In the first Metroid the Metroids were a threat that Samus Aran had to survive. In the second, which came out for the Game Boy in 1991, they were her target. Samus lands on SR388, the Metroids’ home planet, with orders to destroy the whole species, and a meter on the screen counts how many are left: 39 when she sets out, Nintendo Power told its readers. Each one she kills shakes the planet and opens a way deeper underground. At the bottom waits the Queen, and after the Queen comes an egg.
A new team, five years on
Retro Gamer thought fans “had all but forgotten Metroid” by the time Nintendo released this sequel, five years after the first game. It was the work of a new team, directed by Hiroyuki Kimura and Hiroji Kiyotake, the original game’s character designer. Yoshio Sakamoto, who had directed Metroid, took no part. Public sources credit the game to Nintendo’s R&D1 department, the team behind the first game and the Game Boy itself.
The game reached North America in November 1991. Nintendo Power announced it that December as “the follow-up to one of the all-time NES classics”, a “massive adventure” twice the size of the original, with “even more high tech weapons” and “a battery backup to save game progress”. Japan had it in January 1992 and Europe in May.
Down through SR388
SR388 is a maze of tunnels, caves and hidden passages, with the ruins of “an ancient civilization” in its darkest reaches. Deadly liquid floods the lower levels. “As you defeat the Metroids, earthquakes will occur,” Nintendo Power explained, “causing the deadly liquid in some areas to drain and open up new passages.” So the player cannot wander far ahead. Retro Gamer thought the game “far more linear” than the first, “which many fans found difficult to accept”: Samus’s goal was “simply to hunt and eradicate a preset number of Metroids in order to progress”. Samus’s ship waits on the surface, where she can go back to restore her energy and missiles, and save points let a game be picked up later.
The Metroids have changed since the first game. The first one Samus meets is an Alpha Metroid, “relatively primitive”, which charges as soon as it senses her and takes five missiles to destroy. Gamma Metroids are “much larger than the Alphas”. Zeta Metroids breathe fire and carry armour on their lower bodies, so they can be hurt only from the side. Omega Metroids attack like the Zetas but much faster. At the end the player meets the Queen Metroid, for which Nintendo Power advised taking “about 200 Missiles”, and near her a clutch of newly hatched Metroids of the original kind, which have to be frozen with the Ice Beam and finished with missiles.
New tricks for a small screen
The game gave Samus new equipment that later games kept. The Spider Ball lets her, rolled into a ball, “defy gravity and roll along walls and ceilings”; the Spring Ball lets her jump in that form; the Space Jump lets her leap again from mid-air. Nintendo Power listed the beams too: the Wave Beam that spreads shots over a wide area, the Spazer that fires three at once, the Ice Beam and the Plasma Beam, the most powerful.
The Game Boy’s monochrome screen changed how Samus looked. In Metroid her suit upgrade was shown by a change of colour. With no colour to use, Retro Gamer explained, the Varia Suit “had to be made distinguishable by design”, and so it gained the oversized shoulders that became Samus’s best-known look. The same reason explains why her arm cannon changes shape when she switches weapons.
Reception
Not everyone was won over. Reviewing an American import in January 1992, Martin Gaksch of the German magazine Video Games wrote that the game was not as good as the NES original. He found the graphics too dark, said his eyes were tired after a few minutes, and wished for a map at the press of a button. It was “a good action cartridge”, he decided, but not the exceptional game he had hoped for. Retro Gamer recorded that the game won “numerous plaudits and critical acclaim” but that the public “seemed less enamoured”, and that it was “not as commercially successful as Nintendo had hoped”. By 2010, the magazine said, fans had come to regard it as “a great handheld debut for the franchise”.
The hatchling
After the Queen falls, an egg hatches in front of Samus. The baby Metroid behaves as if she were its mother, and she spares it. Super Metroid (1994) follows on directly: Samus has left the last Metroid at a research station, and Ridley breaks in and steals it.
Nintendo returned to SR388 in Metroid: Samus Returns, a remake for the Nintendo 3DS made with the Spanish studio MercurySteam and released in September 2017. MercurySteam went on to co-develop Metroid Dread (2021).
Sources
- Nintendo Power issue 31, December 1991, pp. 51–57: Metroid II feature (SR388; “twice the size of the original game”; battery backup; the new equipment; the earthquakes and the draining liquid; the save points and the ship; the Alpha, Gamma and Zeta Metroids).
- Nintendo Power issue 37, June 1992, pp. 46–53: Metroid II strategy guide (the Metroid meter at 39; the Omega Metroids; the Queen Metroid and “about 200 Missiles”; the newly hatched Metroids).
- Club Nintendo (Germany), June 1992, p. 37: the fire-breathing, armoured Zeta Metroid and the Omega Metroid.
- Video Games (Germany), January 1992: review of the American import by Martin Gaksch (battery saves; a European release expected in mid-1992; not as good as the NES original; the dark graphics; no map).
- Retro Gamer Collection volume 4, 2010, pp. 12–13, “The complete history of Metroid”: the sequel five years later; Kimura and Kiyotake; “far more linear”; the Varia Suit and arm cannon redesigned for a monochrome screen; sales below Nintendo’s hopes; Super Metroid following on from Metroid II’s ending.
- Edge issue 218, September 2010, p. 35, and issue 244, September 2012, pp. 120–121: MercurySteam as a Madrid developer.
- Wireframe issue 52, June 2021, p. 24: Metroid Dread co-developed by MercurySteam, “the studio behind 2017’s Samus Returns”.
- Wikipedia, “Metroid II: Return of Samus” (web, secondary): release dates in North America, Japan and Europe; Nintendo R&D1 as developer; Metroid: Samus Returns by MercurySteam and Nintendo EPD, released on 15 September 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metroid_II:_Return_of_Samus