Super Metroid Subversion part 10: The gift that keeps on giving
0SPOILER WARNING: If you're planning to play this romhack, and don't want the existence of certain things spoiled, turn back now. (If you're looking to get a sense for new players, start at part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtKtKF-tl6w)
I'm finally back to attempt Subversion's extremely-well-hidden second quest. I suppose you could consider this sort of like a plando, except that the game was likely actively designed around the idea. This leads to some amusing and sometimes quite surprising switcheroos, and some realizations of "so THAT'S why that's there".
And if you thought to yourself "this seems awfully early to get full water movement" in the original playthrough, second quest seems likely to test the limits in that regard as well - in fact, it already has, sometimes in awfully unreasonable ways. The invisible crab room has seemingly the most problematic possible water surface elevation, requiring you to either correctly land on platforms you can't see (leaps of faith are bad), or perform a nearly-impossible jump near (but below) the water's surface to get out. I spent so much time here that I cut a couple of minutes of the struggle from this video. Later on, if you end up finding you've gone to the bottom of spore field too early, you may have an incredibly hard time getting back up, again due to precisely where the water's surface was placed. These design decisions have zero effect on the first playthrough because you already have full water mobility, which leaves me with 2 possible conclusions: either the map designers were carelessly haphazard or ignorant when they decided where to place the water's surface in these rooms, or they were actively malicious and the second quest is actually subject to asshole design (unfortunately common for romhacks).
In addition, dark room navigation is now required, which while not impossible, is needlessly hard on the eyes. It almost seems as if Subversion aims to be simultaneously both the most and least accessible romhack of the past decade. To be fair, I probably shouldn't be quite that harsh - making a hack inaccessible requires far less effort than these folks have put into Subversion.
It seems as if only major items have been moved around for the most part, but as it turns out, memorizing exactly where all of those are (including energy tanks), and being fully aware of alternate routes and shortcuts that you could have entirely overlooked in first quest, is extremely important. On that note, I was amused and unsurprised (more like satisfied?) when I found out that second quest _requires_ doing the top of pirate lab out-of-order the way I unwittingly did it in my first playthrough in 1.1.
I'm still curious to find out what else has changed in second quest, and overall it's looking to be an interesting challenge. I just wish they didn't make a few excessively inaccessible design "decisions" in the process, as it heavily mars the experience.
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