How Samus Aran's portable adventure helped me to see the viability of sequels on Game Boy.
After Metroid captured my heart, it became something of an obsession for me. In the days and weeks that followed, my relationship with it continued to blossom and develop, and during that period, I couldn't stop thinking about its every fascinating aspect. I couldn't stop thinking about its brilliant design formula, its wondrously mysterious environments, its incredibly evocative music, its wonderfully distinctive characters, and its amazingly unique sense of atmosphere.
Metroid had invaded every part of consciousness, and for a long time, it was the only thing in gaming that mattered to me. This game, which I'd originally determined to be stupidly arcane and thus not worthy of my time or attention, became one that I simply couldn't stop playing. And before long, I became so intimately familiar with its world that I came to see it as a place of comfort--a dependably wondrous playground wherein I was safe to explore at my leisure and do so while intently examining and thinking about the game's environments. And I engaged in this activity quite often.
Quite simply: I loved playing Metroid and immersing myself in its world.
And that's what I continued to do. Over the following year, I returned to Metroid on a constant basis. I sneaked in play-throughs whenever I could, whether it was during the boring after-school hours that preceded afternoon cartoons or during the hour or so of downtime before one of our big summer barbeques, whence I'd hurry up to my room and attempt to achieve the goal of reaching Tourian before the adults inevitably started to yell for me (or my friends and I) to come down and eat.
And if I wasn't playing Metroid, I was enjoying its content in some other fun way. I was writing about it my specially created video-game-themed "Superbooks" (which were made from Mead writing tablets). I was drawing and sketching Ridley and Kraid and making them a part of my separate card series. Or I was taping a pencil drawing of Mother Brain (as she was portrayed in Captain N: The Game Master) to my liquid-motion spiral timer and creating a customized "action figure"!
I was, like I said, obsessed with Metroid.
For as much as Metroid occupied my thoughts, though, it didn't consume nearly as much space as my other obsession: my dreams of Metroid sequel! In that same period, I spent many an hour thinking up scenarios for how a hypothetical Metroid sequel could play out on the NES' evolving hardware--how it could make use of advanced graphical fidelity. I envisioned a much larger, more expansive game world--a desolate-but-organic-feeling planet that was formed from a ton of interconnected, amazingly atmospheric corridors, caves and boss hideouts. "This new world would have so many new environments shaded in so many different hues," I imagined, "and thus there'd be so much to explore and so much more potential for discovery!"
I looked at what Tecmo accomplished with Rygar (another action-adventure game with which I'd recently fallen in love), whose world was formed from a collection of amazingly disparate environments and strikingly detailed backgrounds, and thought to myself, "If this was what was possible on 1987-era NES hardware, then just imagine what could be done on 1990-era NES hardware!"
Whenever I'd think about the possibilities, I'd be overcome with excitement!
The problem, of course, was that it had never been hinted that Nintendo was interested in creating a Metroid sequel, and game magazines (including Nintendo's own) didn't even care to speculate about such a game. So the reality, I was sad to admit, was that a "Metroid 2" just didn't seem likely. After all: It had now been over two years since the original Metroid was released, and in that era, two years was a long time for an apparently successful video game to go without a sequel. If a game didn't get a sequel within 12-14 months, it probably wasn't ever getting one; its time had likely passed.
And once I accepted that fact, my dreams faded away, and I resigned myself to a future in which Metroid would forever be a single child.
So about a year later, long after I'd abandoned any hope of a Metroid sequel, I grabbed my July issue of Nintendo Power (Volume 26) from the mailbox (which hung right outside our front door) and took it over to the kitchen (specifically to the circular portion of the kitchen counter). Then I began to flip through the magazine and, as usual, seek out games and sections in which I had a direct interest.
Usually I'd check out the other sections afterwards--at a later time--but on this day, for no particular reason, I decided to buck the trend and do something out of the norm: start by taking a quick peek at the issue's foldout poster. You know--take something I didn't care much about and get it out of the way early. So I turned to the magazine's middle portion and unfolded the poster.
