DISCLAIMER: this review will spoil both the original game and official remake for Metroid II. If you're unfamiliar with how either play out, I'd strongly recommend playing the original first, and then the remake.
It's pretty easy to separate remakes into two distinct categories: those that are supplementary to the original (Final Fantasy VII Remake, Twin Snakes) and those that are replacements to the original (Demon's Souls, Shadow of the Colossus). I tend to be more apprehensive towards the latter, but that's not to say it can't be done well. With the right team at the helm (usually including the original designers) it's possible to create something truly special that polishes the original's shortcomings and reinvents what it represented without the constraints of it's era. I haven't played the Resident Evil Remake, but from what I'm told it's the best example of a game that repaints the original while still capturing the spirit and soul present in the PlayStation version.
Having said that, most replacement remakes tend to stumble over themselves and create a product that doesn't really do justice to the source material in any way. Samus Returns is no different.
Looking at it in a vaccum, it's a standard Metroid adventure. Many areas tend to blend into one another and the stop-and-start nature of combat got old quickly, but a lot of it is pretty familiar and comfortable if you're familiar with the series. Looking at it in the context of the source material is where it really starts to fall apart in my eyes.
Much of the charm of Return of Samus was how cramped and stressful the whole journey was. The first game presented a complete mirror of the Zelda series that felt both swashbuckling and mysterious with it's alien world while still feeling like an adventure. It's sequel, by comparison, wasn't nearly as pleasant and leaned more into a psudo-horror atmosphere. You were tasked with exterminating an entire alien race, and the game quite fittingly was upsetting to trek through. Traversing the caves of SR388 always felt tense, the limited visibility meant you never knew what was around every corner, and the Metroid encounters were a mad scramble to stay alive more than anything. Nothing about it felt triumphant. While repetitive towards the end, each subsequent Metroid encounter would eventually feel as if you're just filling a quota, like you're just clocking in for a drab job only to slog through the day and clock out. It was interesting to see Samus not only get tasked with commiting genocide on an alien planet, but for it to be presented without any of the energy you might expect. And yet, in one final subversive gesture, it doesn't end on a sour note. Samus comes across a Metroid hatchling, and instead of greeting it with hostility, she changes her tone and takes it back to the federation. One would expect a game like this to end in bombast, yet the player gets a moment of quiet relief. The mission was over, there was no need for any more violence or conflict. The galaxy was at peace.
Presumably in an effort to modernize the game and have it fall more in line with other popular titles, the official Metroid II remake manages to sand down nearly all distinct elements of the GameBoy classic and create a game that hardly resembles that which it's trying to replicate. It seems as though every change made in Samus Returns was made to make everything bigger, better, and louder. In place of pitch black dour caves you have brightly lit neon crystal formations, enemies are more aggressive promoting the use of your new parry action to make combat feel more "engaging", the list of changes is pretty massive and it'd be boring to just list them all. Instead, I think it'd be valuable to mention how these changes all fit together. In other words, each step in the remake progress was logical.
Newer games are expected to be bigger so they made the map bigger, and by extension added an actual map to track your progress. The lack of any map in the original is a big sticking point for many, but what makes it work is how you only needed to keep a small chunk of the map in your mind at any time, once you finish an area you can move on and never look back. It created a dizzying feeling while exploring, but the excellent layout and sprite designs guaranteed the player should never be lost for too long. Now that the world is massive, it'd be ridiculous to force the player to track it all in their brain, so the map makes some amount of sense. It just comes at a cost of the rewarding feeling players got by picking apart the world completely on their own.
More pressingly, the huge world greatly effects the thrill of hunting Metroids. In the original, not only could they spring up at any moment, but encounters never felt gamey for lack of a better term. Fights could take place in sand pits, cramped caves, or anywhere for that matter. They never felt like video game combat arenas, so the whole journey felt natural. The heart sinking feeling of finding a Metroid never lost it's spark since you never knew when they'd appear. Naturally, SR opts into a dedicated radar that beeps like a metal detector as you approach a Metroid removing the thrill of discovery, and every fight takes place in one of a handful of deliberately designed sterile arenas.
