LogFAQs > #952256140

6. Super Metroid (SNES, 1994)
The last Metroid is in captivity. The galaxy is at peace...

Super Metroid is the grand-daddy of its genre - the item-collecting, map-traversing extravaganza that singlehandedly served as the launch point for hundreds of games inspired by its design, structure, and ethos over the following 25-30 years. While the game obviously owes itself to the original Metroid, in both theme and concept, Super Metroid blows away the original in both the scope of its world-building and narrative. It's got significantly more flexibility in movement, items, and abilities, but it also expands on planet Zebes itself. And its abilitiy to combine all of its individual elements so perfectly and expertly is arguably why it managed to so thoroughly captivate fans both then and today.
Super Metroid has one of my favorite game origin stories - after playing through a handful of the then-recent Metroids in my Senior year of high school, I knew I had to get my hand on Super Metroid and give it a go, despite not owning an SNES. It seems quaint now, but getting online and going through ebay to purchase games seemed so daunting back then, and I was excited as hell after getting a reasonably priced secondhand SNES and Super Metroid in separate purchases. But when the cartridge arrived, I was still too impatient to wait for the system to make it, so I bugged one of my friends to let me borrow his console. And man, to this day, I don't know if I have had a single gaming experience where the expectation and anticipation was so high but absolutely delivered in every way. I plowed through the main storyline in a couple days, spent more days and many hours scouring the map to try and hit 100%. After exhausting every avenue I was willing to reach and getting to a close 97%, I looked up the last few power-ups online, and then immediately shifted into playing through the game again with 100%, to master the game and to get better and better speed times. I think all of the Metroid games lend themselves to this sort of replayability through their game length, difficulty, and open-endedness. But Super Metroid seems to have this aura about it that makes it reign supreme - there's a reason why it still holds the de facto prime time spot by default in just about every AGDQ marathon. Even many casual players will absolutely be compelled to try to beat the game, in some way, pretty quickly - perhaps to see the ending where Samus removes her suit, or maybe just to challenge themselves; it's a game that lends itself to this rinse-and-repeat play approach.
While there are many games that predate Super Metroid (and the Metroid series) with non-linear progression and open exploration, none of them manage to nail the balance of difficulty, atmosphere, and gameplay as perfectly as Super Metroid, which is one reason why it's such a distinct influence to so many later games. While SM carries over many of the items and even areas from Metroid 1, Samus' control and movement is significantly upgraded; she can shoot diagonally and vertically, jumping and running are faster and more fluid, and the powerups themselves serve all kinds of modified, enhanced, or entirely new purposes. Additionally, Super Metroid employs the player with a whole smorgasbord of hidden abilities - moves like wall jumps and shinesparks are taught only by some cute alien critters in secret rooms - and others still like bomb spreading, charge combos, and the crystal flash are entirely buried by the opening demo roll and even then require some arcane button combinations to pull off. On one hand, I could get some criticism for the game not just telling you what you can do, but there's something brilliant buried here - a game that is absolutely completable with none of these "extra moves", but that provide depth and complexity for people interested in learning it. It's a much more complex version of Cappy in Mario Odyssey; there's the tantalizing idea of executing more impressive and tricky moves, but it's completely unrequired to just play and beat the game.
Super Metroid's other big boost is in the story and atmosphere - while Metroid 1 and 2 had a large maze of relatively indistinct rooms and areas, Super Metroid makes each area and many individual rooms feel unique. There's still the occasional indistinct bombable wall housing a secret, but these are not explicitly required to progress the game, and the game itself actually provides you a tool (the X-Ray Scope) to find these off-the-beaten-path powerups. And the soundtrack is such a masterpiece, from its epic intro and ending themes, to its quiet ambient tracks, to the absolute bangers (such as Pink Brinstar and Lower Norfair - both iconic enough to get remade in the Metroid Prime series). Really, from top to bottom, every piece of Super Metroid feels artisanally crafted to fit a purpose - story beats are explicitly mentioned at the outset, but only drip-fed through contextual clues for the entirety of the gameplay. The varied worlds - underwater Maridia, vegetative Brinstar, fiery Norfair, etc. - are filled with distinct, colorful gameplay elements and enemies. And the way that all these graphical ideas seamlessly blend with the actual gameplay itself - loads of critters and objects and terrain that interacts with your growing arsenal in a bevy of ways - is such a triumph of the vision of Super Metroid; it knows exactly what it wants to achieve and manages to pull it off.
When reading up on some articles while writing this, I found a retrospective written in 2014 about SM's intro sequence and its achievement in game design, and in the comments section delved into a discussion about how "ahead of its time" Super Metroid was, and of course remarking of its inspiration to the Castlevania series, and other games like Shadow Complex. What feels so wild to me is that, even with that vantage point two decades after the game's original release, we had still yet to see the release of games like Ori and the Blind Forest, Axiom Verge, or Hollow Knight. Super Metroid was so grand and special to achieve outstanding praise for its forward-thinking concept, and we hadn't even seen some of its finest successors yet.
I'm sticking this classic just outside of the Top 5 to delineate what I think might be the "best game ever made" from my absolute personal favorites. Obviously the lines intertwine quite a bit there; there's no hiding from my own taste. But I do hold up Super Metroid as such an achievement in gaming, that blows me away just how effortlessly great it is, that I wanted to appropriately write out a tribute to its success, and "cap off" this section of the list.
Just, uh, pretend that I didn't stop for 2 weeks to get here.

---

it's an underwater adventure ride