What I Want to See With Metroid & What Could Push a Metroid Game to 20 Million Units?

[The_Liquid_Laser]

ARamdomGamer said:

The_Liquid_Laser said:

Your post still isn't clear.  What it seems to be saying to me is that these elements are there, but they are spread out across several different Metroid games.  That is actually what dilution is.

Ok, I feel it should be clear if someone has some basic knowledge of the series or has played the games to a decent extent but I'll develop each point further, even correct myself.

A) The entire Prime series is T rated, just used the original Prime as the base example. The most dilution one could argue with this is Samus Returns being E10+ but I think is a stretch given how some elements of how ratings get affected have shifted over time.

B) Prime 2, Fusion, and the game I forgot to add Samus Returns (3DS) are the fair, more difficult games of the series, and honestly is not like the rest of the games post-NES lack challenging parts or set pieces, is that these 3 games are the most consistently challenging, and to be honest if the threshold to surpass are the guardians of BotW, the series can pass the difficulty test without much problem.

C) Here I also made a mistake in not including most of the games, is just that Prime 2 is an example that sticks out the most in that premise because that premise is outright stated by the small parts of mandatory story exposition, but the entire Prime trilogy deals with planets where high tech civilizations has been mostly or entirely wiped out, if anyone knows what those games are about Prime 1 deals with the fall of the Chozo at the hands of the Phazon, and 3 also deals with that in its various planets, Fusion deals with the X virus, and the new lore of the Samus Returns remake also has to do with groups being wiped out, and Metroids themselves also play a big part in all these stories, so I stand by these points not being diluted, they are ever present.

D) I don't want to go on about every set piece in the series, but there are always moments where Metroid is unnerving, Fusion is the well renowned peak of this with the SA-X, the whole build up to Nightmare, among others, the whole Space Pirates ship in Zero Mission which on top of being its own unnerving moment is also designed to catch a veteran player out of guard since is an entirely new area of the game, Prime has the visit to the Phazon Mines with continuous attacks from the elite space pirates and very sparse save points, the ghosts Chozo that appear out of nowhere, how the Dark World of Prime 2 is a wasteland that consistently keeps you on the move since your health is always going down outside of safe areas, the constant threat of the Phazon in 3, etc. There are a lot of other moments and sequences designed to unnerve across the series thanks to both its presentation and gameplay, there are just some highlights from the rest of the games.

The only game one could point to a dilution of Metroid elements is Other M.

You are picking away at my trees, and yet you are not seeing my forest.  A person in 2016 could have described BotW as what they wanted in a Zelda game, and someone like yourself could have rebutted their points in a similar way.  "I want a huge, freedom focused, open-world game that is challenging.  Make the overworld awesome!"  "Zelda has already done this.  Lots of Zelda games are open world.  Wind Waker has a huge open world.  Previous Zelda games have challenging parts." 

This is missing the point.  Because before BotW none of the games had the freedom of the original Zelda, nor did they have the challenge of the original Zelda.  The details of Zelda 1 and BotW are extremely different.  However the underlying design philosphy is extremely similar: explore a huge world with extreme freedom, even to the point that the player can easily get in over their head and die.  BotW went back to the original philosophy of Zelda 1 while making it look like a modern game in 2017.

Metroid 1's underlying philosophy is somewhat different: open-world space horror, i.e. make the game mess with the player's head however they can.  The isolation, the challenge, getting lost, etc... is all meant to mess with the players head.  Metroid 1 doesn't even have real boss fights.  Ridley and Kraid are areas you can exit at any time.  There is a fake boss.  The final boss of the game, Mother Brain, is just a giant brain in a jar.  All of this is to mess with the player's head.  There are tons of secrets and also some trap floors.  You don't know what you are going to get next.  I beat Metroid 1 without killing a single Metroid.  That's not the way I wanted it, I just didn't know how to kill them.  They felt unkillable.  That all added to the horror feel.

Metroid 1 is a fairly frustrating game.  You know what other game is frustrating? Dark Souls.  Frustrating is not necessarily bad in a horror themed game.  You somewhat need to feel like your situation is hopeless.  I would be happy if Metroid tried to make a more extreme Dark Souls in space.  Make the game harder and more unsettling than any Souls game.

The main problem with the Metroid series is that the details are too similar to previous games.  I can't be disoriented when I know what to expect.  In the first game, I had no idea what to expect.  Now I feel like they keep rehashing most of the same parts while making the game easier and more linear than the original.  I don't want a Metroid game that has the elements, the details, of previous Metroid games.  I want a Metroid game that gets back to the design philosophy of the original: open-world space horror.