Welcome to part five of “Metroid and Me,” where we find ourselves firmly in the back half of this seven part blog series. This is a lengthy, introspective look at why the Metroid franchise has resonated so strongly with me, and I highly recommend newcomers follow the links below to get caught up on previous parts in the series; there’s an intentional structure here that’s best digested in order. So far I’ve primarily talked about the many virtues of Metroid’s wonderful worlds, and why I love exploring them so much. Today it’s time to break away from those worlds to examine Metroid’s broader gameplay design. Unfortunately, I don’t have a more succinct way of describing it than that. Today’s entry discusses a collection of design ideas that come together to define the pacing and flow of a Metroid game, your moment to moment actions in them, and why it all clicks for me so well. “Gameplay” is one of the more nebulous terms we have in video games, but hopefully by the end of this part you’ll have a better idea of what it means in regards to my affection for Metroid.
| Remix Title: In Your Prime | Original Song: Brinstar - Red Soil Wetland Area (Super Metroid, 1994, SNES) |
| Remixer(s): Big Giant Circles | Original Composer(s): Kenji Yamamoto and Minako Hamano |
In Your Prime
You enter a cylindrical room, and notice a series of platforms spiraling upwards. You take a deep breath and begin climbing, shooting the dangerous creatures that crawl across your path. You eventually come to an impasse, but quickly notice a spider ball track that carefully navigates around it. This is followed by a tricky gap to jump across, after which you enter a brand new room. Scanning this room reveals structural weaknesses in the environment that you can exploit to create bridges to the other side. You switch weapons and create a path across, battling more enemies along the way. The next room presents even more hazards, but you’re dialed in, in full flow, and step forward without hesitation. Nothing can stop you now.
In a single moment in Metroid, you can find yourself engaging in any number of activities. Puzzle solving, platforming, and combat can combine seamlessly to produce an uninterrupted sequence of action-oriented tasks, each one meant to keep the player fully in the moment. For all the cognitive appeal of its environmental puzzles and world design I’ve previously discussed, Metroid remains an extremely action-focused game. “Action” is a broad term though; you’re not constantly partaking in bloody combat or raw tests of reflex and skill here, as per the usual video game parlance. But you are constantly performing actions, engaging with the game in tangible, meaningful ways. This is primarily observable through the way you interact with the game and its world, which is entirely through direct control of its protagonist, Samus Aran. Metroid is by no means novel when it comes to controlling a single character from start to finish, but it is an important first step towards keeping the player engaged and focused. You know who you are and how you participate in the world around you. This grounding instantly gives you a place in the game, which sets the stage for you to “act.”
Your specific actions largely consist of the aforementioned puzzle solving, platforming, and combat, all of which happen naturally as you explore. Mapping out a world in Metroid involves overcoming all sorts of obstacles along the way, and that variety is key to the game’s flow. Pure exploring runs the risk of becoming dull quickly without anything else to do as you run around, but Metroid keeps you regularly engaged, and each activity is executed well. There’s nothing terribly fancy about the platforming or combat, but they work, and along with the excellent environmental puzzles they keep things fresh from start to finish (more on these next week). Supplementing the great variety, Metroid has equally strong pacing. You are constantly visiting new areas, encountering new enemies, and unlocking new abilities, all of which lend the game a powerful sense of progression. Just as important, the vast majority that progression is based in functionality. Where a lot of video game progression is based in stats increasing for both you and your enemies, Metroid consistently allows you to do things you couldn’t do before, and you’ll encounter new enemies and puzzles that require different approaches. Put another way, weapons and items you get later aren’t strictly better than ones you got earlier; they just function differently. That philosophy applies to most aspects of the game, and allows for layers in complexity by combining functionality together. The late game puzzles or encounters aren’t meant to be obtuse, or demand your stats be at a certain level. Instead, they raise the stakes by asking you to consider and use everything in your robust tool set at once. It’s a highly satisfying escalation that gets a lot of mileage out of simple mechanics, and manages to be challenging without ever making giant leaps in logic or ability.
