With Ravenous coming in just a few more months, we've had a lot of people playing Metroid games for the first time! But while Metroid games are amazing to play for the first time, I think they're even better to replay.
This may be a sentiment you've heard before - that Metroid games are meant to be replayed - and that may not be an idea you're used to, since most games are only designed to be played once. This post won't be a specific guide on how to do specific tricks or routes (much smarter people than me have already made those guides, and they're just a Google search away) but hopefully it can give you some ideas for what games you might like to re-explore, and what challenges you can set for yourself!
Also, this post is mainly about 2D Metroid. While 3D Metroid games ARE fun to replay and have lots of replay value, I'm just not as familiar with how to break them.
Here are some well-known runs:
1. 100% runs
The most basic and simple beginner run. Any Metroid game can be 100%ed, and it's pretty fun to do so! Feel free to pull up a map if you're not interested in searching for every hidden corridor, and see how much more powerful you feel walking up to Ridley with twice the normal number of Super Missiles! More importantly, though, the puzzles are often very fun to do! Zero Mission, Fusion, and Dread all have fiendishly difficult Shinespark puzzles, for example, which are a blast to get through.
2. Sequence Broken runs
Sequence Breaks are some of the most interesting and unique features of the Metroid series, and the Metroidvania genre as a whole!
Metroid games are often called nonlinear, but if you've played one of the 2D games, you may have noticed that the game certainly funnels you down a critical path. For example, Zero Mission wants you to get the Long Beam, then Missiles, then Charge Beam, then Bombs, then Power Grip, and so on. However, with some skill, you can get those items completely out of order. Doing so is called a Sequence Break.
The easiest games to sequence break (IMO) are Zero Mission and Dread. Both of those games can be broken in remarkable ways - most of them developer-intended - and doing so makes the game play in completely different ways!
- Both games feature the Infinite Bomb Jump (IBJ), where placing bombs in the right rhythm can get you as high as you want. You can even do it diagonally, to travel across gaps!
- Both games feature Shinesparks, which also give you infinite height or let you shoot across gaps.
- Zero Mission features the One-Wall Wall Jump, where Samus can quickly climb up any wall, just by doing a wall jump (which is done by touching a wall, moving away from it, then pressing the jump button), and then immediately moving back towards the wall you jumped off of. Dread also features the Wall Jump, but doing so against just a single wall is pretty hard.
- Dread features the Coyote Jump, which lets you slide off a ledge, and then jump in midair a few moments after you leave the ledge.
- Dread features the Pseudo-Wave glitch, which lets you break some blocks through walls. The methods vary in setup and difficulty, so I can't explain more here, but there are tons of guides for every place you can do it. This is a trick which is pretty clearly not dev-intended, but it's extremely powerful!
- Dread features the Water Bomb glitch, which gives you just a bit of extra height underwater. It's only useful in a couple places, but those places save a LOT of time, like letting you get Ice Missiles before Spin Boost!
With those few tricks, you can find plenty of different routes through the games, each more ridiculous than the last. Some of these routes may be much more difficult than normal, but they're extremely fun! As a starting place, try a couple of these routes and see how they feel:
- In Zero Mission, get Varia Suit before leaving Brinstar for the first time.
- In Zero Mission, Norfair's rightmost shaft has a secret path which you can access from the top right corner (the part of the shaft you can only access after the Ice Beam). If you take this path, you can access Ridley early! Then, with an IBJ in the room to the right of the elevator, you can go through that area backward, get some Supers, and kill Ridley without ever stepping foot in Kraid's Lair.
- In Zero Mission, you actually don't need to wait until after Ridley to get the Screw Attack. As soon as you're walking underneath its entrance, there's a Missile block in the ceiling you can break, letting you just jump up and grab it.
- In Zero Mission, try going through Kraid without the Power Grip or Ice Beam. It's difficult, but you can get through the entire area without ever going to Norfair!
