METROID: ZERO MISSION - Alpha and Omega | GEEK CRITIQUE

[Music] the approach to a video game remake is one of those special things about this medium in movies or TV a remake is more often a reboot with new actors and a different take on the material video games aren't bound to such restrictions now at their worst a game remake can come across as a cheap cash grab and a shoddy remaster might ruin what made a game so beloved in the first place more often though remakes take a middling approach they might bring a console exclusive to handhelds or especially lately adapt a relatively recent game to current consoles and improve the graphics and framerate while maintaining the same core gameplay these are common they may not be cash grabs but they are still cash ends it's a lot easier to improve on an existing game than to make a whole new but that doesn't go invalidate them a better frame rate and modernized controls can effectively make a remake like this the definitive version of a game but the most interesting remakes are also the rarest when a developer remakes a game that's a few generations old and takes the opportunity to rebuild it from the ground up these blend the best elements of film with the flexibility this industry provides they're not merely the same game you played before no it's a game rebooted to raise it to modern standards the graphics the design often even the engine and physics everything is scrutinized everything old is new again now there's a big risk to that modernizing a game without a careful hands could effectively remove the heart of the experience resulting in a product that's in some ways more insulting in those cheap cash grabs but when such a complete remake goes well when a developer understands what made the original work and keeps that heart intact a remake could effectively replace its clunky outdated predecessor and few games are as clunky and outdated as the original Metroid oh it was groundbreaking in its own time but we've seen before such ambition tends to make a game that ages terribly the NES just wasn't quite capable of what the devs were trying to do by the time technology caught up with them Metroid look like some kind of glorified proof of set for what the series would become but there are still little flashes of brilliance within it it's the Orton point for a franchise that's defined by its world building and consistency the fact that it was so aged 20 years later meant that it was prime prime I got to stop doing that prime for our remake actually you know maybe that pun is appropriate the fact that it actually got remade speaks to the heights Metroid's soared to in the mid-2000s built off the massive success of retro studios Metroid Prime the series entered a renaissance from 2002 to 2007 the number of games starring Samus Aran more than doubled Metroid was more popular and more important than it had ever been so it made sense to bring the original game up to modern standards the story is the same the Galactic Federation brings an age appease space pirates still Metroid's Samus is hired to take them down it makes no effort whatsoever to hide Samus is Kendra this time but and that was no secret by 2004 but the intro does throw in the fact that Samus was raised on zebus which chance that this will turn out to be a far more personal tale than we knew in fact where the season began and everything old is new again well okay the peashooter is still old but don't think samus is anywhere near as weak as she was back in 86 she can fire from a crouching na directions and even her wall jump is back to its former glory and I'm really glad they didn't restrict any of this but I know how this goes go left get the morph all and now whenever you get an upgrade you're taken to the equipment in you to learn all about it it's super quick and it's made even more snappy since you can mash a to skip the item fanfare now I don't mind this at all and in fact it only makes me appreciate more how this series avoided turning into a mind-numbing tutorial slog as too many other Nintendo franchises have it feels great to be back in more familiar Metroid esque territory after the previous game was such a departure I love the x-parasites infusion suit and all but from the enemies to pickups to the map design to same as yourself this is so much more iconic and maybe that's why it's only now hitting me just how different Samus controls compared to Super Metroid most of her floatiness is gone and that attacks movement yes but it also effects combat Samus is sharper and faster and holding r2 old fire instead of cycling through a menu is still so much more natural much as I liked the moon jump I might prefer this leaner or crunchy or Sammis but zero mission isn't just modernizing the core samus has learned a lot of new tricks since 1986 and almost all of her most famous abilities have been implemented and only those famous abilities see Metroid Fusion was distinct for better and worse it boldly took the franchise word and never gone before but zero mission hasn't really done anything new with samus's power set these are the same abilities I've seen before well okay I guess the power grip is new as an upgrade and it's cool they made it into an upgrade it prevents a sort of sticky timeline wicket considering the only reason Samus could climb in the last game was because the fusion suit was so much lighter but all the old upgrades are put to use in new ways the speed booster in particular is greatly expanded here it's a piece of cake tame the shinespark where you want it to be and even the morph ball can be sparked honestly these might be the most fun secrets in the whole series seriously I am loving the puzzles in this game and the degree of outside the box thinking it takes to crack them often I know something is hidden and I have an idea of how to get to it but it's still a matter of skill to actually get there that speaks to the balance that zero mission strikes between super metroids open world and fusions linear skill focused design the story strikes the same balance and it's our return to form for the series the intro is the shortest we've seen and there are no more lengthy text box conversations constantly