And suddenly, there it was...
Now, the print in the poster's top portion didn't specifically say "Metroid 2" (rather, it formed something close to the original Metroid's title-screen logo), no, but the tagline below, which stated that "The universe has expanded," made it abundantly clear to me that this poster's imagery was indeed serving as the official announcement of the Metroid sequel I had long dreamed about! It was no longer just an idea, no; it actually existed!
I was honestly shocked by what I was seeing. I almost couldn't believe it. Metroid 2 was real, and it was probably coming out sometime soon!
However, when I finished unfolding the poster, my attitude quickly changed. Suddenly my heart dropped and my excitement morphed into a feeling of deep concern. This happened because I peered down at the poster's freshly unfolded bottom portion and saw a dire proclamation:
"Coming soon ... for Game Boy."
And oh man was I pissed.
"How could Nintendo do something like this?!" I began to loudly rant. "You can't put a sequel to Metroid on the friggin' Game Boy! It can only display games in black and white! The NES can produce so many vibrant colors and render multiple large-scale environments, and instead of making Metroid 2 for that system, you instead put it on Game Boy--an underpowered brick that has no color variety and can barely handle two onscreen characters?! Now it'll never have the chance to be the classic that it would have been otherwise! What the hell are you thinking, Nintendo?!"
This wasn't how it was supposed to be.
I was so upset that I forcefully declared that I had no interest in ever purchasing a low-grade Game Boy-exclusive Metroid 2! I wasn't gonna get anywhere near that inferior piece of junk! Nuh uh. No way. No how. "As far as I'm concerned," I said with a big grimace on my face, "Nintendo can take its dumbed-down Metroid sequel and stuff it!"
I carried that anger with me for quite a while.
The whole time, though, I knew that I was being kinda silly. I didn't actually hate my Game Boy, no. To the contrary: I'd grown quite attached to it over the previous 6-month period! It was just that I thought of the Game Boy as a "lesser" system that had no business expanding beyond puzzle games and simple platformers. The idea that it could host a direct sequel to an entry from a large-scale Nintendo series was unthinkable to me. "You can't make a sequel to a major NES game and put it on a machine that's less powerful!" I logically concluded. "Doing so makes it instantly inferior and thus a step back for the series!"
You know how it is, though: Time and marketing have a way of changing our perception of video-game products.
After a few months, my resolve started to weaken. I still had many problems with how Metroid 2 was being handled, yeah, but I was finding it harder to deny that I had a certain amount of interest in the game. In that same time, I grew closer to the Game Boy and its games, and after seeing what some of its recent releases were pulling off, I began to consider that maybe I'd underestimated the system's power. "If the Game Boy's technology is capable of producing something on the scale of NES Castlevania," I thought, "then perhaps Nintendo might be able to create an action-adventure game that's at least close in size to the original Metroid."
That's when I started warming up to the idea of a pocket-sized Metroid sequel. I even started to believe that such a game could benefit from the Game Boy's unique values--particularly its portability. "A Metroid game that you can take with you on the road?" I considered. "Certainly that will be a game whose mysterious atmosphere will be greatly augmented by the enveloping influence of the wondrous woodland that surrounds us whenever we're driving to New Jersey!"
"All of this looks amazing!" I kept thinking to myself as I read and re-read the page's descriptions. "I have to get this game if only to put these laser weapons to use and try out all of these awesome maneuvers!" (I ignored the rest of the piece because I didn't want any of the game's other content, like map environments and bosses, to be spoiled.)
The other development was the airing of the Metroid II "Be afraid!" commercial, whose every frame was created using what appeared to be Game Boy graphics. Its alien-looking narrator, who sounded like an even-more-humorless Orson Welles, explained the game's plot ("One life-sucking Metroid survived the first Metroid adventure, and now it's multiplying rapidly!") in the most urgent-sounding way, and I found this to be gripping because "a Metroid escaping and multiplying" was so remarkably close to what I imagined a Metroid sequel's story would be! And it was certainly a story that I needed to follow.
