METROID - A Frustrating Time Capsule | GEEK CRITIQUE

[Music] nostalgia is a wonderful emotion it encompasses what we discovered and came to love when we were kids the stories and experiences that helped us learn who we are most gamers became gamers when they were young and the games you grew up with have an indelible impact on how you appreciate this artform but nostalgia especially childhood nostalgia can also diminish critique I think it's important as an adult to take another look at the things that you used to love and not just speak from the perspective of what you thought when you were six now despite that you're still gonna have a biased perspective I can see the shortcomings in these things that I've always loved I can explain them and admit them and accept them but I'm still biased and I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with being biased as long as you can be upfront about it we're all fans of different things for different reasons and that's okay but Metroid was never something I considered myself a fan which is weird because I just always felt like I should have been but I've tried and tried over the years to get into this series and even though they're fun enough while I'm playing them I've never been able to stick to them like there's nothing that keeps me coming back there was one exception where a Metroid game did get its hooks in me but that was a long time ago and I couldn't get invested in anything else and I think I know why it's kind of a dumb reason the series core gameplay doesn't fall in line with the skill curve that made me a gamer longtime viewers might remember that Sonic 2 taught me that a video game becomes more fun the more skilled you as a player become Metroid games from what I've played rely more on the fun of exploration and I know some people love that but it's never been very engaging to me your avatar grows powerful through upgrades which you find by putting time into exploring an interconnected world but most of my favorite games tend to rely less on avatar strength and more on the players skill mastery games that take that more arcadey approach are just more inherently gripping for me and don't get me wrong I think this industry can and should be a lot more than just games of skill and many of my favorite titles don't all of this pattern but it is I think why I could never stick with Metroid until lately lately apropos of nothing I've been engaging with some of the most highly regarded games in the series all of a sudden I do feel myself perhaps starting to want to dig into this series and learn more about it all of a sudden I might just end up being a ban after all and whether I am or not we fund a critique the experience when it comes to Metroid there is no nostalgia for me but that means that each game I'm playing here has the chance to rise or fall on its own merits because nostalgia or not when I do like something I love it I want to learn and absorb and know everything I can about it that's part of what it means to be a geek right let's see if it's worth it to be a geek about Metroid in the far-off year of 2000 representatives from across the galaxy established the Galactic Federation bringing about an age of prosperity as thousands of spaceships ferry materials between planets but crime always finds a way and space pirates began ransacking the ships with their showy powers the Federation please call in specialized warriors to do battle with the Pirates and paid them large rewards for successful captures enabling courageous souls to make a living as space bounty hunters it is now 20 X t5 and space pirates have attacked a deep space research tip and seized a capsule containing a newly discovered life-form from Planet sr388 it's suspected the entire civilization of SR 3d8 was destroyed by quote some unknown person or thing and the new life-form may have been responsible the federation researchers captured named it metroid for some reason and were bringing it back to earth when it was stolen by the space pirates if metroid is multiplied and weaponized the galactic civilization will be destroyed the federation has found the pirate headquarters planet zebus but have been unable to break past their fortifications as a last resort the federation police have decided to send a lone bounty hunter to infiltrate the fortress and destroy mother brain Samus Aran hee hee hee is the greatest of all the space hunters his entire body has been surgically strengthened with robotics giving him superpowers even a space pirates fear his space suit which can absorb any enemy's power well that would have been a rockin idea but nope that's not in this game regardless zaebis is a natural fortress its interior is a complicated maze and the Pirates have planted booby traps throughout those anti only booby traps in this game samus has penetrated Denis but time is running out will he be able to save the Metroid and thus save the galaxy I played a little bit of this game before but I never knew the story and war went that deep even here at the start of the series the manual is a bit of an excessively literal translation like it refers to the morph ball was the maru mari which allows Samus to grow small and round but it's still way above average for the era and let the weight office Kate samus's of gender the manual exclusively refers to her with male pronouns female protagonists and games are hard to come by even 30 years later but in 1986 in a sci-fi game about a character in an armored Power Suit forget about it this was unprecedented and it was one of many things that made Metroid unique a tradition in the series started here the faster you beat the game the more that power suit comes off beating it in 35 hours gives you this ending but come on it was the 80s that could totally be a dude long hair on a man how outdated everyone knows it now but Generation NES always talks about how surprised they were to find out that Samus was a girl I can see why it really is the kind of thing that your friend at school might tell you and you'd swear they were just making it up here's the map of zebus the manual screams and then gives you this thing that's uh that's not a map it explicitly states you'll have more luck if you just make a map of your own and yeah that's a nice adventure games for you god I miss instruction manuals this one's 42 pages in full color there's tons of illustration today just so much to explain and prepare the player for what's to come it brings me back to those car rides home from the mall and I just got in a new video game and I was so anxious to play it that I'd open the box and pour over the manual ah just reading through it gets me hyped