It’s been several years since we seen our galactic savior of a bounty hunter Samus Aran in a title of her own. Since Metroid: Other M, the most that the Metroid name has been used was Metroid Prime: Federation Force which was a spin-off that didn’t star the famed hunter or appearances in Smash Bros. Then again, Other M left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths, with many claiming it was a the proverbial stake in the coffin for the franchise, citing the inconsistencies of the Metroid of Samus’s portrayal among all things and her interactions with characters, even Ridley who of course makes an appearance and she completely breaks down for roughly two minutes in front of in a nasty case of PTSD despite at this point in the lore, this will be roughly the fifth time she ended up finding Ridley in some fashion only to promptly blow several holes in him with her arm cannon. Yoshio Sakamoto, longtime producer of the Metroid series, was trying to claim at the time that the Metroid Prime trilogy wasn’t canon and the way that Samus was portrayed in Other M was how he envisioned Samus being. Such statements created such severe backlash within the video game community. I, too, admit that Samus pretty much sounded like a an angsty teenager writing in her diary in secret and the story was nothing to write home about, making the game suffer a nasty case of “skip the story, play the game”, even knowing about the Metroid mangas, which gives the history of Samus and the justification for her disposition, that were released years prior to Other M. With all said though, people were still wanting a good Metroid title, me included.
In 2015, the development studio Mercury Steam, who is of Clyde Barker: Jericho and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow fame came to Nintendo with a proposal. Originally, Mercury Steam was giving a pitch for a remake for the 2002 Game Boy Advance title Metroid Fusion. Nintendo essentially went “No” but since Mercury Steam was interested in the Metroid franchise asked them to instead to take a look at their 1991 Game Boy game Metroid II: Return of Samus. With Mercury Steam on the job and Yoshio Sakamoto taking the backlash of Metroid: Other M to heart, making him re-think his stance when it came to the famed hunter, they got to work on what we would receive as Metroid: Samus Returns. The game was a complete secret to most everyone until the game would be unveiled at the E3 conference in 2017, along side with another welcome surprise, the announcement of Metroid Prime 4.
To be all honest, Metroid II: Return of Samus was a game that I felt was long overdue for a remake for many a reason. Before Metroid: Other M, Metroid II was essentially the black sheep of the entire franchise. The game didn’t have too much going for it other than the fact that you are hunting Metroids and nothing more, further not helped that it couldn’t necessarily capture the “magic” that the original NES Metroid conjured up, like the music, the atmosphere, and any sort of urgency, and that may be because that one could only do so much on a 8-bit mono-chrome Game Boy. The game needed a lot of quality of life improvements, like what Metroid: Zero Mission for the Game Boy Advance did for the original Metroid for the NES. There were those that were willing to take up that mantle of doing just that. Before Metroid: Samus Returns was even announced, many fans over the years have been making their own fan remake of the game boy title, one standout being AM2R (Another Metroid 2 Remake), created by DoctorM64 over the span of a decade. However, shortly after the fan-remake release in the summer of 2016, Nintendo promptly dropped a DMCA takedown on DoctorM64, leaving fans rubbed the wrong way as to why Nintendo would do this beyond just protecting a property that, at the time, Nintendo seemed to have no interest in working on.
As of September of 2017, Nintendo has brought Samus back to the world of SR388 to battle the Metroid threat. Was the game worth the wait and warranted a DMCA takedown of a fan-game? Find out.
Hopefully this will be good…
The Story
The story takes place not long after the events of the original Metroid or Metroid: Zero Mission. The Space Pirates captured many metroids that were left behind on SR:388 by the Chozo race, brought them back to their home planet of Zebes, and started to do various experiments on them to try to bring themselves closer to galactic domination, all under the leadership of the artificial intelligence of Mother Brain. Samus of course heads to Zebes and blows Mother Brain and a good number of Space Pirates straight to hell, along with the metroids they have captured and also in the meantime bred for their uses. The Galactic Federation, realizing the threat that the energy-suckers are, dispatched a crew to SR-388, the Metroid’s homeworld, to commit mass genocide on the Metroid species…which didn’t turn out so hot. Losing their men, the Galactic feds hire Samus to find out the fate of the crew and to eliminate the metroids once and for all.
The story for the most part would remain unchanged from the original game to now. Not many would have known about the crew that you were supposed to find, because back in the original game, that detail is only mentioned in the game’s instruction manual. The story now would be displayed in game with text and artwork to you in slide-show presentation, with all images able to be enhanced by means of the 3DS’s 3D capabilities. The story is simple, bringing you up to speed as to what happened in the game prior and showing why Samus is on SR-388. Nothing really too much to go into on that regard.
