamed, each not existing not as an alien-made space, but as a true bastion of wildlife; rock passage-ways that reach the depths of the planter inhabited by fish that walk on land and strange mole creatures, acid lakes that get emptied by the quakes of a furious Metroid Queen after the killing of their spawns, strange bubble towers that fill the rooms and the most forgotten mast of the planet, and ancient abandoned structures overrun by what the Chozo left behind and animals seeking shelter; this is all on a fucking Game Boy ant it feels natural, it feels like a real world that was left behind, one that doesn’t follow the conventions of the pirate bases of old.

There are still some missile doors here and there, but most of the obstacles you face are not left on purpose, they are a byproduct of the decay in structure and bloom in life that the planet has seen, and so doors stop being that common of a way to stop your progress and turn into a signal of were a new upgrade is located, and now the powerups you’ll use the most to proceed will be things like the morph ball jump, the spiderball and the super jump. But even with these systems still at play, I’d be hard-pressed to call this a ‘’Metroidvania’’, Return of Samus reminds me much more of a divided by areas open world, since your advancement is only delimited by if you have killed the current set of Metroid or not, a change that serves a design and even narrative purpose; Samus’ objective isn’t to stop a big final menace, she’s here to exterminate every single one of the remaining bio-weapons that put the galaxy at jeopardy in the first game, and there’s a long list to go through.

Samus starts the game much more armed than in the first iteration, with the morph ball already on toe and with some missiles right out the gate, and the game overall seems to be far more centered on combat than it ever was; every single ability, even the previously mentioned ones, serve a ton in the fighting and evading process, even the beams are now just a change a change of weapon rather than actual tools, and with the game’s field of vision being much more closer to the character and the sprites being far more detailed than ever, there’s clearly a deliberate attempt to encourage fighting even when there’s no real moment in which you are trapped with a enemy; with every Metroid, even the final boss, there’s always the option to run, which not only helps if you ever get overwhelmed (which is pretty easy considering how aggressive your main enemies are), there’s always the opportunity to retreat and revaluate your options; you are fighting against terrible weapons after all… even tho now they feel more than that.

The Metroid go for just really scary bio-arms to actually terrifying animals, we get to see their evolution, their grow process, how they change and adapt, evolving from their known forms and reaching the enormous sizes of the Omega variant. They are threatening beings, not only because they can only be damaged by your most powerful tools, but also because the way they presented; the little animation that plays on some of them as you witness their evolution, the music changing to their theme as they charge against you, how memorable some of them, like your first encounter with an Alpha Metroid or battling a Gamma Metroid in a sand tunnel. This encounters don’t feel epic or grand, they are grounded and tense, this is not a space epic anymore, it’s a hunt that only ends after your list marks the number 0 and the Metroid Queen falls, and only then, after the adventure is over, no countdown for the explosion starts, it’s just a last stroll, accompanied by the baby, and you cannot get the thought out of you head that maybe what you were hunting were actual animals and no simple killing machines, you didn’t really save the galaxy, you just turned a massacre into routine.

Metroid 2 is unlike any other Metroid game, and not only because of the way it plays or its presented, but also because of how it incredibly handles its world, how it’s done in such a perfect way that traversing it stops being an act of adventuring and more of a slow voyage and contemplation, which is something I can’t say expected to feel about Metroid but on Game Boy. However, this attempt at bringing what can be done on this console to new heights and shattering its own conventions comes at pretty clear prices; even if I can’t stop gushing about how the planet is designed, the way SR388 is designed clearly suffers from WhereTheFuckDoIGo-itis, not only you don’t have a map, the new paths that open are all over the place and aren’t clear at all at first, meaning that unless you really know where to go, prepare to go around in circles for a while until you find something you believe wasn’t there in the first place, which it isn’t helped about the small little problem that is copy-pasted rooms: this was excusable in the original, but in a game with no color and filled with the same rocks and pebbles it turns into a huge problem for finding out where you exactly are.

The save points are also a huge hiccup; if you are going to do a game with few places to save, fine, but one thing is to that and other to make them feel like they are placed unevenly, with huge chucks without any place to save and others with two extremely close to each other, and on that note, while the health and missile refills are incredible additions, I wished they were more common, there are far less infinite enemy respawning tubes this time around so I wish a way to gain health back was given after every major encounter or at least most of them.

The Metroid battle themselves are extremely simple yet overbearing in the worst way and I think there’s an overabundance of Alpha and Gamma variants which get old real quick, the beams are handled in a way that even if it’s the best thing they could have done I just wish they where done differently and didn’t act as direct replacements of each other, the music for the most part isn’t that memorable (even if the Queen Metroid theme and Surface of SR388 are incredible), going back to some places only to return to you where before can be brutal… It has its moments and upgrading and certain battles was still enjoyable, but Metroid II is a case of a game I love everything about except for actually playing it, but when some of its problems come because of its own conditions and even the positives, I cannot be mad for too long.

