The Altar of Sequence

First, watch this.  It’s a little long, but it’s super cool.

Done?  Okay, now let’s talk about what just happened.

You don’t typically think of Mario as the sort of guy to traipse around maze-like cave systems, his progression periodically halted by obstacles that must be surmounted by the rewards of further exploration.  A fire flower isn’t necessary for clearing out a tunnel of Piranha Plants blocking the way ahead, it’s just for making it a little easier to complete a strictly linear path.  Right?

But the mechanics of the Fire Flower itself don’t dictate much of anything other than “you shoot fireballs.”  The constraints of the item are imposed by the level design.  And the same is true when applied to the genres as a whole.  What this level in Mario Maker has pointed out is that “Metroidvania” is a question of how levels are designed more than anything else.  Even the mechanics of (what would normally be) a railroaded 2D platformer work surprisingly well in the context of exploration-based gameplay.  (This isn’t actually a new idea; I’d argue that Metroid fell down where Super Metroid rose to the occasion based on factors except level design)

The limits, then, are more a consequence of design of the game world.  Even Nintendo franchises whose games once had more open than linear worlds now tend to opt for the straight and narrow path.  Of course, back in the days of Wind Waker and Metroid Prime, these games were still not programmed well enough that the intended linearity mattered; in those titles, it’s possible to obtain major items and complete long-term milestones in a vastly different order simply by knowing the right bugs and even abusing intended mechanics.  In a way, the difference isn’t that games’ structures have changed recently – it’s that programmers have gotten better at rigidly enforcing them.

This ties in somewhat with the increasing emphasis on narrative and puzzles in games, as opposed to the purely action-driven forays on the NES.  After all, the more your game focuses on story or the player following a specific path, the more the experience stands to lose when the sequence is broken.

But I wonder if it doesn’t also have to do with a creativity drought among game designers?  What I see in a lot of games now is analogous to the concept of “teaching to the test” in schools.  Rather than designing challenges as a set of goals to be reached by any of the vast variety of means the game naturally affords the player, developers set up a goal, a starting line, and a definite plan for every step they want the player to take in between.  God forbid that any powerup or item be used for any purpose except the solving of puzzle specifically laid out by developers.  There’s a delicious irony in the player having to “figure out” less than ever in modern games that are often praised for being “smarter.”

This shouldn’t be taken to mean that a “hallway simulator” has no place in the medium.  Sometimes you sacrifice an explorable world and flexible challenges to highlight a narrative and precisely define the interaction you want.  I actually liked Final Fantasy XIII and even Metroid Fusion as a change of pace.  It’s when each and every game is built like this when I worry that developers have forgotten how to do anything else.

The Time is Right to Remake Super Metroid

Metroid.  It’s probably the actual best franchise Nintendo has created.  Solid gameplay based on exploration and item progression, a story timeline that actually makes sense and features a consistent protagonist and universe (lookin’ at you, Zelda), and some of the most memorable and atmospheric worlds ever navigated in games.  In particular, Super Metroid put the series on the map in the industry as helping define an entire genre.  Back in the day, Metroid was among the greats.

And Nintendo has no clue what to do with it right now.

Following a… mixed reception, at best, to 2009’s entry into the series, Other M, there hasn’t been much action for Metroid fans.  So imagine the shock and excitement when rumors of a new title to be announced came to fruition at this year’s E3.  And then imagine the shock and outrage when said title was confirmed to be a co-op multiplayer/sports spinoff featuring none of the aforementioned features that made the series special to start with: no exploration or open-world gameplay, generic space marine player characters and no main narrative, and a silly tone devoid of the series’ grand immersive tradition.  Actually, you don’t have to imagine the outrage.  The trailer for Metroid Prime: Federation Force on YouTube has a dislike rate of almost 90%.  With that kind of announcement as the first Metroid game in over five years (the first good one in almost a decade), it’s not hard to come away with the opinion that Nintendo is a tad removed from the place where they were when they first created Samus and her world.