Though how a flying energy-sucking jellyfish becomes this b*****d is a story all on its own…
The Gameplay
Okay, now we have a lot to unpack here. At its underlying core, if you ever played a 2D Metroid game like…ever…you basically know what to do here. You navigate the perilous overworld, cavern tunnels, ruins, and so on of SR-388, finding various abilities to help you along your way in navigating, let alone surviving, the planet’s horrors. However, it wouldn’t be a remake without some new perks and concepts along the way.
First thing to note is that Metroid: Samus Returns takes the pages of gameplay from Super Metroid to on forward in the franchise. For instance, in the original game, the various beam weapons that Samus could find had to be interchanged. You couldn’t keep all of them, and for the most part, if you were to progress anywhere, you may as well have kept the Ice Beam and said to hell with everything else because the other beams were useless, especially in the late game. In this game, however, the beam weapons stack a la Super Metroid or Metroid Fusion; ergo no need to back track for any beam weapon. Once you get them they are yours to have for good. No need to interchange them, except for the Ice Beam, which gets a weapon slot all to its own once you find it. For that matter, there are weapons and abilities that weren’t in the original Metroid II game, such as Power Bombs or Super Missiles, which will be needed to progress through the game. For that matter, like any Metroid game, gaining these abilities will give you the excuse you need to backtrack to hunt down other items or missile expansion in prior areas.
Another thing that Samus gets back is courtesy of Other M that you can do from the starting gun is the Melee counter, which is going to be an ability that you cannot shirk off that much, especially in the first part of the game, where you are at your most weak. The Melee Counter can be used most enemies in the game. Just as the name implies, when the enemy attacks, pressing the X button makes Samus smash her arm cannon right into the enemy, knocking them back and leaving them prone for a moment, leaving them wide open to experience the wrath of your arm cannon. Enemies stunned in this method takes more damage than just flat out shooting them.
What did the arm cannon say to the face? SLAP!
Next thing to note that there is a brand new mechanic that is introduced in this game in the form of Aeion abilities, four in all. Three of these four abilities are expies of abilities introduced in prior games in the series. For instance, the Scan Pulse is a similar ability to the Scan Visor of Super Metroid or Metroid Prime fame, revealing a portion of the map to you on your bottom screen and on the top screen where your gameplay is happening can reveal any breakable/hidden blocks to you for only a few seconds. The Phase Drift ability is your replacement to Speed Booster abilities of old. Instead of gaining momentum to go super fast and be able to unleash the destructive “shine-spark” capabilities, you instead slow down time for everything other than you, allowing you to cross collapsible walkways or slow enemies. The Beam Burst works similarly to the Charged Phazon Shot in Prime 3, where your beam cannon goes full on gatling gun when you hold the button, firing at least five times faster than what you can button press on your own which are needed to destroy certain enemies or obstacles. The unique one, the Lightning armor, is something that is supposed to protect you from damage from various hazards to an extent and enhance your melee counter, but it’s generally used as perhaps an emergency health meter. These four abilities are governed by a limited Aeion meter. Every use of the Scan Pulse or taking damage with Lightning Armor on drains the meter. The meter however can be upgraded with pickups in similar fashion to missile and energy tank expansions, and in the meantime you can restore Aeion by finding refill stations that are dotted in various places throughout SR-388 or by defeating enemies.
While its nice having so many things to look for and having many tools at my disposal, I come to find that this is a double-edged sword, not so much for making a game too easy, its just that the abilities are replaced by others. For example, the Ice Beam, which gets a weapon slot all to itself as previously mentioned and can be found very early on in the game, tends to over-rule the need for the Melee Counter for standard enemies. Because, although the Ice Beam gets demoted down to utility status, primarily being used to freeze enemies to make them into platforms, the tried and tested “freeze and shatter” tends to kill enemies just as fast, if not faster, than the melee counter method, and its worse considering when some enemies tend to do things like cloak themselves in electricity so you can’t Melee Counter them without getting hurt yourself. The Beam Burst which can and supposed to lay waste to the most heavily armored standard enemies or obstacles tend to be replaced by Power Bombs, which are easily replenished, in turn the Aeion meter used for that can be dedicated more towards the Scan Pulse or Lightning Armor abilities.
