Backtracking as Theming in Super Metroid
As
loved as Super Metroid is, among the
most common criticisms of the game and its franchise has been its reliance on
backtracking to create the illusion of non-linearity[1],
typical thought being that playing through the same areas repeatedly is
unappealing. Moving forward should always be bringing about new sights, new
sounds, new mechanics, new adventures: so says the conventional wisdom.
This
is borne out not just in typical nitpicks of the Metroid franchise, but also the later-era Castlevania titles the Metroid
franchise heavily influenced, as well as in commercial reviews of, for
example, Devil May Cry 4 or NIER.
That
reveals a special problem with how we look at videogames in the form of the commercial
review, both in terms of how we assess narrative, as well as ludic content,
because games often have good reason to revisit familiar places.
In the case of DMC4, for example, the way we approach the
game as Dante differs wildly from how we approach the game as Nero. In NIER when we revisit old areas, we
expand on the stories of the places we’ve visited before, and have a more enriching
experience as a result.
In the case of Super Metroid, backtracking provides us
with the means by which we display the growth of our avatar, which in turn is a
display of our skill as players for having conquered the game’s challenges.
This renders backtracking not a minor flaw, but in fact an incredibly important
part of the game’s communication of narrative to the player.
As is especially
important in this case, Super Metroid
does not merely provide new tools to the player as a way of finding new areas[2],
but it also gives them new ways to move through old areas, at their
convenience.
Within minutes of
landing on Zebes, the player can find an entrance to Tourian, where they will
eventually find the Baby Metroid, and fight Mother Brain. Securing the entrance
is a statue displaying four of the game’s five main bosses: Kraid, Phantoon, Draygon,
and Ridley. To unlock the elevator down into Tourian, we must kill them, which means
we will have to navigate our way through Brinstar, the Wrecked Ship, Maridia,
and Norfair.
Thus, Super Metroid becomes a game about
exploration and acquisition: Exploring new areas and acquiring new resources,
which then allows us to becomes better explorers and find better resources,
both skills which we will use to find a boss, and then kill them. We get a
simple system of challenges and rewards which then provide us with more
challenges and more rewards.
However, there a number
of easy mistakes that could’ve been made in this process that Super Metroid deftly avoids.
For one, it could’ve
been easy to make the games process of acquisition crucial only to fighting
bosses: “collect enough Missiles and Super Missiles to hurt and kill the
bosses, but they won’t be needed to defeat regular enemies or move through the
game world.” On the contrary: each new Beam, pack of Missiles, etc makes
regular enemies easier to beat than before, with some even making enemies that
were previously invulnerable fellable to Samus’ weaponry, and each addition to
our inventory opens up new places in Zebes to explore.
In addition, Super Metroid could’ve also made a
similar mistake wherein Samus’ new movement tools are only ever used to move to
new places. And while that is the purpose that these new items serve primarily,
they also give the player further rewards by unlocking previously inaccessible
areas in old places and allowing Samus and the player to further their item
collection, as well as by making older areas easier to navigate. Compare that
to progression items in the later-era Castlevania
titles where it’s like finding a card key in an old FPS. There are arbitrary
movement barriers and they only reason that these arbitrary items exist is to
remove these arbitrary barriers.
That’s the real meat of
this argument: Super Metroid’s
backtracking succeeds because by making older areas easier to move through and
older enemies easier to kill, it provides us with visceral proof that we are
succeeding not only because we are moving on to newer and greater challenges,
but because it proves that we are dominating this foreign environment.
It’s almost like
struggling to get C-rank somewhere the first time you play on a higher
difficulty in Metal Gear Rising, and
then toying with lower enemy levels later on when your damage output allows you
to do basically whatever you want. You succeed, and then you succeed in an even
more demonstrable way.
Put simply, the
backtracking in Super Metroid makes
you feel powerful because it becomes so easy to do. Areas which previously
required the Grappling Hook now are much more easily dominated by the Space
Jump. Areas where Samus would be actively hurt or her movement hindered become
as smooth as the rest of the game when you grab the Varia and Gravity suits.
Blocks which previously had to be bombed one-by-one now simply vanish in
frame-rate decaying glory when you use a Power Bomb, and in some of those
sections, if you were already running, the Speed Booster will simply destroy
the previously existing blocks, and it is also so powerful it will outright
obliterate lower-level enemies as well, rendering whole rooms of the game
simply a matter of running where previously they would’ve been approached more
slowly with more thoughts on to how to approach the enemies. These are only a
few examples.
All of this is crucial
to the game’s legendary flow, and that ever elusive “game feel.” This is a
tight system of challenges, rewards, movement, and atmosphere, and when you
remove any one of those things, you get a game that is still strong but
ultimately weaker.
If Super Metroid were to make the mistake of not having each mechanic
prove crucial to moving through the game and conquering it’s environment, you
might result in a game where moving through the environments becomes simply the
tedious task of getting to the next exciting boss fight setpiece, or inversely
it makes the bossfights an interruption of the flow of atmospheric movement
puzzles that define the rest of the game.
Super
Metroid is about as well-designed as a videogame could
possibly be. It creates a continuous flow of gameplay whose rich detail makes
it a satisfying experience even when you can beat it in less than 3 hours, with
an atmosphere that still manages to intimidate and immerse even when compared
to modern AAA experiences. That the solidity of its construction aids this is
not only obvious, but is only another small part that makes Super Metroid the great game that it
continues to be.
Also, Happy Anniversary
Super Metroid! 20 years ago
yesterday, March 19, 1994. Big ups to my friend Julio Peredo for helping me edit this piece. Thanks for reading.
-
Austin C. Howe, Maryland, 2014
[1] A
topic for a later date: sequence-breaking in Super Metroid actually creates true non-linearity, which the
formalization of Prime and Zero Mission outright remove even though
they have the same non-linear illusion in their forms.
[2]
This is why that critique of latter Castlevania
is a lot more functional than this critique of Metroid
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