2021 Replay of the Year: Metroid (NES)
I don’t make a habit of replaying games that I didn’t like the first time around. Occasionally I’ll go back to one if I’m still trying to figure out what specifically didn’t work for me, but with Metroid for the NES, I never really had to do it. I played it once, just because I liked the series a lot and wanted to be able to say I’d gone through the first game. But I’d heard so many people complain about it, say that it’s not worth playing anymore, that it’s unintuitive, too hard, and just not fun, and to just play Zero Mission, that I honestly believed them before even playing it. But that changed this year.
It started with Metroid II. All the complaints people make about Metroid 1 are even louder for Metroid II, on top of others like how it’s not in colour, that the screen is tiny, and that it’s “too linear.” But I’d played all the other Metroid games, so on a whim I finally gave it a go. And it was a lot of fun! So much fun, that I finally realized that maybe I was wrong to hate on the first game.
See, when I played the first Metroid, I’d heard so much about how hard it is and how easy it is to get lost that I went all in on save states and guides. I literally would use a video guide, see what I had to do in a room, pause the video, do exactly what they did (and reset from a save state if I took too much damage), pause the game, watch the next room, and repeat. It turns out: that’s a miserable way to play any game! Sure, I never got lost, but at the cost of actually playing the game. So when I came back to it, I let myself get lost and stuck and fail, and it was way more fun because of it. The bosses take a lot to beat, but it’s Metroid: you can always leave and look for more power ups. And while some of its paths are pretty unintuitive, the fact that each secret way through is repeated actually functions similar to when you get a new power up. When you figure them out, you suddenly have a new way to traverse the world, and are encouraged to go back and see if there are any other spots like it that you missed. Once you realize you can fall through one wall, you’re going to be trying them all. To me, it was a great way to add to the experience of exploration and discovery while contending with the limitations of the NES, and I really enjoyed it.
No other game had me so completely change my mind about it as I did with Metroid, and paired with Metroid II, no other game has changed the games I’ve played since in the way it did. It was such a dramatic shift that I’ve found myself wanting to find more games like it that are supposedly no longer enjoyable, but are actually just old. It’s already led me to some cool old RPGs, and I’m excited to see what else is out there.