Metroid II: Return of Samus

In the era of Metroidvanias before Super Metroid, a dense world would still take the form of traditional single-directional platformer levels, just interconnected with ability-driven progression. Metroid II looks much the same as you descend down into SR388, wading through pitch-black caverns on your mission to eradicate every remaining Metroid on the planet. At most you’ll walk over a bridge or slide through a gap in the floor, but nothing lets you know the game’s true scope until you obtain the Spider Ball. With Samus now able to roll up walls, the player can start crawling up the outside of the ruins where they obtained the upgrade, revealing a far more vast, coherent structure than the truncated view from the entrance allowed. Probing in the ceiling and the high walls reveals new entrances, with new rooms segregated from the main halls and tunnels through rooms you’ve been through before. The NES forerunners of the Metroidvania pushed up against that system’s rigid scrolling system and tight screen buffer, whereas R&D1 squeezes a much more formidable world out of the Game Boy’s more sophisticated renderer.

This scope thankfully lies in a happy medium between impressive room sizes but small individual areas, especially as the game has no built-in map. One central vein connects each of the major ruins together, and once every Metroid has been cleared in a particular area, lava drains in the center to let you progress to the next area, with no inter-area backtracking required. It works great in this minimal handheld format, although it definitely results from technical hurdles; before even an hour is up most players will experience their first instances of déjà vu as they wander into a copy-pasted room, many of which reoccur nearly once per area. Even with the navigational troubles this might lead to, the game thankfully skirts around most of them by making many of the unlockables purely optional. The beams are interchangeable and never gate progression, Samus starts with missiles, and the Varia Suit doesn’t enable lava traversal (lest it break the game’s main loop). Besides finding each of the Metroids, which can get dicey but are usually signposted by their molted larval form discarded nearby, the player can waltz through at their own pace without the constant scouring for secrets.

To signify a Metroid nearby, their discarded shells post-molting lay nearby. It strikes the perfect balance between indicating where your targets are without directly telling you their distance or location. In some instances you’ll walk into an area only to see a Metroid in the process of molting with no warning at all. [src]

The latter half of the game winds down in a strange way, dialing back on the non-linearity as the upgrades slow to a trickle. Branching paths begin feeling less like invitations to new parts of the world and more like mandatory dead ends for Metroids to hide out. This especially becomes apparent in the final ruins, which complement the repetitive obstacle repetition with an interior that purely exists for Samus to save and select a beam from one of four parallel Chozo Statue rooms at her convenience, sullying the organic construction of the rest of the world. Thankfully, at the same time the designers begin throwing more curveballs with the Metroid fights themselves, which up to the midpoint rarely last longer than 10 seconds and often take place in open space. Metroids now are quicker and shoot projectiles, and they hide in sand or above narrow platforms with voids underneath them. As the player has ample movement potential thanks to the space jump by this point, the designers at least tried to diversify the combat segments with hostile platforming to keep the loop from getting stale.

Although I generally avoid using my crit as a response to others, I’m going to gently push back on the modern critical read on this game’s treatment of genocide. To be clear: the depiction of genocide here is objective, with the player having the explicit goal of exterminating the entire Metroid species. Yet the world they reside in is oh so particular in how it aids you, from controlling your access to each area based on how many Metroids you’ve killed to giving you a final ice beam powerup at the end to finish off the final larvae. It’s a depiction of genocide, but whatever depiction of life it has fades away as the world reverts from a place with history to segmented hallways with choreographed, escalating boss battles. A refusal to ask questions about the nature of your actions, the autonomy of the Metroids, the construction of the planet, etc. would be a stance on its own, but Metroid II never lets the question cross its mind, with a cheery callousness that one could, at best, justify only on its vulgar juxtaposition against the evil Samus commits. And do we really gain an understanding of the fluid and contradictory concept of genocide from pointing at this juxtaposition, this gamification, especially as genocide continues unabated under our nose? Or do we point at it to remind ourselves merely that it’s wrong?