to experience this game but nothing will get you hyped quite like this [Music] NES games were known for their bright aesthetics and so once again bucking the trend Metro is developers chose to go the other direction emphasizing a darker moodier palette Donkey Kong Country would similarly stand out with atmosphere and ambience at generation later but here an 8-bit the use of blacks and muted colors is striking the music is just as critical in setting the mood the song starts out by evoking a feeling of trepidation and uncertainty then it breaks into more of a tune which evokes the sort of bittersweet valor it takes to push forward when every tiny step forward seems so arduous monumental when your persevering against all hope [Music] it finally hits an understated but very heroic Rosendo this theme is just a perfect capstone for the series oh and because these things are awesome I'll be playing the Japan exclusive Famicom disk system version of Metroid which features nicer music a safe system that's almost literally Zelda some more complex enemy behavior and less slowdown we explore the backstory we looked at the aesthetic it's finally time to get critiquing [Music] one of the most wonderful things about video games is the way that sequels can iteratively improve on the foundation so in that light I'm going to try not to dock this game based on what comes later this is the first Metroid and I'm trying to approach it that way nonetheless the first thing I notice is that Samus starts out feeling incredibly weak your only weapon is this little peashooter which you can fire directly above are straight forward no diagonals no kraut cuting and that's not me comparing it no you'll notice this immediately right from the first room you'll find these enemies that are exactly too short to be hit you also start out with only 30 health even though you can collect energy to raise that to 99 I can't think of another game that intentionally starts you so far below max health even if you do grind up your hit points getting hit by anything packs such a wallop but it often seems like the better option to just avoid enemies rather than trying to engage them all of this is by design later games start out with Samus feeling fairly capable right from the start and the 3d ones even give you some of your strongest abilities in the prologue to give the player a taste of how powerful Samus will be Metroid 1 goes the opposite direction right from the start you as a player feel like you're deep in enemy territory completely outmatched and completely lost I'm serious here's how my first session went I got the morph all climbed up this long shaft went down a dangerous hallway that led to a locked door backtrack to another even more dangerous hallway that went to another lock door found some missiles took an elevator hit more powerful enemies headed back the way I came used all five missiles to open a door made my p2 turned our longer-range peashooter went to the other locked door discovered I never picked up more missiles grind until I got them discovered this room got stuck in a little nook and had no choice but to commit suicide yeah Metroid's freakin brutal there's no in-game map there's no indication of where I'm supposed to go it's so frustrating and convoluted in one I don't quite get why the space pirates would fear Samus so much the way she starts out but the fact is he's infiltrating the homeworld of the most elite dangerous group of pilots in the galaxy and despite what I said earlier about Metroid being about your avatar growing stronger the game here is doing an excellent job of making me as a player feel very alone and helpless I can appreciate the complete lack of hand-holding I was allowed to proceed onwards of challenges I'd have no chance of overcoming just because they were there the whole point of this opening sequence is to train the player not to blindly push ahead doing that gets you nowhere the game gives you the missiles then punishes you if you don't go back the way you came and use that upgrade to explore more areas if I was aware of at least some of Metroid's conventions regarding how missiles unlock doors I can only imagine how lost I'd be okay so according to the manual those are statues that are representative of the mini-bosses and we'll need to take them down to build a bridge in that room that's why all I could do in there was die now right back to it all that work the game did making me feel like the odds were stacked against me paid off when I reach to this just something as simple as collecting that first health upgrade was such a relief and it's what kept me exploring brinstar I'm surprised at the quick sense of progression you get through here only about 20 minutes of adventuring and I had the morph ball bombs the ice beam and two energy tanks I had also managed to keep a hold on my sense of direction these rooms all look pretty say me and I did cover the same ground more than I probably needed to but as long as I stuck to the corridors I always had at least a relative sense of where I was but that doesn't hold true for the many vertical shafts and this is where it's easy to get lost all in all though it hasn't been as perplexing as I thought it'd be it's actually pretty endearing when things get a little weird like after I got the ice beam I figured I was supposed to use it to climb up the series of rippers by freezing them but I was having trouble finding them again so I headed down this corridor got a missile upgrade came to what looked like a dead end but I noticed I could shoot up the ceiling and hop up there this led to another energy tank and then I emerged at the top of the very chasm I was looking for was I supposed to be able to do that am I supposed to get stuck behind the chozo static use am I supposed to escape here by getting stuck in the ground or Zoomer is supposed to do that when they don't have a block to stand on I don't I love the fact that I don't know little moments like this are all over the place and I just keep thinking like was I supposed to get the Varia suit like this was that an exploit or was it a little of both I keep coming across things and feeling like I'm kind of outsmarting the game or breaking it in a way that I'm not supposed to and again I think that's all part of the design because in Universe Samus is supposed to be doing the same thing on the other hand why did it take so freakin long to get missile drops why does everything look the same I'm doing my very best to take this game as a product of its time but it is a product of its time and it does wear on you after a while so enough floundering around let's see how deep I can actually get