How AM2R and Samus Returns remade Metroid 2

Earlier this month, Nintendo and MercurySteam released Metroid: Samus Returns, on Nintendo 3DS. The game is a complete remake of the Game Boy game Metroid 2. Coincidentally, Samus Returns comes almost exactly one year after the release of AM2R, or Another Metroid 2 Remake. That one was made by fans, and was the target of a legal takedown request by Nintendo. Now it’s not surprising that Metroid 2 has seen multiple remakes. This game is an important part of the Metroid story, after all, because the plot - which sees Samus on a mission to wipe out the entire Metroid species - reverberates into Super Metroid, Metroid Fusion, and even Metroid Other M.

But it’s also a, let’s say, challenging game to play in 2017. For one, it’s different to pretty much every other Metroid game. Instead of zigzagging back and forth across an interconnected, maze-like map, the game opens up, more linearly, in great big chunks. In each area, you find and kill a certain number of Metroids before the lava retracts and you go to the next area - with no real reason to ever return. This is probably due to the handheld nature of the game. There’s no real need to make your own map, as with Metroid 1, and you can explore a single area of the game in one sitting and then safely turn the Game Boy off, without being hopelessly lost the next time you boot up the game.

But Metroid 2 generally feels subservient to the technical limitations of the Game Boy. The tiny screen reduces your visibility, the black and white palette is drab and confusing, and the game’s got limited controls - though, Samus does have more moves than she did in Metroid 1. So there’s plenty of stuff here for these remakes to tackle. And it’s interesting to see the different, and sometimes similar ways that Samus Returns and AM2R chose to address Metroid 2’s shortcomings.

Look at Samus’s movement. Both games dramatically improve her agility, they both give her the ledge grab move introduced in Metroid Fusion, and they both have a dedicated button for rolling up into a morph ball. But Samus Returns drastically increases Samus’s combat abilities, and adds a melee counter and drops the diagonal aiming from classic Metroid in favour of full 360 degree aiming. The bosses are also an aspect that both games sought to change. In Metroid 2 you’ll fight the same simple bosses over and over again, with the only change being the layout of the place where you fight them. AM2R makes the bosses a bit more interesting to fight with new patterns, smaller weakpoints, and by giving the Metroids additional attacks in later fights.

Samus Returns does the same, actually, but the fights are even more elaborate and have more traditional boss-like patterns to learn. And if the repetition gets to you, both games also have extra bosses - like a Torizo from Super Metroid, a door guardian, and a bullet hell weapons trainer in AM2R, and a very difficult mining robot in Samus Returns. Other new additions include new power-ups. Samus had quite a formidable set of tools in Metroid 2 but both games add the Charge Shot, Super Bomb, Super Missile, and Gravity Suit, and AM2R adds the speedboost, with all the shinesparking goodness that comes with it, while Samus Returns instead goes for the grapple beam.

Oh, and that game also has four entirely new Aeion powers, which come with their own energy meter. These are powers that increase your attack and defence, one that slows down time, and another that reveals the map around your current location. Which makes secrets and hidden rooms pretty easy to find. In general, Samus Returns is just less interested in letting you get lost. The Metroid indicator flashes red as you get closer to the bosses, the map screen is very detailed, and these teleporters let you zip around within individual areas.

In terms of level design, both games capture the map of Metroid 2 in the broad strokes. One area from Metroid 2 will look largely the same in both remakes. But they have different ways of filling in the details. AM2R’s philosophy is to generally keep what’s already there, right down to placement of the item pick-ups and the layout of most of the rooms. But, the fans added new stuff on top - like an all new section where you control a robot, and a tense escape sequence from a weapons labs.

Samus Returns doesn’t add much new, but makes huge changes to the current layouts - with so much added density of pathways and obstacles, that many locations are practically unrecognisable. Both games choose to add more obstacles and locks that can’t be opened until you find a new ability somewhere else in the current area - making the games feel more like the other Metroid titles. Though, it’s much more pronounced in Samus Returns, which has all sorts of weird obstacles that force you to get specific items and even beams.

