I've heard that Metroid II isn't one of the greatest titles in its series, but I get the feeling it might have a charm to it.
Metroid II is IMO a jewel, a masterpiece, and it's my favourite 2D Metroid game. It's a bold game that is more "Metroid" than any other game in the series, and is wholly unique.
See how 2D Metroid mazes are mostly composed of straight vertical and horizontal lines, long corridors and long shafts? Well, Metroid II throws that out of the windows in favour of weird, alien but natural-looking caves with convoluted surfaces, with crumbling, silted, millennia-old chozo ruins in the middle of them. That means this game is the Metroid game with the biggest sense of exploration and discovery, because the layout is always unexpected, unpredictable, fresh.
There is nothing straight, clean or modern in Metroid II, there is nothing suggesting any sentient being was there less than centuries ago. In a sense, it's the most "realistic" of the series, with little to none shiny SF elements. It's very lovecraftian.
The Game Boy limitations are exploited brilliantly. The sprites are big and detailed, which in turn makes the visible area around Samus small, but it works amazingly well for the game since it gives you the feeling to be able to only see a tiny luminous area around you, in the middle of infinite and hostile blackness forever devoid of sunlight, since everything is located underground, going deeper and deeper into the forgotten abysses. The soundtrack is pure genius, with strange sounds and melodies reminding you of "Forbidden Planet".
The theme of the game, finding and killing every Metroid, is chilling. Sinister clues can be found, the Metroids mutating into bigger and bigger, weirder and weirder monsters, leaving deformed shells behind. The game even plays with your nerves: you may cross an area and see nothing, then go back and see a shell, meaning that a Metroid just mutated there into an abomination for your to fight.
The whole game reminds you of the alien ship sequence in ALIEN. It's a marvel.
So why isn't it more liked? For the same reason it's a jewel of gameplay and level design: it's a maze game, a game that stands on your sense of orientation. It's much more fair than the original Metroid because the areas don't all look like each other, and there aren't cheap, invisible secret passages, but as said above, the layout is really, really convoluted, weird and big, you feel lost in the entire game, and of course there isn't an automap.
But here's the genius: you don't need a map. The game is complex, but the action always takes place in a reasonably sized area: the idea here is a main path is blocked by lava, when you kill enough Metroids, their queen/mother gets mad, moves, and causes a mini earthquake that lowers the lava, allowing you to continue (BTW, that means Fusion wasn't the first Metroid game to intelligently guide the player to accommodate to handheld gaming). That means you have to use your memory, brain and sense of deduction (not to mention platforming) to explore and find different powerups and Metroids without a map, but the goal is manageable, it's extremely well balanced, especially since the game gives you the tools to do it: the spider ball is here brilliantly used, the whole game revolves around it, and obviously the space jump plays here a much more important role that in any other game.
Unfortunately, nowadays, a game that requires a good sense of orientation and even stands on the ability to locate yourself and guess/deduce where unexplored area and hidden stuff are, is a game that is automatically labelled "archaic". People will immediately ramble about "remakes" and "automaps", without understanding that such decisions would miss what Metroid II is all about.
Best. Metroid. Ever.
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