I can't stop thinking about THE BABY. Wondering where he could be, who he is with, what is he thinking? Is he thinking of me? And whether he'll ever return someday... You have to stop lying awake wondering about THE BABY, wondering where he is, what he's thinking, if he's thinking of you and- Remember me? Take a look at any ranking of the best games
of ever made you'll get an eyeful of Mario, Zelda, and Metroid titles. These are among Nintendo's oldest franchises
with their most influential games. But take a look at Nintendo's sales history
and a different story emerges- Mario prints money, Zelda is a major success. And Metroid doesn't even crack the top ten,
selling only a sliver of what Zelda has. And it's hard to answer exactly why that gap
is so large- The series hasn't had much less impact than the others- the indie genre is
practically one giant Metroid tribute, and plenty of major studios have taken ideas from
Samus. In the beginning, the games struggled to attract
Japanese players, and though they sold better in the west the numbers were weak next to
Mario and Zelda. After Super Metroid became the third game
in a row to fall below expectations, Nintendo put it on the shelf for a while. But they didn't give up. It was a slow burn, but Super Metroid managed
to make the player's choice collection, games that sold 1 million copies and dropped to
$20 to celebrate. It didn't hurt that Samus was included in
Smash Bros, as this may have introduced her to more players than her own games combined. After 8 years of time for word of mouth to
spread, the stage was set for Metroid Prime to become the biggest commercial success in
the series. But even these sales were nothing special,
and Nintendo could only maintain a tenuous hold on that audience with sequels. Whatever the reason for its marginalization,
it's clear that Metroid has been kept alive by a small but devoted fanbase, and the series
will live and die according to whether Nintendo makes the games these fans want to buy. And for the past decade they've kind of dropped
that ball... Before talking about what went wrong, I'll
try to establish what is right for a Metroid game. You may disagree, but I think Metroid can
be distilled down to these three core elements. Exploration means that the player isn't just
moving from point A to B- Everything in Metroid is point B. Though the actual path through
the environment is fairly linear, it doesn't feel that way because the player is absorbing
the entirety of the world as they go along. It's not just about finding the one door that's
unlocked and going through, but making notes of the terrain, objects of interest, the obstructions. Where can't you go, and why can't you go there? You need to know these things so that when
you get a powerup you can have that moment of "aha! I can go back and do that now." Navigation should be such a test of the player's
memory and perception that they should be able to draw a map from heart when it's over. This missile tank is a good example of how
Metroid games are designed. Its placement out in the open misleads the
player into thinking it might be easy to get, only for them to waste a minute of their time
and leave disappointed. But the developers didn't do this just to
be dicks. They knew that frustration would cause players
to remember this room, so that when they got the grapple beam they'd make sure to come
back and finally get the tank... And in turn be led right into the wrecked
ship, the next area of the game. In this way, the developer's unseen hand guides
the player through the world. You know where you want to go, but not really
why, and it's important that the developer's fingerprints remain invisible so that the
achievement of figuring things out feels like your own. After entering Maridia, players expecting
to find a shiny new area to explore are instead unceremoniously dumped back into a previous
area. What's going on? The only path forward turned out to be a dead
end. But the answer has already been seen. A broken pipe passed by in Maridia matches
exactly with the one in the next room, creating an almost subliminal suggestion that this
can be destroyed. The map found in Maridia also adds squares
above and below the tube, suggesting the player can enter that space. It may stump you for a while, but when you
put the pieces together and break this tube it's one of the most rewarding moments in
the game because you feel like you overcame a tough obstacle on your own. But you're never entirely alone (when you
do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all). The RE developers have referred to their games
as Metroidvanaias, so let's go with that. In these games your progress is limited by
keys. Obtaining a new one unlocks a new set of areas
to explore, where the next key will be found. In Metroid, the keys are your powerups themselves,
and unlike RE, they're not disposable. The key that lets you open this door also
lets you open a hole in an enemy's face (I like that). Getting a new upgrade is fun, and the ensuing
ability to enter a previously blocked area is fun. The gameplay is driven by this cycle of powering
up and exploration, and the longer it goes on the more powerful Samus becomes, until
by the end of the game she's like an entirely different character. Compare Samus at the beginning of Super Metroid
to Samus at the end. The player has earned this power by defeating
bosses and seeking out hidden areas. It's important that the player remains in
control of this progress; they need to feel like they're fighting against an alien world
alone, unraveling it one upgrade at a time. When an obstruction comes along, the player