(Of course, none of what was said in this commercial had anything to do with the game's actual story, which, rather, was about hunting down and exterminating the remaining Metroids. Nintendo of America was probably spooked by the idea of airing a commercial that spoke of a planned genocide, so it had its marketing team take some liberties.)
After seeing all of this, I was convinced that Return of Samus was the real deal. It lacked for color, sure, but even then, it looked great. It looked, I was happy to say, like a "true Metroid game." And what was more exciting to me was that it appeared as though Return of Samus was striving to surpass its progenitor--to go well beyond the established template and thus break the mold with its large, detailed Samus sprite (which now closely matched the official-art version of Samus) and its more vast, more expansive alien world.
For the longest time, I didn't think that it was possible for a Game Boy game to surpass an NES game in terms of visuals and scale. Super Mario Land, I thought, was the limit of how far you could take it. But now Return of Samus had come along and shattered my perception. It showed me that Game Boy games were actually quite capable of being bigger and better than my NES favorites. And because it did that, my hype for it shot up to the maximum level!
That upcoming Christmas was going to mark my one-year anniversary as a Game Boy-owner, and I knew that there was only one game that could turn the commemoration into something truly special: Metroid II: Return of Samus!
And on Christmas Day of 1991, I got my wish: The Metroid sequel that I'd been craving for years was finally in my hands! I wasted no time in tearing into it!
Immediately I fell in love with its manual, which was packed with interesting information and imagery. I was delighted to find that its story description was so thorough that it also included a lengthy recap of the original Metroid's plot line and insofar talked about the formation of the Galactic Federation, the discovery of the Metroids, and Samus' battle against the space pirates and Mother Brain. As a continuity hound, I had immense appreciation for this thoughtful inclusion of the series' previous canonical events--all of which I'd obsessively written about and expanded upon in my Superbooks. I couldn't remember of any other instance in which a sequel's manual went into that much detail.
Return of Samus' manual went above and beyond the norm. It delivered a ton of imagery and information even in instances when it wasn't entirely necessary. It took the time to list and describe every suit upgrade, every item, every weapon, and every one of SR388's indigenous creatures down to even the most insignificant of lifeforms. Did I really need to know what the amoeba-like "Meboid" was or how it operated? Was it of any benefit to me to know that much about a creature that was confined to one room in the entire game? Probably not. Yet there it was listed alongside the Metroid evolutions and all of the other principal inhabitants. And I was happy about that because, as always, I wanted to know as much as I could about the game's lore--even its most trivial details--before entering into its world.
I'm telling you, reader: I was blown away by the manual's content--by its depth of imagery and its exhaustive itemization. It filled me with the sense that Return of Samus' scope was massive. In the time I spent reading it, I pored over its every page and its every sentence and did so with the intention of being as researched as possible before setting out to explore SR388's whole new world.
At that point, it was all about first impressions.
The first thing to evoke a response from me was the game's title screen. I was disappointed to learn (or, rather, hear) that it didn't feature an emotive title theme, having which, I believed, was a requisite for a Metroid game. If you wanted to create a true Metroid experience, I thought, you needed to set the tone early and greet players with an evocative title theme that helped them to emotionally connect to the material right from the get-go. The theme, itself, told a very important story about the characters and their world, and players benefitted greatly from knowing about it.
Return of Samus' title screen didn't have such a theme. In fact, it was completely absent of music. All it offered, rather, was a series of strange-sounding beeps and crashing noises--a cacophony that sounded something like an orchestra of crickets chirping wildly during a solar storm.
I waited for some music to kick in and for an in-game storyline explanation to flash onscreen, but neither event ever occurred. There was just continuous beeping and crashing. When it became clear to me that nothing was going to happen--that there wasn't going to be a strong, emotional lead-in--I pressed the Start button and moved on. And in that moment, my excitement dampened a bit. (A rather-touching musical theme does eventually emerge from and overtake the cacophony, but it takes roughly a minute for it to happen. For the 13-year-old version of me, though, that was simply too long to wait.)
