This review contains spoilers
An early metroidvania with the dumbest child isekai plot you could ever think of and a lack of infinite continues in the western version because videogames back then were simple toys that needed to last long instead of works of art.
Despite the ambition that shines through at first with the vulnerability with which the Sunsoft team portrayed the pilot of the SOPHIA in a manner similar to cinematic platformers, a massive world for NES standards bringing different little environments with a graphical simulation of 3D depht at some points...
Gameplay wise it's just clunky. As one of their first projects it was maybe too ambitious and couldn't be polished properly. Early on, there are some spots where the SOPHIA can get stuck on and you simply need to commit suicide to reset things, even if later when you come through that area with the new powerups, you can get out. Unlike posterior games in the genre like Super Metroid, where you can toggle the weapons on and off: you can fire the special shots when pressing down and the fire button (good luck swimming without wasting it) and near the end of the game the platforming becomes extremely annoying because there's a required improvement to the vehicle where it starts automatically climbing up and down walls, making jumps unnecesarily complicated because you can't turn that off. Metroid II would later improve on this wall-climb ability by making it activate while you are in rolling ball mode.
And well, compared to Metroid or The Guardian Legend for NES, the atmosphere is lacking, and compared to the latter, the story is as minimal as you can get. Because it doesn't have a password system in neither the japanese or the western versions, you also have to beat it in one sitting, forcing you to replay it from scratch whenever you turn it off, which is a sin for a 4 hour metroidvania. I used save states at the start of every area so I could continue later once I got tired, I'm not falling on this archaic trap for kids from the 80s who had nothing better to escape to.
Despite the ambition that shines through at first with the vulnerability with which the Sunsoft team portrayed the pilot of the SOPHIA in a manner similar to cinematic platformers, a massive world for NES standards bringing different little environments with a graphical simulation of 3D depht at some points...
Gameplay wise it's just clunky. As one of their first projects it was maybe too ambitious and couldn't be polished properly. Early on, there are some spots where the SOPHIA can get stuck on and you simply need to commit suicide to reset things, even if later when you come through that area with the new powerups, you can get out. Unlike posterior games in the genre like Super Metroid, where you can toggle the weapons on and off: you can fire the special shots when pressing down and the fire button (good luck swimming without wasting it) and near the end of the game the platforming becomes extremely annoying because there's a required improvement to the vehicle where it starts automatically climbing up and down walls, making jumps unnecesarily complicated because you can't turn that off. Metroid II would later improve on this wall-climb ability by making it activate while you are in rolling ball mode.
And well, compared to Metroid or The Guardian Legend for NES, the atmosphere is lacking, and compared to the latter, the story is as minimal as you can get. Because it doesn't have a password system in neither the japanese or the western versions, you also have to beat it in one sitting, forcing you to replay it from scratch whenever you turn it off, which is a sin for a 4 hour metroidvania. I used save states at the start of every area so I could continue later once I got tired, I'm not falling on this archaic trap for kids from the 80s who had nothing better to escape to.