Next thing to note is that nearly every button on your 3DS is put to use: Circle pad to move, Y to shoot, X to do your Melee Counter, B to Jump, and A to turn your Aeion abilities on and off, hold R and shoot fires missiles, the D-Pad switches what Aeion Ability you want to trigger (and yes, you can have multiple ones turned on at the same time). Taking a page from Zero Mission, it uses the L button to fire angled shots. However, unlike Zero Mission, let alone Super Metroid and Fusion, holding L is not going to fire at hard angles. Instead, you have full range of motion, complete 360 degrees, which you can aim with the circle pad and guided by a laser light that will show up on Samus’s arm cannon. When it changes red for instance when trying to aim at an enemy, feel free to fire away. The bottom touch screen also gets some use, namely to switch up what Missile or Beam weapon you are using or to switch into Morph Ball mode by just tapping on the map if tapping Down on the circle pad twice doesn’t suit you.
To me the controls are about as simple as it gets for how much you got control of which is actually a good thing. You have to keep in mind though that if you are going to use the full 360 degree aiming, you are going to be stuck in place to aim so it may very well leave you open.
Beyond that, your second screen is put to full use. Instead of cluttering up your gameplay screen with various HUD displays like your current health, missile count, and so on. It’s all on your bottom screen in large print for you to keep up with. Furthermore, the bottom screen is where your map is located, and given that you have a lot of room on the bottom screen, more of the map is shown instead of a small rough 3 x 3 or 5 x 5 grid (depending on game) that only gives you a small window to your map at the corner of the screen, making the world much more easier to navigate. Accompanying it are three touch buttons that you can quickly press to switch up between your primary beam weapon or your utility based abilities, namely your Ice Beam or the Grapple beam. Holding R to activate your missiles will also give you another couple of touch buttons to switch between what kind of Missiles you want to use. With your information being dedicated to your bottom screen, it leaves the game play of the top screen in full view to see without any clutter, which is actually nice.
As far as the world itself is concerned, the world is divided in nine primary areas. You will only be able to advance to the next area by defeating all the metroids in the area, collecting DNA samples from each of them. Every exit to the area is blocked off by a gigantic lock that will drain purple acidic fluids that impede your path which only unlocks by submitting the Metroid DNA samples to the lock. Each lock essentially tells you how many metroids are in the area that you will need to kill to move on.
Admittedly, the progression is slightly a cop-out to me. Originally, the acidic liquid, or lava, or whatever it was in the original game, while yes, drained down the more metroids you have killed, it was implied that the final boss of the game was responsible for its drainage, by merely moving around and thrashing about in its anger due to you killing the metroids. It was still a bit of a hand-wave if anything, but it made for a rather interesting take of “oh holy crap, how big could this thing be to actually control what this part of the planet does?” Instead, we get monuments that essentially tell you “Kill these many metroids to enter.” Granted, again, this stems from the changes that probably couldn’t be implemented in the original Game Boy game, but at the same time I felt that this could have been done better because at least with the original game, at least the former method didn’t make the game feel linear as what Samus Returns provides.
Look, I still need to kill three more of you so I can get to the next area! Now eat these missiles!
Visuals and Audio
From the moment you land on SR-388 to the moment you finally leave, it’s actually a sight to behold. The one thing that nearly every Metroid tries to accomplish is that sense of isolationism. You vs. the world, in the most part, and the environments do not disappoint. If you were to pay attention to the backgrounds, you see that there is about as much life going on in the back ground as there is on the plane that you walk on; from waterfalls flowing to ruins collapsing from disrepair to movement from creatures that you…might not want to screw around with. If you can, I highly recommend having the 3D on your 3DS up at all times.
What is it that goes bump in the dark…?
The visuals seemed to be pushed to their absolute limits though. I’ve noticed frame drops when crap gets really hectic during gameplay, which is super rare, and every time the cutscene plays when you transition on an elevator, which is a bit more common. I’ve never really seen that in a 3DS game at all, other than lag spikes playing an online 3DS game. Not even Hyrule Warriors: Legends which is a updated port of the Wii U title, which I did call out for having slow down bits, didn’t even do that as far as I could find, and I find it a little weird. Though, admittedly, I’m nitpicking.
With not much audio at all in the original game, anything can very well be an improvement, and sure enough, it was. As far as music goes, having remixed tracks from the original game, as well as remixed scores of tunes from other games in the franchise are actually pretty welcome. That said, though, I will have to admit that there doesn’t seem to be enough original tracks for this game. A lot of them are pulled from various games throughout the franchise, one notable one being the Norfair theme from Super Metroid, or more specifically the Magmoor Caverns from Metroid Prime since that’s the exact remix that it uses every time there’s a heated/lava area you enter into in Metroid: Samus Returns and it gets annoying since there is A LOT OF THEM.
