AM2R & Samus Returns
…so after Zero Mission, I realized I finally had a handheld to try out AM2R on for the first time. Once I beat that I thought, well, I only played Samus Returns once back when it released, so I ought to play that again for comparison’s sake, right? anyway now I’m playing through the whole series again I guess.
AM2R was an interesting ride. Mechanically, I largely liked it – as much as I dig the path the MercurySteam games have gone down in evolving the Metroid formula, it’s exciting to have a bonus game in that speedy GBA era run’n’gun style. It’s largely iterative gameplay-wise, though it does have some unique wrinkles, like the weird Arachnus fight where you have to launch him at certain angles with bombs, or the Spider Ball preventing pitfall blocks from triggering.
The aesthetics are distractingly inconsistent, which I supposed is to be expected from a fangame. From animation to spritework to music, there’s series high and lows throughout. For instance, AM2R features what I think is the series’ first idle animation, and the explosion FX when you pop dudes with the Screw Attack or Speed Booster are so absolutely sublime, my first Screw Attack in Samus Returns was almost embarrassing in its feebleness. On the other hand, most of the boss animation consists of awkwardly puppeteered sprites, and AM2R’s save rooms are the most sauceless in Metroid history.
The same goes for the spritework itself. Much of it is ripped straight from other Metroid games, leaving the game feeling more like a ROMhack than a proper standalone entry, and the artstyle varies wildly – depending on the area, you might see Zero Mission’s cartoony rendering, gorgeously realized natural vistas, or clunky amateurish tiling.
Samus Returns, in contrast, is as consistent as you’d expect from a mainline title, for better and worse. While comparing the two is fun, though, it’s hard for me to call one better than the other – they have such different goals. Samus Returns is laying the groundwork for a new vision of the Metroid series, to be fully realized in Dread, while AM2R is determinedly sticking to the old formula. I like them as companion pieces, to be honest.
Due to its narrowed field of view and emphasis on reactive melee parries, Samus Returns is slower & more methodically paced than your average Metroid game. I found that this worked for me on a thematic level, though. Since each hit takes so much of Samus’ health away, you often find yourself on the back foot in terms of health, incentivizing you to carefully kill each of the crowded level’s enemies rather than just run past them. This makes Samus feel like a scourge, a predator slaughtering her way through the local ecosystem in order to feed on their life energy… which is a pretty god damn interesting feeling to evoke in a game whose premise is hunting down and causing the extinction of the Metroids due to their supposed threat to the galaxy.
My favorite thing about Samus Returns is all of its excellent character animation work. I think the jump to 3D was inevitable, if risky; there’s a lot of charm to Metroid’s environmental spritework that they didn’t quite capture in the transition. There’s some good ideas here – I particularly like the sense of depth the 3D environments add, especially when there’s creatures skulking about in the background – but the areas simply aren’t memorable or distinct compared to those in Super or Zero Mission. Hell, it even falls short compared to AM2R: for all its inconsistency, AM2R areas like the Industrial Complex, with its malfunctioning drones, or the gloomy half-light of the Breeding Grounds are series standouts, and the team’s decision to weave the Chozo lore throughout gives each location a sense of verisimilitude and purpose that’s lacking in most Metroid environments outside of Fusion.
Samus herself, though, feels like more a part of the world than she’s ever been in Samus Returns – even the feeling of smoothly going from a ledge grab into Morph Ball feels excellent, and it’s only a taste of what Dread would have to offer. I love all of her counter animations and badass cutscene moments, too. As someone whose first experience with Samus was Smash Bros., I feel like I’d been waiting for her to do this kind of action hero shit for years.
All of that combined with one of the coolest suit designs the series has ever seen? Hell yeah, brother, this is my Samus.
a nearly 10 year-old illustration I did of SR's Gravity Suit
When it comes down to it, though – and this is not an original thought – the biggest problems with both games are problems inherited straight from the original Metroid II. The designers of both remakes were clearly aware of these flaws, but there’s only so much that can be done without straying away from the vision of the original.
First and foremost, of course, is that the Metroid fights are simply not that fun, let alone fun enough to do dozens of times. Samus Returns takes the slight edge here in that its Metroid fights are merely tedious rather than frustrating – if you don’t immediately hit all your Supers while fighting an Omega Metroid in AM2R, you may as well reset the game. Both games pepper their runtime with additional bosses to break up the monotony, to varied success. I found AM2R’s added bosses largely forgettable, while Samus Returns features both series highs (Diggernaut, Proteus Ridley) and series lows (the awful trial-and-error Diggernaut chase sequence). Still… 50 Metroids is 50 Metroids.
There’s other examples, too, though. Take the Spider Ball, an upgrade that was never re-used after Metroid II: it was probably never re-used because it sucks. It’s a boring upgrade. There's no skill expression, you just hold the button and watch the Morph Ball slowly crawl its way across immense caverns. What’s worse is that there’s usually rewards hidden within those heights, so the player is incentivized to do this sluggish circumnavigation in each & every room. Each remake has its own salve for this: AM2R gives you the Space Jump waaay earlier than most 2D games to make the Spider Ball irrelevant, while Samus Returns mercifully blocks off those caverns to dissuade its use.
Still, inherent flaws notwithstanding, I enjoyed my time with both remakes. There’s some all-time Metroid Moments – I loved how both games feature the number of remaining Metroids slowly ticking down on your screen, only to have the scanner start going wild Aliens-style once the Queen starts popping more out in the final area.
Plus, each game grounds the narrative of the franchise in its own way.
Samus Returns reveals the Chozo’s history with the X parasite, and foreshadows its splintering factions in a way that smooths the transition into both Fusion and Dread. And AM2R finally got me to understand something I’d always found baffling – the fact that our story’s protagonist kills off every single Metroid in only the second game of a series called Metroid. With its more somber ending sequence, no bombastic Ridley fight to be found, though, I get it. After committing stone-cold genocide on the rest of the species, Samus just doesn’t have it in her to kill the baby Metroid. Consequences be damned, mission be damned, she’s found a member of the species that doesn’t attack on sight, and she can’t bring herself to condemn it to death.