AM2R, on the other hand, is fine with you missing a fair few items, and is more open to sequence breaking. Oh, and while neither game messes with the overarching structure of the game - you’re still killing a number of Metroids to open up new areas after all. Unlike the original, both remakes provide a method and a reason to return to previous areas. Samus Returns is dotted with teleport stations that can ping you around the entire planet, while AM2R reveals a distribution centre, later into the game, with pipes that send you back to previous places. Once there, you can use your new powers and abilities to get goodies you couldn’t access earlier.

We can also look at the two games’s interpretation of what Metroid 2 was originally going for. For a clear example, the unnamed and uncoloured liquid that fills the chambers in Metroid 2, was seen as lava by the creators of AM2R, and as purple acid by those behind Samus Returns. And we can look at the backgrounds, too. AM2R looked for interesting tiles in the original game, and went from there. In the second area, these pipes inspired the developers to turn the zone into a water treatment plant. And in an area with loads of beam pick ups, they dressed it up as a weapons testing facility. Samus Returns is a lot less interesting in this regard. Everything’s just various types and colours of crumbling ruins. AM2R is more interested in telling a coherent background story about the Chozo - which is the ancient race that built everything on SR388.

And finally, another big change is to how health, ammo, and saving works. In Metroid 2, you recharge your health and ammo at different stations, and save points are just save points. In AM2R recharge stations are gone, because save stations now replenish ammo and health. Plus, Metroids drop lots of goodies upon death. And in Samus Returns, we’re back to recharge stations and save points, but Metroids now drop pick-ups and there are also invisible checkpoints before and after every boss battle.

Now, it’s easy enough to talk about how these decisions have changed how Metroid 2 works. Both remakes sought to make Metroid 2 work more like the other Metroid games, they both made the boss fights more involving, and they both filled in the blanks left by the original game’s monochrome palette. But it’s just as important to talk about how they change how Metroid 2 feels. Take that last thing about health, ammo, and saving. In Metroid 2, you can find yourself battered and bruised by a Metroid fight, and then staggering back to a save station with a small amount of health. It feels tense, and distressing.

AM2R makes life a bit easier with the post-fight pick-ups, and it neatly streamlines things by rolling recharge stations and save points into one - but the same anxious sensation is just about there. But in providing checkpoints immediately after every Metroid fight, Samus Returns completely removes that feeling. That stressful journey back up through the level and to a save point is just gone. So when judging these remakes, it’s important to consider the actual experience of playing Metroid 2. Not just what the different mechanics and design decisions were in that game, but how they contributed to a specific feeling within the player.

And for me, playing Metroid 2 invoked feelings of dread and unease. It was darker and scarier than most other Metroid games. It gave me the feeling of invading someone else’s space. Where the other Metroid games almost feel like a big puzzle for the player to solve, Metroid 2 felt invasive and alien. And you can point to a lot of reasons for this. The lack of backtracking made you feel like you were always descending deeper and deeper into the Metroid’s lair. And unlike Super Metroid, you won’t return to the safety of your ship until the very end of the adventure.

And then there’s the tiny screen space which means you can only see a few metres in front of you, like you’re pointing a torch into a pitch black room. And where the giant caverns are difficult to grasp through the microscopic viewpoint of the Game Boy screen, making you feel small and insignificant, the narrow, winding paths make other parts of the game feel cramped and claustrophobic. But ultimately Metroid 2 was something of a horror game. A frightening journey into an uncharted planet. A tense dive into an alien’s nest. And, if you ask me, neither remake really captures that because so many of the factors that contributed to Metroid 2’s feeling were seen as issues to fix.

So claustrophobic screens get zoomed out and feel less constricting. Colourful backgrounds and whirring machines make the planet feel more welcoming and alive. Classic Metroid backtracking sends the player up and down the planet’s spine. And the more traditional level design can come across as artificial, instead of alien. Which is never more apparent than in Samus Returns where you make the acidic liquid go down by plugging Metroid DNA into a giant lock mechanism.