None of these elements stand up to the scrappy yet elegant design of the original, but the biggest blunder has got to be the overall tone and feel of the game. As I mentioned earlier, hunting Metroids in the original rarely felt fun. It was a nerve-wracking crawl through claustrophobic caves and generally just felt miserable. The remake instead wants the player to feel as cool as posible while shredding this world to pieces. Samus's parry is the most immediate example of this cheap pop of energy, but the series first of Cutscenes That Wrestle Control From The Player to Show You Something Sick Nasty From Samus is the most obnoxious. Walking into an unknown area and having control taken from me is the quickest way to let me know I'm in absolutely no danger, and anything that happens is bound to be awesome. Because nothing screams genocide like Samus backflipping off of an alien as she shoots it to death.
Not even the beautiful ending leaves unscathed, what used to be a calm reflective escape to your ship is now an action packed sprint through every basic enemy in the game's roster followed by the most embarrassing form of fanservice in the game, a brand new final boss against the most iconic villain of the series, Ridley. Of course the game with the most subversive ending had to end with bombast, that's what they always intended for with the classic violence free ending right?
The cherry on top is the baby Metroid itself, once a symbol of hope to strategically shift the tone before the end is now relegated to a key for item collection right after the Queen Metroid encounter, but before the final boss, leading to the most frustrating item cleanup in the series.
I recognize most of this write up has been me whining about why the remake fails when stacked up against the original, and while that may seem sloppy and unfair, it's only natural given the fact that they share a title. Samus Returns was meant to be a cozy return to form for the series, and in many ways it accomplished that goal. It's nice to see a series come back in a familiar setting after lying dormant for a decade, but that's never what the original was meant to be. It was a brand new adventure that didn't have to follow an arbitrary ruleset laid in place by the series legacy, it was an interesting sequel to a groundbreaking title and nothing else. These days people don't look fondly on Return of Samus, so this could have been a perfect opportunity for Mercury Steam to show the world what made the original so special in their own Resident Evil Remake moment. Instead what we got was a safe installment that proudly wears the series on its sleeve, but holds no reverence for the game that bore the title of Metroid II.
It's pretty easy to separate remakes into two distinct categories: those that are supplementary to the original (Final Fantasy VII Remake, Twin Snakes) and those that are replacements to the original (Demon's Souls, Shadow of the Colossus). I tend to be more apprehensive towards the latter, but that's not to say it can't be done well. With the right team at the helm (usually including the original designers) it's possible to create something truly special that polishes the original's shortcomings and reinvents what it represented without the constraints of it's era. I haven't played the Resident Evil Remake, but from what I'm told it's the best example of a game that repaints the original while still capturing the spirit and soul present in the PlayStation version.
Having said that, most replacement remakes tend to stumble over themselves and create a product that doesn't really do justice to the source material in any way. Samus Returns is no different.
Looking at it in a vaccum, it's a standard Metroid adventure. Many areas tend to blend into one another and the stop-and-start nature of combat got old quickly, but a lot of it is pretty familiar and comfortable if you're familiar with the series. Looking at it in the context of the source material is where it really starts to fall apart in my eyes.
Much of the charm of Return of Samus was how cramped and stressful the whole journey was. The first game presented a complete mirror of the Zelda series that felt both swashbuckling and mysterious with it's alien world while still feeling like an adventure. It's sequel, by comparison, wasn't nearly as pleasant and leaned more into a psudo-horror atmosphere. You were tasked with exterminating an entire alien race, and the game quite fittingly was upsetting to trek through. Traversing the caves of SR388 always felt tense, the limited visibility meant you never knew what was around every corner, and the Metroid encounters were a mad scramble to stay alive more than anything. Nothing about it felt triumphant. While repetitive towards the end, each subsequent Metroid encounter would eventually feel as if you're just filling a quota, like you're just clocking in for a drab job only to slog through the day and clock out. It was interesting to see Samus not only get tasked with commiting genocide on an alien planet, but for it to be presented without any of the energy you might expect. And yet, in one final subversive gesture, it doesn't end on a sour note. Samus comes across a Metroid hatchling, and instead of greeting it with hostility, she changes her tone and takes it back to the federation. One would expect a game like this to end in bombast, yet the player gets a moment of quiet relief. The mission was over, there was no need for any more violence or conflict. The galaxy was at peace.
