I've recently been scolded by one of my tech junkie friends for having the audacity to care about things like power consumption and practicality when it comes to gaming, as I ended up opting for a rather meek RTX 3060 this generation over a comparatively more beefy card like the 3070 or 3080, and a big part of what went into that decision came down to the fact that power consumption in NVIDIA cards has dramatically increased since my previous PC build.
So being the petty nerd that I am, I decided to do some research in an effort to validate my criticisms that current generation cards are spiraling out of control with power usage, and for unjustified reasons. Sure enough, it took no time at all to pin down a culprit, as my immediate suspicion fell on NVIDIA's latest highly-touted feature, ray tracing. This ended up leading me down a rabbit hole to some surprising conclusions. And the verdict is: ray tracing most definitely is a gas guzzler, on top of the fact that it's largely impractical in most use cases.
For some context, I've never been a ray tracing hater from the beginning. I've been on the fence about it for a long time, as I've seen some impressive examples of it in action, but on the other hand I knew it was incredibly taxing on hardware in order to render. I could see the trade-offs being justified though if it really does give games that much of a makeover with its improvements. The clearest example of this I can think of is Microsoft's demonstration of RTX with Minecraft. It is pretty impressive how much it adds character to the worlds just by throwing in some realistic lighting while changing nothing else about the game. Even with its still-highly-pixelated textures, it practically looks like a whole new game.
But there's a reason why Microsoft chose this game to demonstrate the power of RTX, and that's because the vanilla game uses an incredibly basic lighting engine to begin with, so it's much easier to see the stark differences when you throw in something fancier. Traditional rasterization techniques for lighting have come a very long way though, and programmers have gotten exceedingly adept at simulating realistic lighting without actually using realistic calculations for light sources. This allows games to look very pretty without massively tanking your frame rates. The truth is that classic Minecraft simply doesn't take advantage of all these little visual tricks, so it creates an unfair advantage for RTX to make it look better than it actually is.
Take a look at these three comparison shots of Minecraft for a moment:
Now you'll likely notice that the first one obviously is your basic baby boy vanilla Minecraft with no lighting mods applied, while the other two are ray traced with more advanced dynamic lighting.
...Or are they?
One of them is an imposter. Can you spot the difference with which one is ray traced and which one is just using traditional lighting tricks to simulate ray tracing? Don't actually answer that by the way, because any answer other than "I'm not sure" means you might be guilty of being an elitist turbo-nerd and nobody cares. Congratulations. As for most normal people who don't spend all day staring at reflections and shadows so they can adjust their glasses and smugly point out the fakes, chances are you can't spot any meaningful difference, but the correct answer is in fact that the second screenshot is ray tracing while the third is the faker using traditional shader techniques.
No joke, the second sample is using Sonic Ether's SEUS PTGI shader pack, which stands for Path-Traced Global Illumination, and it utilizes real ray traced reflections, while the third is SEUS Renewed, which is a shader pack designed to dramatically improve Minecraft's lighting using only traditional rasterization methods; giving a much more balanced ratio to performance versus visual improvement.
Nope, still not ray traced.
In fact, when I first started using SEUS Renewed, I was already under the impression that I was looking at real ray tracing because it looked so good, only to later discover that it was Sonic Ether's other shader pack that was the real deal. Yet even after comparing the two hands-on, I've found that I still prefer Renewed over the real ray tracing solution. Not only because Renewed doesn't crash my FPS down to 30 as it does in PTGI, but because I actually think in most cases visually it looks better anyway. I always expected my findings to show that ray tracing would look really pretty at the cost of heavy hits to performance, but I never expected to find that traditional shader techniques were already so advanced that they can still compete pretty handily with actual ray tracing.
Now there are a few caveats to this. Certainly when it comes to underwater environments, PTGI has a fairly substantial edge over Renewed. God rays shine through the surface of the water which creates a beautiful visual effect that Renewed fails to replicate, and it's possible if I used Microsoft and NVIDIA's official ray tracing implementation, some of these types of details might look even better.
A demonstration of PTGI god rays.
However, the fact that traditional shaders can already look good enough to compete this closely with ray tracing (while not sapping away as much as 40 frames per second or more) has thoroughly convinced me that there's just no good reason to use ray tracing in most circumstances, and I'm sure if a skilled programmer really wanted to, there's plenty of cheaper visual tricks you could use to simulate god rays too.
In a test experiment with Linus' employees back in May of 2021, they set up several examples of game environments running with ray tracing either turned on or off. They would ask if employees could spot the differences. While some of the more tech-savvy in the bunch were able to guess everything right, they still had to frequently pause and squint around very closely before they could determine it, and even then they weren't always 100% sure of themselves. The biggest giveaway in Shadow of the Tomb Raider for example, was only that the ray traced shadows looked a little smoother than the rasterized ones. Wow. What a difference. Definitely worth obliterating my frame rate for.
Are you really feeling it yet, Shulk?
But it gets worse people. In one test performed by a redditor who posted their results online, power draw on their system rose by an additional 180 watts simply by turning the RTX setting on and nothing else, representing a 70% increase in power draw with their RTX 3080 build. For some perspective, my RTX 3060 card's peak power consumption is supposed to cap out at 170 watts. In other words, literally flipping on this one setting for the RTX 3080 adds more power consumption than my own card is even capable of generating, and that's on top of whatever else the 3080 was already drawing beforehand.
A study conducted at the University of Utah titled A Detailed Study of Ray Tracing Performance: Render Time and Energy Cost similarly reached the same conclusions that I have: that ray tracing is both extremely taxing on hardware performance and energy consumption, and while developers tend to focus on minimizing render time, they should be considering the energy cost as well.
Needless to say, if I was a congressman right now, I'd be writing legislation to limit the power consumption on consumer-grade PC parts just as we enforce miles per gallon standards on vehicles. In a time when climate change is really beginning to bare its fangs and bitcoin mining is consuming multiple nations' worth of electricity, it seems extra irresponsible to me that NVIDIA would push such a gratuitous feature like this and let their power draws run wild over it.
In ray tracing's defense, there are at least a few semi-practical use cases I could see for it. When it comes to older games that use far outdated lighting methods for example, ray tracing definitely could serve as a nice quick and dirty solution to juice them up and make them look prettier with minimal effort on the part of the modder, since the dynamic lighting could be easily adapted to most environments without needing to carefully hand-place and tweak light sources on everything.
Linus seems to be more optimistic about the future of ray tracing than I am, but personally from the experience I've had with it so far, I remain skeptical. The massive performance hits are just too hard to justify for some marginally prettier lighting. Unless the energy and rendering costs can be reined in through more efficient calculation methods, or maybe in the far-flung future when video cards have 100 teraflops of headroom to flex their muscles with and ray tracing has become child's play, it could be rationalized.
But current-gen games mostly shouldn't be bothering with this as far as I'm concerned. In almost every circumstance I could think of, you could probably provide a good lighting substitute for less than half the performance cost of ray tracing, and instead use that extra rendering overhead to put towards higher resolution textures, more polygons, higher frame rates, and further draw distances. For the time being, it's hard to see ray tracing as anything more than a gimmick when you can see how closely traditional rasterization can compete with it, and without the need of the starship Enterprise's warp core in order to power it either.
Early rumors and unconfirmed leaks of the RTX 40 series cards only add to my concerns. The RTX 4060 for example, is estimated to have a peak power draw of anywhere between 290 to 350 watts, which puts it in a similar ballpark to the RTX 3070 TI and 3080 currently. Mind you, this is supposed to be a mid-range card though, not an enthusiast unit like the latter cards. We could be seeing as much as 700 watt power supplies being required for only a mid-tier PC build in the not-too-distant future. The power splurging issues only seem to be getting worse.
So make no mistake, the power consumption of these new cards is excessive, and it is largely impractical. When the biggest source of your gas guzzling comes from an extremely taxing feature that doesn't even offer substantial improvement over more traditional methods, you're not exactly in a position to lecture me about irrational purchasing considerations. Now if you're OK with that anyway because you just want to be able to bask in your god rays and wipe your butt with $100 bills, fine, but let's not kid ourselves that this is anything other than vanity and Chad Warden memes. In the meantime, I'll continue to stick to my practical, more environmentally responsible builds, thank you very much. This is Petty McSmugerson, signing off.
Chrono Trigger is a masterpiece. It's been around for many years now, and I still think it holds up after all this time; it's an absolute classic developed by a legendary team from Squaresoft, with famous artist Akira Toriyama of Dragon Ball fame behind the game's character designs, and god-tier composers Yasunori Mitsuda and Nobuo Uematsu producing the soundtrack. But you probably already knew all this seeing as I'm far from the first critic to sing the game's praises.
What's really interesting about this game is that despite it being roughly 25 years old now, I still haven't seen any other game pull off time travel quite like it on such a massive scale. Most games either use it as a brief plot gimmick or a limited mechanic like Tracer's ability in Overwatch, but in Chrono Trigger, time travel is a major central component of both its gameplay and narrative. Players travel across 6 different major time periods throughout the planet's history, altering the course of events both big and small. As the game eventually opens up and lets you choose when you want to move forward or backward in time, you can really get a sense that you're making an impact on the world, because not only do your actions affect the present, but you can often even see their rippling effects into the future as you move forward in time.
And unlike so many modern JRPGs, there's virtually no filler or grind to be found in the game, even in its side quests. In fact these quests feel so polished that they could have easily been made part of the main quest chain and nobody would even notice a drop in quality; the game just gives them to you optionally anyway to add greater freedom and flexibility, but they're still entirely worth doing as they often flesh out the backstories of key characters in meaningful ways.
But we're not here to gush about Chrono Trigger today. The issue we're here to discuss is that Chrono Trigger has a major problem on its hands in 2022. With the recent release of the Chrono Cross remaster, many newcomers are discovering this franchise for the first time and looking back to not only try Chrono Cross, but Trigger as well. Yet many don't know or realize that despite there being numerous re-releases and ports of Chrono Trigger to modern platforms over the years, they all carry significant changes and flaws to the original Super Nintendo game; some of which even the veteran fanbase doesn't seem to be aware of. So to get a full sense of just how much of a clusterfuck this game has become, let's go over the various versions of it.
