Because timeliness is for chumps

I recently finished playing Mass Effect 3 and have been playing Kid Icarus: Uprising (which is pretty excellent) off and on for the last week or so.

So let's talk about Metroid instead.

When I first played this game, probably somewhere around 1990, I hated it. It was New Year's Eve, and my parents were visiting friends they knew through my father's amateur pool team (I think). These friends had a son, but I don't recall what he was doing at the time. Eventually, I got plopped down in front of the Nintendo, and there were only four games there to play: Super Mario Bros. (which I had played to death by this point and no longer had any practical interest in), Ninja Gaiden II and Wizards and Warriors (both of which were kicking my ass so much they ceased to be fun), and Metroid (which was goddamned inscrutable at the time). Now, I didn't really hate Metroid on its own merits (or perceived lack thereof) so much as I did because the game seemed to hate me pretty thoroughly. Hating it right on back seemed like the only reasonable response.

Hate or not, though, I was intrigued. I liked the dark, lonely atmosphere of the game, the weird and never-explained visuals of monsters seeming to flow out of the stone, the odd bits of sculpture and statues made and left by God-knows-who. The feeling of isolation and abandonment, the mounting danger, all of it hinting at a mystery that will never really even be addressed, let alone solved... How could I not love that?

Part of this effect is achieved by the graphics. The visuals of the original Metroid are very minimalist. Aside from the foreground, the enemies and the player character Samus Aran, there is nothing else but the darkness of the empty screen, reinforcing the subterranean nature of the environment. The enemies (aside from bosses) aren't even enemies in the typical sense. They're just the natural wildlife for the most part. Usually they only respond to you because they see you as a threat, something armed and dangerous and in their territory, and many of them don't even do anything to acknowledge you. So it's just you, and the creatures, and the long, labyrinthine dark. And the ambiance, which is cribbed pretty explicitly from Aliens (they named one of the series major villains Ridley for God's sake!).

The story begins and ends, for the most part, in the manual. The time is somewhere in the unspecified future. The Galactic Federation has discovered, on planet SR388, a life form they have named metroid. Metroids can be kept in suspended animation more or less indefinitely, but when awake they take the form of what appears to be a large airborne jellyfish-like creature, with talons instead of tentacles, and they are capable of draining the life essence out of organic creatures. This last attribute makes them especially intriguing to the Space Pirates. Led by the Mother Brain (an actual brain, of sorts, in a jar), the Space Pirates steal metroid samples and flee to their base on the planet Zebes. There, they plan to breed an army of the creatures. Attempts to stop the Space Pirates in force having failed, the Galactic Federation sends in a lone agent, the cyborg bounty hunter Samus Aran. Clad from head to toe in a high-tech armored suit, the true identity and origin of this mysterious bounty hunter is completely unknown. However, Samus has a record of succeeding against incredible odds, making her the perfect agent to infiltrate Zebes, eliminate the metroid threat, and stop the Space Pirates at all costs.

While it's common knowledge now, in the first game it came as a major surprise to learn that Samus is a woman. Subsequent games have made this known up front, but the manual for the original game was at some pains to conceal this, avoiding pronouns in many places, and explicitly referring to Samus as “he” in certain places.

The rest of the story, such as it is, is reflected in the events of the game itself. While this is true with most any game you play today, there is usually a sharp disconnect between narrative and gameplay, to the extent that the two elements, though both part of the game overall, are almost completely unrelated to one another. The gameplay sections are mostly how we get from one plot development to the next, and the narrative bits (most often presented in the form of cutscenes) mostly have very little impact on the gameplay, aside from telling us why and how we are going from one place to the next. Metroid, especially later in the series, was exceptionally skilled at welding narrative and gameplay together so that the two are effectively the same. The use of atmosphere and subtle contextual clues combine to inform your sense of the situation. The game hints at what is happening, or what may have happened, and allows you to make the conclusions for yourself. The way it lays out its challenges and heightens the tension (and provides catharsis) in various moments is a narrative mechanism all its own, and is unique to the medium of video gaming.

And while there is a considerable body of lore surrounding Samus, the Space Pirates, the technologically advanced race of bird-like Chozo who gifted Samus with her power suit, the Galactic Federation and other entitites within the story, very, very little of that was in place for this first game in the series. Even with all of this lore, though, the true strength of Metroid both as a game and as a larger franchise has never primarily been in its story, but rather in its atmosphere and its gameplay. Very little of what passes for plot is handled through traditional, passively experienced narrative. The way the story unfolds is subtle because you are creating it as you go, in a way few games allow. Metroid as a series (in particular, Super Metroid, which is probably the best example of just about everything the series stands for and has to offer) is likely the most comprehensive example of that tired-but-true storytelling axiom “show, don't tell” that you will ever experience.

This subtlety extends to the ways in which the game instructs you on how to play, also. Where most side-scrolling platform jumping games in Metroid's day had you moving in a single direction – usually left to right, but always very obvious regardless – Metroid gave you its whole game world to explore right from the start. It even tried to teach this early on; attempts to go running off to the right, per the norm for these sorts of games, were quickly stymied by way of a narrow tunnel inaccessible to the player at first. The solution required backtracking to the left, beyond the initial point of entry, to find an item that would allow you to navigate the tunnel. This was meant to also indicate that such back-and-forth exploration would be the norm for the rest of the game.

