This Week In Retro: Super Metroid (Patreon)

March 19, 1994: In space, no one can hear you screech

by Diamond Feit

Silence is underrated. I'm not talking about the complete absence of all sound, I'm talking about the bliss of not speaking aloud. Human beings love to laugh and sing and talk all the time but those fleeting moments, the ones where nothing needs to be said, those stick with me the most.

Video games have always tantalized players with both audio and visual excitement, but for decades, we all accepted it as a given that the heroes we saw on screen could not speak. Few games could support any dialogue, so managing to include the briefest of voice samples in the early 80s could elevate one arcade machine above its neighbors. Once console games began to embrace longer, narrative-first adventures, characters started having conversations to express emotions and motivations for their actions.

Today we've come to expect plenty of words in projects made by development teams of all sizes. Spoken dialogue, too, no longer signifies big-budget cutting-edge technology. Indeed, the common status of in-game speech means that when a protagonist doesn't pepper their actions with quips or elated shouts, we see that as a deliberate choice to make the hero taciturn. In The Legend of Zelda series, every resident of Hyrule has something to say when they meet the Hero of Time, but players never get to hear Link answer their questions or speak his mind.

Among Nintendo's stable of mainstays, one tight-lipped bounty hunter stands taller than all her peers. Samus Aran works alone; she has always accepted and carried out her missions without backup, eliminating any need for her check in with friends or banter with her foes. Later games would redefine her character in many ways, assigning her handlers to give her updates and forcing her to deliver status reports. Yet 30 years ago, Samus demonstrated how actions can speak louder than words in her SNES debut, Super Metroid.

After an introduction like that, I regrettably must state that Super Metroid hits players with an unskippable opening once they press start, a multi-paragraph screed from Samus herself summarizing the events of Metroid and Metroid II. Knowing her backstory does add context to the events of this game, but it's a lot of text to wade through. As a fan I found this segment exciting the first time I saw it, especially with the inclusion of a human voice saying "The last Metroid is in captivity. The galaxy is at peace." That's quite the flex for a cartridge-based video game in 1994. In any event, once this narration ends, Samus will not speak again for the rest of the campaign. 

For those picking up Super Metroid without playing the previous two games, all you really need to know is Metroids pose a serious threat to civilized society and a very large brain in a jar wants to harvest their powers. Super Metroid actually does a great job of relaying the rest of the story without resorting to expository text dumps, as the title screen shows a very tiny Metroid in a lab surrounded by dead bodies. This image, accompanied by the creature's screeches from inside its test tube, makes it clear that this life form presents a far greater danger than its humble physical presence suggests.

When players finally get to control Samus, she boards a space station in search of the baby Metroid seen earlier, only to find the corpse lab minus its famous research sample. Further exploration reveals the little one in the clutches of a ferocious flying beast, one fans will recognize as Ridley from the original game. Even if this is your first encounter with Ridley, the fact that he holds the Metroid in his claws and wants to hurt Samus establishes his role as a major antagonist in the events to come.

Ridley flees the station with his prey, triggering a self-destruct mechanism that forces Samus to hustle back to her ship. Even though this entire sequence poses very little risk to players—Ridley cannot kill Samus and the countdown offers ample time to escape—it establishes what to expect from Super Metroid. In a matter of minutes, we get to practice controlling Samus in a threatless situation, we see the Metroid, we fight Ridley until he takes off, and then we chase after him. It's a far more compelling setup than the big block of text because it's told through gameplay, not mere reading, and it will pay off much later when Samus and Ridley meet again.

Things get even moodier when Samus arrives on the Planet Zebes in pursuit of the tiny Metroid. As she brings her ship in for a landing, rain pelts her spacecraft and the planet's surface. Thunder cracks and lightning flashes in the background. The soundtrack kicks in but only slightly, injecting a hint of life into a scene bereft of any activity. Samus has no leads as to where the Metroid may be, but the game lays out natural barriers to funnel her down into a long, vertical shaft. As she descends, the environment changes from barren rock to an artificial passage worn down by time. Someone—or something—lived here, but they're long gone now.

Once again, fans will immediately recognize these ruins as all that remains from Mother Brain's lair in the original Metroid. Yet the level of detail poured into these worn surfaces should convince any player to read them as decayed and abandoned. Samus doesn't have to say anything, nor does she need to find a discarded diary to tell her and the player what happened here. As with the Ridley encounter, Samus' stroll through these long-dead corridors foreshadow her eventual late-game battle with a rejuvenated Mother Brain, but for now, they represent environmental storytelling at its finest.

After a few routine item pickups, the space pirates finally make an appearance and Samus' adventure begins in earnest. All the empty rooms she ran through earlier spring to life with hostile creatures, though if necessary she can always double-back to her waiting ship for a full health refill. Super Metroid includes a number of these stations as havens for players to catch their breath, as past games required Samus to farm respawning enemies to build up her resources. That tactic still applies here—recharge stations are few and far between compared to nests of monsters—but each supply depot Samus finds means one less repetitive session of blasting bugs for minutes on end.

Speaking of time-saving features, Super Metroid's new map terminals offer an overview of Samus' surroundings, making them the most important innovation to the series. After two straight games of forcing players to wander helplessly underground, this built-in grid-based map clearly delineates Samus' current location, where she's been, and where she has yet to go. Even as future releases would copy this feature, adding additional functions like marking locked doors, three decades later the Super Metroid map remains the template for developers designing a large, interconnected space.