Presumably in an effort to modernize the game and have it fall more in line with other popular titles, the official Metroid II remake manages to sand down nearly all distinct elements of the GameBoy classic and create a game that hardly resembles that which it's trying to replicate. It seems as though every change made in Samus Returns was made to make everything bigger, better, and louder. In place of pitch black dour caves you have brightly lit neon crystal formations, enemies are more aggressive promoting the use of your new parry action to make combat feel more "engaging", the list of changes is pretty massive and it'd be boring to just list them all. Instead, I think it'd be valuable to mention how these changes all fit together. In other words, each step in the remake progress was logical.
Newer games are expected to be bigger so they made the map bigger, and by extension added an actual map to track your progress. The lack of any map in the original is a big sticking point for many, but what makes it work is how you only needed to keep a small chunk of the map in your mind at any time, once you finish an area you can move on and never look back. It created a dizzying feeling while exploring, but the excellent layout and sprite designs guaranteed the player should never be lost for too long. Now that the world is massive, it'd be ridiculous to force the player to track it all in their brain, so the map makes some amount of sense. It just comes at a cost of the rewarding feeling players got by picking apart the world completely on their own.
More pressingly, the huge world greatly effects the thrill of hunting Metroids. In the original, not only could they spring up at any moment, but encounters never felt gamey for lack of a better term. Fights could take place in sand pits, cramped caves, or anywhere for that matter. They never felt like video game combat arenas, so the whole journey felt natural. The heart sinking feeling of finding a Metroid never lost it's spark since you never knew when they'd appear. Naturally, SR opts into a dedicated radar that beeps like a metal detector as you approach a Metroid removing the thrill of discovery, and every fight takes place in one of a handful of deliberately designed sterile arenas.
None of these elements stand up to the scrappy yet elegant design of the original, but the biggest blunder has got to be the overall tone and feel of the game. As I mentioned earlier, hunting Metroids in the original rarely felt fun. It was a nerve-wracking crawl through claustrophobic caves and generally just felt miserable. The remake instead wants the player to feel as cool as posible while shredding this world to pieces. Samus's parry is the most immediate example of this cheap pop of energy, but the series first of Cutscenes That Wrestle Control From The Player to Show You Something Sick Nasty From Samus is the most obnoxious. Walking into an unknown area and having control taken from me is the quickest way to let me know I'm in absolutely no danger, and anything that happens is bound to be awesome. Because nothing screams genocide like Samus backflipping off of an alien as she shoots it to death.
Not even the beautiful ending leaves unscathed, what used to be a calm reflective escape to your ship is now an action packed sprint through every basic enemy in the game's roster followed by the most embarrassing form of fanservice in the game, a brand new final boss against the most iconic villain of the series, Ridley. Of course the game with the most subversive ending had to end with bombast, that's what they always intended for with the classic violence free ending right?
The cherry on top is the baby Metroid itself, once a symbol of hope to strategically shift the tone before the end is now relegated to a key for item collection right after the Queen Metroid encounter, but before the final boss, leading to the most frustrating item cleanup in the series.
I recognize most of this write up has been me whining about why the remake fails when stacked up against the original, and while that may seem sloppy and unfair, it's only natural given the fact that they share a title. Samus Returns was meant to be a cozy return to form for the series, and in many ways it accomplished that goal. It's nice to see a series come back in a familiar setting after lying dormant for a decade, but that's never what the original was meant to be. It was a brand new adventure that didn't have to follow an arbitrary ruleset laid in place by the series legacy, it was an interesting sequel to a groundbreaking title and nothing else. These days people don't look fondly on Return of Samus, so this could have been a perfect opportunity for Mercury Steam to show the world what made the original so special in their own Resident Evil Remake moment. Instead what we got was a safe installment that proudly wears the series on its sleeve, but holds no reverence for the game that bore the title of Metroid II.
Cab
2 years ago