- In Dread, try fighting Kraid with Bombs. For extra dominance, get early Super Missiles before fighting him. Note that failing to get Diffusion Beam will softlock the game later on. Additionally, you won't be able to fight Kraid after entering Elun!He'll disappear if you haven't already killed him, so make sure to go back for him before that point if you want the fight.
- In Dread, immediately after getting Ice Missiles, use a Shinespark to access the Green Teleportal early, then do the nearby Shinespark challenge to get Gravity Suit early. This will also let you get Screw Attack early, which breaks the world wide open.
Once you've gotten used to Zero Mission and Dread, you may want to try out some Super Metroid sequence breaks! In my opinion, these tend to be much more difficult and less natural, but experts can go through that game in effectively any order. There's even a run called Reverse Boss Order, which fights Ridley first and Kraid last!
3. Speedruns
These go hand-in-hand with sequence breaks. I'm no master of the routes, but they feature tons of cool tricks, are beginner-friendly, and are SUPER fun to try! Check out some of these beginner-friendly guides:
Super Metroid: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/69192497
Zero Mission: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1nQKpzxkA0&list=PL2_QxV_GAy-ouu3p_airoWftyTGdAre1J&index=1
Dread: https://www.speedrun.com/mdread/guides/wx9cs
4. Low% Runs
Through sequence breaks and player skill, you can skip a HUGE chunk of the upgrades for each 2D game. A Low% run involves getting as few items as possible.
You can do a 0% run of Dread, for example, by simply choosing to skip every Missile Tank, Energy Tank, and Power Bomb tank (major upgrades, like the Morph Ball, don't count towards item completion). Fusion features something similar, but there's one missile tank which is mostly unavoidable, so people tend to do 1% runs. A true Low% run of either game would also skip optional items, like Spin Boost, but just skipping minor items is a hard enough challenge.
Zero Mission is special, because it actually has a special ending for beating the game with under 15% of items (which includes major items). This is VERY hard, but an excellent challenge for anyone who wants to try it out!
Super Metroid has a Low% run, but it's rather advanced, and I wouldn't recommend it to a beginner. If you're interested, the Low% RBO run is easier to learn, but still pretty difficult.
Any game's Low% Run will be insanely difficult, as it means going through the game with minimal health and ammo. I'd say that Dread's Low% run is probably even harder than Dread Mode, though others may disagree.
5. Randomizer Runs
Finally, what might be my favorite way to replay the 2D games: Randomizers. These runs swap around the locations of every item, meaning you could get the Screw Attack first - opening up TONS of new paths - but then be unable to get through any passages which require the Morph Ball. It's a delightfully confusing way to play! IMO, they work best once you've learned a few sequence break techniques, but every randomizer comes with settings to let you decide what tricks you'll be expected to know.
Every randomizer requires a ROM of the game you want to randomize. The only way to legally obtain this ROM is to dump your own copy of the game. You'll also need an emulator to run the randomized ROM in.
Some notable randomizers include:
- For the easiest possible setup, AM2R's community updates add a randomizer directly into the game!
- Randovania, which supports several games, including Dread, Fusion, Samus Returns, AM2R, Prime 1, and Prime 2.
- VARIA.run supports Super Metroid. It is ridiculously powerful, but somewhat hard to use for your first time. As a starting point, go to the Randomizer tab, set the "Skills Preset" to Newbie or Casual, and keep everything else default.
- The MZM Randomizer is for Zero Mission
- SMZ3 is a famous randomizer which has you playing Super Metroid and A Link to the Past at the same time, with items shared across games.
- Archipelago is a randomizer system, which supports numerous Metroid games, and lets you do multiworld runs - essentially letting you randomize across many games, optionally including simultaneous multiplayer. It's a bit of a pain to set up, but it's well worth it if you can figure it out!
As you can see, there are a ton of different ways to play any given Metroid game, each of which comes with its own consideration and quirks. No matter how good or bad you are at the games, there's a new route you can try out, which feels completely different from your first run! Give them a shot, and see what strange situations you get into!