The Side Notes
Well first and foremost, there is SOME replay value to the game. For beating the game, you unlock Hard Mode. You’re going to have play a new game using the same file that you beat the game on, essentially overwriting your original file, but there you have it. Beating it with all 100% items collected nets you a full look at a gallery known as “Chozo Memories” which shows images of the Chozo people before the events of Metroid: Samus Returns leaving a fair bit of ambiguity to the overall lore of the franchise’s universe, essentially giving you or any theory crafter to make their own story as to what is going on. There is another difficulty mode, known as Fusion mode, but true to Nintendo form, that is stuck behind the paywall that is Amiibo. If you so happen to take the plunge, such as I did, the Metroid amiibo for the game will unlock Fusion mode which has Samus in her suit from Metroid Fusion, albeit tweaked some perhaps so they don’t have to overhaul the Samus in game model completely. The good news is that it’s not a complete cop-out like what they have done in Smash Bros. where it’s just merely a color pallet and not the actual suit. Fusion mode itself is a higher difficulty in and of itself, so there’s a few more hours to play the game.
Same world, new suit, more hurt
However, I feel I must note something pertaining to both Hard and Fusion modes. The game is in fact harder, in regards to how much damage you take, where as Hard Mode, you take double damage, and in Fusion mode you take quadruple damage, making Fusion mode in particular a Perfectionist mode because many enemies and bosses can one shot you if you screw up due to the sheer amounts of damage that you take if you aren’t careful. That being said, the enemies, their actions and behaviors, and so on do not change. They don’t even seem to be any more of a damage sponge for that matter. Nothing as far as main game play changes beyond how much you are punished for taking damage which may not be worth going after Fusion mode other than for the increased damage taking and the Fusion suit novelty.
However, the Amiibo has more than one use. Both the Samus amiibo and the Metroid amiibo for this game performs other perks. Using the Metroid Amiibo, you can locate the nearest Metroid near your position on the map in game. The Samus Amiibo in game gives you a reserve Aeion tank which, in the beginning, will fill your gauge back to full, but if you managed to get all expansions, by the end of the game it will only fill about 1/4 of it. Out of game, the Samus Amiibo will net you concept arts and artworks that were used in the original Metroid II: Return of Samus game for the Game Boy.
Apart from all of what was mentioned, there is a big freakin’ white elephant in the room that needs addressed: Samus herself. Because of Metroid: Other M and the backlash that came from it, Sakamoto had to re-think his vision on how the bounty hunter is. Given Samus’s reactions to the various elements that happens throughout the game, Sakamoto actually succeeded. Samus is back to letting her body motions and precise gun firing to do the talking and she’s pretty much as B.A. as what we all remember her as.
Piss off
The Final Say
At the end of the day, Metroid: Samus Returns does what it came to do. It gave the masses the Metroid everyone wanted, although while at its very core it’s still a remake. That said, it was a much needed one. Mercury Steam and producer Yakamoto gave the original game the overhaul that it was long over due for, introducing new mechanics and abilities, all the while giving new things to do in the game other than just hunt Metroids. I kind of hope they can maybe tweak a bit and we can see later in other Metroid installments. However, if they are to do that, I do say they need to be mindful of their audio tracks they use in the game. While I have loved the franchise’s tracks, at least find some good way to rehash it instead of bringing direct rips from other games and yet at the same time, don’t be afraid to create original tracks. The game originally was the next thing to a blank music score to do wonderful works on so why not go nuts? Players shouldn’t have to worry about the controls too much; they are as simple as can be, perhaps nearly to how they were in Super Metroid or Fusion, but they will have to forgive the rare frame drop here and there. Might not even notice it, really, other than in the elevator transitions. For that matter, players who are still feeling burned by Other M are going to have to at the very least make peace because this is actually a good game to not pass up. Yakamoto apparently learned his lesson and he made the statement that he has taken the criticisms to heart and it actually shows in this game. First play through of the game should net you roughly 10-12 hours of game time to get accustomed to the world, mind this isn’t counting any deaths that you might take, but subsequent playthroughs will see time drops. Truth be told, my most recent run, which was the Fusion mode run, I managed to finish in under 7 hours. It will be on the short side, but, it’s still a nice romp through SR-388. Metroid: Samus Returns gets 9 out of 10.
The last Metroid is in captivity…the galaxy is at peace…