Although I was definitely curious to see what the first game in the series was like when I sat down to beat it last year, Super Metroid was the game that I was actually excited about, and a lot of that anticipation came from my experience with the game's intro sequence. At one point during what must've been middle school, I went on an online emulator and decided to boot up Super Metroid on a whim in between bite-sized play sessions of Contra and Mike Tyson's Punch Out!!, and the music, environmental storytelling, and especially that fight against Ridley all made the game intriguing to me. That sequence ended up being stuck in my mind for years, and on top of how great it was to relive it when I began my playthrough with this game, I ended up really enjoying Super Metroid as a whole, even if I didn't think that it was perfect.

Like all good sequels (or threequels, in this case, but I haven't played Metroid II: Return of Samus yet), Super Metroid took what worked with the first game and expanded on it, and the game did this while also injecting some of its own unique ideas. The sense of isolation from the first game is much thicker and more atmospheric here, as the decrepit environments and occasionally grotesque enemy design made venturing into the unknown feel eerie and unsettling, along with the areas feeling genuinely distinct from one another rather than just being simple color swaps like in the original game. The gameplay loop of exploring to find new items and areas felt exciting rather than tedious here thanks to the substantially larger map and decreased amounts of required backtracking, with the addition of an actual map being a lifesaver (although remembering which rooms were which was still a bit difficult). The sense of progression through the power-ups and items in Super Metroid is palpable, as having the initially annoying enemies get decimated by your missiles and arm cannon upgrades is satisfying in ways that the original Metroid struggled to convey. This directly ties into the game's tense and chaotic boss fights, with some of the scripted moments making for some surprisingly effective bits of silent storytelling. The score by Kenji Yamamoto and Minako Hamano was superb, as their memorable, yet evocative and ominous tracks were very effective in conveying the mood of each of the game's areas.

One of my least favorite aspects of the original Metroid was when I'd end up in an empty room, shoot the walls and ceiling at random in order to see where to go next, and then being annoyed with the fact that I was supposed to blow up some arbitrary block that looked just like the rest of the room, and this issue of random, cryptic design unfortunately found its way to Super Metroid on multiple occasions. Granted, the addition of the X-Ray Scope fixes this issue to an extent, but it arrives a bit too late into the game for it to be as useful as it could have been. The only area of the game that I straight up disliked in its entirety would be Maridia, as the spike in backtracking and the inclusion of quicksand that is unreasonably vexing to get out of made it a slog to get through. For the most part, the controls are an improvement on the first game, but I still found Samus' jumps to be inconsistent, with wall jumps being especially fiddly to pull off without eventually unlocking the Space Jump. Despite my gripes with the game, I still thought that Super Metroid was a great game that refined what was set up by the first game, and since I've heard good things about Metroid Fusion, I'll check that out at some point.