The OG
Starting with the Super Nintendo game, it turns out even the original carried a few bugs and glitches of its own back in the day; though I couldn't tell you exactly what they are or how to even replicate them because in all of my 20 years of replaying it I've never once noticed them. Supposedly there's some rare crashes, music glitches, and so forth that can be triggered through very specific circumstances, but I have yet to see them, so they do exist but you have to be fully aware of them and look them up in order to actually pull them off, as it's very unlikely that you're going to discover them on your own, making the SNES version of Chrono Trigger a generally rock solid choice for playing the game if you can somehow get your hands on it these days. But it's not even available on the SNES Classic or Switch Online service, making this version of the game very difficult to come by, as your only options for playing it are either original hardware or emulation.
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Next is the Playstation 1 port of the game, which came out as part of a double-feature package called Final Fantasy Chronicles. This version added some really nice quality of life features, the coolest of which are some fully-animated cutscenes done in the style of Akira Toriyama's art, making them look like something straight out of the Dragon Ball universe. On top of this, there's tons of little unlockable extras, including an art gallery, monster data, boss data, treasure map, music box, and a theater mode for rewatching the cutscenes whenever you want. It's a surprisingly comprehensive addition. Beyond that, this release is mostly a straight and faithful port of the original SNES game, retaining largely all of the old visuals, sounds and gameplay.
So one might think that this must be the ideal version of the game to play, right? Well unfortunately, the PSX port contains one critical flaw that kind of brings the whole experience down, and that is the atrocious load times. The Playstation 1 was one of the earliest consoles to transition from cartridge-based media to discs, and because of this, load times became a common issue for many games, but it's especially noticeable here because there is a painfully slow wait time at the beginning of each battle sequence in the game that didn't exist before on the SNES. And since you're going to be doing plenty of fighting in this game, those load times start to add up quickly. Similarly any time you want to open a menu and equip some items, it's also a considerably longer load time over the original game. It's a huge pacing-breaker, and sadly the achilles heel for the entire port. Playing it on PS2 or PS3 backwards compatibility doesn't help much with reducing the load times either.
You might be tempted to go for this port just for those added anime cutscenes, but trust me, it's not worth it. Most of them are just rehashed sequences that were already in the original game anyway; they're just told with flashier animation.
Chrono Trigger: Definitive Edition
So in comes the DS version of Chrono Trigger, hooray. Now, many fans herald this release to be the "definitive" version of Chrono Trigger, as it contains all of the nice quality of life updates from the PSX release, but minus the abysmal load times. In addition, it even adds MORE content over the PSX version, with a little Pokemon-style battle arena where you can level up and fight with your pets against other players, and there's several new post-game dungeons to explore. BUT unfortunately once again, not all is sunshine and rainbows here.
For one, the further added features of the DS version feel a little tacked-on and not all that interesting. The new dungeons resort to a lot of recycling content and repetition, and they aren't particularly satisfying to play. Second, the script was heavily retranslated for this release, slightly changing the characterization of many characters, and while I guess it's possible that this was done to make it technically more accurate to the original Japanese, it loses a lot of the charm and fun from the original script nonetheless.
Glenn's character was arguably done dirty the worst, as he completely loses his funny Old English dialect that he spoke in. Fans of the DS port will argue that no one else in the middle ages spoke this way in the game, so it only makes sense to remove the dialect, but this was already largely accounted for in the original translation anyway, as Glenn only developed this form of speech after he was cursed into his frog form, inferring that he got it as a result of his transformation. Still some might say this doesn't make much sense either, but I'd like to remind you we're nitpicking over the finer technicalities of a talking frog-man in a silly anime game. If you really wanna get that anal about it, then why are the prehistoric humans even able to communicate with us at all? Shouldn't they be speaking a completely different language considering they're from 65 million years in the past? Just let me have my stupid Old English frog-man god dammit!
Erhmm, anyways, point is, ultimately this does somewhat come down to a matter of taste, but I think if anyone's really giving it a fair shake, they have to admit that the original translation was just more fun, and overall this simply feels unnecessary. The script was already serviceable enough before and really only needed minor touch-ups around the edges, not a complete rewrite. This aint no Final Fantasy VII rush job we're talking about here.
But that's not even the most egregious change to this port. What really tanks this port for me, is the terrible piss yellow tint that seems to have somehow smeared itself across the entire game. Yes, that's right. Apparently someone at Square must have dropped the final build in the toilet by accident and forgot about it for a few hours before pulling it out for mass production. A lot of fans seem to have missed this, but literally every single sprite and background in the game has somehow suffered some weird color alteration that has resulted in the game's art style being severely impacted and the colors overall being dulled by this strange yellow filter. You can see in a direct side-by-side comparison that the original Super Nintendo version just has way more vibrance in its color palette.
Some people have described this as an intentional "color correction", but I really have to question that, as I don't see how anyone could think it's an improvement over the original art style. You've just dulled everything with a blander faded look that is not at all faithful to the original game. My best explanations are that either something went wrong during the conversion process from Playstation to DS but it was subtle enough that none of the developers noticed, or perhaps they made these changes to accommodate the lighting of the DS screen in some way, but either way I think it would have been much better if they just left it all alone.
Its only saving grace here is that it may be easier to overlook these details on the smaller screen of the DS, so I guess if you really can tolerate this and the major script rewrites, the DS version of Chrono Trigger isn't the worst thing you could go with, but I still think it's far from ideal, and definitely not the so-called "definitive" edition that many like to herald it as. Content-wise this may be the most feature-rich version of the game, but I'd argue that all of it is frankly unnecessary, as the original SNES version already felt like a complete game and didn't need any extra content to support it. These extras are just luxuries and nice-to-haves, so they aren't worth the cost.
WTF happened...
Moving on, we have the mobile phone port next. Now things really start to get messy here, because the mobile port inherits the aforementioned discoloration issues from the DS port, but now with a mandatory pixel smoothing filter applied that results in some strange artifacting around the seams of tiles; making the game look strangely blocky and distorted in really jarring ways. This is of course now compounded with the toilet filter over everything. It also has a completely redone interface intended to accommodate smart phones, but as the developers seem to lack basic competency in art and UI design, the new interface doesn't seem to properly mesh with the original 16-bit art style. The font and menu backgrounds use a smoother higher resolution look while everything else around them remains classic 16-bit. It's a sloppy and ugly mish-mash of clashing art styles, making this arguably the worst version you could choose for playing Chrono Trigger.
And seriously, why the forced pixel smoothing filter? You're already on a mobile phone screen! The original art naturally fits with the small screen. It's not like you're stretching the pixels out on a 4K home theater system. There's just no point to it. What's particularly hilarious is that you can have a much better experience just downloading the free SNES9X-EX+ emulator on Android and playing the original SNES version through that, despite that this version wasn't even designed for phones in the first place. Just avoid the mobile port at all costs.
Calling on the gods to save us
You might now be holding out hope that the PC master race surely reigns supreme, and with their all-powerful teraflops and gigahertz, the PC port will unquestionably crush the competition. SPOILERS: Nope. In fact, the PC version is actually based on the fractally fucked mobile port, so it carries over many of the same issues from the phone version. You still have the piss yellow discoloration, the redone UI that doesn't match the original art style of the game, the retranslation that diminishes the charm of the characters, and the poorly-implemented pixel smoothing filter over all the sprites. There are even further broken visual effects that weren't present in the DS version, such as the time traveling warp effect or the fog and mist in the middle ages. So in essence, we're basically playing a port of a port of a port at this point that has gotten so broken over the years through compounding problems that were never properly addressed; it's all just become a complete mess.
Now there are at least a few advantages that the PC version has over the mobile port. In this version you are now at least given the option to disable the awful pixel smoothing filter, and it does have an improved font for the UI that blends in better with the rest of the game's aesthetic; though the menu backgrounds still don't look quite right among other things. The PC port also features cleaned up versions of the anime cutscenes that originally appeared with the PSX port, and they now look sharper than ever; though of course in typical Square fashion they still somehow managed to screw this up, as a couple of cutscenes are just missing entirely for no discernible reason, along with a few other bonus features from the DS port.
If you can imagine it, the PC version was actually even more broken on release than what I've just described here, but over the years they have at least managed to patch it in order to fix some of the more egregious issues... but even THIS they've managed to screw up, as some of the more recent patches have actually added NEW bugs to the game, such as a distracting screen-shaking effect when you move diagonally with your characters. One can only hope all of this gets addressed, but given how many issues persist with this port on top of legacy problems that were never addressed on other versions of the game, it is unlikely that all of it will even come close to being entirely fixed in the foreseeable future.
The Chrono Trigger PC port, which should in theory be the definitive version of the game, is instead just a clusterfuck of porting jobs that have carried over from one another to create this stitched-together mess. So now Chrono Trigger's in this weird situation where yeah, sure, there's modern ports of the game--it's on mobile; it's on PC--but they're all fatally flawed to various degrees, and they're not real options if you want an even decently-polished experience with the game. You would think this would be something so simple; just do a straight port of the original SNES game with the added features of the PSX and DS ports and you'd have a slam dunk version for modern audiences, but I can't personally recommend these ports in their current state.
Is there any hope?
So many of these changes to the game have been pointless. They didn't need to completely renovate the UI; they didn't need to change the color palette, and they didn't need to rewrite the whole script. And now there's so many people playing Chrono Trigger for the first time without even realizing that they're getting a severely compromised version of the game.
So, this is my big warning to everyone who might be wanting to get into Chrono Trigger in 2022. Just stay away from all these modern ports. Now you might be asking, OK then, so how should we play Chrono Trigger if we want to get our hands on it today? Well listen my friend, I know some tend to grab their pitchforks when it comes to piracy, and I'm not saying you should pirate it, but ya know... I'm saying you might want to grab an eye patch and uhh, maybe get some fresh air sailing the seven seas a bit until oopsie, you just so happened to bump into some lost booty containing a digital rom of Chrono Trigger for Super Nintendo. In Minecraft.
Seriously though, emulation really gets a bad wrap despite doing some important work for game preservation, and particularly when it comes to Super Nintendo games, it's not overly complicated to configure and get going, and there are now emulators available which can fully replicate the original experience, with perfect accuracy down to the individual CPU cycles and even recreating slowdowns that occurred on original hardware.
Cleaning up a classic
To show you just how easy it is to get Chrono Trigger up and running in an emulator, let's take a look at one example with BSNES. So the first thing you'll want to do after downloading BSNES is set your video settings correctly so that you can play the game in fullscreen and stretch the pixels as large as you can make them without distorting the aspect ratio. That might sound confusing to someone who may not be familiar with these terms, but all you have to do here is go to the Settings menu at the top and then under the Output setting, select "Scale" and make sure "Aspect Correction" is also enabled. Show Overscan Area should be turned off. Under the "Shader" menu in Settings, set this to "None".