And during the opening minutes, my excitement continued to dampen until it all but dissipated. This happened for a variety of reasons. To start, I wasn't particularly enamored with the "Samus Appears" fanfare ditty; it wasn't nearly as moving, as powerful, or as rousing as Metroid's, and so the adventure, sadly, started out on a flat note. Also, I didn't like that the action was slower-moving and that the animation was so very lacking in comparison to Metroid's (it wasn't really, no; it just seemed that way because of how slow the animations were occurring). And I wasn't happy about the fact that Samus started out the adventure with missiles (and so many of them) because missiles, I thought, should be earned and not simply handed out. I took this as a warning that Return of Samus might not be as exploration-based as I had hoped.
What I was experiencing here was my first bout with sequel shock, which I describe as such: When you're deeply attached to a game--like, say, Metroid--you become apt to develop a negative opinion of its sequel if you discover, immediately, that it doesn't conform to all of the series' established formulas (or what you believe to be the series' established formulas). Return of Samus', as I saw them, were some serious deviations, and they had me feeling very concerned.
Though, after I messed around a bit in the opening areas and got a feel for the game, my mood started to change, and suddenly I was feeling optimistic. What helped turn the tide were Return of Samus' new additions, of which I quickly became a fan.
I thought that having Samus' ship parked on the planet's surface, in a place in which it was freely accessible, was a brilliant design decision and that the ship, itself, made for such a tremendous, memorable visual. Being able to return to the ship at any time and fully replenish your health seemed like an "advanced feature"--something that the original Metroid probably couldn't have pulled off.
I was happy to see that backgrounds (some of them, at least) now had texturing (Metroid's backgrounds, conversely, were all solidly black). I liked that you could crouch down and fire while in that position; being able to do this allowed you to more effectively combat the small ground-stalking enemy types. And I was pleased that you could now fire downward while aerial--an ability that was sorely missing from Metroid; downward fire made combat and block-clearing so much easier!
And after I became accustomed to Return of Samus' differences, I was able to see it as its own game. I was ready to judge it on its own merits. And from there, it was all a matter of digging beneath the surface and finding out what other surprises were waiting for me!
I was well aware of the series' penchant for defying the action-game convention of "You must travel rightward from the starting point," yeah, but still I instinctually headed right after descending down the game's first vertical tunnel. And sure enough, I ran into a major barrier: a pathway flooded with life-draining lava! I recalled that the manual mentioned something about a "dangerous liquid" that blocks off certain areas, so I understood that no progress could be here. So I retreated back to the last junction point and then proceeded to head left.
As I was traveling along, I had a surprise encounter with an Alpha Metroid (the Metroid's first evolutionary form). I was so startled by the encounter's abruptly triggered, contrastingly harsh music that I spazzed out and started mashing all of the buttons and hitting every which direction on the d-pad, and as I was fumbling around, all I could do was watch on as the Alpha Metroid bounced me all around the room. Though, I eventually regained control of my senses and proceeded to destroy the Alpha Metroid by blasting it with five missiles (truthfully, I resorted to missile-spamming because I was still in a bit of a panic mode).
It was only then that I realized that there was a connection between the Metroids and the "earthquakes" of which the manual spoke: Earthquakes would trigger after a certain amount of Metroids were destroyed! And these earthquakes would work to clear away obstructive lava! "What an interesting mechanic!" I thought. (Strangely, though, I never questioned the cause-and-effect relationship--how killing a flying creature could trigger an earthquake. Usually I was quick to point out and pick apart such silly plot contrivances. Later on in life, when I forced myself to confront this contrivance, I decided to explain it way by saying that there was no cause and effect relationship and that the earthquakes were instead occurring coincidentally! Because, of course, I was a huge Metroid II apologist.)
In that first session, I didn't play too far into the game (about all I did was clean out the first dome area) because I was short time. It was, after all, Christmas Day, and for me, holiday activities always took precedence over video games. So Return of Samus would have to wait.
