#ash.rom

The Game Boy sequel is much weirder, with frequently changing time signatures, no apparent keys, and intentionally discordant intervals. The Metroid battle theme cuts off the phrase halfway through at seemingly random, so it makes it seem like game glitched and skipped 2 beats, but the fights demand so much attention you can’t figure out the pattern to it. The Chozo Ruins theme alone drove me nuts, because despite not being catchy at all it became stuck in my head, especially with that echo across 3 octaves.

Super Metroid’s soundtrack is perhaps the highlight of the entire series. Samus Aran’s theme, which would appear across many titles, is so darkly triumphant, a perfect motif. The ambience of many of the “safe” rooms sounds like nothing you would ever hear on earth. Ridley’s theme is in 5|4, with the mission impossible style “2 long beats, 2 fast beats” that makes it seem like the track is speeding up halfway through each measure then laying off the gas again, which makes for a frantic fight. The “item obtained” jingle is as memorable as Zelda’s, but darker.

Metroid Dread, the most recent Metroid game, has some great themes as well, like Ferenia’s theme, where the bass and left hand piano eventually become deliciously out of sync, and it carries the tradition of ominous ambience and tense battle music, but I truly think the prime trilogy nailed the sound design in particular. Everything - from your footsteps, to the creature noises, to the charging of your power beam, to the scanning noise or static, sounds exactly the way it should. And the music itself is so damn good. Honestly, I think Magmoor Caverns is perfection. It’s a revamp of Norfair from Super Metroid, using the Phrygian scale (yum!), dramatic chanting, and it just keeps building up, and up…

That means that the one stage that doesn’t have a frame rule - the last one - needs to be played frame perfectly to match the TAS, and it has some of the trickiest exploits in the game. We know exactly how many frames it takes to beat the level in the fastest possible time - in fact, human players have done it, but only in a segmented run. Nobody has managed to do it in a full game, from start to finish… yet. It’s going to happen. But I don’t think it’s going to happen quite as quickly as some people hope.