Next we need to set the inputs. Go to Settings > Input... One nice feature of BSNES is that you can have multiple inputs bound for one player, so in other words, you can configure it so that you can easily swap between keyboard controls or a controller like an Xbox gamepad without having to constantly go back and rebind the controls, so if you forget or are too lazy to plug in a controller one day, you can just keep on gaming with your keyboard; no extra configuration necessary. If you don't really know what to set the controls to, I'll provide a set here that I use for keyboard, and you can tweak them to your liking from there if you want.
Also keep in mind if you're using an Xbox controller, the X and Y buttons as well as the A and B buttons are swapped around compared to a Super Nintendo controller, so make sure to take this into account when mapping your buttons.
At this point your game is basically already playable, though we'll still want to make a few more tweaks just to give us a smoother experience. Open Settings > Drivers... Make sure the video driver is set to OpenGL if it isn't already, then check the box for "Synchronize". This will turn on VSYNC which will eliminate a "screen tearing" effect that can sometimes occur on your monitor. Next we need to configure the audio. "waveOut" is fine for the audio driver, but the main things we'll want to set here are "Dynamic rate" and the latency setting. Leave "Synchronize" turned off for audio. Dynamic rate must be turned on instead when using VSYNC with the video driver. Lastly, you may have to do some testing for best results, but try to find an audio latency that is as low as your computer can handle before sound in your game starts to crackle or distort. In my case, I had to set mine to 192 for best results, and if you really don't feel like fine-tuning it, this is probably a safe setting to go with generally for most PCs.
And that should cover everything! BSNES is ready to go. You can start the game by going to the "System" menu and then "Load Game...", and finally press the F11 key on your keyboard to enter fullscreen mode. There are a couple of last notes I'd make about this though. BSNES has a few built-in pixel smoothing filters which can help make the games feel a little more modernized for the big and sharp displays of today. You can fiddle with them if you want, but I'd personally recommend the LQ2x filter for best results. It's going to smooth over the pixels a little bit without creating ugly seams like in the mobile port, while mostly retaining the look and feel of the game's original art style.
Lastly, if you happen to have a fancier 120 Hz monitor over the traditional 60 Hz, then you may need to do some additional tweaking by turning off synchronization with your video driver and manually setting adaptive sync with half refresh rate in your NVIDIA control panel, otherwise you may still get some video stuttering issues when in fullscreen. If you don't know what any of this means or whether you have a 120 Hz monitor or not, then chances are you don't even have to worry about this because your screen is not running with these settings turned on.
BSNES is one of the most accurate emulators on the block these days, but there are other options too which you may want to be aware of. SNES9X is another good pick as well. Despite being less accurate than BSNES, it's a little more feature-rich and has a few advantages. Particularly if you have a potato PC, SNES9X is going to run faster and is generally less taxing on your system. Another feature I like about it is its inclusion of the 2xBRZ pixel smoothing filter, which in my view is the best filter for SNES games out of the numerous I have tested over the years. It really helps give your game a nice HD look for modern displays without being too overpowering with its smoothing effect.
I won't get into a finer breakdown of how to set up SNES9X as it's more or less very similar to BSNES, but I can show you some of my basic recommended settings here.
Going overkill because we can
If you really want to go full galaxy brain like me, you can also download RetroArch as your emulation software of choice, but that's going to take a lot more involvement to set up than the other options here and may not be necessary for your needs. There are also many fan patches to the game available on romhacking.net which can address the few issues that the SNES version had. These can be installed using an app called Floating IPS, or FLIPS for short. My personal recommendation would be the Bugfix and Uncensoring patch, which restores missing dialogue from the original translation while keeping all the good stuff that the DS port removed, and it even fixes the old bugs despite that you're unlikely to run into them anyway. It's a nice quality of life update if you really want to go all out on the SNES version, but like I said before, this is all honestly overkill anyway, as the original game is perfectly playable with just a basic rom and competent emulator. I'm just letting you know your options.
And if you really are that hung up about swashbuckling on the open seas for a copy of Chrono Trigger, then by all means purchase the PC version on Steam anyway while still choosing to play the emulated version for a better experience. Then your conscience can be clear.
One final option is that apparently fans have been working on a Chrono Trigger Restoration Project for the PC version, which supposedly aims to restore everything that was great about the SNES version while retaining the newer features of the later ports, but I haven't been able to find any screenshots or videos of it online to verify its quality as a mod, and as Square is still continually updating Chrono Trigger for PC as we speak, it's hard to say how stable the mod currently is since it may not always be updated to support the latest version of the port.
Hopefully people have found this exhausting guide helpful, so you can enjoy Chrono Trigger with the quality and polish it deserves. Such a fantastic game shouldn't have such a complicated and troublesome history, but alas these are the cards we've been dealt. Now excuse me while I go fix the timeline so we can play the Chrono Trigger HD-2D remake that came out last year.
[UPDATE 11/6/2021]: Big update to the mod pack with numerous improvements!
- File size cut in half by removing now-redundant mods.
- 7th Heaven mod manager no longer requires running an installer and is standalone.
- Ninostyle chibi models updated with tons of new character models.
- Satsuki Yatoshi upscaled backgrounds updated to V5 as featured on Dtoid's article.
- Rotty's Choice bonus soundtrack option has been updated with improved selection, better volume-balancing, and merged with the other soundtrack selections for convenience.
- New mod FF7 Refined added which makes QoL improvements to FF7's dialogue and combat.
Intro
Have you just recently finished playing through Final Fantasy VII Remake and are craving for something more to hold you over until Part 2? Or perhaps FF7 is something that you've long wanted to jump into but never found a good starting point. Well folks, it turns out that now more than ever is actually a fantastic time to experience the original Final Fantasy VII, as just within the past year there has been a surprising amount of advancement in the modding community that has drastically reduced the amount of headache involved in giving the game a nice facelift and bringing it up to modern standards.
Version 2.0 of FF7's current most popular modding client, 7th Heaven, was released last year, removing a lot of tedious steps that used to be involved in the setup process, and even when you did follow all the steps right with the old version, it was still largely a coin toss whether it would actually work or not. Now it's considerably more stable. The nice thing about 7th Heaven as well is: it doesn't actually modify the base game in any permanent way. It only injects the mods at launch and then discards them when you exit the game, so if you don't like something about a particular mod that you're using, you don't need to start all over with reinstalling the game.
What's more, I've streamlined this process even further by providing a singular beeg fat download link that contains all of the necessary files and mods to get you going. The pack is 9 GB when downloaded and 14 GB after extraction. It overhauls nearly everything in the game. Given its size though, you may want to get the download started now before you read any further:
FF7 Remake gives the original game quite the facelift, but it also made numerous major and minor changes across the board to the game's story, characterizations, designs, and gameplay; so much so that it's really not an accurate representation of the original game with just a shiny new coat of paint. It's become its own thing entirely. In fact, without getting too deep into spoilers, one could say that it's more of a quasi-sequel to the original game rather than a "remake" of it. It presumes in some sense that the events of the original game already happened before, so it does benefit the player to be familiar with these events.
Furthermore, the remake only covers a small portion of the original game. The city of Midgar was only disc 1 of a 3-disc PS1 game; there is an entire world to explore outside of it, so you are sure to find plenty of new content in the original regardless if you already played the remake.
It should also go without saying that FF7 Classic still holds up quite well from a gameplay perspective. There's a reason why the game broke all kinds of sales records when it first came out back in 1997. Its biggest barrier to entry now is just its extremely dated presentation, which thankfully mods are now here to remedy.
Objective
My goals with this guide are primarily to:
1. Make the modding process as quick and painless as possible, and
2. Provide several preset options that aim to update the game's assets while remaining true to its original art style, as it can be very convoluted to try and achieve these results on your own.
From there, you can tweak them further to your liking, but please note that if this is your first time playing the game, I would highly recommend starting with just one of the preset profiles so you can get a better feel for how everything works, because if you start making changes without knowing what a mod actually does, you could cause conflicts in enabling multiple features that try to overwrite the same assets.
Also keep in mind if this guide looks a little overlong and daunting to you, most of the wall of text below is really just me rambling about what stuff actually does and how it works so you can make informed choices, and it doesn't really involve you doing anything much of the time outside of copy-pasting a few files here and there.
Now that we got all that out of the way, let's get started!
The Actual Guide Part of the Guide
Note: Due to significant changes since the last update to this mod pack, if this is not your first time installing, it is recommended that you uninstall everything and do a fresh reinstall again in order to avoid problems. Make sure your saves are safely secured somewhere before doing so.
1. First you'll need to install a standard copy of Final Fantasy VII. Both the Steam version or the original disc version will work. 7th Heaven will remove the need for a disc check after setup. Most likely the majority of people will be using the Steam version, so I will be using this as the basis for my examples going forward.
2. Download and extract the beeg fat modding file using an archiving program of your choice such as WinRAR or 7Zip. Both have free versions available.
3. Copy the "mods" and "7th Heaven" folders to your main FF7 directory. For reference, the default path for a Steam install typically is:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\FINAL FANTASY VII
I have already pre-modified some files in these folders to configure some tricky settings for 7th Heaven, like the game's internal resolution for example can only be changed from manually editing the GameDriver.cfg file. The modified file in this pack will update it to increase the internal resolution from the default so the game will look sharper. If you really want to tweak it to your liking though, you can just edit the file yourself by opening it in any old notepad software.
These pre-configurations also add a couple of extra control schemes for SNES and Xbox Wireless Controllers, as well as install our preset profiles for all of our mods.
4. Open your 7th Heaven folder and create a shortcut for the 7th Heaven.exe file, as this will be how you access and play FF7 going forward. To do this, right-click on the EXE file and select "Create shortcut". Drag the shortcut to wherever is most convenient for you; most likely your desktop.
5. Now launch 7th Heaven. It may immediately greet you with a General Settings screen to configure. If not, go there first by clicking on "Settings" from the top-left menu and then "General Settings".
