Metroid: Samus Returns

Metroid: Samus Returns, the 3DS remake of Metroid II: Return of Samus, seeks to reimagine certain elements of the original, but focuses on all the wrong elements: instead of improving the original’s linear structure or doubling down on its foreboding atmosphere, Samus Returns decides to revamp the combat and visuals, making them flashier and more complex. The result is a disappointing game that misses what worked in Metroid II without adding much in return.

The plot is fairly straightforward. Bounty hunter Samus Aran is hired to go to the alien planet SR388 and commit, well, genocide: she’s to kill all Metroids in the planet, ridding the universe of the species.

Killing Metroids is the protagonist’s ultimate goal and it’s something that the player is going to do a lot. They’re the main bosses in the game and there’s more than forty of them: while most areas hide just five of six, some will have more than ten Metroids for you to find and battle against.

In an ironic turn, Metroids are the ones responsible for impacting the game’s structure, turning it away from the main characteristic of the genre that’s named after them. Unlike most Metroidvanias, Samus Returns is a very linear game, with Samus killing all the Metroids of a single area just so she can proceed to the next and kill all Metroids there – rinse and repeat.

There’s basically no exploration in the game. The player will only go back to previous areas to find small upgrades that were hidden behind locks to which they didn’t have the specific key yet. You’re always proceeding forward, from one area to the next to hunt Metroids: you always know where to go and there are very few surprises in store – the game even warns when there’s a Metroid nearby by making its icon flash on the bottom screen, which is a pretty useless addition since there was already a very ominous sign in the environment: there’s always a hatched egg near the location of a Metroid.

The original game was also linear, but it worked because of its eerie atmosphere and claustrophobic environments. There were no flashy icons trivializing the hunt and if the eggs signposted the presence of a Metroid, later on you would find the eggs after killing one of them, which made their appearance a surprise. Now, there’s even a huge device at the start of an area that also tells you how many Metroids there are there, so the player is left with nothing to surprise them besides the eventual transformations that the Metroids undergo.

In Samus Returns there are few to no surprises and the Metroids also lose their threatening aura: killing them becomes not only routine but an easy affair. While in the original, the Metroids were something to be feared, with the player dreading the fights, now they feel like busywork.

The culprit is the “improved” combat, which makes everything easier and most of the time even boring. Now, you have complete control of your aim: by holding the L button Samus is locked in place and you can move her aim 360°, which means you can hit everything on the screen at any given time – if she’s not taking damage herself that is. Enemies, consequently, pose much less of a threat, and they are made even easier with the second addition to the combat: a melee counter.

Samus can now perform a parry, which can be followed up with a powerful shot that singlehandedly dispatches any common enemy, while leaving Metroids open for several missile shots. Since the window to perform a successful parry is ridiculously large, there’s no risk/reward in the mechanic. And since it dispatches most enemies with a single shot, players are actually encouraged to use it all the time with all enemies that use a melee attack – and only a select few don’t. This slows down combat by a considerable notch, making players reactive instead of proactive in fighting the various creatures in SR388.

This also makes fighting them repetitive: since the window to parry is too generous and enemies flash before attacking, players don’t need to study the monsters and understand their attack patterns, but just blindly use the parry as they flash or just come a bit closer – every monster encounter, therefore, is basically the same.

In other words, gone is the feeling of dread that made the original work despite not focusing on exploration.

Talking about exploration, one of the first abilities you acquire in the game is the Aeion power of revealing the map and all the secrets it contains with the press of a button. This is one of the most baffling design decisions present in any Metroid game to date: the game actively works against building any sense of exploration, giving the player the choice to know where everything is from the outset. This makes coming back for the missile expansions and energy tanks feel more like busywork than anything else: you always knew where they were and just have to keep going back for them each time you acquire the necessary “key”. They are the only reason for you to come back and not the added bonus of testing your new equipment in an old area while you try to find a new place to explore there. If this power was found very late in the game it would have been another story – it would have been useful only to search for the remaining upgrades that you missed the first time around. Acquiring it at the beginning, however, just makes exploration nonexistent.

Worse still is that the level design takes this power into consideration and so it’s not too much concerned with signaling to the player which parts of the environment can be bombed or destroyed, assuming that the player already knows that by using the Aeion power: some parts of walls will have something off about them, but not all.

Another Aeion power is a shield that makes Samus literally invincible while her Aeion gauge lasts. This is used to pass through areas that would otherwise heavily damage the protagonist, but when used against common enemies – which drop orbs that refill your gauge – and bosses, it makes combat a cakewalk.

Samus Returns is actually filled with bad design decisions and problems with signposting. There’s a small gap right at the beginning next to your ship, for example, that is the perfect fit for a morph ball. After acquiring it, if Samus returns (I’m not sorry) to that spot, morphs into a ball, and enters the gap, she’ll find that… there’s nothing there and all the backtracking was for nothing. There’s also a special kind of Metroid that you find right near the end that needs to be hit by one specific tool in your arsenal before it can be damaged – this tool, however, will probably be one of the last things the player will try against the Metroid, as it was fairly useless in fights until then and there’s nothing in the creature’s design that says it’s weak against it – making the battle a frustrating experience of trial and error.

There’s another boss – a mining robot, and there’s at least a great build-up to the fight – that has an attack in which it uses a vacuum. Throughout the whole game, the player is taught that vacuums destroy bombs, with several devices spread throughout the areas that suck and nullify them. Guess what the player needs to use against the robot when it is using the vacuum? It’s not only counterintuitive but also arbitrary: why on SR388 do small bombs damage it when vacuumed but not missiles or even super missiles?

Lastly, Samus Returns also falters when it comes to the build-up to the climax. In the original, when Samus gets deeper into the planet, the common enemies start to disappear, making the final area practically empty of them. It’s a fundamental bit of environmental storytelling as it shows the problem regarding the Metroids, which are being exterminated precisely because of their unrestrained capacity of destroying all sorts of life. Here, the final areas are as packed with enemies as all others, which will make the player wonder why the Metroids must be exterminated at all.

For a Nintendo game is also baffling to see that Samus Returns has a lot of style with no substance: form without function. The game, as was the case of Mirror of Fate, makes great use of the 3D effect of the 3DS, with environments that reveal a lot of activity in the background, which the 3D makes feel deeper to create a great sense of scope. The problem is that the things that happen in the background are just for show: you may see strange worms coming in and out of holes, but these worms will never leave the background. They are not foreshadowing of enemies or bosses to come, but just some flavor added to the environment. You may see things breaking down and falling, but it never impacts the actual places Samus visits or hints that things will start to break there. This ends up having the opposite effect of what was intended: as there’s no connection between background and foreground, this “special flavor” reveals its own artificiality, making the environments feel disjointed and fake.

Lacking the backbone of the genre – exploration – and the foreboding atmosphere of the original to make up for it – even the soundtrack is recycled, but more energic and less eerie than it should be – Metroid: Samus Returns is a disappointing remake of the Game Boy original.

January 15, 2021.