Atmospheric masterpiece which contrary to popular belief, isn't rivaled by the Donkey Kong Country series. The exposition test with a close-up of Samus is one of the most iconic still frames to not be a title screen.
There's next to no exposition throughout the rest of the game, actually, yet there's storytelling all around. In a small room you meet the Mocktroids, the first failed attempts at cloning Metroids, there's the remaining non-hostile wildlife teaches you how to use abilities such as the Shinespark, and the wrecked ship which hints at ill-fated previous attempts by humanity to make contact with Zebes. Already hours into your adventure and the planet's hostility is still making itself clearer.
Super Metroid also becomes rewarding on subsequent playthroughs, since you're easily capable of sequence breaking once you know where you need to go to make essential progress. Developers deliberately added the wall jump feature, which shows they were accepting of players circumventing the game's structure to play their own way, and this trust adds another layer of maturity to the vibe of the game, one that goes beyond any lonely paranoia or horror aesthetics.
Still, there are aspects later games would improve on. Fusion improves the control scheme, and a greater portion of its bosses feel impossible to cheese your way through. Here, you can sort of get through some fights without quite figuring out what you're doing by the end. Metroid Prime, due to its first person POV (already hard to deny as an improvement), has fairer enemy placements, plus also more interesting boss encounters. But what the series has never reached again is a level of detail and cohesiveness that filled Super Metroid to the brim with memorable ideas and moments of rewarding pause. Everything comes together here, and the more I play this, the more every indie Metroidvania success story of the modern day feels utterly lacking in anything besides spritework and polish.
There's next to no exposition throughout the rest of the game, actually, yet there's storytelling all around. In a small room you meet the Mocktroids, the first failed attempts at cloning Metroids, there's the remaining non-hostile wildlife teaches you how to use abilities such as the Shinespark, and the wrecked ship which hints at ill-fated previous attempts by humanity to make contact with Zebes. Already hours into your adventure and the planet's hostility is still making itself clearer.
Super Metroid also becomes rewarding on subsequent playthroughs, since you're easily capable of sequence breaking once you know where you need to go to make essential progress. Developers deliberately added the wall jump feature, which shows they were accepting of players circumventing the game's structure to play their own way, and this trust adds another layer of maturity to the vibe of the game, one that goes beyond any lonely paranoia or horror aesthetics.
Still, there are aspects later games would improve on. Fusion improves the control scheme, and a greater portion of its bosses feel impossible to cheese your way through. Here, you can sort of get through some fights without quite figuring out what you're doing by the end. Metroid Prime, due to its first person POV (already hard to deny as an improvement), has fairer enemy placements, plus also more interesting boss encounters. But what the series has never reached again is a level of detail and cohesiveness that filled Super Metroid to the brim with memorable ideas and moments of rewarding pause. Everything comes together here, and the more I play this, the more every indie Metroidvania success story of the modern day feels utterly lacking in anything besides spritework and polish.