Super Metroid (Super Metroid Redux)

[DF]

I came across the Super Metroid Redux hack the other day and I figured that since it's been a while since I've played Super Metroid last, why not give that a whirl? 3h 08m later, I finished the game with 50% item completion. Let it be known that I'm in no way an expert on SM or know its map by heart, but I've gone through the game a few times. Just...it's been a good while so I've forgotten a few things.

What is Super Metroid?

The third game in the Metroid series, and one of the games that really got the Metroidvania genre off the ground and got people to take notice. Though it's a return to the setting of the first Metroid game, everything has been expanded and better-defined...and there's also an automap that really helps with not getting lost.

Taking place immediately after the end of Metroid II: Return of Samus, Samus Aran takes the Metroid Hatchling to a research center to study. After she leaves, the research center comes under attack by Space Pirate forces who steal the Hatchling! Go to the pirate's base on Zebes and kick their asses again and get the Hatchling back!

What is Super Metroid Redux?

It's a ROMhack that changes a few elements of the game but keeps the content mostly the same as the vanilla game. Some changes include being able to see the item percentage and gameplay time on the Samus screen, having run being an automatic function instead of having a dedicated button ala the GBA games, removing the item pickup fanfare from small items like Missile Tanks (and you can skip the textbox too!), faster elevators and door sequences, and even the Metroid Prime feature of the Charge Beam drawing in pickups is present here! As opposed to hacks that greatly change the game, Redux pretty much is full of quality-of-life improvements on top of changing the controls to resemble the GBA games. There are some extra patches like making the physics heavier-feeling or having save stations restore energy/ammo included too. Here's the link to the hack on RHDN.[www.romhacking.net]

Gameplay

This is a 2D platformer where you explore the various regions on the Planet Zebes as you search for the kidnapped Metroid Hatchling and blast everything in your way. As with most Metroidvanias, exploration is the key as you try to find items to grant you new abilities to access different areas. For example, once you land on Zebes proper, you're forced onto a set path to the Morph Ball, which allows you to enter very narrow passages. You can find some Missiles nearby and these allow you to open red-colored doors, and once you go back up the elevator, you can eventually discover a passageway you can roll down where you fight the first boss and can grab Bombs that allow you to destroy certain walls, further opening up the game.

You have a simple beam cannon to defend yourself at first, and you can aim in eight directions (with straight down allowed when you're jumping). This has infinite ammo, so don't fret about wasting shots on the critters you find. There are upgrades for the beam cannon in the world, with the Ice Beam freezing enemies solid to make temporary platforms, or the Spazer Beam that greatly widens your shot, and most of these beam upgrades stack with one another. When you get the Missile Launcher, you can fire those instead, and those do have an ammo count. Good thing critters carry spares on them! When you're low on health or ammo, destroying enemies usually has them leave behind pickups to get you back to full power. You slowly find new abilities in the world, mostly after killing some kind of boss, though some things like the High Jump Boots or Charge Beam are unguarded. The game is partitioned in many 'rooms' either one screen big or many screens tall and wide, and you open doors with your weapons to get through to the next, or you ride elevators into another area, or so on. There are no teleporters or other modes of fast-travel, but things like Speed Booster and Space Jump can kind of speed up your travel times.

You don't have to get all of the items to advance through the game, and the game is open-ended enough that you can even skip major upgrades and still finish the game. The developers have a general path for you to take through the game, but there's enough leeway that you can get items out of order ('sequence breaking') either through player skill or with glitches. There's still a hook for completionists with the collection rate, and being able to do it quickly is another badge of honor. Nothing is ever actually out of reach...just you gotta figure out how to get there first, and you may need some item too.

Though it shares the genre with the later Castlevania games, there's no RPG gameplay here. There's no EXP system for leveling up, and instead of finding or buying equipment, you just come across permanent upgrades instead. There's also no RNG drops with respect to gear or upgrades like Souls/special abilities/etc..