Sadly, on that evening which is now more than two thirds of my life ago, I just didn't get it. The concept of such an aggressively non-linear game simply did not sink in. The world was divided into different themed areas, and damned if I was going to go to one area before I had properly cleared the previous one. It got so bad that, when I finally was given a copy of the game, I had to use a now well-known cheat code to start the game off with either most or all of the upgrades available so I could explore the game's world and reverse-engineer a path from start to finish. It didn't click just how much backtracking was necessary.

It's not that Metroid was hostile to new players. It was a rather pioneering game, in all honesty, and the methods at its disposal for teaching you how to think in order to succeed were a bit oblique. In fairness, this is by necessity. The technology was (mercifully) not available to give players the sort of in-depth tutorials games today are prone to. There may be an element of overall unevenness to the game design purely because of its newness, not just as a franchise but as a concept. When you are the first person ever to do a thing, you rarely ever do it well. The sequels to Metroid refined its principles and its formula, however – Super Metroid, the third game in the series, is a virtuoso piece of entertainment any way you look at it; I literally cannot think of a way the game might be improved – but the first installment was a diamond in the rough. It was an amazing concept for its time, but what it did, effectively, was throw you into the deep end of a pool and say to you: “Swim, or drown!”

Friends, I did not swim. I did not swim.

Of course, the other problem I had with the original Metroid was the lack of a map. This, coupled with how copy-and-paste the environments can get, led to a lot of confusion on my part until I had a better feel for the game world. The trouble I had figuring out where I was at any given moment was only compounded by the trouble I had figuring out which of the virtually identical vertical shafts I had used to get there in the first place. I don't know, maybe I just have poor spatial awareness.

All of these problems were most of the reason I was so excited when Metroid: Zero Mission was announced for release in American back in February of 2004. Normally, I'm somewhat leery of remakes. The more I like the original game, the leerier I get about the remake. It's simple really: I like the original product for specific reasons, and a remake is going to feel obligated to change something about the game. The more I like a game, the more things in that game I like, the greater the probability that things I like are things that will be changed, etc.

With Metroid, I liked the original material in spite of what felt like some serious flaws in the original product. That the stated goal of Zero Mission seemed to be to make a version of the original Metroid that was more like the incomparable Super Metroid* (itself a refined take on the concepts present in the original and the oft-forgotten Metroid II) pretty much voided my concerns right up front.

I was not disappointed. Zero Mission stays faithful to the overall feel and layout of the original Metroid, while adding many of the newer styles of upgrades and abilities presented in later games in order to modernize it in more than just the graphical sense. New mini-bosses have been added, and the look of the game has been heavily upgraded. Yet there is still that feel of minimalism to the backgrounds. Said backgrounds are more detailed, of course, than anything seen in the original, but there is as much implied as shown in most of them. The exception, of course, is those sections which take place outdoors (there are added outdoor environments in this version of the game, now). In addition, there was a surprisingly extensive epilogue section taking place after the point at which the original game ended.

Interestingly, there was a Gameboy Advance cartridge available around this same time that was simply a port of the original Metroid. No fancy bells and whistles, just regular, 8-bit vintage Metroid, sold as a standalone cartridge. Then there was Metroid: Zero Mission, which also included the original game on the cartridge as a bonus. There was nothing required to unlock the original, no special hoops to jump through; it was right there in the options menu. Somehow, inexplicably, the port of the original Metroid outsold Zero Mission (which, again, included the original Metroid as a bonus).

But as with most remakes, Zero Mission was not a unanimous favorite within its fanbase. Some disliked the epilogue, either because they took issue with the switch in gameplay (going from an action-adventure platforming game to a stealth game), or because it screwed with canonical elements of the story as established in the sequels. And I can understand these gripes, even if I personally was quite satisfied.

Another part of the dissatisfaction with Zero Mission is the absence of sequence-breaking.

Now, sequence-breaking in the original Metroid – that is, performing tasks and completing challenges out of the order the game's creators intended (implied based on the most “logical” sequence of upgrade acquisition) – was performed either by cleverly exploiting game physics to access parts of the game the player was not meant to reach at that time or in that way, or cleverly exploiting glitches and game bugs to access parts of the game that the player was never meant to reach, period. Later games featured sequence-breaking as well, but usually this was more a result of the former type of exploitation; the latter type tended to be ruled out by superior programming and coding, and the comparative absence of bugs and glitches associated with it.

Zero Mission largely does away with this sequence-breaking, as have many of the latter-day games in the series (the first, most aggressive and most loudly decried offender in this category probably being Metroid Fusion on the Gameboy Advance). There are a few places where it's possible, but it feels a lot more strongly telegraphed to the player, or else far more minor in nature. Of course, Zero Mission takes a page out of its precursor Metroid Fusion's book by including guides that appear on your map to tell you where your next goal is located. Thankfully, the guides can be turned off, though the map of course remains.

All told, Metroid is probably one of my favorite franchises. I rarely manage to finish the games I buy, but I have made my way through all but Metroid II (never played it, though I am very much looking forward to the fan remake), Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime II: Echoes (largely unfinished due to simple lack of time as much as anything else), Metroid Prime: Hunters (because seriously, that game is a fucking abomination) and Metroid Prime Pinball (because, uh... I'm not a huge pinball fan, I suppose). If that doesn't speak for the quality of these games, I don't know what does.

*In case it isn't clear by now, I like Super Metroid more than just a bit. This probably has something to do with the minor fact that Super Metroid is absolutely awesome by any objective measurement you care to apply.