Metroid: Samus Returns Revisited

For the last two weeks I've been traveling quite a lot and since Nintendo's Smartphone games don't work without a solid internet connection, I had to resort to my Nintendo 3DS, where I was in the mood to play Samus Returns again.

For my review last September I've played through the game in both the Normal and Fusion Mode difficulties. This time I opted for a Hard Mode playthrough, where I followed two rules:

1. No Scan Pulses
2. No Backtracking before the end of the game

The only exception to the second rule would be revisiting the Surface area once before facing the Metroid Queen to complete the map there with Space Jumps, which isn't possible anymore, as soon as you are in company of the Baby Metroid.

But this gave me a lot of time with the baby, where for the first time I could take some of the shortcuts that it provides for obtaining various power-ups. I also scored the second best "ending" in Hard Mode with a time of 7:40, which leaves a lot of room for improvements. But I wasn't speedrunning, I was playing more casually and I also had the goal of completing the entire map without any Scan Pulses, which wasted quite some time.

When filling out the map, the game can be a little annoying, because there are many squares, where you often have to touch some weird corners either by jumping against the right spot or by using the Spider Ball. So, sometimes for one little spot on the screen it creates an entire square on your map, which caused quite some short-notice backtracking on my end. "Oops, I missed some weird corner again."

On the long run I want to unlock all nine ending eventually, but beating the game under 4 hours will require a lot of practice and perfect knowledge of the game world.

At least I enjoy replaying the game a lot. It might even become the Metroid game with the highest replay value for me and it will certainly replace Super Metroid and Other M on that regard, the two Metroid games I've beaten the most so far. It just has the fast paced and smooth gameplay that I enjoy about Other M, but it's a lot closer to the classic Super Metroid gameplay, where the SNES game sadly feels very sluggish with its controls from today's standards.

Samus Returns is quite linear with its strict area-by-area approach, but most Metroid games follow this approach, some are just better at hiding it than others or offer some weird sequence breaks as compensation. But the areas of SR388 themselves usually feel quite open and the game doesn't have this "in your face" linearity of Metroid Fusion or Other M, where you're always told where to go. There's also no forced backtracking to previous areas, which was super confusing in some of the Metroid Prime titles. All of the backtracking is just there for you to discover more hidden power-ups.

Already with the GameBoy Classic I thought that the approach of killing all Metroids within one area to proceed felt quite smart. And Samus Returns really did a good job of developing this formula into a game that has a nice flow. I enjoy it a lot and this certainly wasn't the last time that I've played through this game.