Super Metroid (SNES) review "Did this site need another Super Metroid review? More importantly, do I care?"

Having played so many good-to-amazing Metroidvania games over the past few years, it was only fitting that I revisited the game that initially got me so into that sort of thing — 1994’s Super Metroid. I remember playing through it a few times in the mid-to-late 1990s and thought it was really awesome, taking the concept of the original NES Metroid, but making it so much better that it’s hard for me to even compare the two games other than saying they share (in general) the same setting and name.

Fast forward to 30 years later and, well, this game is still really awesome. Considering how many of my old favorites I’ve played in more recent times, only to find that the magic was diminished or even gone, this made me happy. It’s nice to know that nostalgia isn’t always misguided.

So, apparently during the course of the GameBoy entry into the series that I’ve never played, series heroine Samus Aran gained possession of a baby Metroid and took it to a space colony to be researched. However, as soon as she leaves, Ridley, the draconic leader of the Space Pirates, perfectly executes a break-in and massacre. After a short confrontation with the returning Samus, it snags the hatchling and returns to planet Zebes. Looks like it’s time for a big, happy reunion — the kind that has all sorts of guns, lasers and dead bodies everywhere!

Things start out quietly, though. When Samus lands on Zebes, she starts by exploring deserted corridors and tunnels, being funneled along a set path due to not having the necessary goods to blast through certain doors or enter tiny pathways. However, at the end of this trek, she’ll gain her first ability and be able to condense her body into a small sphere that can access those narrow pathways. This also has the side effect of turning on the juice to Zebes’ facilities, leading to her having to blast her way through pirates and other creatures while seeking out paths she can roll through.

She’ll quickly get missiles that allow her to break through pink-shaded doors and she’ll beat down a mini-boss to gain the ability to emit bombs while in ball form. With these powers, she’ll be able to travel through the game’s beginning zone and reach Brinstar. In true Metroidvania style, during all of this walking and jumping, you’ll regularly notice places you can’t access and, if you’re smart, take notes so that when you acquire new powers and weapons, you have a list of locations to revisit. It won’t take very long to topple the first boss of the original game, Kraid, even if he’s a lot more imposing in appearance this time around. It will take a lot of work and exploration, as well as multiple boss fights, before you ferret out Ridley’s hiding spot for a truly epic battle for survival, though. Heh, you didn’t think the monster pictured confronting Samus on the game’s box art was going to be easy to get past, did you?

And, of course, you’ll find that Mother Brain joined Ridley and Kraid in surviving the first Metroid and is waiting for her rematch with Samus. There’s the matter of the missing Metroid hatchling. Those two things collide at game’s end in arguably the greatest example of dialogue-free storytelling I’ve encountered in a video game.

Truthfully, everything simply runs so smoothly in this game. The only things I can manufacture complaints about are minor annoyances such as how Samus’ spin jump can lead to me occasionally over-shooting platforms or that the grapple beam that allow her to do her best Bionic Commando impersonation to cross certain rooms really made me happy to earn the Space Jump ability that essentially makes that tool obsolete.



But everything else is near-perfect. The sense of progression. How each region of the game has its own feel and identity. That awesome feeling of accomplishment I received every time I gained a new item and could roam the world to find out what new places (and new treasures) I could unearth. The way Samus started out as a frail and weak adventurer, but gradually gained an arsenal, as well as enough energy tanks to absorb an unearthly amount of punishment. And, on the flip side, how those late-game bosses and some of the challenges presented in their realms were more than capable of inflicting that unearthly amount of punishment, meaning that no matter how powerful I got, I still had to take things seriously because my victory was most definitely not assured.

Are a lot of those elements pretty commonplace nowadays? Sure and they’re often put together really well, too, but that wasn’t really the case back in 1994. Back then, Super Metroid was a revelation — a masterclass in how to craft an exploration-based action game. And even now, 30 years later, it’s an excellent game possessing beautiful graphics and sound for its era and an excellently-designed world loaded with secrets. In my recent replay of it, I only wound up with 70 percent of its items and nowhere near as many of the super-powerful Super Missiles as I’d have liked. I also noticed a number of corridors and rooms tantalizingly out of reach, with no clue as to how to access them, even when I routinely was using the X-Ray Scope and its ability to locate secret passages and walls that can be broken.

Sure I was able to overcome its challenges, but not as effectively as I had in the past. Now, if that isn’t a reason to start up another run through this one, I don’t know what is! Because, you see, that’s also part of the fun. Even if Super Metroid has a vast world and lots of secrets, a skilled player can run through it in a mere handful of hours, giving it all the replay value that any game could possibly strive to have. Nintendo loved to accentuate the “Super” part of Super Nintendo by placing that word into any number of its titles. This one earned that adjective many times over.

Community review by overdrive (January 19, 2024) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.