What do you think of when you hear the word “Samus”? Perhaps you think of the playable character in the Nintendo fighting game series, “Super Smash Bros.” Perhaps you don’t recognize the name at all, and always assumed the lead character in the “Metroid” series to be named “Metroid.” (An old inside joke among Nintendo faithful.) Perhaps you do know the name and the series the character is from, but are not yet privy to the knowledge that Samus, the intergalactic bounty hunter in an orange and red power suit, is a woman.
The “Metroid” series is one of Nintendo’s most storied and revered franchises, albeit, at times, not a popular one, especially compared to the pop culture dominance of other Nintendo characters such as Mario, Kirby, or Pikachu. Despite critical acclaim at almost every turn, the series ranks as one of Nintendo’s worst selling ones– ranking somewhere between “Star Fox” and “Wario” games. In fact, not a single title in the series has broken the 3 million units in sales mark, even with multiple titles on the Nintendo DS and Wii systems, with an install base of over 100 million each, worldwide.
And yet, in the face of all this, Metroid has consistently been one of the most requested game franchises from Nintendo, having produced two of the most well-beloved titles ever made in “Super Metroid” and “Metroid Prime,” and it has been some time since Nintendo answered fans’ requests with a satisfying release.
2010’s “Metroid: Other M,” the product of a partnership between Nintendo and action-game specialists, Ninja Theory, had competent gameplay but warped Samus’s character to such a degree that many came away calling it the worst title in the franchise. That title would then be taken by 2016’s “Metroid Prime: Federation Force,” a 3DS spin-off that featured a 4-player co-op campaign with clunky controls and poor communication features. With that in mind, the last well-liked title in the franchise came out 10 years ago in 2007’s “Metroid Prime 3: Corruption” for the Nintendo Wii, and even longer if you were a fan of the 2D exploration games like “Super Metroid,” which saw its last entry in the series five years earlier in 2002’s “Metroid Fusion.”
It may seem strange to start a review with a lengthy retelling of the history of the franchise, but virtually everything about the release of “Metroid: Samus Returns” is reliant on that history and the context it carries.
“Metroid: Samus Returns” is a remake, or, more accurately, a reimagining, of the 1991 GameBoy game, “Metroid II: Return of Samus,” and the first side-scrolling entry in the series in 15 years. The game follows the same plot as “Metroid II,” and features many of the same themes and set pieces.
The mission is simple: there are 40 metroid scattered throughout the depths of the planet SR388. Sluices controlling the level of purple acid gate the player’s progress until they defeat a certain amount of those metroids in a single area, forcing the player to search high and low to find them all before moving on to the next area, and repeating the process from there.
It’s a repetitive process, not least of all because the metroids only have 4 forms, meaning each of those fights are repeated throughout the game– the only variable being the elements and terrain they take place in. The saving grace is that each of the battles aren’t very long, and those that are take place closer to the end-game and aren’t nearly as numerous. On top of all that, Samus will gain more and more powers between the first and last time you fight any individual boss, really giving the player a sense of progression as bosses that may have challenged them earlier in the game become cakewalks by the time more evolved forms show up. The interspersing of unique bosses in between also helps to break up possible tediousness.
Due to the nature of the gating process, the game itself is much more linear than other side-scrolling “Metroid” titles. Rather than weaving around a complex map, gaining abilities to access new areas through ones the player has passed through before, the player simply moves from one area to the next. It’s a holdover from the source material, as “Metroid II: Return of Samus” was very much hampered by the hardware it was played on– featuring much less weapons, and having more issues with navigation due to how much of the screen Samus’s size took up.
“Samus Returns’s” solution, then, was to implement the classic Metroid gameplay into each area, so while the overarching structure is linear as you progress from one area to the next, each individual area has you taking multiple paths and backtracking while collecting new abilities to access previously inaccessible rooms. Helping in this endeavor are teleportation stations, which allow the player to quickly move between areas, allowing the designers to hide secrets in early areas that the player won’t be able to access until much later in the game– something that couldn’t be done in the original without tedious backtracking.
“Samus Returns” also gives Samus a handful of new aeon abilities that add to the experience in different ways. Each ability is fueled by the aeon gauge, which replenishes in the same way that you can recover health or ammo– by defeating enemies or finding a specific refuel station. These new powers include a rapid fire ability that lets the player unleash a large amount of damage in a short time, a shield ability that protects Samus from damage, and a third ability slows down time, which is helpful in many situations, but comes in most handy to pass over tiles that would otherwise break before Samus could traverse them.
Yet, the most significant of these new powers is the scan pulse ability. In older “Metroid” titles, and certainly, for many games in the genre the series spawned, exploration was often a tedious process of trial and error. The map appears as the player moves through the world, and the path forward may not always be clear– most tiles that Samus is able to destroy look like normal tiles until the player tries to destroy them using either a missile or a morph bomb. This often led to many players getting stuck and wasting resources attempting to destroy every tile in sight hoping they’d eventually hit the correct one. But using the scan pulse shows players which nearby tiles can be destroyed, as well as filling out the map around Samus, which can help the player find the correct path and secret rooms scattered throughout the game.
What this all adds up to is what is clearly the most accessible title in the series for new players. The introduction sequence quickly summarizes the events of the original “Metroid,” and since the focus of the game is more on ambiance and exploration than narrative, nothing should go over any player’s head. (Though if you have interest, the original title was remade in 2004’s “Metroid: Zero Mission” for the GameBoy Advance, which is also available on Wii U.)
In many ways, “Metroid: Samus Returns” is just another “Metroid” game. It doesn’t revolutionize the mechanics, and it’s hard to argue that it’s a better game than the gold standard, “Super Metroid.” But in many ways, that’s besides the point. It adds a lot of new ideas that improve the classic gameplay, it’s a new entry in a series many thought Nintendo had no interest in producing again, and it turns one of the most inaccessible titles in the “Metroid” series into the most accessible.
It’s a game that will undoubtedly satisfy longtime fans, act as a perfect way to introduce new players to the series, and, in the same year that “Wonder Woman” took over the box office, is a most welcome return of one of the biggest and most important female characters in video games.