Don't be alarmed by all the sliders and options. You only need to verify that all your directory paths are correct. They should all be linking to various folders inside your FF7 installation location. For a Steam install of FF7, these should look like:
FF7 Exe: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\FINAL FANTASY VII\FF7.exe
Movies: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\FINAL FANTASY VII\data\movies
Textures: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\FINAL FANTASY VII\mods\Textures
Library: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\FINAL FANTASY VII\mods\7th Heaven
If they don't look right, correct them and click Save. You don't need to touch any of the other options.
6. It's time to choose a profile for what mods you would like to use. Go to Settings > Profiles...
I have created several preset options for you which I will break down here so you can better understand what they do.
There have been lots of fan mods over the years; some of which were started and never completed, some that are still a work-in-progress, and some rare few that actually managed to stick it through to completion. Because of this, it is tricky to provide a set of options that will give you everything you might be looking for, so to the best of my ability I have compiled a few choices that I think will give the best results.
As many may know, FF7's original character models were notoriously "blocky" to say in the least; even more so than other games of the time. When you're in combat, they look alright, but out in the field and overworld, some might say it's just a little too abstract to put up with, so there are currently two prevailing sets of character models to use right now which address this.
One is Kaldarasha's ChaOS model set, which overhauls ALL of the game's character and NPC models to look more like their higher-detail battle models. This mod is actually fully complete, so there are no unfinished models or inconsistencies to be found here. That's why I generally recommend this option for first-timers as it will give the most complete and cohesive experience.
The other model set is ninostyle's chibi models, which very charmingly update FF7's art style to strike a more classic JRPG look that the original authors were probably going for at the time but the technology just wasn't there. This is a perfectly fine option too, but it comes with some caveats. It's still a work-in-progress, and some of the models are not done. The plus side is, all of the important and major character models are included in that "done" part, so it's only some rando NPCs you might encounter still running around in their original blocky state. And this art style blends in better with the original models too, so it doesn't look so jarring side-by-side, but nonetheless it is an issue to consider if that bothers you.
Lastly, you might be wondering what's the difference between the
"Balanced" and "Pretty AF" options for these two sets. In addition to
the chibi models that ninostyle has been developing, he has also been
hard at work redesigning many of the game's battle models to be higher
detail and look more like the game's concept art depictions of the
characters with this sort of sketchy pencil-like look. It's a really
cool aesthetic, but once again, it's far from complete, so enabling it
will result in a lot of jarring inconsistencies in art style. That's why
I give you the "Pretty As Fuck (AF)" option, so if you just don't care
about consistency and want to have the highest detail models available,
have fun and let loose. The "Balanced" option in contrast aims to keep
the art styles consistent across the game at the cost of some occasional
visual downgrades.
All of these presets use satsuki's upscaled backgrounds, cutscenes and retextures.
Remako was great for its time but it has long been superseded by satsuki in quality, to such a degree that CaptRobau himself (author of Remako) has cancelled development of Remako 2.0 as it's no longer necessary.
Of course, if you're a real purist, you can just choose the "Purist" option which mostly leaves the game untouched outside of upscaling the backgrounds and environments.
Anyway, after you've chosen your profile, you may receive some warning from 7H about how the Animation mod might cause your computer to asplode or some such nonsense. Just ignore it. It doesn't know what it's talking about.
7. Select your preferred control scheme by going to Settings > Controls...
Note that you don't need to click "Save" after selecting a control scheme. You only need to do that if you modified one of the presets.
8. Finally, verify that your Game Driver settings are correct. Settings > Game Driver...
Most of it should already be correct, but mainly make sure that Window Mode is set to Fullscreen and Resolution matches your monitor's native size. Remember that this is only the display resolution; the game's internal resolution is handled elsewhere and will not change regardless of your setting for this, so just make sure it matches your screen.
Anisotropic Filtering should be turned on; Linear Filtering off. Turn on VSYNC if you feel that you need it, but it's not required.
Anti-aliasing isn't really necessary when you can always just crank up the game's internal resolution instead. A game from 1998 isn't exactly demanding on PCs anymore.
Change the tab to "Advanced" and verify that VGMStream is set for the Music Option and FFMPEG is set for Movie Option. Fancy Transparency should be turned on. Everything else can be left Off. Click Save.
9. You are now ready to play! Clicking "Play" may give you some initial warning messages during first-time run. These can be safely ignored and just click "OK" or whatever option it gives you to close them.
And that's it! A lot of words but not as many steps as you think. Now have fun. Show off your big HD swords.
Final Notes
- As an added bonus, I also threw in my own mod for the soundtrack called "Rotty's Choice". You can enable it in your library if you want to, but you have to manually select it after choosing an initial profile from the previous steps. It will give the soundtrack a nice overhaul with a largely more orchestral feel to it. You can find it by double-clicking on the "Music - Media Selection" mod and selecting it from the drop-down menu.
- As yet another bonus, I've included FF7 Refined, my ambitious little project to overhaul the game's dialogue and tweak its combat. As many may know, the original FF7's English translation was notoriously rushed, and there is already another retranslation project floating around called "Beacause", but it's designed to only be compatible with a separate mod pack, "The Reunion", which generally doesn't work well with 7th Heaven. This mod, FF7 Refined, is designed from the ground up to work with 7H. It is still a work-in-progress though, but is complete up until just before Cloud and Aeris arrive at Wall Market.
See the results for yourself:
- The latest version of Satsuki Yatoshi's upscale mod utilizes a new advanced feature that adds some special animation effects to the background environments in the game. As this feature is still experimental, it can cause some occasional slowdown issues even on modern high-end machines. For this reason if you find it to be too much to handle, you can disable it by double-clicking on the "[Tsunamods] SYW V5 Field Textures" mod and turning them off.
I was looking over an article talking about top-selling Switch games today, and came across a staggering statistic that Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has sold a whopping 37 million units on the system. That's pretty insane for a game that wasn't even technically a new release when it came to the Switch, but what really caught my eye was when I glanced over to the comments section and found someone saying this:
"The success of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe just shows how much they missed the mark with the Wii U."
Now it's not really important who said this so I won't bother citing their name or anything, but I just find this framing interesting because it touches on an issue that I see recurring often with many fandoms.
To me this statistic says more about irrational biases against the Wii U rather
than the console itself actually being a bad system. After all, it's not like the game
plays drastically different on Switch (in fact I'd argue the Wii U
version is actually better for a few key reasons). It's the games
that should always sell the system, not the other way around. That's
why I never bought a PS Vita. Great piece of hardware, but it had virtually no
games, so looking back on the system as a whole, I could hardly call it "good" because no matter how shiny and slick the hardware is, without the games, it's just a glorified paperweight.
Yet with the Wii U people just had this cult-like
collective hatred against the console no matter how many bangers it put
out, and MK8 is demonstration of that. Breath of the Wild could
have been a Wii U exclusive and all people would do is just complain
"Why is this game on Wii U?" instead of "Wow this makes the Wii U a
must-have system" like they would normally say for any other console. I saw this happen specifically with the release of Xenoblade Chronicles X. People were genuinely angry that the game wasn't a multi-platform title because they didn't want to buy a Wii U just to be able to play it. The cult narrative has dictated
that the Wii U is poop no matter what it does.
It's a behavior I've found quite puzzling and very particular to the Wii U's case, as the console has continued to supply port after port to the Switch with glowing fanfare, so clearly people liked the games on the system; they just didn't like the system itself; even if fundamentally the gameplay experience was almost exactly the same. I don't have an explanation for it, but it's just a fascinating phenomenon I've observed. Fandoms can have really strange group-think tendencies sometimes where once a narrative gets established about something, no matter how much reality suggests otherwise, it doesn't matter. The narrative has been set in stone.
I get that the Switch is definitely more attractive from a hardware perspective. It certainly has more utility and use-cases than the Wii U ever did with its ability to serve as both a handheld and a dedicated home console, and I prefer it as a better system myself. But I refuse to believe that this feature alone is so vastly important to one's gaming experience that it's the only reason the Switch triumphed where its predecessor failed.
You could argue maybe it's the Wii U's poorly-received gamepad that factored into the sales as well, but if that's the case then why was the N64 more successful? You can't tell me a Nintendo 64 controller feels better to play on than a Wii U gamepad. That thing was an unwieldy mess. At least the Wii U's button layout was pretty straightforward and logical. Its only real fault was just how big it was. And besides, most games had multiple control options including the Pro controller or Wii remote.
People just wanted to hate the Wii U. That's the vibe I always get whenever it is discussed, and it doesn't make sense knowing that these same people play the Wii U's games on their Switch with nothing but praise for them. It's funny to see how the story we weave around these devices can shape their failure or success far more than the actual quality of the product.
Hey there, we're talking about a very important and pressing subject today. No, this isn't about the impending doom of climate change, or Cuban protests over food and medicine shortages. We're of course talking about boobs you silly person.
I just recently read an article titled "Zendaya Responds to Space Jam 2 Lola Bunny Redesign Controversy" by ScreenRant, and it was frustrating to me in how it took the side of de-sexualizing a classic character while presenting its central defense for this as just a self-evident assertion that required no further justification. It's strangely dismissive despite the unearned confidence.
For full disclosure, I did see the original Space Jam as a kid when I was very young. I haven't really rewatched it since (though I did look up a few clips for writing this article to make sure my facts were accurate), and I have no particularly vested interest in this franchise specifically. The new quasi-sequel that just hit theaters doesn't look like my cup of tea and I'm probably not even going to see it. At the time that I saw the original, I enjoyed the film for the silly popcorn entertainment that it was, but I have no idea if it would still hold up today. However what I can say for sure is that its characterization of Lola is perfectly fine and I take issue with the broader sentiment in general that sexy characters are just inherently bad in some way.
This is a strangely regressive and prudish mindset that the left has been adopting in recent years, which is ironically conservative in nature. Traditionally it has always been the right that has consistently told women to cover up and dress appropriately, or else it is somehow an invitation for would-be rapists and harassers to take advantage of you. Now thankfully the left doesn't necessarily argue that latter part, but it still adopts the former based on no real grounded justification for itself; the argument being that dressing or looking sexy is somehow inherently objectifying.
To quote the article from above, this is the kind of sentiment I'm talking about:
"In prior interviews, [director Malcolm D. Lee] shared his surprise when he first watched Space Jam,
explaining his unease when he witnessed the sexual objectification of
Lola Bunny. As a result, Lee focused on adding greater depth to her
character by emphasizing her skills as an athlete and leader."