needs to take it as a personal challenge to explore more and find the item that's waiting
out there for them. The importance of powerups is demonstrated
by a glitch in Super that allows players to restart the game with their suit upgrades. All the rules go out the window; after landing
on Zebes, you can go straight to Norfair and kill Ridley first. The only area that's off limits is Tourian,
but even this obstruction is under your control- just find the bosses. The fact that items are so powerful leads
to sequence breaking where collecting an item early lets players can get farther than intended
at the time. Nintendo tries to crack down on this in newer
games, but in a way sequence breaking means the game is on the right track because items
are being given the appropriate power in the game design. It doesn't matter how well laid out the map
is or how fun the powerups are; if the world is boring, the game will be a failure. One of the ways the original Metroid shows
its age the most is that rooms repeat so much. Some people still like the challenge this
game poses, but the exploration is hardly interesting when every room looks the same,
and the navigation is confused because this room could be one of six in the area. Compare this to Super Metroid's Brinstar. The first area is overgrown with green vines,
while the very next room changes to a wildly different scene with fluttering flower petals. A few rooms later and the game's tone has
dramatically changed again, all while adhering to the same vague plant theme, and there are
other shifts beyond that. There's practically as much variation in this
one area as all of Metroid one. This helps keep the player interested in the
world, but it also aids exploration by giving the player landmarks to go by. Even without a map, and in spite of being
a larger game, Super would still be much simpler to navigate than Metroid because of how distinct
every environment is. In the service of creating interesting worlds,
Metroid games often go beyond the standards of detail for their time. Super Metroid's shriekbats have piles of droppings
beneath them. Parasites scatter from a body when approached,
creatures reveal tunnels in the walls. A mother alien attacks when you approach her
young. Water droplets are kicked up in damp areas,
and Samus' visor glows with some kind of night vision in dark areas. The hard to see light on her hand glows with
it. The broken turret sockets in this room can
be used as an alternate attack to electrocute the boss, whose young then carry the body
away. Metroid Prime impressed with scan logs for
everything on the planet, visor effects that put the player inside Samus' helmet, and the
generally insane level of detail in the worlds. Someone at Retro worked their ass off to put
interesting things into every corner of the game, and that's the level of commitment needed
to make a world seem like a living ecosystem. The player has to believe that if they look
somewhere they'll be rewarded for the effort. The games also need emotional impact. The player should be so absorbed in the world
that they'll want to stop in their tracks just to soak it in. When Samus returns to Zebes, the thunderstorm
and ominous soundtrack set the mood right away. The world seems deserted. The player knows a threat exists, but the
longer it takes to appear the more the tension grows. Any of that sound familiar? Metroid borrowed heavily from the Alien movies,
but the big difference is that Metroid is a game. Instead of just watching, the player has to
plunge themselves into the danger, and the music and visuals do heavy lifting to enhance
or create the feelings along the way. After beating the first boss, the player returns
to the surface to find that the rain has stopped, and the threatening score has been replaced
with Samus Aran's theme. Where the player was once intimidated, they've
persevered and established control. Moments like this define who Samus is. We don't need dialog or cutscenes to tell
us because we've lived as the character through the unfolding game design. You can clearly see these 3 main elements
when comparing Super to Metroid Prime. On the surface, Prime plays nothing like Super;
Samus is slow and stiff, moving at only a jog. She can only make the simplest jumps, and
iconic abilities like the speed booster never appeared. But Prime did have the puzzle-like exploration,
emphasis on collecting powerups, and all the atmosphere the Gamecube could render. Prime proved that it doesn't matter if it's
2D, 3D, first person, or whatever. As long as these elements are the focus, anything
can be a Metroid game. In fact, you don't need even Samus or Metroids. Axiom Verge is a Metroid game; it may have
a different character on screen, but the core game design is the same. Indie developers have done a great job of
breaking down what Metroid is and expressing that essence in their own ways. In fact, it seems like one of the only developers
to really struggle with what Metroid is about is Nintendo. Yoshio Sakamoto intended to tell a story with
Other M from the start. He had a small role supervising Retro studios
in terms of which ideas were and weren't appropriate for Metroid, and if you think Retro had no
bad ideas, one of their concepts was for a serial killer baby AI to kidnap Samus and
subject her to psychological torture in another dimension. Maybe having to explain who Samus was and
wasn't to another studio made him regret never explicitly defining the character in the games. Whatever his reason, Other M set out to do
just that. Other M is a fun enough action game on its