before I hit that wall you [Music] there's a criticism the gamers a little younger than me often bring up with a game I consider nearly perfect Donkey Kong Country to save system specifically that you have to pay two banana coins at wrinkly school house in order to save your game here's the thing when dkc2 came out even having a saved game was still a bit of a luxury needing to grab a few banana coins was no big deal and I never addressed it in my own video on that game because it never bothered me but I can see why if the games you grew up playing weren't so stingy with win and how you got to save it might be a problem I never saw it that way because 16-bit was my era 8-bit was not my era and I think I'm getting muddled by a similar set of circumstances I played melee I know this song I know kraid will be somewhere in the brinstar depths but it's more like brinstar deaths am i right haha ah but seriously even though I have two energy tanks now Santa's still responds with only 30 health leonie's down here are much much tougher they take more hits and hit a lot harder and remember this is despite the fact that I picked at the Varia suit early which boosts samus's defense the only thing I can see to do is to head back up to brim-star farm for energy and come back here with full tanks this isn't challenging this isn't frustrating this is just busy work and there's nothing I hate more than what a game wants me to do busy work I promised myself that I would stop playing whenever one of these games stopped being fun into chemical or and in any other instance this would be that wall but I also expected a game that would be Nintendo hard and come on I haven't even fought the first boss yet this is just how 8-bit conventions worked things that seem unfair to me now would have just been accepted by players in 1986 so nearly 15 minutes that's how long it took me to fill up to energy tanks just mindlessly running back and forth and shooting enemies this is what unexpected to do every single time I die forget about not having a map forget about a lack of conveyance the fact that you have to do this to even have a chance to get lost in this world is the biggest problem I have exactly that said hopefully the worst is over well it didn't take long for all that health to get will down by the demons of the Greenstar deaths mostly because of pure free-range BS like this like come on what was I even supposed to do about that and why can enemies attack me as I load into a room for that matter why can they Devin can even kill me during a screen transition this is also why I really started having trouble keeping track of my location literally just about every connecting room in this area has the exact same layout and again it's not like it's frustrating in that good kind of overcoming the odds style on the contrary it just feels cheap and lazy but eventually eventually I did make it to what was clearly marked as an endpoint there is even an easy enemy spawner there that you can exploit to fill up your energy mind you it still takes a few minutes due to how stingy the game is with drops but still it's accommodating suspiciously accommodating I wonder why what oh god oh no what do i do oh hey Mindy tank yes give me give me I can win I feel great I can't do I think I might be too little to play this game at this point I did go ahead and look up a guide I betrayed by spamming morph all bombs at him apparently what I should have done was head over a norfair and get more upgrades before fighting crate to have an easier time here but honestly I've hit the wall I could keep going but I don't see that I'd be having much fun if I did especially because I know for a fact that a return trip to this same mission is in the cards I'm comfortable saying I've seen enough of the original Metroid or so I thought much much later in the production of this season I found a modification of this game called Metroid mother it sadly does not give Sam striped shirt but it does update the graphics and give you a mini-map I only intended to look over it but I actually ended up playing the entire thing in one go when you play it like this what's really stunning is just how short the game really is but even those repeating rooms are literally just there to pad out the game when you boil it down Metroid is a giant maze where you'll find power-ups fight to underwhelming bosses and then gain access to a really frustrating one the very best games in the series would figure out how to give me almost invisibly guide the player through these objectives while never cutting them off from the larger world Metroid 1 doesn't do that it doesn't have any sense of order and it isn't designed for the player but it does have a sense of progression those four enemies really make you appreciate the way of being in a way no other game has and by the end you can become so powerful that it's comparatively a chore to lose at or to get to that save screen you get to feel that spectrum of power and especially with the map I have to admit I had a pretty good time I compared this game quite a few times to Donkey Kong Country and I think there's a reason my mind kept going there Metroid was a game that was ahead of its time in atmosphere and world building a game more challenging than most others of the era a game meant for mature players and I don't be mature by the ESRB standards or games like Mario or Kirby are easy for anyone to pick up and play Metroid and DKC are a much steeper challenge but they're deeper mechanic's lore and the sheer breadth of their worlds give that more experienced more mature gamer a lot of depth to sink their teeth into it's kind of funny to notice these parallels considering the 25 years later such an awful rift would develop between their fan bases but it also kind of makes sense that both series would end up almost competing for that necessary level of focus and care but in stark contrast to DK sees characters and community Metroid one has an incredible sense of isolation loneliness and even at times hopelessness all of its systems coalesced to make you the player feel overwhelmed outmatched part of that is just a side effect of how clunky and outdated those systems are but even that seems largely intentional I can see why players in 1986 would have loved this game there was nothing else out there quite so esoteric unfortunately that doesn't mean the game holds up 30 years later next time though I'll be looking at a game I know even less about Metroid to return of Samus you can lock it right now with a $1 donation on my patreon otherwise I'll see you next week you keep geeking I'll keep critiquing thanks for watching [Music] you [Music]

