4/5 ★ – Diluted_Thought's review of Super Metroid.

Back on my Road to "Dread", and this time with the legendary "Super Metroid", the game that inspired so many indi studios to take a stab at the now popular genre. This game is legendary and for so many reason so I finally got to see what all the hype was about 28 years later....almost a whole 3 decades! So lets start there. This game REALLY holds up well. The sprite work is great and the colors are wonderful here. Samus is fun to control although there were some hiccups which I'll get to later. I was ill prepaired for the difficulty of this game though. After coming from "Metroid: Zero Mission" I came to find this game quite a bit more difficult. Sure it made for some fun challenges but boy did some areas and bosses get overwhelming. But the idea of finding a new power up to add to your arsenal to make you more powerful and unlock new paths is alwasy exciting. I mean ALWAYS. It seems like a simple progression trick but its hard to get around the fact that you've just earned a new means of traversal, which in itself is delightful. I can now see how incredibly influential this title is to something like "Axiom Verge", my first ever Metroid-Vania. Kinda cool to see where some of these ideas came from. Towards the end of the game I went back and tried to explore every nook and cranny of every room to see if there was anything else to find before fighting Ridley. This was such a fun way to explore the game at my leisure and one final run through areas before finishing the game off. I did want to mention that the boss designs here were pretty great and hearing them scream in old Kaiju samples was a definite treat for me. Despite the fun I had I did run into some frustrations. To start, the wall jump seemed finicky. Trying to get out of vertical rooms was such a fucking pain. I kept thinking, "Wait, is it me? Is my timing off? What am I doing wrong?" And the honeslty I still couldn't tell you. The other I issue I had was with the Space Jump upgrade. There were time I could space jump across a room no problem and other times, specifically when I was trying to get to higher areas, the jump would stop and I'd fall right back down and have to start try it once more, and once more, AND ONCE MORE. Again, was it me? But my biggest complaint about the game is that, for as great as it is, it has a problem giving you the information needed to either get to some area or how to do certain things. The first instance is in an area the internet has titled "the noob bridge", and boy did it make me feel like one. You have to run across the bridge which, I was unaware of until I looked it up. I had the same issue with the Shine Spark. As I watched a little bird run around the room and jump real high I kept wondering what the hell I was suppose to do. I knew how to run, but nothing tells me to press down before launching myself. To open the Meridia map you have to Power Bomb the glass tube to break it open. Again, there is NOTHING in the game to tell you that you need to do this. You can point at a close by room and see there is a broken glass tube but there is no indication you can do this yourself. One particular boss fight also suffers from this issue. The Draygon boss battle was far more difficult due to there not being any indication that you can kill her with electricity. And no amount of button presses I did got her to release me and I watched her beat the absolute shit outta me until my death. I understand that this game runs on the idea of exploration, experimentation and discovery but sometimes it helps to communicate better. After about 11 hours in the "Super Metroid" I was finally able to see the influence this game had on so many other game that came after it. Its a solid platformer and a memorable one. Had I played this earlier in my life I'd probably given this game a 5 star rating, but it did have many issues that could have been resolved with better communication. Still, it was a really good game, I still had a good time despite my criticisms and I can finally say I destroyed Mother Brain for good.