This is the first instance in the article where it mentions objectification, and it does so by just casually assuming from the outset that the movie did in fact do this to Lola's character merely because the director of the new film said so. At no point does it actually explain where in the film it allegedly "objectified" Lola, so I can only guess what they meant based on surrounding context and what I could find in the movie.
So, in reviewing footage of Lola from the original Space Jam, the strongest case I could find for her being objectified was in her introductory scene, where Bugs calls her "doll" in a clumsy attempt to hit on her. Now there are technically at least two ways you could look at this. Yes, on the one hand you could take the very literal interpretation that a doll is in fact an object, so by calling her that, Bugs is equating Lola to an object, and therefore objectifying her.
On the other hand though, dolls are typically toys designed specifically to look attractive, so by calling Lola "doll", Bugs is not trying to imply that Lola is just some plaything for his amusement, but rather is complimenting her on her beauty by suggesting she looks as attractive as a doll. This does not have to imply anything else about her character beyond that. It does not necessarily have to denote that this is the only thing about Lola that matters.
Hell, with the way Bugs delivered the line, it's possible it might not have even meant anything other than just a feminine substitute for his usual word he uses to refer to people; like from his famous slogan, "What's up doc?" He didn't put any suggestive emphasis on the word when he used it.
Regardless, Lola did seem to take offense to the term; possibly because she viewed it as objectifying anyway, or maybe it's a term she just personally doesn't like for whatever arbitrary reason. The movie never exactly does clarify why, and it's probably not important because I think the real goal of the script here was simply to set up some excuse to build tension between the two so Lola could challenge Bugs to a game of basketball and show off her skills. There was likely no political commentary meant by it.
But for the sake of steelmanning the argument, let's just grant
everything to the white knights here. Let's assume Bugs did mean to use
"doll" in a demeaning and objectifying way, and Lola took offense to it
specifically for that reason. Even if we grant all that, the film still
seems to side with Lola on this. Bugs is portrayed in a negative light
by calling Lola something she doesn't want to be referred to, as she
ends up humiliating him for it, and the movie never tries to make the
audience sympathize with Bugs for losing against Lola at basketball.
He's just defeated and the scene moves on to the next set of gags; no
violins to be found. In other words, even if we concede that Lola was
being objectified, the messaging of the film still doesn't suggest that
Lola's treatment was a good thing in this instance.
But that's just one angle of looking at this. The other angle to this is the insinuation that female characters being too attractive is inherently sexist. Once again, neither the article's author nor the people quoted in it make any attempt to explicitly spell out where the supposed sexism or objectification took place, so I can only shoot from the hip here and guess what they meant by it, but it does seem to be frequently suggested that merely being sexy by itself is automatically degrading.
If anything, the irony here is that I'm the one who should actually be allowed to get away with making a blanket declaration as if it is self-evident, as the point I'm about to make should be obvious at face value. But I'm going to defend my point anyway, and the point is this: Sexualization is not inherently objectifying a character.
In order for someone to prove me wrong, they would have to somehow demonstrate that Lola can't simultaneously be sexualized while also having a fun and independent personality, as well as a great talent for basketball. This is of course an impossible task to prove, because it is self-evidently absurd that Lola can't be all these things at the same time. There's nothing inherently stopping her from being a great leader and basketball player while also just happening to have some nice curves on top of it all. Big tits and curves don't magically cast a spell on her which bars her from having other traits about her character, even if that was the way they chose to portray her in the movie.
But it turns out that the original Space Jamdidn't portray her that way anyway. She was a talented basketball player, and she was characterized as very strong-willed and independent. And yes, the film didn't shy away from showing off her curves too, but the point is it wasn't her sole character trait. As mentioned before, in her very first appearance she swats away Bugs' advances while completely embarrassing him at a match of basketball. How is this anything other than female empowerment?
There is however one scene where Lola gets rescued by Bugs, as one of the villains from the film, a "monstar," was about to unsuspectingly body slam her from behind. Now, looking at this one way, you could characterize this as a stereotypical damsel-in-distress trope which plays to certain sexist attitudes; however by this point in the film it was already thoroughly established that Lola was easily one of the best basketball players on the team; if not the best player outside of Michael Jordan himself. She just happened to be caught off-guard in a rare instance of her lacking awareness, so Bugs pushed her out of the way in self-sacrifice as he took the fall.
You know what this is called? A well-rounded character in that despite her being generally skilled at the sport, she can still make mistakes and has to rely on her teammates once in a while, as any good depiction of a team-based sport should be. Granted, the scene was really just an excuse to build a shallow romance subplot between Bugs and Lola. Still a lazy cliche in the way it was executed I suppose, but not a sexist one when taken in full context. It should also be noted that this was the only instance in the entire film where Lola showed any kind of vulnerability.
Rick and Morty's recent season opener began with an episode about Rick's
highly sexualized arch nemesis Mr. Nimbus, but I didn't see anyone
characterizing his depiction as objectifying just because he was
portrayed in a sexually provocative manner. You could argue that this is
because he's also a character shown to have a strong sense of
independence and strength, as well as some nuance in that he ultimately
ended up allying himself with Rick and his family, so he has some characteristics that go beyond him just acting sexy. Huh, I wonder if
there's another character similar to this in animated media... Oh right
that's Lola Bunny! It's almost as if we're just cherry-picking our outrage when
women are sexualized because it's the hot button issue of the current
zeitgeist... Almost.
Now, the characters of Space Jam in general were pretty one-note to begin with. This wasn't exactly a very deep film; it's about a bunch of silly cartoon characters coming together to have a big basketball tournament, and that's really all there was to it. But to the extent that Lola had a personality, it offered just as much depth as any of the other characters on the team. Hell, Daffy Duck was treated more degradingly than Lola with how much he was used for nothing more than mockery and gags. Lola meanwhile was actually contributing to the team.
People with big boobs and nice curves do exist in real life. They do possess skills and personality traits that go beyond their looks. If anything, it is insulting and demeaning to them to suggest that they are somehow inherently lesser people just for being sexy. There's nothing wrong with sexy characters being sexy. I can't believe I have to actually say this, but apparently it's not that self-evident to people now.
I know we're talking about a cartoon bunny here. I realize this discourse is inherently kinda weird and silly, and there are probably too many people online taking this whole "controversy" too seriously. But as I said, my critique here isn't even about Lola specifically; it's about a general trend in the industry of de-sexualizing female characters as if it is some kind of sign of moral progress. It's just not though. Being sexy isn't a crime, context matters, and no, Lola being a cartoon bunny doesn't change anything about this either. Weirdness does not equivocate to immorality. It's just weird.
Why are we even conceding this ground to the right when we don't have to? Because I consider myself a lefty, but the sad reality is, I know there are a lot of people out there who unironically would sacrifice Medicare For All, $15 minimum wage, ending the drug war, and other important issues on the altar of "but muh SJWs; they're taking away my big rabbit tiddies!" This is how republicans sucker people into voting on non-issues because they don't have anything real to offer their constituents, so let the right be the out of touch prudes crying about girls dressing too revealing. That's what they used to be 15 years ago. How did we end up getting saddled with this? We can have our sexy female characters. Hell, make everybody sexy. Big dicks and boobs everywhere. I don't care. We can have our cake and eat it too. We don't even need to concede this ground. Why are we doing this?
Here's a big brain take for you: people like attractive characters in their fiction. Wow, what a shocker there. Truly a revelation. It turns out, attractive characters are attractive, and we like to see them. Also, making your characters intentionally uglier or less attractive does not automatically give them more depth either. Good writing gives your characters more depth, and no amount of shrinking their boobs or straightening their curves is going to make up for that. You're not some hero for deflating Lola's fictional rabbit tiddies, so stop pretending that you are.
Anyways, don't censor the booba. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
It's your boi MajinRotty back on my bullshit. Listen, I happen to fancy myself the greatest Metroid fan of all-time; so much of a fanboy that even the Prime trilogy isn't Metroid enough for me. And you know me; I always make sure I use a rigorous and impartial process to determine such things, which I may be willing to disclose for the low, low price of 1 bitcoin. That's it. Just one. You can't beat that price! But that's neither here nor there. Point is, I happen to be a Metroid expert of sorts, and therefore based on my self-anointed proclamations you should definitely take my opinions on it seriously. Let's get into it.
14. Metroid Prime: Federation Force
I must confess something here. I've never actually played this game. One would think this would be a point against my credibility as the greatest Metroid fan of all-time, but they would be mistaken. See, it's actually the opposite; it further solidifies my cred because no good Metroid fan would support this game. Even if it's actually a good game on its own merits, the context in which it was announced and the obviously shoehorned nature of the concept makes this an insult to the fans. Nintendo has a bad habit of coming up with a gameplay idea and then slapping one of their existing IPs over it after the fact, and it backfired on them hard this time.
13. Metroid
It's funny that I hold this franchise in high regard, yet the principle title that started it all is, honestly, kind of a bad game. And I do consider this to be the case even by 8-bit era standards. In contrast, Super Mario Bros 3 still holds its own against Super Mario
World as a perfectly fine 8-bit romp. Hell even the original Mario Bros still has its merits. I just can't say the same about
Metroid. I grew up with the game alongside Super Metroid at the time, and the only value I could ever glean from it was how it related to its sequel on the SNES. Seeing what Zebes and Mother Brain's former lab looked like before it was destroyed added some richness and context to seeing it again in Super Metroid, but beyond that, this game has been made almost entirely irrelevant from its subsequent sequels being superior to it on every level; not to mention that the game itself received a remake in the form of Zero Mission, which wholly trounces it in quality.
Being a founder of the genre, the game was of course a metroidvania title, which naturally meant you had a big sprawling map that you could traverse in any direction; except for one problem. There was no map. Yep, as you traveled into the depths of planet Zebes, it was just on you to keep it all in your head as to where you were going. Adding to the frustration was the fact that the game uses a very repetitive tileset; often taking the exact same sprites for blue tiles and recoloring them as orange tiles for example. The level design didn't make it any easier too with how much it reused the same long narrow shaft structure that you have to climb or descend for seemingly every environment.
Anyways, many have asked the question "Why can't Metroid crawl?" but in this game the real question is why can't Metroid crouch dammit?! There are enemy encounters where even on level ground the creature is too short for Samus to hit, and since you couldn't crouch or shoot diagonally, you basically just had to forget about killing them entirely in most cases.