getting in the way the fun instead there are brief but very effective cutscenes that speak through subtext speaking of subtext kozo statues aren't just for power-ups anymore I ran into this standing statue and when I hopped in the game wordlessly indicated where I needed to go even just having a map here is a massive change from the NES version and I don't mind it all that it points you in the right direction plus famous fusion it's a portable game and wandering around aimlessly wouldn't be appropriate unlike fusion though you're not so directly directed from place to place there's no atom here on zebus and no direct instruction on what exactly you're supposed to be doing I was often being shown only a general area I needed to be in and the deeper I got the further off the obvious route I needed to go to reach those points but conveyance is still achieved to a sometimes radical redesign of individual rooms and the frequent addition of completely new locations no longer did I spend the first half hour zigzagging through the same hallways over and over now I needed the long beam moved to the second half of the map and before I could do that I was shown the roadblock to Torian which is finally not a suicide pit as for new areas I was pleasantly surprised when I popped up into criteria which was going to exist up here back in Super Metroid the fact that zero mission adds it here is indicative of how seriously it takes maintaining consistency with what had come before or I guess what will come after Super Metroid zebus will be a desolate planet out of time but zero mission has to characterize the world in an earlier point when it was far more all alive to that end the graphics are made colorful and vibrant to a greater degree than ever before that impacts the tone of the game and it fits this design perfectly it reminds me more than a little of Metroid to swashbuckling adventure this is not about isolation or loneliness this is about fun but it's also about presenting a vast interconnected and believable world and once again zero mission styles itself after the best of his predecessors flora and fauna team through every corner of service and I really got the impression that this ecosystem was alive to a degree that not even Super Metroid can manage the graphical style is my favorite in the whole series but the music and I've never been a fan of the Game Boy advances sound Hardware nor its relative lack of sound hardware to be more exact C sound Nixon had to be done using CPU cycles meaning the higher quality music would come at the direct cost of the GBAS power fusion wasn't too badly affected by this thanks to its lower key and the in soundtrack but zero mission has to remix some of the more upbeat melodies of the NES game brinstar is particularly grating and it sucks because the composition itself is fantastic it just comes out sounding so tinny and distorted this isn't a deal-breaker of course I kind of got used to it after a while and most of the new music doesn't really suffer too bad being more clearly composed with the GBA in mind the game design really started diverging from the original once I got to kraid where once the brinstar depths were a massive labyrinth of repeated rooms and wasted time zero mission adds so much that the structure is unrecognizable new puzzles features and gimmicks make finding create an absolute blast where the original was designed to seem like it had more depth than it really did zero mission is just assigned but with that more modern design may come a little less player agency a lot of those little tricks I found back on the NES don't seem to apply here near the start I decided northern map and go up through these tunnels same as I had in Metroid but this time I was dunked in acid for trying later after I got the ice beam I came through here again but I was actually blocked by the chozo statue so I headed to the opposite side of the chasm skillfully climbed the Ripper ladder and still I couldn't break this sequence in fact by the time I did get up there it was in the middle of quite the backtracking slog this was one of the only times I felt zero-emission was held back by its adherence to the original map I had to go from Craig to norfair for the high jump then all the way back to brimstar for the Varia suit and then all the way back down to norfair to use it and it's just because the top of Rin star is where the Varia suit was in the original game even so there has got to be a faster way to do this I keep noticing speed blocks in suspicious places remember speed running closer was alive and well by 2004 in Super Metroid was one of the biggest reasons it got there so zero mission is clearly built with speed running in mind way more than any of its predecessors the shinespark is put to better use than it ever has been not just for item upgrades but to bolt through rooms you've been through before it can turn any entering backtrack into more of a skill spectacle if you know where to use it but I don't a game built on Metroid structure just might not be able to achieve player conveyance with as much Vanessa Super Metroid but it did at least railroad me less and less as I got further and near the end chozo indicators stopped showing up at all and I do love the way it eases off on the hand-holding as you get deeper for one most of the chozo indicators are entirely optional if you want to hop into them but I was actually allowed to fall completely off the quote-unquote correct route and I didn't even know it at the time see I think I was supposed to beat this boss head down to lower norfair and get stuck in this little series of hallways since I didn't have super missiles so I should have gone back up and discovered that something had cleared the way into this tunnel they might have fought this boss named imago who hilariously crashes through the scenery and clears the way to the super missiles when you beaten down in lower norfair you can even see this thing wriggling around but I have a problem I'm really really bad at adventure games and I guess I lack the spatial awareness to notice that this wriggling bug was right below the tunnel so instead I just shot out a ceiling tile and ended up