Am2r Zeta Metroid

[Ken Reels]

thefirst of the game boy's two pulse channels has a frequency sweeper on it that makes it very good for sound effects, and it was often reserved for that purpose. metroid ii in particular makes heavy use of pulse 1 for its sfx

the game boy's stereo sound is somewhat limited, it can play full left pan, full right pan, or center pan which is just both audio channels at 100%. still, having stereo sound means that it can create delay reverb effects in some circumstances, provided you have two audio channels available to both fade and pan on.

a major upshot of these factors is that metroid ii doesn't really feature constantly-playing, mood-setting music. it mostly relies on atmospheric soundscapes. sometimes an area transition is punctuated with a few small stabs, or a short tune that gives way to ambient sounds for a long time before a repeat. there is music for metroid encounters--it is largely dissonant and mostly concerned with conveying that a screeching alien is trying to murder you in the face, and it is immediately cut off by a short victory fanfare when you defeat your prey

most of the audio information to take in with metroid ii is the environment itself--sound effects from the enemies, corrosive liquid dripping from ceilings, your own actions in the space--your footsteps, jumps, shots, the sound of morphing

speaking of the environment, compared to the zebes of the original metroid, which felt pretty wide open and had good visibility and color to distinguish areas, sr388 is designed to feel claustrophobic, disorienting, and scary.

in metroid 1, samus is about 32x21, depending on animations and including her gun. in metroid ii she is roughly 37x26 pixels, a huge difference, especially considering how much smaller the game boy display area is!

because there is little color information to use, the reuse of room layouts in metroid ii, held over from its predecessor, often makes it difficult to discern where you are. some of the tunnels in later areas even loop around on themselves in confusing, non-euclidean ways! you are mostly left to rely on contextual clues such as what enemies or hazards are in a room to figure out where you are, and there's no map or minimap, unsurprisingly for the time

again, despite the smaller resolution of the game boy, pretty much everything is more detailed than metroid 1, the camera is essentially zoomed in, really leaning in hard to the sense of you being alone in a world of mostly narrow, dark passageways.

this is pretty different from kraid and ridley in metroid 1:

for one thing, kraid and ridley were, more or less, unique enemies, but also you got a direct, tangible benefit for defeating them in the form of an immediate grant of 15 missile tanks. on top of that, each boss had an e-tank waiting for you to collect when it was safe to proceed

the metroids in metroid ii have no such benefits. sometimes there are energy and missile recharge stations hidden in the boss arenas, i think there may be a missile tank or e-tank here or there, but in general, aside from being required for progression, there is no direct, tangible benefit to killing any metroid in metroid ii. they don't specifically guard items, they don't individually control whether a nearby door is locked or unlocked, you just have to kill them all

you encounter them in rooms with no other enemies and fight them one-on-one. when you eliminate all of them, the lava level in the world lowers and you can progress to the next stratum, and the game tells you how many more you have to kill to proceed

very few of the game's items are actually required to win as long as you have enough missiles to kill metroids with, and you can get to where those metroids are. without the use of glitches, circumventing the lava to get to later areas is basically impossible

as you go through the game, the types of metroids you encounter shift from "alpha" metroids all the way up to the extremely vicious "omega" metroid, until finally wrapping back around in the final area to the kinds of metroids you're used to from metroid 1, which leads up to the final actual boss fight with the deadly and large queen metroid

by the time you reach the final area of the game, original recipe metroids are a breath of fresh air! they're pretty scary in metroid 1, these fast as hell beasts that you never see until the very last area despite being the game being named for them, that are totally invulnerable unless you freeze them and then pump them full of missiles

by contrast, most of the metroids in metroid 2 do not need to be frozen, cannot be frozen, and can in fact only be damaged with missiles on specific parts of their body! they are kind of like kraid but they fly at you aggressively and sometimes spit lightning or fire!

you have a limited amount of ammo for any given fight, there are a lot of fights, and some of these fuckers take a ton of missiles to kill--omega metroids take a whopping 40 hits to their stomach to kill, and they will chase you down and spit fire at you while you're trying to get your hits off

the way ammo and life drops work is different from the original too, which can make it feel like you're being starved of resources! if you're attentive, you can figure out ways to farm effectively, but if you're not, you are going to spend large portions of the game terrified to take a hit or shoot a missile. i cannot underscore enough just how much metroid ii captures this feeling of being stranded deep within a hostile world of things that want to kill you, trying to eradicate its most vicious denizens, all on threadbare resources

crucially, samus's damage output against metroids never changes. she can soak more hits, she can hold more missiles, but if you have 10 missiles to your name when you walk into the fight because you didn't know where you could restock, an alpha is almost as stressful to fight in the endgame as in the early game

so by the time you get to the end of the game, seeing the face-hugging, life-sucking classic metroid is a relief. you freeze them and put five missiles in them while they can't move. easy. let's wrap this up.

i am not going into any detail on this fight, but suffice it to say that it goes hand-in-hand with everything i have talked about so far about the use of space and the use of limited resources. i would even go so far as to say that the queen metroid is the first actual boss fight of the metroid series, though i recognize that's probably a pretty contentious assertion of what constitutes a boss fight

if i had to summarize, i think both am2r and samus returns want to be like later games in the metroid series--am2r wants to be more like zero mission, while samus returns wants to be more like 2d metroid prime

in trying to emulate those later games, they rapidly lose sight of what made metroid ii a unique and interesting game, and a game worth playing. the overbearing linear progression of metroid ii works best in this environment where moving forward is an inherently tense and confusing experience. in the face of a smoother, more modern experience, it becomes a much more tedious slog that has to be made up for with gimmicks that i just don't think work

wow, did i write all that? i'm sorry, and/or you're welcome, and if you haven't played it, i hope you will play metroid ii: return of samus. i have talked almost exclusively about what i love about it, and not about the things that are rough about it (of which there are many! it is a 1992 game boy game) but it's so interesting, and so cool, and i wholeheartedly recommend it, warts and all.

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