Metroid began development under the codename Space Hunter by Nintendo’s R&D1 division which was led by Gunpei Yokoi. It’s aesthetic was hugely inspired by Alien, which is most notably credited specifically with inspiring it’s female protagonist, Samus Aran, and the name for one of the enemies, Ridley (being a spin on ‘Ripley’) from Alien. It was designed to combine elements of platforming and shooting with The Legend of Zelda’s adventure and exploration. Speaking of Samus, the manual deliberately misgenders her and leaves the discovery of her gender as a secret for players who beat the game in under 5 hours.
Playing the game however, was unpleasant for me. The environments were very homogenous, disorienting, and with no clear direction. Many important things, including bosses, are hidden behind destructible walls that have no signposting. But this isn’t really that unreasonable for the time, the Legend of Zelda was the same way. Further, the manual specifically warned me about all this, I just didn’t take it all in. The following page from the manual clearly lays out that the game will be a maze and that there are secret passageways that you have to attack in order to find.
Manuals during the NES era were essential reading. It was much easier for developers to include helpful information in the manual than it was in the game, mostly due to system memory and cartridge storage constraints. Almost all games were butting up against a restriction from those two limits. Metroid’s manual also includes a basic map, information on how to kill Metroids and the final boss, and information about the structure of the game. Map below, other helpful pages at the bottom of the page.
There are places in the game that are just dead ends, like the three identical rooms to the left that have no items and lead nowhere. These were likely included to enhance the mazelike feeling of the game. I also wonder if the rooms being completely identical was a way to save space.
I didn’t internalize all the manual informed of nor did I meet this game where it was. I ended up getting very frustrated and looking at maps online to help me figure out where to go. As a child with more time available to me and with the gaming standards of the time, maybe I would have made my own map and spent hours checking all the walls for openings but that’s just not something that I would do in this day and age.
Further complicating the mazelike nature of the game is the its health system. Your maximum health starts at 99 and there are 8 energy tanks in the game that will give you another 100 maximum health. To quote the manual, “Energy is stored in these tanks”. At the beginning of the game and when you die however, you start with 30 health. Not 30% health. 30 health. On top of this there’s nowhere in the game that will fully refill your health. So if you want to full health, you have to grind it off of respawning enemies. It’s a very tedious process and to quote a GameFaqs poster who was defending the game on this front “<if you do it the effecient way> it only takes 5 minutes”. This “efficient way” they described, however, is only possible in the final area of the game, which you have to beat the other two bosses to unlock. It also still takes 5 minutes.
All told, however, I don’t think Metroid is a bad game. I just don’t think it’s aged well. For the standards of the time, though, I think it was a perfectly reasonable and good game. What is interesting is seeing how Metroid II and Super Metroid change or supplement the design to address these difficulties. Both games add places where you can refill your health but for navigation take different approaches. Metroid II adopts a more linear structure that eliminates the worst of the original’s mazelike qualities. Super Metroid keeps the maze but instead adds the map, the mini-map, telegraphs hidden items and passageways better, and provides an X-Ray Scope later in the game to help you find the more hidden places.
I can’t really say I recommend playing Metroid in this day and age except as a historical artifact, but if you go into it understanding what it is and what it expects from you, you’ll have a much better time than I did. Make a map and check for hidden locations.
P.S. Each screen in Metroid can either scroll vertically or horizontally, never both, and every time you change rooms this orientation changes. If you’re in a horizontal room, every room it’s connected to is a vertical room and vice-versa. This also means that if you’re in a horizontal room, the secrets can only be on the left and right sides and if you’re in a vertical room the secrets can only be on the top or bottom. Knowing this quirk would make the search for secrets much, much faster.
