The difficulty curve seems almost inverted. During the first few areas, fights were difficult, and I regularly died due to how much health you can lose per hit. Now, in Area 5, I have the space jump, screw attack, plasma beam, and gravity suit, and I’m feeling practically invincible. Also, it seems like I have all of the upgrades save one, so what is going to fill the remainder of the game? Well, at least I’ll be able to collect items hidden along the way now rather than marking them for later!

There are these awesome giant slugs moving through the backgrounds of Area 6’s putrid graveyard, and I just know that I’ll never have anything to do with one beyond admiring it like a captive in a zoo. I’ve seen a lot of critters throughout the game, from big worms tunneling through rock to dragon-like creatures drinking and swimming in cave pools, and none of them ever shows up in the foreground as an enemy or interacts with the play space in any way. It’s a big missed opportunity.

Good discordant suspense music in Area 6, and I like that the mid-Area seal lowers the hazardous liquid on one side but raises it on the other, allowing access to half the region at a time. Actually, it’s even better than that; after completing the left side, you can only move to the right, but rather than just taking you to a new half of the level your path leads to the end point of the part you had already completed, forming a circle and leaving you wondering what has changed back on the left. This is a really unexpected structure! To rephrase: the liquid lowers on one side and rises on the other, so you move up and around and reenter the area from the end of your progress with it. Then there’s a new Metroid—your first omega, in fact. This area’s structure does a brilliant job of capitalizing on the game’s premise of hunting down metroids simply by taking advantage of the fact that they are living creatures and should be able to appear in places you’ve already investigated. When the state of the liquid changes, the game secretly placed a new Metroid in that room, and since the only place you can go is back through the loop from the other side you can’t miss it. And both seals only require a single metroid each, contributing to the symmetry. I honestly love it. I checked, and this is broadly based on the same part of Return of Samus, with two metroids in the same place but at different times, but it wasn't as pleasing because there was nothing to force your approach to one side of the loop; you just went back up because there was nowhere else to go. This is a real improvement and a very appealing bit of level design. Area 6: very nicely done!

And then to top it off Area 6 pits you against that mining robot at long last. I know that some people hate boss fights that involve a lot of dodging and waiting for a weak point to be exposed, but I thought it was all right. It took me 4 tries, and I was starting to get frustrated towards the end from having to sit through the early attacks again. That's definitely the danger of using this pattern-evasion style of boss; if it had gone on for many more attempts for me, I probably would have hated it. It helped a lot when I eventually realized I could use the Aeion slow-down ability to dodge an attack during the final phase that seemed impossible. And I was confused about how to hurt it at the very end, but I figured it out based on the importance of the morph ball throughout the fight (which is refreshing, by the way). So, yeah, I liked it.

Area 7 is fine. The computer displays and broken vats communicate the idea that this is where the Chozo engineered the metroids, and the music is an appropriately techno thing. More omega fights, which are fairly satisfying but could have used more variation since you're fighting three of them in a row. Otherwise an unremarkable area that’s a bit one-note but at least doesn’t drag on for too long.

Here is where I start getting properly angry at this remake. In Area 8, there is only one metroid left, and the game needs to create space for you to feel the weight of your nearly complete task. The area around the metroids’ lair should be devoid of life, implying that they have consumed every living thing in the vicinity. Samus should have a quiet, creepy, grim final approach to the queen. So why am I killing a bunch of these stupid bats and solving a dozen dumb missile tank puzzles? Stop trying so hard to give me gameplay content all the time and recognize that there are other modes of expression available to you!

The larval metroids are fine. The fight with the queen is fine, if a little stiff and mechanical, like the mining bot. The way you use the spider ball to hold your ground when she’s trying to push you into flames is cool. I feel like it was a bit anticlimactic, but partly that might be because I knew to try going inside her with the morph ball (and that was well done)… and partly it might be because she’s not the game’s true climax. Because there’s more. Which is terrible.

After finding the hatchling, instead of a peaceful, contemplative climb out of the bowels of SR388, there are—somehow!—yet more enemies to kill. More missile tanks to collect. And then, when we get up to the surface, we have another track ripped from Super Metroid: the desolate Crateria theme.

Then: Ridley. Of course, Ridley. Can’t have a single game in the series exist without Ridley, can we? The fight is a little repetitious. Anyway, who cares; it shouldn’t exist. Again, I understand the ambition. It’s even a fun idea to do this, to have Ridley show up at the very end to try to take the hatchling from Samus. But it’s a childish goal. It’s utterly destructive to what the original game accomplished, which was remarkable in foregoing a timed escape sequence or another boss fight—or any more fights at all—and instead just giving you peace. This is far, far less under the guise of more.

The fact that Samus Returns expects you to take the hatchling on a joy ride to every Area to clear crystals for you like a glorified power-up so you can find more damned missile tanks is just unforgivable. I knew this was coming; those crystals blocking so many of the collectibles along the way were exactly what I thought they were. I get the ambition here, but just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should, and this absolute excess of videogame—in place of what should be a gentle, uplifting epilogue that relents and puts an end to all the killing—is the epitome of missing the point. MercurySteam, for the most part, built a competent, enjoyable Metroid game—albeit one with some lazy, safe elements, a lack of atmosphere, and unresolved structural contradictions—but in the end they do not understand Metroid 2 at all. Samus Returns is a decent game but a poor remake. Someone reading this will object: "It's not meant to be a remake; it's a reimagining!" I don't care. It could have done its reimagined ending with so much more artistry, but instead it destroyed what Return of Samus accomplished 26 years earlier with far weaker technology. It's not just the ending, anyway; the whole thing is stuck in one mode, content to be blatantly gamey, from the obvious missile tank puzzles that are barely integrated into the world to the weaker environmental storytelling, missing well-calibrated tone, and hammy narrative beats in comparison to the original. It's the clichéd bombastic, flashy Hollywood remake that fails to comprehend the subtlety of its antecedent. It's entertaining enough, but it's shit art.