Metroid II was the return of Samus in a brand new way, a return that allowed for experimentation, that brought back a spirit of wonder and ingenious I didn’t think possible considering the circumstances; I could say many more things about Metroid II that irk me the wrong way, but I don’t think it’s fair to focus on that when it managed to do something so impossibly difficult. This isn’t my favorite Game Boy game, not by a long shot, but it’s the most fascinating and daring, and if that itself doesn’t have value, I don’t know what does.

one of the more encouragingly dissectible metroid games. yeah you’ve heard it everywhere; the hardware limitations enforce a more anxious atmosphere and the dull colors convey it yada yada yada. but one thing i don’t always see people highlight are the hellish soundscapes that blanket the entire experience. exacerbating your trek through rubbled caverns and cities lost to time. as you creep and crawl your way up, down and all around confusing and numbing passageways a nightmarish clusterfuck of a melody backs you up. anxiety slips its way into the foreground. a fleeting silence ensues before reaching the inevitable encounter with one of the dozens of metroid creatures. business as usual. as you escape the decayed yet entrancing ruins, the ever gratifying main theme plays, signifying your triumph and carries forth motivation to continue the monotony. one more thing to add would be the setting: ancient ruins and forgotten tunnels laid to rot in the pits of hell. how did this happen? why are these places left extinct aside from the disconnected monsters that lurk? we will never know. stuff like that gets my brain going you know? insanely impressive for a game of this caliber to invoke such boundless emotion. definitely should not be overlooked.

it took me ENTIRELY TOO LONG to understand that this is a quintessential video game. my past attempts at plumbing its depths have failed—it felt cramped and clunky compared to super metroid or even the nes original. every so often i would make another failed attempt and come away with the impression that it was one of those "you had to be there" experiences and i had simply missed the boat forever... (i scarcely even knew of it until after i had played SUPER metroid, despite my age (i turned 11 in june of 1991, setting na release dates aside)) which sort of reinforced my uncertainty about its whole appeal, because, i mean, i HAD a game boy and i love and cherish the handheld mario and zelda games of the same era. what was i missing?

maybe first and foremost—and i am certainly not saying anything new or revelatory, here—that cramped screen space is a boon to the claustrophobic atmosphere of this thing, definitively setting it apart from other games in the series. you especially begin to feel this when you've made some progress and begin to hurt for a map, or some indication of where precisely the metroids you've yet to find and defeat may be lurking. the sheer empty darkness of these chasms is both smothering and informative of the barely fathomable scope of the world around you. this rules! metroid 2 is a HORROR game. its music often being sparse gothic dirges, all discordant 4-bit harpsichord, pulse wave doom and skittering alien noises, the vibe is relentlessly eerie. an even spookier precursor to the dank jams of castlevania: harmony of dissonance. it takes you back to a time when nintendo weren't afraid to experiment and make strange, almost avant garde art with their games. this is just about a masterpiece of exemplifying the beauty of technological limitations.

i won't get deep into the storytelling aspects, but one of the more impressive things to me, here, is the fine balance of streamlined, almost arcade game like flow to things (read: yes, it can feel a bit repetitive (though i DO feel this has been overstated, as the quake and lava-lowering that marks its gated progression is actually pretty satisfying when you've been hunting for a while...)) and environmental, cinematic (dialogue-free) storytelling. the events of super metroid resound in my mind now that i have my own experience with the oddly bleak return of samus in there, too.

(note: i played this in retroarch with one of those game boy color shaders that represents the handheld's screen as a frame around the game itself and i 100% recommend this.)

(extra side note: if metroid was inspired by alien, metroid 2 would seem to be obviously inspired by aliens in that it is primarily a mission of extermination... but it also presages the ideas of prometheus—specifically with regard to the fate of the chozo and the engineers and their role in the existence of each's lethal cosmic progeny—in some pretty interesting ways. makes u think.)

Systematic Genocide Simulator, brought to you by Nintendo. Complete with jump scares, labyrinthian and borderline non-euclidean oppressive spaces to stumble through, bizarre and uncomfortable musical choices, a camera that manages to convey uneasy claustrophobia in a 1991 handheld game, and an ending that gives you the very companion that you set out to kill and makes you contemplate your actions through 5 minutes of uneventful walking set to melancholic yet vaguely friendly music as you realize you're the monster. How did this get made?

It was nice to learn about Hiroji Kiyotake, one of the directors of Metroid II, and probably a leading force in the sheer personality and fun that a run of good GB platformers have - Metroid II, Super Mario Land 2, the Wario Lands...

