My final thoughts on Super Metroid are a bit complicated because i think up until finding Crocomire this game is peak but from then until ridley’s lair it is a really frustrating experience without a guide because some of the crucial items or pathways are kind of ludicrous to find/figure out. You can even accidentally heavily sequence break by using the wall jump in areas that were meant to be discovered once you get the space jump which led me to explore entire areas just to be hit with a dead end because I did not have the one item I needed to progress, leading me to spend hours backtracking and trying to find the hidden area with the next important item. Especially Maridia is super unfun in this regard. And this is not helped at all by the map which at some point becomes pretty much a grid of squares and have fun trying to figure out which rooms link into which. If you get it wrong have fun backtracking for 15 min to guess again. But then when you reach Ridley’s lair it becomes peak again.

I appreciate this entry a lot but after spending as much time running around in Maridia and Norfair as I did with the rest of the game its hard to give it higher than a 7.5-8.0

Side note: the final boss is fantastic. I was very worried when i saw the exact same layout as mother brain’s fight in zero mission (which is horrid) but it was a very nice subversion.