circumnavigating lowered warfare completely different paths I diverged from the main route but I never knew I'd even done it until I played the game again and oh yeah I'm playing the game again more on that later the fact that I was allowed to do this but that I didn't even notice anything wrong about it speaks to just how evolved the team's approach to map design had become there wasn't much at all to create or ridley in the original game they're a lot more impressive here but they honestly just feel like easier retreads of super metroids renditions which I guess makes sense from a story perspective but it was still disappointing to see the exact same strategies for working don't get me wrong kraid and ridley are still great they just come across as one of the few things that's a little to remake II about this remake fortunately there are also a slew of new bosses and they more than make up for it like fusion some of these guys are built up and escalated long before you ever fight them and there's always more strategy to them and just tanking hits and spamming missiles they use the layout of their rooms and the gimmicks of their layers to great effect but there's still nothing here that got my heart racing the way Ridley did in Super Metroid and nothing even came close to the insane difficulty of most of the bosses in fusion instead of building a bridge creating Ridley's enormous visage is open to reveal the path to Mother Brain the Metroid's down here are amazingly an actual threat they've broken out and killed the space pirates who had captured them they swarmed the background they're larger than before and most importantly they don't stay frozen for nearly as long the Mother Brain fight itself is still frustrating but the faster twitch your controls at least make it a fun sort of frustrating and hey look she actually kind of fights back now that's cute whoops this is the first time zero mission has managed to kill me what he speaks again to how much easier it is than fusion by the end of fusion I had died more than 20 times zero mission got me once but I was a little more careful in the second attempt and managed to take her down mother brain just can't die without triggering an explosive countdown one more trip up and out of that familiar chasm but the game doesn't just end on an elevator this time samus emerges onto the Criterion's surface to make her escape it could have been a little more challenging and it could have done more new but taken on its own merits zero mission is a fantastic game and wait Oh zero mission ain't done the space pirates suit samus down well she's just trying to do the usual Metroid ending reveal she crash lands back on Zetas with nothing on hand aside from her rather a useless emergency pistol and it's all she'll be able to rely on as she attempts to infiltrate the space pirate mothership commandeering one of their ships seems to be her only option for escape samus still has her acrobatic abilities she can climb in wall jump but she really is almost defenseless with virtually no protection samus takes even more damage than she did in fusion and she can't fight back at all the best that pistol can do is paralyze a pirate for a few seconds this means that zero mission suddenly shifts hard into a genre change the adventure till now has been a triumphant action-packed romp now out of nowhere it's all about stealth when the space pirates catch me the music changes alarm blares and they just swarm me the only option is to run and hide and this along side a steep difficulty spike really sets this apart from what's come before I died plenty of times through here it's a more developed take on those heart-rending moments in fusion where Samus would cower from the SA X but where those were largely interactive cutscenes as long as you did what you were supposed to zero-emissions stealth is an actual game with multiple options to get through the pirates eventually backed me up into the kozo ruins and here it got even tougher as I had to avoid searchlights and crumbling terrain that would often put me directly under their line of sight it's so exhilarating to just barely scrape through like this actually it's reminiscent of that feeling I got at the start of the original game where Samus was alone outnumbered and underpowered deep in the ruins I found a mural that depicted a familiar suit of armor this triggers a flashback Samus has been here before and so the series has finally confirmed that Samus really was raised here raised by the chozo and it looks like they've got one more test for this is the only boss that you ever have to fight from such a weak position and reflects Samus a self back header when she passes that test when you pass that test well through the whole game I've been finding these unknown items that were incompatible with the Power Suit passing this test does more than restore what Santa's had before it also decodes those latent abilities ascending her to the height of her potential to put it less dramatically I gain the gravity suit the space jump and the freaking plasma beam all at the same time an even more triumphant rendition of the brinstar theme kicked in and the space pirates had absolutely no chance rooms that moments before I had to carefully and quietly sneak through we're now just torn apart in fact the space pirates are hiding from Samus now I think the space pirates became the arbiters of their own undoing they sort of just let Samus go because by bringing her back they have unwittingly created their most powerful enemy this juxtaposition is powerful and exciting and most importantly earned but even now the game's not backing off the difficulty space pirates still hit hard and never drop her sort of pick ups and back to where the mothership a single Ally can rip you apart if you're not careful there's no more guidance from hero it's up to you to climb to the bridge of the mothership and retrieve the power bombs I actually spend a lot of time just wandering around here but this close to the end a little esoteric design has more than justified it feels now like with all this power I'm pushing against the game design and it is fantastic one more of those wonderful skill based