Definently underrated. I came into this game as a fairly experienced Metroid player and didn't really have any problems with navigation, but an in-game map still would have been appreciated. The secrets all feel great to find. The fights with later stages of the Metroids get a little annoying, but I love the way that less creatures are able to survive the closer you get to the Metroid nest, and just love the games themes overall. The game didn't feel too unforgiving either, plenty of save states, I didn't even worry about having to resort to save scumming (played on 3ds). The game hasn't aged perfectly, but I still had a really good time with this one.

I've been trying to play every Metroid game in order of release because the only one I ever beat was, ironically, this game's remake, Samus Returns, and I'll replay that and review it eventually, but because I had already played that game and my friends wanted me to play Super, I was advised to skip this one here, and I did, I played Super first, really enjoyed it, but then I decided to go back to this anyway, I just felt wrong skipping it, and I'm so glad I did.

Metroid II is very different from the rest I've played, including it's own remake, you're not trying to escape the planet, you're there with a purpose, kill every Metroid, it's pretty fucked up and the game is clearly trying to tell you (especially at the end) that maybe what you're doing here is at least morally dubious, and I absolutely love that. Is the gameplay a little rough? yeah, for sure, but outside of that I think pretty much every technical "limitation" of the gameboy ends up working in it's favor. The screen being so small makes the game feel really claustrophobic the whole way through, the music could barely even be considered music sometimes, it's mostly composed of... weird, creepy sounds, the atmosphere is honestly as good as it got in Super, maybe even better at points. The reason it's not equally rated however, is the bosses, there's 40 Metroids to defeat, and they're all pretty uninspired fights, most of them die in 5 missiles, non of them have any interesting patterns to learn, and I understand that this is also probably due to the gameboy's limitations but I can't justify it in this case because it's such a huge part of the game.

Overall, I highly recommend everyone reading to at least give this game a chance, especially if you skipped it for how it looks or for it having so many remakes out there, this is a completely unique experience that I think every Metroid fan would appreciate.

In my opinion, Return of Samus, despite being on the GB, is significantly better then the first game in everyway. As with the first game, I felt as if they where trying to do too much with the game when they couldn't on NES hardware. But here, Nintendo was able to completely translate the concepts of the first game and make something that feels much better for the GB hardware. I am not going to finish it however, as I will instead play the remake; but understand through my good amount of playtime here, that it is quite a good game.

Great game for an original Gameboy game and a huge improvement from the first game. The controls are a lot better, the map is designed much better, and the enemy placement also isn't insane like the first game. There are still some problems, however. The boss fights are a little repetitive and annoying, there's not much variety in scenery due to the limitations of the Gameboy's color palette, and having no health/missile refills in the last area with the omega metroids is pretty stupid. But otherwise, I very much enjoyed it. The way you kill the final boss is pretty cool as well and I love the ending with the cute baby metroid.