]How I Played

I didn't use a guide and just went off of my vague memories and whatever intuition I had on hand. I ended up missing the Wave Beam, the X-Ray Scope, and the Grappling Beam. I knew about walljumping and Shinespark and that's mostly how I was able to get through Maridia to Wrecked Ship without Grappling, and that was actually kind of fun to try out for a change. I ended up playing with the Charge Beam off and I found rapid-fire beams to do better on enemies than waiting for Charge Beam to power up, mostly because it didn't seem to charge during somersaults. I mostly didn't use Missiles or Super Missiles except on bosses, but I used Power Bombs in plenty of places that seemed suspicious, as one of the features of Redux has tiles that need a specific weapon be revealed with Power Bombs ala the GBA games, so you can see if you're using the wrong thing instead of trying everything and getting nowhere. I had just started the second row of Energy Tanks, and I think I had all of 105 Missiles, 20 Super Missiles, and 25 Power Bombs at my disposal. No Reserve Tanks either.

Controls

By default, the game has fire on X, jump on A, run on B, and Cancel Item on X. L and R aim down and up at a 45-degree angle, Start pauses and you can swap between the map screen and Samus' status here. Select button selects Missiles, Super Missiles, Power Bombs, Grappling Beam, and X-Ray Scope. With Redux, fire and jump stay on their buttons, Walk or Run is now on B, and Y is the dedicated X-Ray Scope button. R aims upward at 45 degrees, but if you aim straight up or downward, you'll stay aimed that direction while you hold R. L is now 'Brandish Item' that allows use of Missiles when held. So now, you'd hold L to ready Missiles and hit X to fire instead of using Select. The controls were changed around to make Super play a little like Fusion and Zero Mission on the GBA, as there were fewer buttons on the system. You're able to freely rebind the buttons in the options menu before you begin play proper, too.

I changed the controls so Y was fire, B jump, walk/run on A, and X-Ray on X...though I never got to use it.

Difficulty

Overall, I felt the game was kind of on the easy side, but I've been through it several times already so I knew what to expect. The only times I died were Phantoon (I wasn't exactly prepared), the kung-fu brothers in lower Norfair (two deaths), and Ridley got me three times. I had zero trouble with Kraid and I took on Draygon the intended way given I didn't have Grappling Beam. I think the most difficulty I had otherwise was just being stubborn and trying to walljump through areas I wasn't supposed to be in yet.

There are some areas with refill stations (or you can just use the patch to let save stations fully restore you), but there are also some areas where enemies constantly respawn and give health/ammo pickups. Just keep blasting the enemies and you'll be back to full power in a few minutes!

There is a Hard difficulty in Redux, but I don't know what that does. I expect a simple stats bump for the enemy forces. You can also enable/disable auto-run here.

Saving

There are three save files. There are save rooms scattered throughout each region that you can enter and save. If you die, continuing will just bring you back to the last save point you used, but everything you did after you last accessed it will be undone.

Graphics

Being a Super Nintendo game, everything's done up in pixels, though there's some nice zooming effects like when Ridley flies into the screen at the start of the game or when Samus' ship escapes exploding Ceres Station. You spend a majority of the game underground and the areas are pretty well-detailed and lit despite that, though there are still some dark rooms, like the ones with the fireflies that further dim the room as you kill them. Major bosses are typically very big sprites, with Kraid being around two screens tall. Most regions have two 'tilesets', such as Crateria having both the outdoor area that's initially rainy and having the caverns just under the surface, or Brinstar having not only blue caverns, but overgrown regions and a partially-flooded area with red stone work, as well as a few rooms that are pink with petal-like things snowing down in the background. Because of the room system, you'll often enter another 'biome' with zero warning. This can be a problem in areas like Norfair before the Varia Suit, as you're given no warning the room behind a door is superheated until you enter and start rapidly losing health.