For most of the day, though, Return of Samus dominated my thoughts. I continued to reflect upon my experience with the game and make mental notes. I continued to make lists of its pros and its cons and compare it to the original Metroid. Often I dwelled on the negative and focused on what I perceived to be the game's shortcomings. Mostly, I was disappointed with a certain aspect of its level design: the lack of bombable walls! I'd since become so accustomed to Metroid-style level design--the type I originally considered to be unacceptably arcane--that I was actually bothered by the fact that Return of Samus didn't put a lot of emphasis on random wall- and floor-bombing! Hidden-tunnel-finding, I believed, was a very important level-design aspect because it helped to make the game's world feel mysteriously expansive and give you a sense that there were big secrets hiding beyond every surface.
Now yeah--Return of Samus did contain some bombable walls, like the one directly above the Wallfire turret in the first dome, but they were too obvious. The game basically pointed them out to you. Also, none of the hidden tunnels (as far as I knew) led to secret areas and rooms; they always took you, rather, to where you needed to be. And this caused me to think that the game was simply too linear. My hope was that its world would eventually open up a bit.
Also, I was disappointed with game's soundtrack (if I could even call it that) and what it turned into once you moved beyond SR388's surface.
The starting-area theme was terrific. It was well-composed, energetic and inspiriting. It wasn't quite as rousing as Metroid's Brinstar theme, no, but still it was very heroic-sounding, and it had the power to inspire me. But once you moved beyond the starting area, there wasn't much to hear. The proceeding areas' "music," inexplicably, was composed of nothing more than odd chirping noises and psychedelic-sounding warbles; it was basically muted.
This was such a big letdown because the original Metroid had some of the most evocative music I'd ever heard--memorable pieces like the aforementioned Brinstar theme; the disconsolate, quietly desperate Kraid's Hideout; and the frightening, sinister-sounding Ridley's Hideout. Its evocative music made it what it was. It was an integral part of the package. Though, Return of Samus had almost nothing like it. Its "music" was instead highly restrained and completely bereft of emotion.
"How could they forget to add the all-important 'emotion-inducing' music?!" I wondered confusedly.
But I also spent plenty of time thinking about the aspects that I really liked.
I was really fond of the new Spider Ball upgrade. It was a wonderfully inventive item, I thought, and it added a whole new dimension to map-exploration. Its controls were sometimes annoyingly unresponsive and inconsistent, yeah, but occasionally having to deal with a little glitchiness was a small price to pay for an ability that basically allowed you to travel anywhere.
I enjoyed experimenting with the Spider Ball and using it to navigate around the dome area's ceiling structures, which, ordinarily, were far out of reach. At first, I was thrilled to be engaging in this type of activity because I thought that I was getting away with something--that I was breaking the rules, like I used to do in Metroid, and traveling to spaces that were never meant to be accessed. But the moment I came across ceiling spikes, my excitement immediately faded because it was immediately obvious to me that (a) the designers intended for me to engage in such activity and (b) I wasn't the maverick I imagined myself to me. Still, I loved that I was able to do it.
Also, I was happy to see the return of the Chozo statues. Their presence, I felt, created an important visual link--one that served to meaningfully connect two games whose visuals were rendered by very different types of technology and thus not wholly compatible. They were comforting; they reminded me that I wasn't far from home. Though, I wasn't sure how, exactly, the Chozo were connected to SR388. According to the manual, they were "some unknown civilization," but that didn't explain anything about what they were doing there! For the longest time, I considered this to be the game's greatest mystery.
In the early going, that's how it would go: I'd play Return of Samus for an hour or two, and then I'd spend the rest of the day reflecting upon the experience and thinking about and balancing the game's negative and positive aspects.
I'd take major issue with the fact that the enemy cast included robots (because I felt that Metroid worlds should feel purely organic and, also, that the presence of functional machines served to diminish SR388's "long-deserted" vibe), but then I'd recall how much of a blast I had zapping enemies with the Spazer and Plasma beams (which were placed way too close in proximity, I thought) and space-jumping my way across and around the domes' towering expanses (well, it'd be fun until I inevitably mistimed a button-press and dropped 20 screens and fell onto spikes). I'd complain about the transitional areas, which were formed from series of indistinguishable zigzagging tunnels, and how terribly uninteresting they were, but then I'd spend several minutes thinking about the cool exploration sequences and my intense, exciting scraps with the terrifyingly aggressive Zeta Metroids and the imposing, tough-skinned Omega Metroids.