But I’m not here to rant about how much Federation Force is a slap in the face to the series.  Right now I’m here to talk about how Super Metroid can still save it.  Or rather, a remake of Super could.

I should note that usually I don’t go in for remakes as opposed to new, original ideas.  I think they’re usually a little lazy as a way to put out an installment that doesn’t require the same conceptual, programming, or design efforts; or a stopgap measure to sate fans of a series between major releases.  But that brings me to my first point.  A remake of Super, at this point, would primarily be a return to form and a celebration of Metroid‘s roots.  Since it’s clear that there’s not much desire to come up with a new concept for it right now, returning to the concept put forth by what many consider to be the greatest in the series would go a long way toward convincing them that Nintendo still respects the elements that earned Super its recognition.  A gesture saying “now look guys, we remember this exists.  We loved it too!”

This gesture would not be lost on an audience who grew up and is still playing and making games under Super Metroid‘s influence.  Metroidvania is a fairly popular genre in the indie scene and it would be missing a massive opportunity not to capitalize on that, even from a business standpoint.  The genre alone would sell copies, never mind the association with a classic Nintendo name.

Besides, simply being a remake wouldn’t necessarily mean that it’s a complete recycling.  Given modern console capabilities, a successful capture of the aesthetic and tone of Super Metroid would be mind-blowing to witness.  Imagine exploring Zebes in full HD, even 3D, environments and the kind of graphical quality that could be brought to bear in portraying them.  Imagine Super’s amazing and varied soundtrack given a remaster across the board.  Heck, even imagine an updated control scheme that streamlines some of the clunkier bits of Super in terms of movement and HUD navigation.

The progression of the game would also be an easy roadmap to follow.  Super has one of the best such roadmaps that video gamers have ever been challenged to follow.  For an in-depth analysis of this as its own topic, I recommend reading “The Invisible Hand of Super Metroid,” but for this post, suffice it to say that every area, every item acquisition, and even every dead end is placed in such a way as to guide players subtly while still affording them the sense of exploring the game world.  Exploration is the defining trait of the Metroidvania genre, and one of the best examples of it could be lifted wholesale at a time when that genre is popular.

And of course, if Nintendo really wanted to go the extra mile, they could add new content: perhaps new game areas (think Chozodia from Zero Mission), unlockables (taking cues from Prime Trilogy’s bonuses), incentives to speedrun, extra game modes like a harder difficulty or item randomizer… all of these have solid precedents from both previous official entries and the fanbase.

A remake would be great, but I feel like an effective one would be done with a couple caveats in place.

First and most essential, the game mechanics themselves would have to be virtually untouched.  The reason Super has endured in the fans’ memories for so long and still maintains an active playerbase today is because of how versatile the physics and even the glitches have become, catering to all styles and paces of play.  The temptation to remove single-wall wall jumping or the Mockball to “balance” the game or tighten the programming would definitely force it to conform to a unified vision, but it would sacrifice all of the charm and longevity Super possesses – not to mention completely alienate the speedrunning portion of the fanbase, who would be among the first to buy it.  The touchstone to point to here is Ocarina of Time 3D, which retained most of the sequence break-enabling glitches while still touching everything else up.

Second, even though the graphics and sound would be well-served if brought to modern standards, the design sensibilities would have to be grounded in the spirit of discovery and player-determined experience, something that isn’t always as appealing to developers today looking to railroad and handhold players according to their own ideas.  That just doesn’t fly in Metroid like it might in a AAA cinematic release.  For the sake of the experience, keep the noob bridge and don’t show a “run button” popup over it.

And, for the love of all that is not Other M, it would have to be free of any attempt at fleshing out the story beyond the opening monologue and a very few sparse cutscenes.  The narrative of Super is simple, and that simplicity grants it power.

