I’ve always been surprised at how much I don’t dislike this game. It’s a surprisingly okay game, all told, and a colossal improvement over the series’ first outing. Having said that, it’s not a game that really does anything impressive in the gameplay department; its combat is very shallow, shallower than the first game’s, and its traversal isn’t anything to write home about either. Still, it’s not bad, and it does a few things really well when we put gameplay aside; it’s got a great atmosphere, especially for a GBC game, and the game’s ending is incredibly memorable - one of the strongest moments in the whole series.
The weakest aspect of this game is the metroid fights. The Omegas are approaching something vaguely resembling a decent enemy, but they still have an annoying move where they can just decide to charge you in a seemingly unavoidable pattern. All the other fights feel like a struggle against the AI RNG to let you hit the enemy without taking too much damage. Other enemies, with a couple exceptions, are a walk in the park to dispatch, so the combat mostly boils down to backtracking to a recharge station or farming an enemy for health, spamming missiles, and hoping for the best. You can certainly play better or worse to mitigate the damage you take, but it doesn’t have much of an effect, and this makes the combat on the whole kind of a letdown.
Exploration here is kind of decent, though. Coming directly off of Metroid 1, 90% of rooms not being a copy and paste job feels way more relieving than it should. The spider ball is a nice tool in that if you spider ball up a wall with a hidden passage, you’ll enter the passage. This was always weirdly satisfying to do while playing, and as a result, I found myself actually kind of enjoying finding these hidden passages, in a way that I mostly didn’t in the first game. The space jump is introduced here, and it’s bizarre how irritating it is to use. Missing a single input with poor feedback locks you out of restarting the space jump until you land somewhere, and it mostly just feels awful.
It’s at this point that I have to admit that I almost didn’t finish the game this time around. I realized while fighting the final boss and dying alarmingly quickly that I had missed the Varia suit. On realizing I was going to have to spend upwards of 15 minutes backtracking just for one item, I almost quit, though I came back after a couple hours and ultimately killed the Queen. The fact that such a critical powerup is so easily missable is something that bothers me more than it probably should. The screw attack is similarly missable (I naturally missed it), though hardly as important, as most of the actually threatening enemies are metroids, which are immune to it.
Despite my lukewarm feelings towards the game mechanically, I have to give it credit for setting a really excellent tone and atmosphere. This is somewhat helped by the cramped screen space on the GBC, but the pitch black background, threatening, dissonant, and somewhat sparse soundtrack, and subtle details like the fading number of enemies as you progress deeper into the planet, all do a great job of instilling an atmosphere of foreboding and hostility. The ending, between the moment with the egg where the metroid counter increases to 9, the battle with the queen, backed into a corner, and of course the final “escape” with the baby metroid in tow, with calming, contemplative music playing in the background, all hit exactly the right notes, and make the game worth playing almost on their own.
This game does end up getting a recommendation from me. I think it’s a game worth experiencing, if for no other reason than its atmosphere, subtle themes, and finale sequence. It’s a pretty middling ride until that point, but it’s not actively off putting for the most part, outside of a couple repetitive shafts in some of the metroid nesting grounds. It’s a hesitant recommendation, and a rather lukewarm one, but it’s enough of a net positive to earn one. It’s not the greatest metroid game, by a long shot, but it’s not a bad game, and I think that’s what I find most surprising about it.
The weakest aspect of this game is the metroid fights. The Omegas are approaching something vaguely resembling a decent enemy, but they still have an annoying move where they can just decide to charge you in a seemingly unavoidable pattern. All the other fights feel like a struggle against the AI RNG to let you hit the enemy without taking too much damage. Other enemies, with a couple exceptions, are a walk in the park to dispatch, so the combat mostly boils down to backtracking to a recharge station or farming an enemy for health, spamming missiles, and hoping for the best. You can certainly play better or worse to mitigate the damage you take, but it doesn’t have much of an effect, and this makes the combat on the whole kind of a letdown.
Exploration here is kind of decent, though. Coming directly off of Metroid 1, 90% of rooms not being a copy and paste job feels way more relieving than it should. The spider ball is a nice tool in that if you spider ball up a wall with a hidden passage, you’ll enter the passage. This was always weirdly satisfying to do while playing, and as a result, I found myself actually kind of enjoying finding these hidden passages, in a way that I mostly didn’t in the first game. The space jump is introduced here, and it’s bizarre how irritating it is to use. Missing a single input with poor feedback locks you out of restarting the space jump until you land somewhere, and it mostly just feels awful.
It’s at this point that I have to admit that I almost didn’t finish the game this time around. I realized while fighting the final boss and dying alarmingly quickly that I had missed the Varia suit. On realizing I was going to have to spend upwards of 15 minutes backtracking just for one item, I almost quit, though I came back after a couple hours and ultimately killed the Queen. The fact that such a critical powerup is so easily missable is something that bothers me more than it probably should. The screw attack is similarly missable (I naturally missed it), though hardly as important, as most of the actually threatening enemies are metroids, which are immune to it.
Despite my lukewarm feelings towards the game mechanically, I have to give it credit for setting a really excellent tone and atmosphere. This is somewhat helped by the cramped screen space on the GBC, but the pitch black background, threatening, dissonant, and somewhat sparse soundtrack, and subtle details like the fading number of enemies as you progress deeper into the planet, all do a great job of instilling an atmosphere of foreboding and hostility. The ending, between the moment with the egg where the metroid counter increases to 9, the battle with the queen, backed into a corner, and of course the final “escape” with the baby metroid in tow, with calming, contemplative music playing in the background, all hit exactly the right notes, and make the game worth playing almost on their own.
This game does end up getting a recommendation from me. I think it’s a game worth experiencing, if for no other reason than its atmosphere, subtle themes, and finale sequence. It’s a pretty middling ride until that point, but it’s not actively off putting for the most part, outside of a couple repetitive shafts in some of the metroid nesting grounds. It’s a hesitant recommendation, and a rather lukewarm one, but it’s enough of a net positive to earn one. It’s not the greatest metroid game, by a long shot, but it’s not a bad game, and I think that’s what I find most surprising about it.