Metroid is a game about a space bounty hunter, raised by now-extinct sentient alien poultry, who was gifted power armor and a curse that causes any planet she sets foot on to (eventually) explode. It’s also about how curling up into a ball on the floor can solve any number of life’s problems.
Metroid: Zero Mission is a complete reimagining of the very first game on the NES/Famicom, taking power-ups from Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion, giving the game a shiny coat of paint and overhauling the level design. It’s one of, if not my #1 favorite official Metroid title; the game is constructed such that - outside of the very beginning - you can do pretty much anything in any order you want, and it just feels good to control. I’d reckon this is almost the best Samus has ever handled, though some may give that title to Super Metroid. Via Chozo Statues, the game offers the player a fair bit of guidance without holding their hand too much; this makes it one of the most beginner friendly games in the series, and an easy recommendation to people looking to get into them.
The LP
This series will be going through the game on Hard Mode, obtaining 100% item completion along the way. The main difficulty Hard Mode introduces is cutting down the number of resources you have to work with; Energy Tanks now only give 50 extra health instead of 100, and other item expansions only give 2 or 1 to your maximum capacity. Other than that, it’s not so bad after playing through the game once or twice.
One of my favorite aspects of this game is its open-ended level design, so you can expect a lot of things being done out of sequence, and perhaps not quite in the way first-time players would be intended to do. I’ll also be clearing the game in under 2 hours total.
Thread Rules
No discussing “that part” of the game until we get there. The part after Mother Brain, of course. That’s about it.
This is looking good! I’ve played Zero Mission before, but just once and it was an eternity ago. I’m looking forward to seeing what an experienced player can do with it!
I’ve seen chained bomb jumps before I did them myself, but I didn’t appreciate them before I tried to play Metroid Prime and had trouble getting the timing right for even two. That was a good showing.
Can you walljump to shimmy up a single wall in all the games? (Well, all the games where you can walljump.) If so, I’ve been missing out. Then again, I’m pretty casual at Metroids and the last I played was AM2R, where you just have the Spider Ball.
You can in Super, Zero Mission, and AM2R! It doesn’t work in Fusion, because the way that game handles wall jumping is… kinda weird, it forces you away from the wall too much for single-wall climbing to be possible. But the benefit there is that it makes “normal” two-wall jumping more intuitive, I would say.
I’ll leave this thread open for a couple more days, then it shall forever be closed off. Or just moved into the realm of Completed LPs. Same thing, really. Hopefully I did a good enough job showing off a few of the silly things you can do with this game and why I love it so much.