Now, you might say that I’m reading too much into Metroid 2, and that most of these things were just due to the unavoidable limitations of the Game Boy. But I want to argue that most of this stuff was probably intentional. I mean, the game was made by Nintendo R&D1 - the same studio and much of the same team behind Metroid 1, Super Metroid, and Metroid Fusion. So it wasn’t some weird spin-off. And the game’s producer, the late Gunpei Yokoi, was the inventor of the Game Boy and so was very aware of the console’s limits.

I think the team took those limits and made a game that would suit them - something more intimate, claustrophobic, and foreboding. And I think you can tell that the designers were trying to freak you out. Look at the Metroid husks. They don’t just work as a good navigational tool to let you know that a boss is near, but they also act like a warning. They can leave you with a pit in your stomach, because you know that you’re about to face a Metroid.

And then Nintendo used these husks to surprise you. After always finding husks before fighting Metroids, the game suddenly surprises you with a Metroid midway through a corridor… and then reveals the husk in the next room. The game’s not afraid to break its own patterns, after all. The repetitive act of killing Metroids to drop the lava level is shattered towards the end of the game, where the lava actually goes up, forcing Samus to go back and find a new type of Metroid.

The music is very telling, also. Of course, there’s this hopeful, exciting tune that plays through the main column of caves that links back to your ship. But it gives way to quiet, spooky, and discordant tunes when you descend into the different lairs. Where most retro games are filled with catchy, hummable tunes, including a lot of great Game Boy games made by R&D1, Metroid 2 sometimes just uses silence, some weird electronic sound effects, and Samus’s footsteps, to throw you off.

I should point out that Samus Returns mostly does a good job of this, with surprisingly faithful remixes of the original music. When it’s not just re-using music from other Metroid games, that is. AM2R is also a mixed bag when it comes to music, and a lot of the tracks have been replaced with jazzy, upbeat, Prime-style music. Metroid 2 also had some quiet, evocative storytelling, used to construct a certain, foreboding mood.

Like, towards the end of the game, you start to notice that the number of normal enemies is going down. Where the early parts of the cave, near the surface, are bristling with alien life, the lower bowels of the planet are practically empty. And when you get to the area just before the Queen Metroid, there are no normal enemies at all. Just a quiet, eery climb up to the final area. You’ve either gone deeper than any non-Metroid life form has gone in a very long time, or the Metroids have systematically wiped out every other animal, powerfully asserting their spot at the top of the food chain.

And then you get to this room. Where all the other Chozo statues in the game have been kept preserved, and sealed away from pesky Metroids behind impenetrable blast doors, this one - deep inside the Metroid lair has been smashed to pieces. It’s head is down here, it’s body is up there, and its item - the ice beam, the only weapon capable of stopping the normal Metroid, has been pushed aside. Yikes. AM2R captures this part quite well. There’s sadly no ice beam because you get it much earlier, but the statue is still there. And the lower areas are devoid of enemies.

But it’s Samus Returns that really didn’t get it. I don’t think the final Chozo statue is even in the game, I couldn’t find it, and the enemies never let up. Right there, in the path leading to the Metroids lair, you’ll be fighting dozens of standard enemies In a noisy, messy gauntlet. Back to the Game Boy game. After this area and a final boss fight - did you know, by the way, that Nintendo suddenly removed the ability to pause during Metroid 2’s final boss fight? Friggin’ Dark Souls up in here. Uh, after that fight, Metroid 2 has one of the most surprising and low key endings of just about any game from this era.

After finishing off the boss, Samus comes across this baby Metroid who assumes Samus is its mother. Instead of killing this final creature and finishing the mission, Samus decides to spare its life and the two leave the planet together. One of the most isolating games you can play suddenly gives you a companion. And as you leave, the Metroid gobbling up walls that block your path, this strange, calming, and evocative music starts to plays.