Despite having played most Metroid games I'd never played Metroid 2. I bounced off of it a few times, but after roughing it through Metroid 1 (another brilliant game), I went ahead and played through 2.

At first I was hesitant about the structure of the game - seeming to move away from the chaotic maze of Metroid 1 for a more linear experience. But I think the structure of Metroid 2 - that of burrowing into an ant farm, exploring smaller labyrinths budding from a main path - works well. It enforces the narrative of Samus as this bounty hunter, cold bringer of death, her triumphant "overworld medley" song being replaced by the quiet nature and sounds of Metroids merely living at home.

The black and white graphics look amazing at times - especially level 3 with its mechanical sand maze and the vertical, overgrown shafts. At its best there's a real sense of encroaching into disturbing territory, the way it feels to peer from a safe path into a deep patch of forest. The variety of 'nests' the game manages to convey is inspiring! The game fully understands its visual format and how to exploit it. Metroid fights remain tricky to cheese, with the metroid becoming invincible offscreen, always feeling claustrophobic and chaotic, thrilling.

There are a handful of rough edges (the lack of save points, occasional missile/energy grinding) but I think the rest of the game makes up for it. I love the setpieces with the Metroid counter resetting in the lair, or the omega metroid attacking you after killing the alpha, or the lair of the omegas. I do think that the art could have been a bit more interesting at parts, especially with all of the vine background layers in level 3 - some later levels feel a bit empty .

That being said, the atmosphere never feels overexplained. It was fun to stumble upon the massive Chozo compounds, with dangerous robots, butted right up against Metroid caves and lush caverns.

Shoutout to the ambient music, which works really well! Unsettling, dark stuff, really understanding the 'texture' of the game boy sound palette.

--

Overall, it's a very strong game, but I can't give it the "5 stars'... I think it might be related to the economy of ammo and energy and how they inevitably shift way in your favor as you progress through the game - enemy encounters always feel a little less exciting once you have the screw attack, plasma beam, etc. It feels a bit counter to the narrative they're setting up with you diving into more dangerous lairs. The Omega metroid may look spooky, but it's not much of a threat with my 150 missiles, varia suit, and 500 energy.

Metroid -> Super Metroid is a commonly discussed evolution of the series and one that is absolutely true, with the start of Super Metroid all but spelling it out for the player. But how about this: Metroid II -> Metroid Fusion is a completely parallel yet similar evolution of taking an older title's unique ideas and modifying them. Both of them offer more linear experiences than the game they preceded (Metroid/Super Metroid) that offer a more "horror" vibe to them and revolve around the idea of hunting, with Fusion having you take the role of the hunted and Metroid II taking the role of the hunter. This dual track of Metroid development is very interesting to consider, but how about the quality of it as a game? Well, I'd call it a game that succeeds in spite of itself.

This game runs a LOT on the general atmosphere and "vibes" of the game, this light horror tension as you're walking through stark white (or puke green if you're playing the original original Game Boy) stone enviroments while waiting to see where you're going to run into the tough boss you're going to be hunting down, seeing their discarded shells or floating awaiting your approach and THIS part of the game is pretty effective. There were multiple times where when I came across a long corridor and would move forward in little bursts so I wouldn't trigger a boss if I wasn't ready health-wise and that kind of feel is exactly what the game feels like it is going for. The final Area is particularly strong at this, nearly empty save for the final enemies and a few secrets. It really gives the feeling of traveling through a ruined and desecrated facility, continuing the Metroid trend of strong enviromental finishes to Metroid games which is what kept the game in the 7 star range for me. The strong music helps in this regard, spooky bit tunes and screeches and lowkey enviromental noises that really set the tone. The title theme is a particularly strong one, the transition from the little "scree....scree..." noises to a more relaxing tone is basically how the game goes, the kinda frantic stomping anger of the final boss theme, the general surface theme. This game really doesn't have a LOT of music but it takes full advantage of the primitive Game Boy sound options to make a pretty memorable OST.

I was also impressed by this game's use of visual langauge and how it made a game without a ton of tile variety quite legible, in addition to servicing the background story. For example, you come to the same tiered tile set of platforms in pretty much every area, which is a visual indicator of being that area's "hub" from which you'll be exploring the other areas for their designated Metroids, which gives an effective way to know when you're in a new area when combined with each area having either a unique flying enemy OR a unique hazard at the bottom of it. Simply by looking to see "oh, is this the one with spikes?" was enough to give me a good idea of where I was via mental map, helping with the total lack of an in-game map. Blast doors you need to use missiles on pretty much always lead to something good, while if they lack the missile doors you're in league for a boss fight. That sort of thing permiates the game and is very helpful.

