The strange introduction to a beloved franchise.

As you might surmise from my username PurpleShyGuy (a name that I only somewhat regret calling myself), I’ve been a longtime player of Nintendo games, starting early with most of their franchises. Though when it came to Metroid I had a somewhat bizarre beginning, since it wasn’t the original Metroid I started with, nor the sequel that announced the return of Samus, nor even the hugely seminal Super Metroid. No, my introduction instead was watching a robot guy using a baseball bat to smash Kirby’s puffball face in. That was because my first ever encounter with Metroid was in Super Smash Bros. for the N64, in which the roster contained Samus Aran, who from my understanding was some kind of android. You couldn’t really blame me for thinking this, since Samus in Smash 64 only communicates her anguish of being kicked and punched via a series of computerised woom sounds.

It wouldn’t be until years later when reading an ancient relic we now refer to as a game magazine, that I happened upon a piece on Retro Studios’ Metroid Prime that contained the truth. Within the article there was a screenshot of the inside of Samus Aran’s helmet, with a caption underneath explaining that sometimes Samus’ face can be seen reflected in her visor. A shocking revelation to be sure, because not only was Samus a human in a robot suit, but she was also a lady human in a robot suit. And after months of waiting, I was indeed ready to play as that lady human in that robot suit when I eventually got my hands on Metroid Prime. Despite it being my first ever Metroid game, it speaks volumes that the developer managed to impart what these games are most renowned for: atmosphere. The gravity of this didn’t fully hit me until I landed on Tallon IV, and exited the ship to the sight of rain running down my visor and music beautifully swelling in my ears.

What makes Metroid Prime such an amazing game, is that it teaches you all the moves to the Metroid mambo even though the series up until that point had been exclusively in 2D. Metroid even completely checked out of having a proper entry on the N64, apparently due to no one having the confidence in being able to make it actually good. But when the GameCube rolled around, Retro Studios managed to get it all in there: the aforementioned atmosphere, exploration, clearly separated areas to travel back and forth from, and acquiring abilities to access new parts of those areas. Prime also goes even further by enriching the world with the introduction of scanning, giving you tidbits of lore to read at your leisure. One such piece that always stuck out was the Space Pirates’ failed experiment to replicate Samus’ Morph Ball technology, which ended in the subject’s bones being broken. Given the fact that the Space Pirates colour code their armour so that Samus knows what type of beam to kill them with, this result isn’t especially surprising.

My first 3D Metroid was quickly followed by my first 2D Metroid: Metroid Fusion.While people take Fusion to task for being too linear, as someone who played it on the Game Boy Advance which had a limited battery life, I did appreciate the game just telling me where to go next. Plus, the continuous game overs caused by Fusion’s difficulty drained my batteries enough already. But what Fusion did better than any other Metroid game to date was inducing raw undiluted dread in the player. This also makes Metroid Dread somewhat unfortunately named, but let’s face it, the E.M.M.I.s have nothing on the SA-X. The SA-X itself is a fantastic case of role reversal, turning you from the bounty hunter into bounty hunted. In other words, you now see how everything else sees you, as the cold, calculating, murder machine that is responsible for wiping out an entire species.

Linking my GBA to my GameCube also allowed me to take a dip into the very first Metroid, and boy, if you thought Fusion was a bit of a bossy pants, ordering you around here and there, then the original Metroid has absolutely zero leadership skills. While it was a fun novelty going back to where it all started, after a few hours of aimlessly wandering around I decided to throw in my space helmet and give up on completing it.

With Prime’s success, a sequel was announced and subsequently released and then played by me. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is the harder, meaner and more labyrinthine Prime. Most of your beam types now require ammo to use, and the light-world-dark-world mechanic effectively doubles the complexity of the level design. I would call Echoes the Dark Souls of the Metroid series, but in actuality, it is Dark Souls that is the Metroid Prime 2: Echoes of Dark Souls. This was also Dark Samus’ introduction, who was setup as a Vergil-like rival character that you would throw down with at certain points in the game, differing from the unstoppable predator that was the SA-X. Echoes also strangely had multiplayer, and people must have liked it (or at least someone at Nintendo thought people did), because the multiplayer-focused Metroid Prime: Hunters quickly popped into existence soon after.

With the sequel came other sequel named Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, which featured the most bombastic intro of any Prime game yet, with Samus being thrown into a battle between the Federation and the Space Pirates that crescendoed in the bounty hunter fighting Meta Ridley while falling down a freakishly long tunnel. The game as a whole was more set-piece and story focused when compared to Prime 1 and 2. I also never got confused as to where to go and there wasn’t any bosses that gave me any serious trouble in overcoming. Contrasted to Echoes, Corruption was the easier, kinder and simpler Prime, the Kirby’s Epic Yarn of Dark Souls if you will. Taken as a trilogy, I would say that Prime 1 is the 3rd Goldilocks choice of Primes, as it is not too overwhelming or too simplified, but just right. And when Prime 4 comes out, could the person who keeps putting in those pace-breaking 11th hour fetch quests in please stop? Seriously, you could save time to do anything else, like go to the spa, reconnect with a family relative, or spend absurd amounts of money on worthless, vaguely defined, digital tokens.

After many years away from the franchise, my next mission ended up being the big one. Yes, Super Metroid, which I managed to play on my older brother’s Super NES Classic that he let me borrow. They say that you should never meet you heroes, that no person (or in this case video game) could ever live up to the near-impossible fantasy that you’ve built up inside your head. Yet, Super Metroid is still an amazingly playable and enjoyable game all these years later, with the only real negative being that it made me hate quicksand to an unhealthy degree. To be honest, I don’t really have much to say about Super Metroid, other than it was the Metroid that refined the lasting formula that games still use to this day.

More years pass and now we finally get to Metroid Dread, which planted the idea seed that has now blossomed into the opinion flower you now see before you. Having just finished the game, it’s easily the one that I could write the most about. I could go on about the stellar movement, the 3rd-Goldilocks-option difficulty, or how the one-way doors never cease to annoy the piss out of me, but I think its more important to recognise what Metroid Dread represents. Imagine being someone whose into Metroid, and years and years after the fan-enraging Metroid Other M you get the fan-enraging double-decker that was Federation Force, then it is announced that the people whose last game was Castlevaina: Lords of Shadow 2, are going to do a remake of the second Metroid, as if to try and score a fan-enraging hat-trick.

But fortunately from what I hear, Metroid: Samus Returns ended up actually being pretty decent. And now the franchise has the brand new entry that is Metroid Dread, a game that was long thought to have been dead and buried, now bursting confidently back onto the scene. It’s good to be a Metroid fan again, and when Metroid Prime 4 comes out, hopefully that will remain the case.