Masterpiece: Super Metroid

At its best, the Metroid series is about solitude; you’re left alone on a strange alien planet and its up to you to figure out where to go and what to do. And while the first game introduced the concept, it was with Super Metroid, released nearly a decade later, that the developers at Nintendo perfected it.

The game begins heavy on the exposition, with series heroine Samus Aran outlining what has happened so far. The story isn’t all that necessary though, and it’s not long before you’re on a self-destructing space station running for your life. From there you move on to a strange alien planet in search of a stolen metroid. And it’s here that the game actually reveals itself.

Though it has the appearance of an action game, at its heart, Super Metroid is about exploration. You make your way through a series of interconnected rooms and caves, unsure of exactly where to go. The series pioneered a new form of backtracking, and it’s on full display in Super Metroid. As you progress you come across areas that are inaccessible, forcing you to turn around and search elsewhere. But they’re not inaccessible forever. A large part of the Metroid series is collecting power-ups, and most of the time when you come across a new weapon or ability, there’s an “ah ha!” moment where you remember just where to use it.

To make things easier, Super Metroid introduced the concept of a map to the series. Though it gives only a bare outline of your surroundings, pointing out important rooms and items, it’s incredibly useful, especially given the size of the world you are exploring. And, if nothing else, it eliminates the need to play with a pad of graph paper at your side.

Super Metroid.

Additions like the map seem small at first, but many of them are important changes that have gone on to become series mainstays and make the original Metroid feel archaic in some ways. Super Metroid featured an inventory screen that let players switch between weapons, introduced power-ups like the grapple beam, and, like Metroid II on the GameBoy, allowed players to actually save their progress, without resorting to a password system.

But what’s most impressive about the game is its atmosphere. The Super Nintendo may be woefully underpowered by today’s standards, but that hasn’t diminished the atmospheric nature of Super Metroid one bit. The feeling of being alone on an alien world is incredibly powerful, and this has a lot to do with the game’s dark and foreboding soundtrack.

You don’t have to look far to see the influence that Super Metroid has had on other games. The Castlevania series managed to make a return to the gaming consciousness with Symphony of the Night, a game that is very similar to Super Metroid. So much so, in fact, that similar games—that is, open-ended, side-scrolling action games—are now frequently referred to as “Metroidvania.” Of course, subsequent Metroid games followed a similar path as well. Even the original Metroid Prime, which, despite its shift to 3D and a first-person perspective, feels very much like the SNES game. Even more recent 3D action games like Batman: Arkham Asylum owe a lot to the structure of Super Metroid.

Whether or not we’ll ever get to see another 2D, side-scrolling Metroid game remains to be seen, and with Metroid: The Other M on the way the series appears to be moving in a different direction. But this form of exploration, which had been done before Super Metroid but was perfected there, can give games an amazing sense of pace. And you can always dust off your SNES or hit the Virtual Console to relive the experience.