Metroid II: Return of Samus (Game Boy) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
467A playthrough of Nintendo's 1991 action-adventure game for the Nintendo Game Boy, Metroid II: Return of Samus.
The game clocks me at exactly two hours to finish the game, and as a result I got the best ending.
With Nintendo's announcement that they'd be releasing an official remake, "Metroid: Samus Returns," in the fall, I thought it would be fun to revisit the original. It does feel a bit old now, but it's still amazingly playable. I thought that it'd really be undermined by its lack of more modern conveniences, but it holds up extremely well with it's smart level layouts that've been designed with the Game Boy in mind.
The story of Metroid II is one of the major pillars of the entire storyline, and it's really cool how it uses no text at all to convey it. It still hits all the right keys that the first game on the NES did- it's all dark and dreary (really, the Game Boy screen did wonders for atmosphere on this one!), and despite the lack of color, there's still some pretty fair distinction between each of the areas. The music often gets derided, but I really liked it. It goes for ambient background rather than straight music in many places, and it sounds odd with loads of seemingly random notes pinging at odd intervals - it's definitely effective and unsettling, but it can get a bit long in the tooth after awhile since it's so high pitched.
The game plays much like the original Metroid, but there are a few new weapons (the spazer and plasma guns) and moves added (the space jump and spider ball). The controls are usually pretty good, though they're a bit rigid and it can be frustrating to get Samus to move in the right direction if you use the spider ball near two walls. The ability to duck and shoot is a welcome upgrade, though! The biggest difference is in how it allows you to progress. Major areas of SR388 are blocked off by a lava flow, and to have it recede to get access to the deeper areas, you have to kill the Metroids in the current area. It sounds confining, but the areas are all pretty big and have lots of stuff buried in out of the way places. It never really feels restrictive, and it made sense to chunk it up a bit considering the "portable" format. This also really helps ease the pain of not having an auto-map - that wasn't introduced until Super Metroid! You won't spend anywhere near as long aimlessly wandering down corridors for the 80th time trying to figure out what you missed like in the original though - this is quite a bit more streamlined.
Finally, the tension that the game somehow manages to mount in its graphics and sounds all comes to a brilliant head when you stumble unexpectedly into a Metroid. It lets out a super-loud sound - I'm tempted to call it a jump-scare - and the alien will fly at you, trying to kill you before you can missile it to death. The further you get into the planet, the further you find them developed, giving you some real monstrosities in the forms of Metroid Zeta and Omega. Ugh. You'll likely almost soil yourself the first time you stumble into the Omega if you aren't expecting it. It's totally dramatic, and terrifying, and awesome.
Metroid II was one of the earlier GB games to use a battery to save the game instead of a password, which was a real God send. And, it was created under one of my favorite Nintendo figures, Gunpei Yokoi. He was awesome, his games were awesome, and Metroid II: Return of Samus is a pretty heroic effort that largely succeeded.
Here's hoping the remake does it justice!
You can find my playthrough of Metroid (NES) here:
https://youtu.be/EhnWKcO1byU
And Super Metroid here:
https://youtu.be/Y9tufNHthJE
_____
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!
Visit for the latest updates!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/NintendoComplete/540091756006560
https://twitter.com/nes_complete