Then you have the flying enemies that like to cling to the ceiling and harass you from above. You would think this isn't as much of an issue because Samus can thankfully at least aim upwards, but no, because you see, your pitiful little pea shooter can only shoot 5 feet in front of you before the bullet just mysteriously disappears into the ether, and that rule still applies even when you point up, so you can't actually reach them until they fly down and come into a certain range; giving you only a fraction of a second where you must furiously mash the shoot button and pray you kill it before it kills you.
It was also an all-too-often occurrence that baddies could just fly into a door with you at the same time that you're transitioning to the next room, and during this period your health would rapidly deplete while you are completely unable to respond until the transition finishes, which in many cases may just result in your death before the whole ordeal is over.
But I'm not even mad about it. It's a bad game, but it was an experimental title that was trying something that nobody had a template for at the time. I can hardly fault it for not knowing how to make the concept work. At least the soundtrack was pretty good. Several of its tunes are staples of the franchise that have seen numerous rearrangements in subsequent titles.
12. Metroid Prime Hunters
I must confess again that this was one of the few titles I never played, but judging from what I've seen and heard about it, it doesn't sound like I missed much. I already wasn't much of a fan of the Prime series in general, and the limitations of the DS hardware made this one seem like it strained itself to get the formula working on mobile. The controls are weird and the campaign seems rather unmemorable; though I heard the sole reason Hunters was actually worth playing was for the multiplayer, but seeing as that's probably pretty dead at this point too, that doesn't leave us with much value remaining in this game.
11. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes
You probably thought I was joking in my opening paragraph, but spicy take incoming my friends; brace yourself: The Metroid Prime trilogy as a whole isn't as great as many of the fans may remember it. I think its insistence on a first person perspective has forced the gameplay to be compromised in several critical ways, and its issues are further exacerbated in this title for implementing some of the worst design decisions of the entire trilogy; inflated health enemies that take forever to kill and lock you into a room so you're forced to fight them, limited ammo beams that deplete quickly but are required for progression so you just avoid using them when you otherwise want to, convoluted level design that forces you to constantly reference your map because you have no idea where you're going, and much of this is made worse by the fact that so many of the environments are over-saturated with a bland brownish color palette, or violet purple when you enter the dark realm. That's it. Those are the only two colors you'll ever see.
It all just starts to blend together after a while; further adding to the general confusion of where you're going because everything looks the same. Imagine the Chozo Ruins from the first Metroid Prime except it's the entire game.
Then to top it all off, you still have to nauseatingly collect all of those damn keys at the end with vague clues offered as to where to find them. I don't know how I managed to finish this one, folks. It took every ounce of my patience to do it. But I did it for the love of Metroid nonetheless. Just don't ever ask me to do it again.
Many of this game's concepts sounded cool on paper. The light and dark realms, the two races battling for dominance over the world, Dark Samus, and so forth. But after the initial intrigue wears off from the first couple hours of gameplay, it went downhill real fast for me.
10. Metroid Prime Pinball
OK... I didn't actually play this one either. Jeez Rotty, have you played any of them?! Shut up OK, this is my god damn list and if I wanna put games on it that I never even played I will fucking do it, bitch. Question me one more time and I will turn you into a god damn cupcake.
Erhmm, anyways, while I can't say I've technically played this game before, I have certainly played many variants of pinball in the past, so it doesn't take much to extrapolate where I would likely rank it. It's shallow, but nonetheless harmless fun, which is more than I can say for any of the previous titles on this list thus far, so it earns its 10th place rank by default. Plus, it was pretty cool and creative to have the pinballs shaped like morph balls. Nothing wrong with a pinball game themed around Metroid. It's just inherently limited by its lack of ambition.
9. Metroid II: Return of Samus
Hey! I can actually shoot more than 5 feet in front of me now! I don't have to fear walking through doors anymore! Metroid can crouch! The game obviously learned some lessons from its predecessor; though at this stage in the franchise there was still a lot of work to be done before I would call it great.
There was still no map to be found, and to make matters worse, the Game Boy's limited hardware meant that the game didn't even render in color, so good luck remembering where the hell you're going again. The Game Boy Color later helped alleviate this issue somewhat, but at its core the game was still fairly repetitive; focusing on Samus' journey to the metroids' homeworld to exterminate them once and for all. Because of this, the vast majority of boss encounters were just recycled skirmishes with metroids in various stages of metamorphosis.
There wasn't a whole lot of variety here, but the level design definitely felt more dynamic and interesting than the first game, with not so many long and tedious shafts to climb. And although it could still be a ruthless game like its predecessor, the quality of life improvements made it feel more like it was on you when you messed up, and not that the game was just being cheap and janky. This aspect gave it an almost survival horror-esque atmosphere in some ways, which worked to its favor.
8. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
As much as I want to rank this game higher due to how much I appreciate its improvements to the Prime formula, unfortunately it still suffers from many of the same trappings that I dislike about this trilogy; namely the slow pacing, lackluster platforming, tedious scanning, and convoluted room-spanning puzzles are all still prevalent issues here which grind the gameplay momentum to a halt. However, it definitely boasts some impressive reworked mechanics to make use of the new Wii motion controls, and I think it's made all the better for it. This is one of the few Wii games that I felt genuinely enhanced the experience by utilizing motion controls, and I actually prefer them to the original controls.
The shooting felt a little too "basic" in the previous games, so adding an emphasis on aiming to the mix brings a much-needed layer of skill to the combat. The new grapple ability was satisfying too; allowing you to yank shields off of enemies so you could expose their weak points.
I can see where some would say the other motion control elements like operating access panels and pressing buttons in Samus' ship were gimmicky, but I would disagree. To shamelessly use the meme, it really makes you feel like you're Samus Aran, and being able to see all the different buttons and gizmos in Samus' ship was a really cool touch. 7/10 -IGN.
The art design of Prime 3 addresses my previous gripes with Echoes. The environments have much more diverse and unique designs, and aren't annoyingly complicated to navigate. Though it does go perhaps a bit too far in the opposite direction; making the planets a little too linear in structure. Key collecting was finally fixed too, only requiring you to collect some but not all of them, and you will likely find enough to progress to the final area just by playing through the other content naturally anyway.
Corruption's quality of life improvements and motion control enhancements really helped breathe some new life into the Prime formula which was already overstaying its welcome for me, and for that, it just barely manages to justify its existence.
7. Metroid: Samus Returns
Some people describe this as Metroid's "return to form" after apparent missteps on the part of Other M and Federation Force, and while it's definitely not a bad game by any means, I found it to be the weakest of the post-Super Metroid sidescrollers where the formula has been thoroughly refined. To its credit though, I felt it also boasted some of the most unique and refreshing new mechanics to the series in quite some time, as it did seem like previous entries were starting to rely too much on the same old tricks with a slightly different coat of paint. This game actually gave Samus some genuinely all-new abilities without making it feel too wildly different from the Metroid that you know.
Its main shortcoming comes in when you examine its level design, which suffered somewhat from Metroid Prime 2 syndrome; there's just so much damn brown. Brown caverns everywhere. The lack of diversity in its environments really takes a toll after a while, and many zones just felt unnecessarily large and labyrinthine with not much in the way of actually interesting things to do in them.
There's a few other nitpicks I have too, like Samus' power suit redesign could have been better, fuck that obnoxiously long robot boss fight, the Ridley showdown was unneeded fanservice, and being a remake of Metroid 2, it still suffers a little from the repetition of all the metroid encounters, but nonetheless it was still a solid package overall, and I was happy to see Samus finally get some fun new abilities that really shake up the gameplay. Though it doesn't surpass the fan remake of Metroid 2, it takes a significantly different approach that makes it still worth playing regardless. For the love of the Chozo though, no more remakes. We need new experiences going forward with the franchise.
6. Metroid Other M
Ahh Other M, how misunderstood you are. Though initially fairly well received by critics on release, it didn't take long for a rather ferocious backlash to form around it from the fanbase. And to be honest, I can understand the criticisms. I just think they are grossly overstated.
Other M is probably the most story-heavy Metroid game to date, and its characterization of Samus is rather problematic. She comes off as moody, indignant, and childish, while at the same time alarmingly subservient to Adam in a way that feels like she's lost her sense of agency, and to top it all off, she has a complete mental meltdown when she encounters Ridley which makes no sense in the context of where the story is at. Gone is Samus' stoic, confident demeanor that shows she's a bounty hunter that knows what she is doing. I've seen entire 30+ minute long videos railing on the failings of Other M because of its storytelling.
There's just one problem with all this. Outside of Fusion, Metroid traditionally hasn't been a series that hinges on its narrative to be good. Sure you can scan and read about all sorts of stuff in the Prime games, but it's all optional content that isn't integral to your enjoyment of them. Once you take a step back and look at Other M as a whole, the gameplay is perfectly fine.
Hell, even the voice acting and dialogue outside of Samus' stiff delivery is fairly adequate. It's largely just a Fusion retread in terms of setting, but with speedier controls that feel more fast-paced and punchy like Zero Mission. As the first 3D Metroid to finally break away from Prime's first person perspective, the gains to Samus' nimbleness are immediately apparent. She's much more agile and fluid to control, and she even gets some flashy melee takedown moves that feel pretty good to pull off.
It's just unfortunate that Sakamoto insisted on a simpler control setup that didn't allow for the nunchuck attachment, as it once again forced some unnecessary compromises. But overall the end result is a game that still feels much closer to the sidescrollers with respect to its gameplay, and for that I can be very forgiving of it.
Plus, visually speaking Other M surprisingly holds up very well. In my replay of it in Dolphin, just upscaling the game's display resolution to HD with no custom texture packs or remastering beyond that makes the game look like it could have easily passed for an Xbox 360 or Switch title. Trailers for this game didn't do it justice in showing off how visually excellent it could look in action. The fact that it runs at 60 FPS natively on Wii on top of that is pretty impressive.
To be honest, one of the real disappointments of Other M that isn't talked about much is its soundtrack. It's just so ambient to the point of being practically inaudible. There's really nothing memorable about it, and having a forgettable soundtrack is not typically something you would attribute to a Metroid game.
Does Other M make some missteps? Yep, it's definitely got its fair share of issues, but at its core, it's a decently fun Metroid experience that offers more environmental variety and cool set pieces than Samus Returns did, and without the constraints of Prime's first person perspective. That's the truth folks; don't shoot the messenger.