Still, I was mostly positive on the game. I was really digging it.
Though, one of my biggest fears was sadly coming true: Return of Samus was turning out to be a very linear game. Its world wasn't comprised of a group of neighboring areas that you could freely move between, no; rather, its layout, I was learning, was basically a straight line, and thus advancement was purely sequential.
The game did have an exploration factor, yes, but one that was more controlled. That is, you could only explore the dome area to which you were currently confined, and exploration was, for the most part, simply a means to uncover branching rooms and tunnels that contained nothing more than optional items and upgrades. So as I was playing, I never got the sense that thorough exploration could be the key to opening up whole new self-contained sections that were hiding numerous secrets. The original Metroid always gave me that sense, no matter where I was in its world.
I mean, yeah--I liked how Return of Samus rewarded me for my thorough exploration by providing me items and upgrades that I might have otherwise missed, but the whole time, I kept wishing that it would provide me much greater rewards--that my exploration would instead lead to the discovery of expansive sub-areas whose existence served to blow the game wide open.
Instead, Return of Samus continued to be linear and condensed-feeling. In too many instances, major items were placed too close to one another, so when I'd get the next item in line, it would feel too soon. Like I said before: The Spazer Laser and the Plasma Beam were only a few rooms apart from one another, so I barely got the chance to put the former to good use. Also, one dome in particular had about 60% of the game's total items stuffed into it!
So my sense was that Return of Samus was overly structured and that much of its level design was rushed.
At no time did I ever feel lost or unsure of what to do next. I was never really stumped or fearful. And that was a negative because these were the types of feelings that you were supposed to have when you played an exploration-based action-adventure game (particularly a Metroid game). You were supposed to struggle to find answers.
But that wasn't happening here, no. The only puzzling obstruction I came across in Return of Samus was a seemingly impenetrable wall that was blocking off access to one of the transitional areas' subsequent sections. I remember this event well because it occurred on the morning of a big day: New Year's Eve--a day when playing video games felt special.
I simply couldn't figure out how to get by that damn wall. And eventually I became so angry with my inability to clear away this obstruction that I decided, for some reason, to pause the game and head over to the kitchen and express my frustration to my aunt, who was helping to prepare for the night's activities while my parents were out shopping. Not surprisingly, our short chat didn't produce a solution to the puzzle. (Actually, my aunt barely engaged me. Mostly she just listened to my rantings and kept nodding her head up and down, as if to say, "That's nice!" Such a response was obviously code for, "Couldn't care less, so hurry up and go away.")
Well, really, there was no puzzle. It turned out that all you had to do to clear away the obstruction was fire missiles into its two pixelated, chunky-looking blocks. Why I didn't immediately think to do such a thing, I don't know. I guess I was just overcomplicating the matter.
But even though I continued to take issue with a lot of what Return of Samus was doing, I was still very much enjoying its action. It was a highly engaging game.
And it had a terrific endgame sequence--a final stretch that contained a couple of cool surprises.
First there was the introduction of actual new music (better late than never, I guess), and it was exactly the type of music that I hoping to hear in a Metroid sequel. The moment I entered the game's final section, a frightfully-urgent-, sinister-sounding tune began to play. Immediately its message was clear to me: Something distressing is about to happen!
And something distressing did happen. It was another of the final section's surprises: the return of the base-form Metroids! Though I suspected that the game's ominous accentuating of a strange egg and the Metroid counter's resetting to 9 were pointing to such an occurrence, I was still caught off guard by it. I just didn't expect that the designers would bring back plain ol' Metroids and assign them the job of protecting the final boss. I thought, rather, that they'd strictly adhere to the "evolution" theme. I was glad that they didn't. I was very happy to see the base-form Metroids; I viewed their appearance as a cool throwback and another important link to the original Metroid.