With a map that helps the audience visualize their progress, Super Metroid masterfully leads players around Zebes, giving them the freedom to explore but also nudging them towards the next key destination. Once Samus downloads area data for Crateria, her landing zone on this planet, it highlights three points of interest. First, she can head back to her ship and go right to discover a new area. Second, on her way down she ran past a crawl space that leads to a new item. Third, the map indicates she also missed a hidden passage, one that looks like just another cave wall.

Players may choose any of these mysteries to investigate, but there is only one path that will allow Samus to make headway. She needs the Morph Ball to roll her way through narrow openings, which lets her pick up Missiles that she needs to open red doors. Behind one red door in Crateria lies the Bomb upgrade which she needs to destroy the wall blocking her from excavating the passage on her map which she can't otherwise enter.

First-time players might stumble around a bit before they happen upon this exact sequence and move forward, but the layout of Crateria ensures that no dead end wastes much time. On the contrary, dedicated Super Metroid players might discover extra missiles or even an energy tank if they make a thorough search of Crateria. Having more health and more firepower will directly benefit Samus in her first boss fight when she picks up the Bombs.

Crateria thus serves as a microcosm of what makes Super Metroid so fun to play; the more time players spend maneuvering Samus around the map, the stronger she becomes. While the game offers plenty of crucial power-ups that unlock new movement techniques and allow access to new locations, it hides as much as it lays out in plain sight. Super Metroid goes to great lengths to keep players from wandering too far in the "wrong" direction, else they end up fighting a battle they cannot win because they missed a crucial weapon or tool. Yet the freedom to make mistakes, get lost, and even fail is what entices players to dig deeper and deeper into Zebes.

Of course, the opposite also proves true, as 30 years has shown Super Metroid offers just as much entertainment to experienced players as novices. Beating the game brings up a results screen, displaying how long it took for Samus to complete her mission and what percentage of items she recovered. For decades, players have challenged themselves to whittle down both of these numbers, figuring out methods to save as much time while also grabbing as few enhancements as possible. It's why I wrote "wrong" in quotes above, because with enough practice, Samus can go practically anywhere she pleases on Zebes regardless of her strength. Even today, players seek new ways to elude Super Metroid's complex system of locks to get things done faster with less equipment.

Since Super Metroid brings Samus back to Zebes where the story began in the original Metroid, she will recognize many of the places and faces that she comes across. Players of the first game, too, should remember names like Brinstar, Norfair, Kraid, and Ridley. Yet Super Metroid uses the concepts from 1986 as a launching pad, not a blueprint, rearranging and expanding these elements into something that, while familiar to veteran players, still feels fresh. 

Significantly, the many subdivisions of Zebes have been blended together to create a more comprehensive world instead of a collection of wholly independent areas. Elevators still serve as the primary means of transportation between zones, yet Samus can also discover shortcuts and one-way conduits to connect different regions.

One such example is the sealed pipeline Samus runs through in Brinstar to reach Norfair. The transparent material allows Samus to see that she's deep underwater, and the map screen suggests the tube is actually part of a separate area named Maridia. Exploring Maridia later in the game, Samus will find a similar, shattered tube. This tips players off as to the fragility of the tubes, a hint that Samus can break it from the inside with a Power Bomb, granting her access to the rest of Maridia.

Super Metroid imparts this information without any text or a glowing map icon, instead relying on communication through gameplay and experimentation. Better still, players who already know about the shortcut can exploit it to enter Maridia much earlier in the game, bypassing the lengthy trek into the flooded area from the Wrecked Ship.

These kinds of design choices kept me playing and replaying Super Metroid for years after its initial release, granting me a familiarity with Zebes that I normally reserve for real-world places, not video game levels. It helps that the skilled artists at Nintendo crammed the planet's many caverns and corridors with a variety of unique fixtures. I remember seeing the entrance to Tourian, the final area, relatively early in my first playthrough, and finding the pulsing lights and sudden curtain of mist off-putting. Again, Samus didn't need to tell me to turn back; once I saw the statues of Ridley and the game's other bosses, I knew exactly what lay ahead and opted to walk away.

Samus' persistent silence did not make her unique amongst other heroes in 1994, but the fact that Super Metroid spins a compelling yarn without any in-game dialogue makes it a landmark title even today. I already knew about Samus' relationship with the last Metroid, a moment recreated at the start of Super Metroid to keep players up to date. Her eventual reunion with her surrogate offspring shocked me, considering the alien can only express itself via shrill chirps. When Samus escapes Zebes again, it's a bittersweet victory; she completes her mission and survives, but she's also alone in a way that she wasn't when the game began.

Super Metroid would not conclude Samus Aran's story, for both she and the eponymous Metroids would return in numerous sequels and spinoffs in the following years. Yet 1994 was the last year we got to play a Metroid game that embraced silence. Metroid Fusion has Samus engaged in a constant back-and-forth with a computer as well as saddling her with an internal monologue. Metroid: Zero Mission retains her chattiness even as it retells her origin story, adding dialogue to a game that never needed it. The recent Metroid Dread lets Samus go quiet again but keeps the loquacious computer partner who insists on bombarding her (and players) with information overload. 

I know this sounds like splitting hairs, but the ability to tell stories without resorting to speeches is one of the great strengths of video games as a medium. I'm not anti-dialogue; Castlevania: Symphony of the Night borrows heavily from Super Metroid but also has tons of characters jawing with one another and I love it. In the case of Samus though, Nintendo had it all figured out, creating an iconic hero with a persistent foe who never needed words to communicate. I'm happy that the success of Metroid Dread means we'll see more Samus in the coming years, but I'd be even happier if she went back to dispensing space justice in silence.

Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but xer work and opinions exist across the internet.