own, and it does something that Prime never managed to do; it gives us a fast Samus that
does handle like the same character from the 2D games. But judge it by the standards we've established
and the problems appear right away. Exploration is extremely guided and linear,
with navigation rooms setting beacons every step of the way. The beacons are only a few rooms away and
those rooms are almost always in a straight line with little variation. The game rarely requires you to go off the
beaten path in order to move forward. The exploration is compartmentalized to small
areas at a time, and you're usually told where to go and when to go there. The main sectors lock to limit you to the
one Adam has authorized at a given time... denying you the ability to backtrack when
you get a new item, and doors regularly lock behind you to close off explored areas. There's not much use in inspecting the environments
when you're limited by things that you have no power to unlock. This part of the game leads to a dead end
that contains nothing of interest other than a short cutscene, and then the player is forced
to turn back. Not because they have a new powerup that can
break through an obstacle... because they're stuck. They have no choice but to give up. Then, the door just opens for no reason. No achievement, nothing solved- the player
is just arbitrarily stumbling forward because the game says so. Samus slowly explores this building with a
Resident Evil style camera to once again hit a dead end and be interrupted by a cutscene. When the scene is over, she'll have to start
exploring the building all over again, only to end up in a practically identical room
for a fight to take place. Why not just have that fight the first time
around? Because pieces of a narrative are being delivered,
and the game needs to give you busywork in between. After beating sector 3's boss, the player
is locked out of the elevator only to end up at another dead end to be turned back. So why not just let the player enter it the
first time? I assume they wanted players to see the grapple
hook, but why bother? The player isn't navigating by memory anymore. They'll receive a beacon that tells them exactly
when to come back. You're never in control of your progress,
never thinking your own way through the world like you should be. The game is in control, and it's almost as
if it's jerking you around like this to deliberately make you feel lost and powerless (you don't
move unless I say so, and you don't fire unless I say so). Powerups are also drained of their reward. Instead of finding them, Adam authorizes you
to use them, often at the most arbitrary times (I was in the bathroom, did I miss anything? Samus?!). With no achievement linked to collecting abilities,
it almost feels as if they're not yours, and that Adam could revoke them at any time. The powerups also don't have much power in the
game design. If you were to restart the game with every
ability, as we did in Super Metroid, you'd still be standing around waiting for these
doors to unlock. To be fair, some of these problems began with
Metroid Fusion, which also used beacons and locked players within a certain sector at
a time. But Fusion got away with this because it didn't
diminish powerups and exploration to this extent, and it also had an excellent atmosphere. Other M has the sinister tone, but it never
evolves or has emotional impact. Most of the soundtrack is "spooky white noise." Longtime Metroid composer Kenji Yamamoto wasn't
suited to dramatic cutscenes, so anime composer Kuniaki Haishima was brought in instead. He's a great composer, but he's not as well
suited to actual gameplay. Compare the amount of heart in these tracks. Not that he had much to work with; the game's
three sections can best be described as "metallic hallways with plants," "metallic hallways
with frost," and "metallic hallways with lava." Only a handful of rooms manage to really impress
with their imagination. In a Metroid game, every room should be as
cool as this, not just a rare few. The story doesn't matter. Even if it had been a masterpiece, the game
still would have failed as a Metroid due to the gameplay being subjugated in favor of
that story. It wouldn't make sense to find powerups on
a federation ship, so they get authorized instead. The gravity looked silly in the cinematic
moments, so it had to be cut. The frequent cutscenes determined progress
instead of the player's own movements. But the fan reaction revolved around the story
and sexism, and that controversy is what Nintendo heard the most of. The backlash was so bad that Yoshio Sakamoto
signaled that he was leaving the series, and Nintendo didn't acknowledge the series' 25th
anniversary even while proudly doing so for Mario and Zelda. Metroid once again entered years of radio
silence. Then Nintendo showed us that they had learned
from the mistake releasing a story based Metroid that ignored the series principles by releasing
a story based Metroid that ignored the series principles. Other M did a weak job, but Federation Force
isn't even on the map- there's no large scale exploration or backtracking, as the game is
broken into missions that are mere minutes long. There's no powerup collection at all, with
players instead unlocking first person shooter style perks, and the atmosphere is... I could kind of watch this all day... It was apparently intended to build up the
federation troopers since they might factor heavily in the next Prime game, but what do
they matter in terms of game design? Were fans asking for the next Metroid to revolve