5. Metroid Prime
As the first Metroid game to make its foray into 3D from an unknown developer at the time, Metroid Prime made a pretty ballsy move; one that would inevitably alter the course of history for the franchise. Retro Studios of course decided to go first person. Fans were alarmed at the time, but after the game hit store shelves and all the dust settled, most came around to thoroughly appreciating the game that was crafted.
I was not one of those fans.
My journey with Metroid Prime has been a weird one. I never quite got over that first person perspective, and for the longest time I could never entirely put my finger on why. At first I was just disappointed that Samus has such a cool power suit yet you don't even get to bask in its presence most of the time, but eventually it dawned on me that it goes much deeper than that. After all, I frankly didn't care for the fusion suit design in 2002's Metroid Fusion either, but I still found myself disregarding this as an irrelevant nitpick because the gameplay was still great at the end of the day.
The reality is, the change in perspective forced all of the traditional Metroid mechanics to be reforged and reshaped around it, regardless of whether it actually works or not. So much so that some classic abilities like the speed booster, space jump, and screw attack were just flat out dropped, and even when they found a way to rework these abilities in later entries, the implementation was considerably clunkier than it was in the sidescrollers. Samus just feels sluggish to control overall, and it's a problem that the Prime trilogy never truly managed to escape.
The thing about first person shooters is, the emphasis on aiming and gunplay makes up for the lack of mobility and control options that you usually have more flexibility with in third person. But the problem with Prime is that its "gunplay" to the extent that it has such a thing doesn't really feel all that good. You have a very limited set of weapons and it's a single stick shooter, so there isn't really much aiming involved. You just face the general direction of your target, lock on and fire away. Halo: Combat Evolved this is not. But that's fine. Metroid isn't trying to be Halo, right? Right... so why are we in first person again? Because now we just sacrificed one of the key elements of a good Metroid game--satisfying platforming and mobility mechanics--and for what? Some minor gains to immersion? We now neither have the good gunplay of a first person shooter nor the quality platforming of the sidescrollers. In my view, this just wasn't worth the trade-off.
Outside of this rather large and glaring fundamental issue with the gameplay though, Metroid Prime almost entirely borrows from the template laid out by Super Metroid; practically beat-for-beat. You start out on a derelict space station, have a brief encounter with Ridley, and then rush to evacuate just in time to land on the nearby planet and investigate those shady space pirates. Once there, you are treated to an utterly engrossing and atmospheric world ripe for exploration; with an attention to detail and quality soundtrack that all lives up to the Metroid name.
It's an effective formula, and it really is a testament to the quality of Super Metroid's design that despite my major gripes with the core mechanics of this game, I still found equally many things to appreciate about it. The world of Tallon IV goes a long way toward saving Prime from its shortcomings. It certainly nailed the atmosphere and exploration aspect of Metroid.
But at the end of the day, I think there's no getting around the fact that this is really just Super Metroid with inferior mechanics, pacing issues, and tedious key-collecting filler at the end, which leaves me feeling somewhat unsatisfied, despite that it is a technically functional and competently-made game. I mean if you're just going to do Super Metroid again, at least do it like Zero Mission and refine rather than regress the core gameplay.
As you can see, I have an endless love-hate struggle with this game. On the one hand, it put a beloved IP back on the map and ushered in a new Metroid renaissance of sorts, yet on the other, I cannot escape the feeling that it has held the franchise back by forever coloring everyone with a bias that this is all a 3D Metroid game can be and nothing more, and for me, I still just see so much more potential in it. I think we can have a 3D Metroid that has all the shiny bells and whistles of a AAA production but without sacrificing the quality gameplay of the 2D classics. For now, I will have to continue to wait for that day that such potential can be realized. As for Metroid Prime, faaaaaaaaaaaaawwck. How am I supposed to rank this? I'm giving it 5th place out of charity for the fans. But that's the highest I'll concede to you, filthy secondaries.
4. Metroid Zero Mission
At the time of Zero Mission's release, this game existed in a bit of a strange place. Ostensibly it was a remake of the original Metroid for NES, but Super Metroid already served as a sort of "soft remake" of it to begin with; having Samus return to planet Zebes to once again battle classic villains like Kraid, Ridley and Mother Brain in many of the same locales found in the first game while also expanding the world with new zones and possibilities that weren't limited by the old 8-bit hardware, so what purpose does it really serve to go back and redo Metroid once again?
Well as it turns out, this game manages to somehow walk that fine line of balance where it doesn't eclipse Super Metroid but does introduce some nicely reworked mechanics coupled with a few surprises along the way that really make it stand on its own. The main thing is, Zero Mission just feels incredibly good to play. Controlling Samus is a breeze. She can hop, flip, grip and climb over virtually any obstacle with effortless fluidity, and the power grip added from Fusion was further refined to allow Samus to aim and shoot while hanging from ledges. Zero Mission practically makes you feel like a speedrunner even when you're not trying to speedrun the game.
The level design still features a lot of verticality much like the original map of Zebes, but without feeling nearly as repetitious, and the soundtrack faithfully recreates many of the same classic tunes. Just when you think Zero Mission's shown all of its cards though, it pulls the rug out from under you as Samus is suddenly shot down by space pirates and temporarily loses her power suit. For the first time ever, we got to control Samus in her zero suit and navigate through an incredibly creative and fun stealth section. Sneaking past space pirates and stunning them at the right moments with your pistol while scrambling for hiding spots actually worked quite well within the Metroid formula. And yes, Metroid could officially crawl now. At least briefly.
I only have nitpicks to offer against this game. It's fairly short, the objective hints are a little too hand-holdy, it's not as richly-detailed as Super Metroid, and its brighter color palette along with its slightly more "upbeat" soundtrack prevents it from reaching the same levels of atmosphere and sci-fi horror moodiness that I prefer from the best Metroid games, but its gameplay just feels so good at the end of the day that most of this is a wash.
Zero Mission was criminally overlooked when it came out; barely managing to etch out 500,000 units worldwide after a year on the market. I suspect it was at least partially because Nintendo didn't put much effort into advertising it. I'm pretty sure the way I came across this game was when I was just browsing the aisles in Best Buy one day and spotted Metroid among the shelves, proceeded to shit bricks, and then immediately headed down to the checkout counter with it. Like what the hell man? This should never be the way that you find out about a Metroid game, especially one as great as this.
3. Metroid Fusion
Eight years after Super Metroid came out, waiting for this game felt like an eternity for me. I found it strange that Nintendo was always churning out sequels for all its other franchises--including Star Fox and F-Zero in the interim--while Metroid languished in obscurity outside of Samus' brief cameos in Smash. Then Nintendo randomly dropped two giant bombshells in the form of Metroid Fusion and Metroid Prime just days apart from each other. Though Prime mostly soaked up all the attention in the limelight, Fusion was the real MVP up in this bitch. Developed by Nintendo team R&D1; the same team behind the legend that is Super Metroid, Fusion seemingly came out of left field with its radical redesign of Samus' power suit and completely new setting, as well as an all-new threat that rivals the metroids in the ferocity and danger that they pose.
The X parasite was a really cool concept. At first glance they're a seemingly harmless floating amoeba-like blob, but they possess one absolutely terrifying trait. They're a parasitic organism that consumes and then copies the appearance of their host lifeform. Once the transformation is complete, they then multiply rapidly and asexually. The worst part of it all? Samus got infected by one. Nearly claiming her life, she barely managed to survive when a last-minute cure was discovered using metroid DNA. But the danger was far from over after that. The experience completely altered Samus' physical appearance, and much of her armor had to be stripped in order to save her life. Turns out that infected armor still managed to finish copying her, and thus the SA-X was born.
Now stripped of most of her abilities, all Samus could do was frantically run from the fully-powered SA-X that was using her own weapons against her, and the longer she remained ill-equipped to fight it, the more it just multiplied into deadly copies of the bounty hunter. Every time you encountered the SA-X, the game did a fantastic job building a thick sense of dread in the moment; making you scramble to the nearest exit in order to evade the parasite's vicious attacks.
Fusion's emphasis on story was a refreshing change in direction too. I found myself thoroughly appreciating Samus' introspective monologues and the computer AI's interactions with her. Unlike Other M, Fusion does a great job of showing Samus' feelings toward Adam without coming off as some kind of weird daddy complex. This game gave us the best peak into Samus' mind in a way that felt believable and fitting for her character, and to me, this is by far the greatest depiction of Samus I've seen out of any game from the series. Its only shortcoming is that it came at the cost of restricting progression to a significantly more linear structure. If Metroid can find a way to do more storytelling like this while keeping the game world more open-ended, Nintendo would have another masterpiece on their hands.
Fusion, much like Super Metroid, is one of the games that most captures the essence and soul of what a great Metroid game is. It is absolutely dripping with sci-fi horror atmosphere. Its world is mysterious, haunting, and foreboding. You're paranoid of what you might discover around every corner, but the allure of uncovering the space station's secrets is too great for you to ignore.
2. AM2R (Another Metroid 2 Remake)
Some might think that with this being a fan game, it is nonessential and probably lacking in production values and polish, so it couldn't possibly measure up to Nintendo's own remake of Metroid 2. However, they would be committing a terrible mistake in making such assumptions. In fact, if people weren't explicitly told that this was a fan game and it was allowed to release on official Nintendo hardware, most players likely wouldn't even notice that it wasn't actually developed by the big N. More so than that, it's just unequivocally better than the official remake. AM2R's long 10+ year labor of love by the fans is a crowning achievement and testament to the Metroid community's devotion to the series. The developers of this game truly understand Metroid.
If you thought Samus couldn't feel any better to control in Zero Mission, AM2R still somehow manages to refine her controls even further. You're now given a dedicated button for instantly transforming into a morph ball, Samus can draw items to her with the charge beam like seen in the Prime series, there's a walking animation and a running animation depending on how hard you press the joystick, you can lock Samus' direction so she can fire forwards while stepping backwards, and you can enable auto-climbing over small obstacles so Samus wastes no time hurdling over minor breaks in terrain. From a mechanics point of view, this is the best Metroid has ever felt to play. The attention to detail here is insane.
