Intro

I have a strange relationship with Nintendo. Super Mario Bros was the first game I can remember playing at a friends’ house and Super Mario World was the first game I ever owned, as it came with my Super NES.

I’ve loved several Mario games, Zelda games and the original Donkey Kong Country games- I have played dozens of hours worth of drunken Super Smash Bros Melee with my high school friends and more time than I can reasonably estimate killing time on my Gameboy Advance SP while on military courses in the early 2000s.

I also am extremely critical of Nintendo’s consumer practices, particularly in regards to how they handle their back catalog and how most of their games are stranded on their legacy platforms and the ones they do bring to their current hardware, are given a fraction of the attention which community modders give those same games for free.

They also do their best to cease and desist everyone who has the nerve to use their passion for their properties to make fan projects - which in my opinion, they do to prevent their fans from outdoing them.

They are inconsistent about their fidelity targets, sometimes designing games perfectly for the hardware they are releasing the games on- producing incredible performance results like Super Mario Odyssey or they shoot for the moon and have games which struggle to hit 30fps, like Breath of the Wild, while refusing to officially port their games to PC or create new hardware iterations which can run their own games more competently.

Finally, their online service, both when it comes to value and stability, is atrocious.

They are both an incredible company who make amazing games and a terrible company who is very out of touch with many aspects of the modern industry.

The vast majority of the amazing games they make are targeted at children and families, but one Nintendo franchise is very much unlike the others -it draws its inspiration from films like Ridley Scott’s Alien and like that film, stars one of the most badass women in the entire medium.

That series is Metroid

Metroid was originally created by Satoru Okada, but the man behind the majority of the franchise is Yoshio Sakamoto, who was the character designer on the original game and has overseen every other game in the series- if not as director, then as a key adviser.

The result of having Sakamoto act as the shepherd of the series, is that despite the numerous iterations and spin-offs, the Metroid canon has remained relatively tight.

The only major deviations from the originals come as a result of Zero Mission and Samus Returns, as they are remakes of the first two games, which have some more narrative detail.

The series has had a lot of absolute bangers over its nearly 40 year run, which have come in the form of mainline entries, a trilogy of spin-offs which shift the perspective to first person, remakes of both the official and unofficial variety and even some creative fan projects which Nintendo, being Nintendo, has sadly cease and desisted.

So join me as we take a historical look at the gameplay as well as the stories, featured in every official game in the series, as well as some key fan projects.

Without further ado, I present to you: Metroid.

Metroid