Over those last few minutes in the game - there are no enemies or puzzles to deal with - you’re given time to reflect on everything that has happened. Maybe consider Samus’s final act of mercy and compassion, which will be revisited in Super Metroid. Or maybe you’ll reconsider the ethical ramifications of your, frankly, genocidal mission to kill a non-space-fairing species that was only used as a biological weapon by the space pirates.

A genocidal mission which would be brought back up in Metroid Fusion, where it’s revealed that by wiping out almost all of the Metroids, Samus wrecked the ecosystem and let an even more dangerous species come to bear. And maybe this gives a new meaning to the discomforting feeling of the rest of the game? It’s a dark and disturbing game for a dark and disturbing chapter in Samus’s life. As S.R. Holiwell wrote in the terrific Metroid 2 defence piece A Maze of Murderscapes, “Games about killing should probably make you uncomfortable. They shouldn’t be carefully crafted to be pleasant. Metroid II is openly about killing. It makes me uncomfortable with wordless specificity”.

Samus Returns on the other hand is very comfortable about killing. The game puts a tremendous focus on combat with that 360 aiming, multi-phase boss fights, ridiculous Aeion powers, and these goofy cutscenes where Samus does ninja moves on Metroid bosses. Why Nintendo is so obsessed with turning Samus into Bayonetta is beyond me, but there we go. And, so, that final escape sequence with the baby Metroid contains yet more combat, not to mention an unnecessary additional boss fight. So much extra combat, actually, that you can hardly hear that the Game Boy game’s final music, which was given a subtle update in AM2R’s completely faithful recreation of the ending... has now been given a strange high tempo electronic remix in Samus Returns.

And if there was any doubt that Samus Returns just didn’t get Metroid 2’s themes, well, this is a game about travelling to an alien’s home planet to viciously wipe out the entire race, with a primary mechanic, the melee counter, which is about acting in self defence and only killing when first provoked. I’m half joking with that one. But this ending stuff absolutely boggles my mind. Samus Returns doesn’t just accidentally fail to capture the feeling of Metroid 2 by updating things, but it specifically undermines the original game in boorish, bone headed ways.

Now. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to hold up Metroid 2 as some perfect game. There’s much more to it than most critics seem to realise, but it does have shortcomings that any remake should seek to update. So I’m disappointed that these remakes had the opportunity to use modern game design to deliver the same experience as Metroid 2, but in a different form - not the same form but with a different experience. Because what does it matter if these games have largely the same level design if not the same disorienting feeling of exploring those levels? The same Metroids, if not the same dread of facing another one in a dark corridor? And so on.

Both remakes attempt to retcon Metroid 2 into more familiar Metroid design, so AM2R brings the game up to the same standards as Zero Mission and Super Metroid, while Samus Returns feels like a mix of classic Metroid games and Other M. But maybe those other types of design didn’t fit Metroid 2? Maybe the game’s themes and intended experience required a different set of mechanics? The closest analogy I can think of is remaking the oppressive Far Cry 2 to be more like the action movie playgrounds of Far Cry 3 and 4.

So, yeah. This doesn’t make these remakes into bad games and I really enjoy both of these titles on their own terms. AM2R is a terrific accomplishment for a fan project and lots of fun to play, and Samus Returns has plenty to enjoy also. But, you know what happens to remakes. One of these games will be become the defacto way of playing Metroid 2, and the original - already maligned and misunderstood - will become even less popular.

Well, that was a bit of a bummer to end on. But, hey, there we go. Thanks for watching and thank you for your patience in September - I’ve been unable to make stuff for half the month due to a nasty cold, which hopefully explains my slightly weird voice in this one. But I’m back now! And a special thank you to all my Patrons who keep the lights on at GMTK. Subscribe if you want more game design stuff every few weeks, and to get notifications whenever I stream new games here on YouTube..