Two of the coolest features added in later updates include fusion mode and the randomizer. Fusion mode is a step above the game's hard difficulty. If you want a Dark Souls-meets-Metroid experience, this mode will give it you with soul-crushing challenge, and it even comes with a fully-animated fusion suit as seen from Metroid Fusion. You can combine this mode with the randomizer as well for a truly harrowing experience, where the game will rearrange all the item locations so you have no idea where you'll find the powerups and abilities that you're looking for. There is nothing more satisfying than when you hit a brick wall with a certain boss, then go foraging for more powerups and come across a lucky beam upgrade or essential tool that gives you a huge leg up against them, and then you return to give the boss a fistful of plasma. It gives the game a completely different vibe that adds tons of replay value.
Unlike MercurySteam's remake, the level design offers much more diversity in environments while having less wasted space. You won't be wandering a bunch of samey-looking caverns trying to find something interesting. One of the more astonishing things about it too is that this game even has set pieces. There's a whole section with an evacuation sequence, an eerie encounter with a blind-but-deadly creature, and a brief cutscene of federation soldiers getting mauled by an omega metroid to name a few. AM2R doesn't cut any corners like you might expect from a game on a $0 budget.
The only thing I kind of wish it had was a few cutscenes done in the style of Zero Mission's just to give it that extra layer of shine, but as it is, AM2R already offers more than enough for a fully-featured package. It's a more faithful remake than Samus Returns; almost to a fault. The game is still inherently limited somewhat by the repetitious template of the original Metroid 2; constantly having to track down and kill numerous metroids, and to MercurySteam's credit, they found some creative ways to experiment with that whereas AM2R decided to play it more safe. But the end result is still one hell of a game, and with so many modes and customization options, it is far and away the most replayable Metroid game to date.
1. Super Metroid
So apparently Nintendo went from making a bad game to producing a middling quality but passable sequel, and then finally to the next natural step of $$$ FUCK IT YEAAHHH TO THE MOON BOYS. GAMESTOP, AMC, AND DOGECOIN COMBINE INTO A VOLTRON MECH OF KICKASS. $$$
The jump in quality from Metroid 2 to Super was so astronomical that it didn't just end up far surpassing its predecessors but it instantly turned itself into the gold standard that every metroidvania has been living in the shadow of ever since, including Metroid's own sequels.
Oddly enough, the game had a troubled development and was almost cancelled by Gunpei Yokoi on multiple occasions. Its release was continually delayed and its budget increasingly grew out of control. Yoshio Sakamoto recalled Gunpei once angrily commenting on the team's obsessive devotion and crazy overtimes with, "Are you lot trying to produce a work of art or something?"
As a matter of fact, they were, and the end result was a masterpiece that even hooked Mr. Yokoi himself after it was finished. Super Metroid was the most expensive game ever made at the time of its release, and it was a budget well-spent. The level design, the soundtrack, the graphics, the atmosphere, the controls; Super had it all.
Right when you first land on Ceres Space Station, the atmosphere is palpable. There's no soundtrack playing when you arrive; it's just the whirring ambience of the station's ventilation systems that you hear in the background amidst a cold, quiet, and eerily lifeless backdrop. As you wander the station, every room is deathly silent and devoid of life. Finally, you stumble upon the corpses of research scientists alongside shattered glass where the larval metroid was supposed to be; an ominous sign of events to come. What follows in the next room is an iconic moment that's been forever baked into my mind.
The metroid larva sits peacefully in a jar at the other side of the room. The background is pitch black, and even the sound of the ventilation has now stopped. All you hear is the occasional chirps from the baby metroid. You can walk over to it, but nothing happens. Several seconds pass and it seems like there's nothing to do here; whatever ravaged this place before must have already come and gone, but then suddenly an orange set of eyes pierces through the darkness. Firing at it has no effect, until Ridley finally reveals himself fully, roaring as he grips the metroid in-hand. The iconic boss music kicks in with full force, and an intense battle breaks out. The whole sequence is just incredibly cinematic, in a time when describing any video game as "cinematic" wasn't really a thing.
Something particularly notable about this game is how almost every background and environment is so animated. There are glowing lights, pulsating flora, rain effects, mist and fog effects, plant pedals that gradually fall to the ground, and heat wave distortions in hot zones. Did I mention this was a Super Nintendo game? How the hell did they cram all that shit in there? Anyway, there's always something of interest to look at. Super may no longer be the best that the series has to offer mechanically, but its world is just so well-crafted that this criticism barely registers as a footnote, and in some ways its unique "floaty" feel compared to its contemporaries only adds to the sense of immersion that you're exploring a truly alien planet.
Ideally, this is a game best played when you're as young as possible, but not necessarily for the reasons you might think. I was fortunate that I had the opportunity to experience it when I was just a kid in the single digits. There's something about the way your brain works when you're young; your mind is so full of imagination, and when combined with playing a game like Super Metroid which emphasizes and rewards exploration so much while inside of a richly-detailed world, the ideas in your head go completely wild at the possibilities of what you might discover behind each locked door or hidden passageway. It's a feeling you just can't replicate as a more jaded adult.
More than 20 years after its release, I'm still discovering new secrets about the game. Even without the benefits of nostalgia or youth though, Super Metroid is still an amazing classic that stands the test of time.
Metroid Dread Bonus Commentary Special
Believe it or not, I actually started writing this blog days before Metroid Dread's announcement. I didn't time this to coincide with the Metroid hype cycle, but now that I guess it's here, I should probably make mention of it! With the initial trailers and treehouse demos now out, Dread is shaping up to be a great-looking game. I was initially skeptical of the new suit design, but it kept growing on me over time, and now it's quickly elevated itself to my second-favorite suit behind only Samus' classic varia suit itself.
Newcomers should realize just how insane this announcement was. Metroid Dread is like the equivalent of Half-Life 3 for Metroid fans; none of us ever thought it was going to come out. The title and concept have been rumored for more than 15 years. It was a myth-come-true. But it's real, and it's finally here.
The gameplay is looking really interesting. As both a sequel to Metroid Fusion and a game being developed by the studio behind Samus Returns, it appears to be combining and expanding upon the mechanics of both. Of most interest to me is the new successor to the SA-X; the EMMI machines. After finishing Fusion and Zero Mission, I had conceptualized an idea in my head of how cool it would be to have an entire metroidvania centered around this unstoppable threat that can randomly show up and force you to take cover or run, instead of only during select semi-scripted segments as seen in Fusion. It appears Sakamoto was clearly thinking the same thing, so now the madman went ahead and actually did it. I'm really excited to see what they came up with.
My one small worry is that despite all the video demos for it looking pretty good for the most part, this is still MercurySteam developing it. I enjoyed Samus Returns for what it was, but I still expected much more from a 2D Metroid than the game we got. I hope now that the team has had a foundation to build upon with the 3DS title, they can deliver us a much more polished experience going forward, but time will tell.
Double-Bonus Commentary: What order should you play the games?
Oh you thought I was done, did you? I'm sorry, but I just can't shut up about Metroid. Since Dread is now just on the horizon, more than likely many people might be wondering what's the best way to approach the series before the game's release?
Well, that can largely depend on how much time and effort you're willing to commit. If you only have a fleeting interest in the series and are unsure of whether you want invest in it, then just play Super Metroid. It's a classic that's simply too essential to skip.
If you're fairly certain you're going to be playing Dread but don't have time to play all the old stuff, then just play Metroid Fusion. With Dread being a direct sequel to Fusion, it will be more than enough to get you up to speed on the main plot and hopefully get you even more pumped to dive into Dread. The nice thing about all these games is the intros do a pretty good job of recapping the story so far, so you generally won't get lost no matter where you start from.
But if you really want to do things right, probably the best way is to play the core Metroid titles in chronological order of events. That being said, the first two Metroid games for NES and Game Boy have not aged all that well and would not be recommended as starting points. Thankfully as also covered above, we have really good alternatives. So here is the ideal recommended play order:
Metroid Zero Mission -> AM2R -> Super Metroid -> Metroid Fusion
This play order is an excellent choice for two-fold reasons. Firstly, all four of these games are rendered in timeless Super Nintendo-style 16-bit graphics, so there is a certain sense of consistency in playing them all this way. Second, the progression of these games just so happens to work out that each successive title holds your hand less as you get better at them. With Zero Mission, it will point out your objectives directly so you know exactly where you need to go; helping you ease your way into the series. Then AM2R stops giving you directions, but the map layout is intuitive enough that you can pretty easily figure where you need to go even without the game spelling it out for you, and then finally you get to Super Metroid where all the training wheels come off and you'll sometimes need to pay close attention to your surroundings to make note of areas you couldn't reach before so that you can come back later with the right equipment. It really works out well in gradually training you for the harder stuff... At least until you get to Fusion, and then it's back to hand-holding again, but it has its reasons for doing so.
There's a few caveats to this play order though. For one, there is a minor regression in mechanics moving from Zero Mission and AM2R to Super and Fusion, which might be a little off-putting to someone who's already thoroughly gotten used to the style of controls from the first two games. I don't think the regression is all that noteworthy, but nonetheless it is an issue that could affect some. In such cases, it might be better to play Super and Fusion first, and treat Zero Mission and AM2R more like prequels so your expectations are properly grounded. This is a perfectly fine way to play too, as like I said earlier, these games do a generally good job of recapping the plot regardless, so you have some flexibility here. The only issue with this approach is that you're dumping yourself right off in the deep end of the pool by starting with Super, but if you're up for the challenge, go for it.
Another issue is getting your hands on all these games can be a headache if you don't know where to look. Unfortunately there's no convenient Switch collection to just snag them all on. Thankfully, I can point you in the right directions.
Super Metroid is the easiest to obtain. You can play it through the Switch Online app. It is offered as part of the subscription which grants you access to the classic SNES library.
Zero Mission and Fusion are a bit trickier, being that they are GBA titles. You can try to obtain them on original hardware if you can somehow evade the scalpers, but they're also available on the Wii U virtual console for around $8 a piece. Otherwise your only other alternative is emulation.
Finally, there's AM2R. Thanks to DMCA shenanigans from Nintendo, finding a properly up-to-date version of this game online is more of a pain than it should be, and the updates really are essential. You can head over to the AM2R subreddit and there are threads there that can hook you up with a launcher and updater which can get you what you need, but you'll also still need to do hunting on your own to find a copy of the game itself. Though if it seems like too much hassle, playing the 3DS remake Samus Returns is a serviceable substitute.
Once you're done with all that, feel free to branch out and go crazy! You may be ready for Dread, but there's always more Metroid to be playing, and someone needs to keep those space pirates in line.
Triple-Bonus Extra Special Something-Something Commentary