This is great and all but all runs into some pretty serious flaws in the game. I actually didn't find the boss fights too repetitive, there's enough exploration that it turned into more of my brain tinkering how best to exterminate the next boss which given the hunting / "genocide ALL metroids" theme feels intended, but instead the problem I had is how often the fights just felt like a health/missile check. You simply do not have the mobility with Samus' stiffer Game Boy controls and the chunky sprites vs. the screen size to effectively dodge your opponents, let alone easily hit weak points, meaning that a lot of fights felt to me like spamming missiles while tanking hits and hoping my chunky dodging was enough. The Ai exploitability (which I don't blame them for it's an OG Game Boy game for god's sake) adds to this. It DOES mean some of the fights were quite intense, but it adds a pretty hollow element to a bunch of them. There's also a few of them that just do NOT work right, usually involving long vertical drops, the one with fake blocks was a specific low point as 80% of the fight was just trying to even jump to fight it. The fact that the boss only moves when on screen and the way the music/sound effects work also makes it feel incredibly artificial, just not good.

This dovetails nicely into another issue I had: For some reason this game HATES recharge stations, but it doesn't fully commit as something like Super Metroid would later do by locking you OUT from them until you finish a specific area. Instead it just puts them in horribly awkward locations, like on the ceiling or random crevices, making them really easy to forget location-wise or just take a long time to get to. Some even have enemies that circle them you need to dodge and they'll do like NO damage but force you out of the Spider Ball or Space Jump (which you need to access most of these) and now you have to go through like a whole minute of them to get back there. Why is this a thing? I could understand if it was survival horror style scarcity, but no, not only are they often not locked off, but the game frequently puts farming areas w/ enemies that respawn constantly on screen (compared to leaving and re-entering) for you to get your resources back up, so the scarcity isn't really a "thing". It is a very confused design choice.

The map is mostly easy to navigate, but I will say I ended up looking at a guide three times during the game, although I think only one was really the game's fault. The first time was wholly on me because I thought I had checked an area multiple times but despite knowing what each screen is I apparently didn't jump all the way to the top of one. The last time was just convenience after I died to the final boss to see if the area had health/missile refills or if I had to backtrack. The middle time was because I forgot what area had lava to recede after beating one Metroid batch, which DID feel like an issue as it can be kinda easy to forget where the lava areas are, this isn't too bad but it does feel like this game could use a rudimentary in-game map if possible. Even moreso than Metroid 1 in a way: It's more viable to make an in-game map on your home console Metroid game than the Game Boy one that's absolutely gonna be played on the go constantly.

A few general and short thoughts at the end: The platforming here is very simple and never too challenging, but it is still fun if chunky at times. Annoying how various late-game stuff can be when you do it without the High Jump Boots, which ARE optional and which I never found. Enemies being placed at annoying heights was overly common, especially with flying enemies, where it was hard to find a jumping OR crouching height to hit them. This is a rare game where I feel like it looks better when NOT played on a Game Boy Color, so I recommend that.

Real Life Time: 8 Hours 32 Minutes
In-Game Time: 6 Hours 55 Minutes

transcendent and emotionally affecting in a way not dissimilar to link's awakening, and genuinely unnerving even 20 years later. metroid's first masterpiece

backloggd community be like oh yeah this game super good even if has no redeeming qualities outside its music

You're going to need a guide for sure, but this is surprisingly fun. It's primitive, and some of the different metroids are really difficult, but it's somehow a huge leap ahead of the horror that was the original, and I had a lot of fun.


Really? Of all games to act like the original is better than the remake, you guys think it's this one?

I didn't enjoy it most of the time tbh because gameplay feels so clunky. But it's surprisingly well designed and atmosphere is great, i'm looking forward to play the remake!

Metroid II peaks in Area 3, wastes the player's time with the next two mini areas, and then gets mean when Zetas are introduced. Before finally being cruel and insisting on several Omega bouts back to back with 0 ammo stations nearby and the only way to acquire missiles without backtracking for a while being to farm one specific enemy. If Metroid II didn't engage in such bullshit I'd heartily recommend it, instead this one is only for series enthusiasts.
Great sense of tone though. Much moodier than either of its remakes.
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I just realized that the Omegas are probably tuned as such in order to punish players that didn't pick up all 22 Missiles. It incentivizes collecting everything in order to more easily meet the 3hr par time.
The highpoints of Metroid II are engrossing and I believe that it's a triumph as an artistic piece, so it's a shame the second half trends toward being a slog. It's a rough gem for sure.

death metal on a 3 inch screen

+ literally about descending into hell
+ makes great use of the game boy’s dimensions to create a claustrophobic world
- or +, depending on mood: feels a little like playing NES on cough syrup