Then there was the final boss: the ghastly Metroid Queen, which didn't look anything like I expected. I assumed that the final Metroid evolution would, according to logical continuation, be an enormous, hulking beast, so I was quite surprised when it was instead a reasonably sized (though still considerably large) quadrupedal alligator-like creature with an extending head! It was nonetheless one of the most frightening-looking characters I'd ever seen in a game.
I don't remember how I fared against the queen in our first encounter--if I succeeded or failed. Though, I do recall the nature of the battle: It was a big mess. My heart was pounding, and I was so nervous that I kept (a) screwing up the timing of my evasion-intended jumps and (b) wildly mashing the attack button in my desperate attempts to halt the queen's nasty head-extending bite attacks. I felt (at first, at least) that this encounter was way more intense than Metroid's Mother Brain fight!
And after I won the battle, the game had one last surprise for me: the hatching of the apparently harmless baby Metroid. In a cool little twist, this little fellow refrained from attacking me and instead lent me its assistance! It helped me to clear away the otherwise-indestructible crystalline obstructions and thus escape to the planet's surface. In the 2 or 3 minutes we spent together, that little Metroid and I formed a bond (and that bond would grow much deeper in the future).
As I watched the credits roll, I reflected upon my experience with Return of Samus and started putting together some final impressions. My thoughts were mostly positive, and a big part of the reason for that was that I was still on a high after having played through what I considered to be an outstanding endgame sequence. And that recency bias worked to counteract all of my negative opinions.
My final verdict was that Metroid II: Return of Samus was a pretty great action-adventure game, and my feeling was that I needed to play it again real soon!
And that's exactly what I did! I started a new mission a few days later. And after that mission was completed, I started another one! And I just kept on going. Over the next few months, I played through Return of Samus several times.
And each time I played through it, I grew more appreciative of its divergent aspects. Many of the things that it was doing started to make sense to me: Its stage-areas' aural accompaniment wasn't a cacophony of chirps and bleeps, no. Rather, it was an understated ambiance whose purpose was to create a mysterious, unsettling atmosphere and convey to you that SR3888's alien world wasn't like any other you'd ever visited before. "Only a true Metroid game could be brave enough to take this approach--to largely eschew music in favor of letting environmental noises tell the whole story," I thought.
Its mechanical enemies weren't "out-of-place robots," no. They were machine guardians left behind by their creators (the Chozo) and thus very much a functioning part of the planet's ecosystem. Only now they were without purpose; they were doomed to forever roam the domes' environments and serve as protectors for a civilization and a people that no longer existed. Theirs was a sad story, I thought, and one that was definitely in the spirit of Metroid.
And the game had to be linear and direct because Samus' was an urgent hunt for incredibly dangerous creatures that could rapidly multiply at any given moment and then proceed to invade and destroy neighboring planets. The level design, I could see, reflected the nature of the mission.
So even though I wasn't happy about the fact that Return of Samus eschewed its progenitor's open-ended, labyrinthine design, I understood why it needed to, and I could acknowledge that there was a sound logic to its design philosophy. And, also, I could see that I was being a little biased in my assessment and that the game actually did offer a lot in the way of exploration and mystery; and quite often, it was able to capture Metroid's spirit. Had any of that not been true, I wouldn't have been so eager to revisit its world again and again!
So while Return of Samus didn't resonate with me quite as strongly as the original Metroid did, it was still a highly impactful game. That's why I spent so many hours playing it and exploring its world. Its why I spent so much time thinking about and obsessing over its story and its characters. I loved Return of Samus. I considered it to be a worthy Metroid sequel.
From then on, Return of Samus became, much like its predecessor, a game to which I'd turn whenever I needed an action-adventure fix or whenever I had an hour or two of downtime before a special event (like one of those big summer barbeques). At that point in my life, the demands of school and extracurricular activities cut short the amount of time I could spend playing video games during the weekdays, so I did most of my gaming on the weekends, which, as I saw it, included Friday nights--the time when the free-of-obligation portions of your weekends truly began!