Channel: The Geek Critique

Views: 542,024

Keywords: The Geek Critique, TGC, Geek Critique, Josh Wallen, Metroid, NES, Metroid 1, original metroid, review, analysis, critique, video game design, game analysis, metroid games, first metroid, nes metroid, nintendo hard, nintendo

Id: r-xda6XkkEs

Length: 19min 12sec (1152 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 26 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/reymt]

Really interesting to look back how games and genre developed, and how alien they can seem nowadays.

I wonder if it's part nostalgia and bias, but I am happy to have started playing games during the SNES era (as opposed to NES and earlier). I feel there game design got really good, Zelda LTP and Super Mario World weren't to bad of a start. Of course besides Donkey Kong Country, Starwing and Mario Kart.

That's not to say there weren't a bunch of annoying games who thought save systems are a temporary trend. Early 3D on PS1+2 wasn't that great either from a technical perspective.

[u/DaveSW777]

The 'trick' to Metroid not being frusttraing is to not die. I know, that sounds stupid, but if you can maintain high health the game is fairly easy. Completing it all in one sitting is important too. That way it doesn't feel like a constant losing battle.

[u/jiodjflak]

If you want to play through the original, play Zero Mission. Modernized original Metroid with a pretty cool aftermath part at the end.

[u/Kered13]

Metroid sadly just does not hold up today. If the game would respawn you with full health, it could probably still be a fun game, but having to grind fifteen minutes to fill only two energy tanks (and you can have many more tanks) is just not fun. It could also be more indicative of where some of the mandatory hidden paths are. At points you just have to bomb floors randomly to find the way forward.

[u/underthemilkyway]

Video game criticism is the complete opposite of film criticism. Just surface level overviews of the mechanics. These "critics" never have anything very interesting to say. Very rarely do I find a video game review that looks at anything beyond basic mechanics, a casual look at the music, and a brief mention of the art style. The rest of the review tends to be needless padding about nostalgia and maybe a story overview. Seriously, watch this video and ask yourself what percentage the actual critique takes up.

[u/xeonisius]

I recall at the time Metroid came out I didn't like it, but it grew on me. It ended up becoming what I consider to be the greatest game on the NES. It's interesting because at the time I never thought there was any issue with how grindy gaining health could be. I thought that having to make your own map added to the game. 20 years later I went back to it and I found that having to grind for health was a slight annoyance, but the lack of a map was painful. Strangely enough the thing that completely killed it for me, however, was the shortness of the default beam. For some reason its shortness made me give up, which is odd because I never had a problem with Zero Mission's short beam. It may be related to the fact that the original Metroid had a much larger screen area where Zero Mission was more zoomed in.