puzzles netted me an extra tank and I knew I'd need it because surely this entire toughest nail sequence was building to an incredible final boss I made my way to the top of the ship where Ridley built a robot of himself oh he looks so cool oh man he's gonna whittle away with me I'm gonna die so many times I'll feel so good by finally beat him ah that's it the final boss is one of the easiest bosses in zero mission and it's not like it has the poignant story to fall back on like Super Metroid it's just a ridley robot and it comes almost entirely out of left field I have read that it's a lot more of a challenge if you've gotten all the items I'm sure that would have been awesome but I know completionist and I wish they it may be scaled it with how many energy tanks you have or something I guess they didn't want people getting stuck so close to the end but compared to what I've already overcome this was a bit of an anti-climax either that or the Ridley robot is just a massive coward and decides to just self-destruct instead of fighting me regardless Samus has mere minutes to get out of here this is the final escape sequence in 2d Metroid and just with the sheer number of options you've got here it is definitely one of the best heck Metroid fans of argued for years whether zero mission is the best in the series that it may be better than Super Metroid and in a lot of ways I see where they're coming from the hunt for upgrades is the most well developed in this franchise finally nailing that balance between using your head and using your skill it also doesn't arbitrarily walk you into the endgame a power bomb can shatter this tunnel and get you back to the main map and since I thought it could have been more challenging there's a hard mode that unlocks once you beat the game I died in the first minute oh I am going to be playing this again screen transitions are a snap upgrade completion is shown on a second playthrough and the tone has so much more levity without sacrificing anything in the way of mythix our lord it reveals more about Samus Iran than anything has to this point and by confirming her origins finally provides the reason for these statues to help her and guide her throughout the galaxy one of the final shots returns to the mural where it's revealed that a very young samus added a personal touch God the feels if you were curious about how far we come beating the game even amongst the original Metroid and before I started zero mission I didn't beat that game one more time no mods just to compare it was still interesting as a time capsule of gaming in 1986 but man it was a chore to get through this is not even a remotely fair comparison zero mission doesn't just superannuated it replaces it that historical curiosity is the only reason left to play the NES version zero mission is the definitive way to experience the series origins and it might just be the definitive Metroid experience period Super Metroid is an epic and a masterpiece it sticks with you but a lot of the reason it sticks with you has to do with its scope and pacing it has incredible highs but spends just as much time being more introspective and low-key and I loved Fusion when I could actually play it but all that story focus was only really gonna be engaging once it'd be hard to slog through all that again but zero mission is not Super Metroid and it's definitely not future it's less sprawling than the former more playable than the latter and more replayable to both of them I've actually beaten it again just since I started writing this script and on what is now my third playthrough I'm finding so many ways to blaze through it faster and faster zero mission is all rise it's the sort of evergreen game I could see myself playing regularly because zero mission is 2d Metroid at its most evolved it combines and refines the very best aspects of a series and that surprises you with something brand new I don't think it's as great an experience as Super Metroid but I do think it's every bit it's equal as a video game it's the gold standard of what a remake in this medium can be and he is the perfect capstone to the series and now that I have completed all of the side-scrolling games I don't think I was being fair to the Metroid series Metroid and I might have gotten off on the wrong foot the first game I really played is often considered a masterpiece in its own right but well you know how fusion played well to my tastes I think the direction this first game I played went played against my tastes and when I was 14 I wasn't mature enough to see past that I let that first impression color my judgment of this franchise even as much as I loved Super Metroid because of its reputation I assumed that it was an outlier and I didn't really give the other 2d games a chance but now that I have what's the verdict am i in fact a geek about Metroid abso-freakin'-lutely at the very least I am for the 2d games contrary to what I expected going in there's so much more to them than just wandering around and finding upgrades so much more skill to be earned beyond just increasing your avatar strength Metroid has surprised me it has impressed me and on a few occasions it has humbled me rather than the adventure interfering with the gameplay this series uses its gameplay to create and inform a cohesive world and the way every single adventure builds directly off the last makes Metroid worth geeking over but that's not the only reason I've been able to stick with them creating these episodes and having you guys to hold me to a high standard has forced me to engage with Metroid on a level I never had before and I want to thank each and every one of you for this opportunity I found so so much more to love about these games than I even expect it to and it is a damn shame that the 2d series ended in 2004 at least that's word officially if I patreon has hit a milestone for a bonus episode the next time on TGC I'll be covering the game that indirectly started this entire project another Metroid to remake and if it hasn't I'll see you guys next season until then you keep geeking I'll keep critiquing thank you so much for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: The Geek Critique