around the guys who tell you doors are off limits? The next Metroid will take place on.... (When are you gonna talk about the Federation?) (You never talk about the fuckin' Federation!) Is this the Federation thing again? (All we want to see is the troopers, you never put them in the fuckin' games!) Alright. I'm tired of this shit! You want the Federation?! How bout some Federation FORCE?! -Ooh, that's good! Luckily, the game Nintendo should have released
was just a little further down the road. Samus returns wasn't even announced in Nintendo's
e3 direct that year, instead being quietly shown on a stream afterwards. Nintendo must have wanted to avoid making
a big splash because they were afraid it would lead to another big outrage, but lo and behold,
the fans weren't outraged, and it's not really a mystery why. Samus Returns has exploration. Like the original, it's segmented into caves
systems that you explore to hunt Metroids. Metroids are tracked by clues in the environment,
like shed skins and a beeping that grows more intense when one is near. The game usually doesn't care which order
you take them out in, making it less rigidly linear than some games in the series. Beacons aren't set on the map by default,
but the option to manually create them is there if you get stuck. The game grants a scan pulse ability that
reveals weaknesses in walls. This might raise the eyebrows of a hardcore
fan, but the ability doesn't really give away puzzles and mainly saves players from having
to bomb every surface to find clues. It's like Super Metroid's x-ray scope, but
with an energy limit. The sections also never lock themselves behind
the player, and backtracking is easier than it's ever been thanks to the new teleporting
statues. In general, the game lets players find their
own way and get lost. The game has a wealth of powerups to collect
and they're almost always the driver of your progress. You're constantly seeing things that you know
you'll be coming back to later, and "later" is whenever the hell you want it to be. Starting the game over with every upgrade
also seems like it would really fuck everything up, just the way it should be. The only obstacles your powerups can't clear
are the Metroid statues, but finding and killing the Metroids is entirely under your control. It's the same as the boss statues from the
old games, just on a smaller scale. Atmosphere is the only element the game struggles
with. It's impressive enough for a polygonal game
on a last gen handheld, but it struggles to match either the charm of the sprite based
games or the detail of the Prime games. The early environments are fairly repetitive,
but major shifts do start happening halfway through the game. Enemy variety is also limited, and you'll
be doing a whole lot of this until the very end. But in spite of these faults, the game manages
to draw the player into the world enough to achieve the sort of hypnotic immersion the
series is known for, and mood has much more variation and strength than Other M. ...Oh,
fuck it, good enough. There's room to argue over how the game turned
out as a remake, but there's no arguing that Samus Returns is a true Metroid designed around
the ideas that made the series what it is. And it's great to see that Yoshio Sakamoto
returned to make it. Where will Metroid go from here? Will Metroid Prime 4 continue on this path
and stay focused on pure gameplay? Or will it get sidetracked by another story
no one really wanted? Mario is a plumber because they needed a mustache
and overalls to make his nose and arms visible. Samus turns into a ball because they couldn't
animate her crawling. These games date to a time when gameplay came
first and the story was just an afterthought, and Nintendo's recent struggles are due to
getting that relationship reversed. Bottom line America- Nintendo needs to make
Metroids that are focused on the essentials again. And buy them this time, you dickheads.
Truly an amazing introspective on the Metroid series, and why it did well before falling (and somewhat rising again). Also somewhat pushes the fact that the series needs more sales in order to get more games.
I watched this on YT before it was posted here, and thought it was really well made and a good analysis of the series. Definitely recommend watching it!
"And buy it this time, you dickheads."
I want more information on that press conference at 17:18, anyone got any leads?
That was a nice thought video. His views on Majora's Mask remake are interesting too.
This video is great, but he got one thing wrong. Sakamoto didn't work on the Prime series at all.
From what I understood he finds the slower pace of Prime to be a negative? I mean... it's not that bad or even agonizingly slow. Can't get no slower than Metroid 1, 2 and Super (if you don't know the tricks).
I agree with a lot of what he said but I feel like he fails to see the idea behind the whole "authorization" bit. Yeah, it was HORRIBLY executed but the idea in of itself isn't bad. In fact if it were done well it would be very interesting and a change of pace! I'm more surprised he didn't even talk about the poorly directed cutscenes.
And I just realized that this is the same guy that destroyed Majora's Mask 3D over, what he claimed to be horrible changes, "questionable" QoL. Things that actually made Majora's Mask all the more enjoyable for me.
I have to also STRONGLY disagree on Samus Return lacking atmosphere. It wasn't the creepy vibe you get from the original GameBoy release but it certainly was leagues ahead of Other M, which feels cold and liveless, unironically. SR really gave me that feeling of desolation. Of being alone in a maze-like cave system MILES deep in a planet.