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Frogger on 25 September 2017
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Mar1217 said:
spemanig said:

The boss fights are some of the best parts of SR, but they are absolutely possible with the older aiming. (some of the platforms would need to change for some of them that are over lava though) But look at fusion. Awesome fights in that game. Best in the series outside of Kraid in Super which is the actual best in the series. Didn't need free-aim at all.

Still trying to play AM2R, but still can't get my controller working.

I don't want to spill everything about my critique lol. Hate most of the music. Previous metroid games, including M2, had simple melodic music that was extremely deliberate. In SR's search for bombast and fanfare, it loses that simplicity and deliberateness in favor of a very busy soundtrack. Busy as in that most tracks have too many different sounds going on at once, making it sound messy. This is an issue that plagues reorchestrations, but what's funny here is that because of how sparse M2's soundtrack is, half of it isn't used and is replaced by a shit ton of original, really crappy (for the most part) music. It also reuses a lot of tracks from Super, which I really hate. AM2R does this too, as well as Prime. It takes what used to feel like area specific themes and turns them into generic "volcano/jungle/water" themes. Not even Zero Mission did this, and literally takes place on the same planet as Super.

Don't mind the graphics, but prefer the 2D art style. Much better than Other M though, so I'll pick my battles there. It's definitely not something I'd criticize the game for. What I don't think i like are how the environments relate to each other because it doesn't feel like a world to me at all. just a bunch or pretty rooms with themes that connect them together. That's actually something I know for a fact AM2R excels at, and something the previous games did well. I'll need to play again to be sure though because something tells me the fact that you zoom past each area in such a curated way has made this cohesiveness less obvious than it actually is.

I don't know what arts are. Aeion you mean? Hate half of them. Don't mind the other half. The map one completely eliminates all sense of discovery. Giving the player the X-Ray scope at the beginning instead would have solved the (bomb every crevice) issue without revealing the whole map. Everything else could have been map stations, which reward exploration with map chunks.

The UI is fine. Is it fine?

...

Yeah, I think it's fine. I don't like how tapping the screen to ball up feels, but I like that the option exists because it's much better than simply pressing down twice. In the future though, I'd want it to be its own button.

Pretty sure this thread has spoiled the majority of your critique right now xD

- M2's soundtrack was facing hardware limitation. It has a lot of ear ripping tracks which shows that they were going for more than just simple melodic music + a lot of these tracks were short which means they looped often and it would probably irritated lots of people.

- SR's soundtrack definitely go for a Prime style and more intense of music on some occasion and it shows with stuff like Diggernaut(probably the best boss track btw), Surface of SR388 or Lava caves. But stuff like Chozo Laboratory,Main caves or Lower Brinstar is actually more in line with what I heard from the other games, very atmospheric. To be honest, the soundtrack does have a lot of nostalgia pandering with all these remixes. And personally, even I like all these different sounds they've added into these remixes, means that they are less repetitive which plagued the original. It comes off a bit chaotic but certainly not in a bad way. (But that's just like you, an opinion :) )

- About the world itself, although some of it might looks a bit disconnected from a what a world should look like, it weirdly still holds up. That's just me, but I can clearly see the way these zones are interconnected to each other, specially more apparent once I reached Area 4, which looked like the heart of SR388 with these kind of "blood vessels" in the background. (Though I've not yet seen Area 5, so maybe it will evolve the other way)

- Sorry I meant art style not Aieon abilities :P The point about the scanner is understandable though, but since I am aiming for completion, I use it to make sure I don't miss on anything, would be glad if they changed it to the X-ray scope. Time stop and electric shield are nice implementation for some of the puzzle. (In fact I had a sequence break without using one of them when I was supposed to)

- They should have put the ball up control to the shoulder button ZR or ZL on the N3DS/N2DS,I don't utilize the bottom screen for that, way easier with rapidly pressing down 2 times with the circle pad.

Trust me when i say that I haven't even scratched the surface lol.

I mean, I'm a musician. What SR goes for is almost nothing like prime in most instances. ZM's soundtrack and even AM2R's is. SR's is like, idk, generic orchestration. I don't think limited hardware is an excuse for the Gameboy. I just think M2 was going for a more abstract sound, but what SR does is not that. It's overcompensating with a cacophony of clashing sound fonts to sound cinematic. It really sounds like an incohesive mess in a way that no metroid, even M2, has ever sounded. But the reason why is definitely the sound fonts. This is a common issue with soundtracks like this. They focus so much on the new soundfonts that they forget to focus on fundementals. This is why 8/16-bit music is so often good. Composers don't have enough sound fonts to bullshit.

Not everything is bad though. Just much of it. I have to play again to be sure of the world design. Nothing wrong with the art style though. I really hope this Samus replaces the one currently in Smash for the next one. Only good thing to come out of this game in regards to future games. Give me those big sholders again!

I really don't like the electric sheild. It makes you almost 100% invulnerable since you gain so much aeion after killing any enemy. I don't like the idea of adding puzzles to metroid at all, though. Metroid has until now been a very naturalistic world, meaning that some care has been made to make most of the world feel like it has formed naturally, but SR has a very systematic world, meaning that much of the world isn't trying to hide the mechanics it's trying to trigger. Puzzles are the most obvious example of this. There are very few examples of puzzles in games where they don't stick out. When people complain that a game is too "game-y," this is usually what they mean. It's too systematic. SR has this issue in a series which previously excelled in the opposite.