Views: 640,770

Keywords: The Geek Critique, TGC, Geek Critique, Josh Wallen, metroid, samus, samus aran, zero mission, metroid zero mission, metroid zero, metroid remake, remake, review, analysis, game analysis, gba remake, gba, game boy advance, 2004

Id: bFuEk7WOBJw

Length: 22min 7sec (1327 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 23 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/LinkOnFire]

Man, I love Zero Mission. I honestly like it more than Fusion, especially with that last bonus section with the space pirates.

I really wish Nintendo would make another 2D Metroid. I miss it dearly.

[u/headforthehills]

I usually don't like these kind of video game think pieces, but this one does a great job of highlight what made Zero Mission such a great game. I haven't played since it's release but looking back it's subdued narrative presented in still image cut-scenes with no text was very striking to me even as a kid, especially after the amount of story that was in text in Pirate Logs in Prime and conversations with Adam in Fusion.

[u/JarekBloodDragon]

I disagree that mother brain was a fun kind of hard. Mother brain was metroid trying to be a bullet hell it was just annoying.

I also HATED the random stealth section of zero mission. I don't play metroid for stealth. That's a completely different genre. I just found it incredibly tedious.

I don't agree with his assessment that metroid needs to be harder, either. I play metroid for exploration, not difficulty.

[u/Weltall548]

I'm a hardcore Metroid fanboy, but I never thought Zero Mission was that great. It's dull and lacks the challenge Fusion had.

[u/Matthew94]

First time watching this guy. He's pretty entertaining but I'm really tired of the "generic youtube voice" everyone seems to have.

[u/ViSsrsbusiness]

His content is top-tier but I can't get over his speech impediment. It takes me right out of the moment, regardless of how much I try to enjoy the material.