My favorite games build on simple ideas like these in smart ways to generate effective variety and pacing, all without becoming overly complicated in the process. Variety and pacing are fundamental video game traits I consider extremely important, and games don’t always treat them with the level of care I’d like. I’m someone who enjoys seeing, thinking about, and doing new things, and games that have me repeat actions or put up barriers can wear me down. Score attack modes, grinding for experience points or random drops, copy/paste quest design, and endless treadmills are quick ways to leave me disinterested in a game. But Metroid consistently presents me with new challenges and new ways to interact at a smooth pace. There’s always a new item to find, a new path to search, or a new boss to fight, each of which is impressively handcrafted and detailed. This progression always presents something new to focus on, which lends a satisfying sense of purpose to your quest. Last week I mentioned how that sense of purpose is important to me, and that’s precisely because it allows Metroid to avoid those aforementioned pitfalls and distractions. When a game is too “open,” it can be hard to fill with meaningful content, and end up being too thin, aimless, or repetitive for my tastes. While some see this as an opportunity to “make your own fun,” I’ve always seen it as a game not knowing what to do with itself. It banks on the player to construct their own goals to some extent, and searching for ways to entertain myself within a video game rarely feels like the best use of my time. I prefer something with a more identifiable and timely purpose, and Metroid delivers.
That sense of purpose also lends the game a purity of focus that serves to keep you fully in the moment, an important idea I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Video games can be surprisingly great at finding all sorts of complicated ways to pull you out of the experience, but Metroid’s tight focus allows it to avoid “gamey” distractions. It has no abstract quest logs, objective markers, or checklists to direct and reward your progress. Your mission is grounded and intuitive enough to provide clear, tangible goals without that extra overhead, and the game is confident enough to let the player form their own investment without overly gamifying it. This allows you to stay completely focused on the task at hand and the action on-screen, rather than sifting through menus to monitor your progress. In fact, Metroid takes its hand-off approach further than most. On top of not explicitly directing the player’s experience, there’s virtually no explicit story exposition to be found, and almost no management of any kind to perform. You aren’t asked to listen to lengthy monologues or story dumps, or dig through menus to juggle inventory or skills. When you're playing a Metroid game, you are playing a Metroid game. Again, it sounds simple, but I can’t stress the importance of this point enough for me and my personal preferences. Perhaps the number one thing that can push me away from a game is being ripped out of the experience too frequently. That’s why games with busy quest logs, overly forced direction, long-winded exposition, or constant metagame management can leave me feeling cold. Anything that takes away from my own interaction feels too passive, and video games are my medium of choice specifically because I like being active.
Deep down I’ve always been a “doer,” rarely prone to long-range planning, searching for deeper meaning where it may not exist, or fiddling with things that don’t have a tangible impact. That by no means implies that I don’t carefully consider my actions or think ahead, but left to my own devices I prefer to live and think in the now, engaging in interesting tasks that benefit from my full attention. I derive a certain thrill and satisfaction from taking on said tasks, and performing them to the best of my ability. I enjoy the process of learning things as I go, trying to execute on that knowledge at each step, and seeing the results that follow. Put more simply, I like to dive in, explore, and find my own way. Jumping in headfirst is not only a more enjoyable process for me, but more importantly, I always understand something much better if I discover it on my own. That’s particularly true if I make mistakes along the way, which is where many of my most poignant lessons occur. When I was in school, my teachers could explain the material as much as they wanted, and while that could provide a good starting point, I would never really "get it" until I actually sat down to work out a problem on my own. I need to engage with things firsthand for those lessons to resonate meaningfully, and that’s precisely what Metroid allows me to do every step of the way. It presents you with an intense and daring quest, one that you have to simply dive in and tackle with gusto. It’s a balance of freedom and structure that sits perfectly with me and my preferences, and it’s hard to overstate how critical that is to my affection for the series.
I’ve covered a range of design elements today, but they all come back to a single idea: every part of Metroid’s design serves to keep the player squarely in the moment. Whether that’s from sublime variety and pacing that keep up the game’s flow, the absence of distracting “gamey” elements that would dilute its focus, or a commitment to letting the player have an active role at all times, Metroid pulls together a lot of ideas that serve this purity of purpose. Yet for as simple an idea it may be, it takes a lot of very careful and deliberate execution to pull it off, which Metroid nails. More importantly for our purposes, that idea aligns perfectly with my own personality and preferences. I love diving in head first, focusing on a task, and performing it the best I can as I find my own way; I’m in my element when I’m getting my hands dirty and learning on the go. Or as I have been told by personality tests, I am “happiest when centered in action-oriented tasks which require detailed logical analysis and technical skill.” Metroid’s action-oriented focus on exploring complex worlds fits that bill to a tee, and goes a long way towards explaining my infatuation with the series. And with that, I think we’ve covered enough ground for today. Next week we’ll continue talking gameplay, but narrow in from its broader design to more granular nuts and bolts. Specifically, we’ll look closer at Metroid’s puzzles, platforming, and combat.
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