And whenever Friday night would roll around, I'd think about how I wanted to spend my time and almost always come to the conclusion that the most appropriate thing to do was to engage in an activity that offered me a lot of freedom. The most appropriate thing to do was to play Metroid II: Return of Samus on my portable Game Boy.
Thus, Return of Samus became my first ever "Friday game." I'd load it up every Friday at the same time (8:00 p.m.) and play it while parked in that same section on our den's sectional sofa (the one below the hanging lamp!). And for years, it provided me great Friday-night entertainment. Also, most memorably, it served as a great companion to my favorite block of TV shows: ABC's TGIF lineup, which included beloved classics like Full House, Family Matters and Perfect Strangers. I'd play Return of Samus while watching or listening to them. For the longest time, that was my tradition.
Those Fridays were always a ton of fun. I loved them. And I look back on them with great nostalgia.
Return of Samus made me realize that Metroid games, rather, were best enjoyed in the home environment--in intimate, distraction-free settings that allowed you to focus all of your attention on the games and thus become deeply immersed in their worlds. A Metroid game's mysterious atmosphere, I came to understand, was best augmented not by the influence of blue skies and endless stretches of woodland but rather by the type of enchanted vibe that could only be generated by wooden walls, old furniture, and the spaces in which your fondest gaming memories were formed.
Of course, that era of my life didn't last forever, and eventually there came a time when I no longer had the desire to revisit Return of Samus on a regular basis. The winds had changed, you see. The Game Boy's release-schedule had completely dried up, which served to hurt my interest in the platform, and the SNES had completely taken over my life. So I just didn't feel like carrying my Game Boy around anymore.
When I returned to Return of Samus in the future, I did so, instead, on devices like the Super Game Boy and the Game Boy Player. And while it was cool to play the game on my TV, the experience just wasn't the same, and it was obvious to me that Return of Samus just didn't work as well in this format. It was a portable game, and its action was authentic-feeling only when it was experienced on an actual Game Boy. Unfortunately, though, I could no longer get the authentic experience I craved because my Game Boy had broken (I stupidly left the batteries in for too long, and at some point they corroded and thus destroyed the battery terminal).
That's why I was so eager to purchase Return of Samus when it came to the 3DS Virtual Console. I'd long been waiting for the opportunity to play it in a format for which it was best suited, and in November of 2011, it finally happened. And I wasn't surprised to find that playing Return of Samus in this manner felt oh-so-right; it was finally back where it truly belonged--on a portable device and therein its natural habitat.
Ever since then, I've been revisiting Return of Samus on a regular basis, and I've been enjoying its action just as much as I did back in the day. It's still just as fun.
All I can say is that it's great to have this game back in my life.
Whenever I play Return of Samus, I'm reminded of why I love the Game Boy's aural and visual qualities and why they're such an important part of the experience. They're part of the game's fabric. They make it what it is. And they have a way of imbuing it with a type of magically nostalgic energy that only Nintendo's old gray brick could generate. So what if it lacks color? It's got something that counts for a lot more: an entrancingly unique personality.
So yeah--I have a lot of love for Return of Samus. It's one of my all-time-favorite action-adventure games and a very important part of my history. It wasn't quite as impactful as Metroid or Super Metroid, no, but still it managed to have a profoundly consequential effect on my life. It did so much me: It provided me great gaming experiences. It inspired me to imagine and create. And it helped to make my Friday nights a whole lot more fun!
And most importantly, Return of Samus did an amazing job of proving to me that the Game Boy was indeed worthy of playing host to major sequels. Its great success in doing so caused me to make a 180-degree turn and enthusiastically welcome the idea of big franchises getting Game Boy-exclusive sequels. And I was now able to see that portable games could be just as substantial as any of those I'd played on consoles and computers and in the arcade.
And it was all thanks to Metroid II: Return of Samus.
Mission accomplished, Samus. Your completion time was a few weeks, and your rate for wiping away doubt was 100%.
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