The HUD takes up a small portion of the upper screen, so you're always playing with a black bar on the top. You have your Energy readout with pink squares indicating full Energy Tanks, or gray squares for empty, as well as big Missile icons and numbers below it for your Missile Launcher, as well as icons for the Super Missiles, Power Bombs, Grappling Beam, and X-Ray Scope. The minimap shows a rough 3x5 set of rooms with you in the center where possible, with map-accessed rooms in blue and rooms you've been in shown with pink, though hidden rooms naturally will not show up here until you've been in them. There's also a feature where items in rooms show up as as dot on the minimap. On the big map, the Redux hack expands how much information is shown, with doors between rooms now showing their original color, and one-way doorways are indicated with indentations in solid walls. Rooms with collected items show a dot in the middle, while uncollected items are a big circle.

Redux also adds a fully-colored Samus sprite on the Samus status screen as opposed to the wireframe in the original game, and this still will show some upgrades activate on its sprite.

Audio

There are two voice lines at the very start of the game, but the rest of the game is just text, music, and sound effects. Each region typically has two themes, though Wrecked Ship's is just a slight variation of what you heard the first time through. There are two boss themes, one miniboss theme, and one final boss theme. I honestly didn't dislike any bit of music, though some of the more ambient tracks like upper Norfair or Wrecked Ship didn't really catch on. There's a low-health alarm when you're at around 30 health, and this can get annoying if there's nothing to kill and hope for a health pickup.

Stability

I didn't run into any bugs or any issues during my play. I only noticed a graphical glitch with the hack's new Screw Attack animation when doing a walljump to the left, but that was just a graphics issue that stopped as soon as you exited the somersault.

Replay Value

The game can be pretty short, but if you're the type to chase high scores, then you can get a plenty more hours out of this than the one-and-done. What kind of challenge do you want to knock out? 100% items? Lowest clear time? 100% and lowest clear time? Lowest clear percentage? Reverse boss order?

What Worked For Me

I think the relative shortness of the game worked in its favor. Though the game world is pretty big for a platformer, it's also not filled with a bunch of fluff or I guess, a bunch of things meant to slow you down and delay you. It can be kind of frustrating to get lost and not know where the game expects you to go next, but I didn't slam into this as hard as I did Castlevania Harmony of Dissonance. It's a hell of a lot more straightforward than HoD.

I really liked the music. As mentioned in the Audio section above, only a few songs weren't really catchy, but Super Metroid's soundtrack is part of my ever-growing playlist, and deservedly so.

I like having ranged weapons when exploring in a game like this. Comparing it to the Castlevania Metroidvanias, those almost always have you using melee weapons with limited ranged options. Here, you can blast away with impunity. Even if the game is still kind of cramped compared to Castlevania, given aspect ratios and sprite sizes.

What I Didn't Like

The kung-fu brothers in Lower Norfair right before Ridley. You have two Space Pirates that are immune to pretty much everything you throw at them, and you have to bait them into using their dive kick which turns them gold for a couple of seconds, making them vulnerable to damage. Trying to trigger the dive kick while they slowly plunked my health down was beyond annoying and was a serious momentum killer. Bosses made sense--find the weak point and then focus your firepower into it. If the boss didn't immediately show it, you could just wait for them to become vulnerable and carry on. With them, it didn't seem like waiting was good enough...granted I was also trying to keep my ass alive at the same time.

Verdict - 5/5

It's a great game and one of the defining pillars of an entire genre. Exploring the vast underground of the planet and shooting everything in your way is fine, but the hook of slowly growing in power as you explore and take out major targets is pretty engaging too. And trying to figure out where the game wants you to go. The Redux hack doesn't really mess with anything vital and its changes trend towards addressing some annoyances (the long item fanfare for even minor items for one) as opposed to adding new content or the like. You could apply it to your game and start that and be fine enough for a first-time playthrough since it doesn't make the game harder or anything like that. Just maybe with having to hold a button to use Missiles and aim and move can be a little busy, and I've seen one review state that playing this on a keyboard is impossible because of ghosting (only registering so many keys simultaneously).