I'm a huge Metroid II: Return of Samus fan, the game being my favourite 2D Metroid. I know it's not a popular opinion, but it actually has nothing to do with nostalgia since I first played Super Metroid, then Metroid (NES) as a bonus in Metroid Prime, then Return of Samus, then Fusion and Zero Mission.
I said this about the game in another thread:
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.
So, I was therefore very cautious about Samus Returns since I knew it obviously would have an automap, and much more powerups and therefore would be much more linear since it'd have more areas blocked by powerup acquisition... I feared a remake would make a very unique episode into yet another Super Metroid clone...
But after beating the game 100%, I'm actually extremely pleased with the result. The game has issues, but it has the main quality of being NEW despite being a remake, trying new, bold things: the 360° aiming, the Aeon abilities, the counter move, the way boss battles are managed, all those are pretty clever and are managed excellently or decently. I was afraid that after the Other M hysteria (I love that game) Nintendo would be too afraid to experiment with Metroid in general and 2D Metroid in particular (frankly, I thought the 2D series did nothing really interesting after Super Metroid), and I'm happy to be proven wrong.
Quickly:
+ The unusual level design of Metroid II is still there, with extremely huge caves and weird room shapes, breaking the "grid" aspect of other 2D Metroid games.
+ Despite the automap, the game is so
huge and unusually shaped that the "I feel completely lost" aspect of Metroid II is still there.
+ Boss battles are great.
+ I love the Aeon abilities, including the sounding revealing the breakable blocks - the game has been designed with this in mind, it fastens the pace and is well balanced. I like that the others are optional for combat, allowing different battling styles. I hope we'll see more of those powers.
+ The game is really beautiful in 3D thanks to the backgrounds, which are extremely detailed and tell a story.
+ I love the tough difficulty, which is perfect IMO.
+ I love that the "weird sound effect" soundtrack is still there.
+ The counter move is interesting, especially in boss battles.
+ Samus is a dream to move around, I'm so glad the "Samus is a ninja" concept introduced in Other M lives on.
- The counter can be somewhat annoying with standard enemies, though, making the game a bit repetitive: for every enemy, wait for it to flash, press the button, then blast. It makes different patterns too same-y.
- An OBVIOUS flaw: not enough different enemies. It's really weird there is SO LITTLE different enemies in the game, the game going as far as using palette swaps.
- Not a fan of the reused tracks for heated areas or the "jungle" area (the Maridia track is used, right)?
- The backgrounds are pretty, but they're always very bright and coloured and open, and while playing you don't notice them all that much. The darkness and claustrophobia of the original game is lost, which is a shame.
- The backgrounds are pretty and varied, but the foreground/play area is mostly composed of the same dirt/rock textures and blocky shapes, making the game feel too repetitive visually. The foreground variety should match the background. It's ironic that the original Metroid II on Game Boy feels much more organic and varied and alien and creepy.
- Among the reasons why I prefer NES Metroid and Metroid II to Super Metroid, there's the "labelled block" cliché. Like, you fire on a block and then a tiny label appears: "nope, you can only destroy this block with _______". In Samus Returns, blocks must be SPECIFICALLY destroyed by bombs, missiles, super missiles, screw attack or power bombs and nothing else. This cliché is so artificial and so annoying, it immediately takes me out of the game, especially now that Axiom Verge or Environmental Station Alpha proved you didn't need it to make a terrific Metroid game.
All in all this is a great new addition to the 2D series. I'm really happy of the direction apparently taken story-wise, too, I hope we see more of Metroid mutations and the X.