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I owed you people another Metroid review, and here it is. First off, a little story: Super Metroid wasn’t the first game I actually played on an emulator, but it was the first I was asking EVERYONE to get it for me in a fricking CD just so I could play it. It was during the time pen drives were starting to flourish, and I was stuck with using 1.44 MB floppies. You know how big was Super Metroid? 3 MB. Zipped? 1.5. See?

Fast forward to the present, I literally have this game in anywhere I could fit it in. My computer, my PSP, and my Wii all have Samus Aran’s third adventure (at that time), making it clear my opinion about it: I LOVE Super Metroid. In fact, hell, I could easily say that it’s my favorite in the whole series, with Metroid Prime and Zero Mission tied for second. With that out of the way, let me explain why I love this game so much.

The first two Metroids were all about extermination. Samus dived into Planet Zebes to destroy the Metroid snatched by the Space Pirates and defeat its mechanical leader, the Mother Brain, before escaping from a self-destruct sequence. Later, she went to SR388, the Metroids homeland, to make sure no Metroid was left alive – with the clear exception of a small baby Metroid, which she took it to a space colony for further investigation.

Big mistake. Ridley, her longtime nemesis, was already watching, and just mere minutes after leaving the colony, Samus learns that the Space Pirates are back and angrier than ever. Snatching the baby Metroid, Ridley shows Samus how much more he has improved all these years, and goes on to destroy the colony. Barely escaping, our female bounty hunter has no choice but to RESCUE the baby Metroid. Yes, rescue. But who cares if it’s rescuing or exterminating? This is just an excuse to drop you into a new, epic adventure inside a newly-reconstructed Zebes.

And boy, does it look pretty. Admittedly, the game looks a bit pixelated compared to recent entries in the series, but since this is a Super Nintendo game and it’s meant to be played in a TV, it doesn’t really matter. In fact, it adds to the surrealism of the number of exploration you must do inside this planet. One time you’re sent into a nostalgic journey back to the original Metroid’s Tourian ruins, then another you’re in this huge bramble-filled jungle cave. What about your first time entering a extremely hot corridor in Norfair, or the first time you step inside the Wrecked Ship? The locales are varied and make you feel like you just want to see it all, and then after you travel through it all you’d just want to play through it all again just to re-experience it again.

Which is good, because the Metroid formula is intact here: non-linear exploration with loads of backtracking. While the NES game established this, it was Super Metroid that perfected the blueprint, making games like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night follow suit and gamers coin in the term “Metroidvania” to every game since to use such mechanic. It works because for every obstacle you find in your way, there’s a power-up somewhere around the world for you to obliterate it. Red doors? Shoot them down with Missles. Rubble in a tight passageway? Bombs do the trick. Some screw-like blocks in the celling? Let’s swing around with the Grappling Beam. The game does a marvelous job telling you when to go back and search for the right item when you need it, and once you do, you find yourself with an itch to try it out somewhere else just to see what else you can find. Thank goodness for the invaluable sub-menu that gives you a full map of your current area, and it’s a godsend that the programmers actually dropped an X-ray Visor in the game too so you could easily find all 100 items surrounding the planet – one of the most satisfying accomplishments any Metroid gamer should go for.

Oh, and did I mentioned that the music’s awesome, too? This was the game that put Kenji Yamamoto and Minako Hamano on the map, with their mood-setting tunes and epic boss battle themes. The boss battle theme you hear the first time you fight Ridley is so good, it has been integrated in every Metroid game featuring the dragon baddie since, and the tune you hear in the depths of Norfair has been remixed to be played in Magmoor Caverns in Prime 1. You know this soundtrack is the best out there when your friends beg you to give them the .mp3s ASAP. I would too!

There’s a bit of challenge in this game, but if you’re expecting this game to be hard as in “get killed over and over until you manage to pull off the win”… That depends. See, boss battles in Super Metroid are challenging, and if you have only a fraction of all the items found around Zebes you will have a hard time beating them. But the true challenge in this game (and in most Metroids) is simply come prepared for the battle. If you have less than 7 Energy Tanks when you eventually battle Ridley, you’re in trouble; if you come with every item ever possible to earn, defeating him will be a breeze. More challenging than ever is the classic self-destruct sequences (hardly a spoiler – they’re a given in any Metroid title). With only minutes to reach from point A to point B, doing it perfectly requires skill and steady hands, and its challenge for the average gamer easily topples any boss battle.

Another thing that I like about this game is how customizable it can be for the player. Say you’re like me who find the current control setting a bit awkward. Well, you can change them! My current setting sets the item-switch button to Y, shoot with B, jump with A, and run with X. This setting works because I can switch items on the fly without moving my left thumb off the d-pad and quickly shoot a missile or two on the way. Another thing that’s nifty (and unique from other Metroid titles until now) is the ability to switch off items in the sub-menu. You don’t like how the Ice Beam doesn’t let you mow down every enemy as you’d like to? You can switch it off for the time being until you eventually encounter the infamous Metroids. Everything can be switched on and off, from the Morphing Ball to the Screw Attack. Sometimes I simply switched off certain items just to see how big of a difference it makes when Samus isn’t with them on, like not having the Gravity Suit inside Maridia or switching off certain beams just to see one in action.

Which brings you to one of the coolest things in this game: secret techniques. While classic ones like the bomb jump return, the wall-jump and the Shinespark abilities are introduced in this game (leading to the game’s ever popular speed runs – completing the game in the least time possible). Even more secret are the Power Bomb+Beam combos (By using only the Charge Beam and one other beam upgrade, select Power Bombs then charge away) and the Crystal Light, which lets you fully recover by using 10 of each ammo supply and holding L, R, Select and the beam button. All of these are shown in the opening demo, but finding out how to pull them off is another story – usually those tricks are left to be seen in Nintendo Power mags or friend gossips.

So is Super Metroid perfect? By today’s standards, it could help to earn some polish here and there, but in my opinion, it hardly needs tweaking. As it is, it’s already 100% complete. Yeah, the item-switching is kinda awkward, but I hardly ever found it hindering to my experience. The newer Fusion and Zero Mission may have perfected the control mechanics, but let’s be honest: they’re both simply orbital moons around this gigantic planet for the SNES. If I decided to buy it for the Virtual Console even after playing it countless times through emulators, it simply means that it’s just too good to let it sit in my computer. It deserves to be played the way it was meant to be: in your TV, and with even more countless walkthroughs coming buy, 800 Wii Points are, in no ways, a waste of money. This one deserves a 10.