In short, the keys to success in a remake are updating the production values while not needing to update the gameplay, aesthetic, and narrative elements that have already proven timeless enough to warrant a revisit.  Not that any of this is likely to occur, given the sparseness among Metroid titles that’s been a plague since even the N64 era, and the (sadly accurate) perception at Nintendo that it’s simply not one of the more popular franchises they can offer.  Even so, just because the opportunity isn’t taken doesn’t mean it’s not there.  I doubt many complaints would arise from Metroid fans.

“Just” a Game

The introduction of Metroid Prime does much to bring its series into the world of modern gaming after skipping a console generation, making the 3D leap and boasting surprisingly slick controls and fantastic presentation (every bit as good today, frankly).  It also serves as an “excuse” to strip Samus of her signature abilities granted by upgrades to her power suit.  To explain why the hunt for power ups was necessary in a sequel after collecting them all in the previous installment was uncommon.  Usually the audience just accepted that the game would be boring if they began with access to every item from the get-go.  It’s about the journey, after all, especially so in the Metroid series.  But nope, says Prime, we’re going to explain why the planet crawl and item progression is necessary.  And so a quick cutscene was devised wherein an explosion threw caused Samus to take critical armor damage and lose most of the upgrades it had.  Now players could feel completely comfortable with the need to re-collect all of them, without the inconvenient narrative hangups.

The concept of “Gameplay and Story Segregation” is a pretty familiar one if you’ve played video games for basically any length of time.  It’s almost omnipresent in the medium, and probably one of the few conventions to exist solely as a result of games’ own inherent nature: interactivity (as opposed to their borrowing plots, physics, presentation, or other elements from film or TV).  Because it tends to highlight the tension between player actions and writing decisions, one sort of tends to get the impression that it’s a bad thing.

Even if we grant this (which I’m not sure we should), though, sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.  The bigger impact the player has on the progression of the game, the more egregious it tends to become when writers try to maneuver around the resulting contradictions.  This can lead to some clumsy-looking/sounding ambiguity in dialogue and other text or voice acting; and it can  raise issues with continuity when sequels roll around.

Back to Metroid Prime, whose intro explosion set the stage in the simplest possible way.  It’s more than its distant ancestor, Super Metroid, did to explain why Samus was only armed with the basic beam back in 1994 (i.e., nothing at all).  This fit overall with Prime, which was ever so slightly more focused on the narrative than Super.  In a way, that one simple explanation foreshadowed the equally simple but elegant presence of the lore in the rest of the game world, which, thanks to the scanning mechanic, was only there to the degree that the player desired.  Still, as an isolated incident, it wasn’t exactly incredible – “boom, your power ups are gone” in a literal sense doesn’t integrate much better with the rest of the story than it does in a figurative one.

The sequel, Echoes, on the other hand, took every aspect of the narrative one step further.  There were more mandatory cutscenes, more mandatory lore, and more integration of the loss of power ups into the gameplay.  Prime gave you one vague objective (“track the Space Pirates and stop them”) that snowballed as you opened up the map, and whatever you found along the way to help was fair game.  Echoes spelled out the main conflict explicitly from the start, but it also set up the recurring theme of getting your own abilities back from invading the monsters that stole them – much more implicit, but still central to the game.  Showing Samus lose her items to the enemies in Echoes arguably worked even better than the one-off cutscene explosion in Prime because it gave the player (not just Samus) targets to hunt.  This was much better plot integration, a point of real development in a sequel.

Here’s the thing, though: it created a bit of an issue for future installments.  Lo and behold, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption comes around.  The developers eschewed the ability loss this time around, and it might seem puzzling at first.  After all, the Prime series had always been praised for its marriage of the franchise’s signature gameplay with a more modern narrative sensibility.  Why lose that?  Personally, I think the developers realized that it might be getting a little tiresome to keep coming up with new ways to justify the treasure hunt from the standpoint of story.  And for all of Corruption’s departures from the previous games that didn’t turn out so well, I think this one was spot on.  After all, the only thing more important in good game design than pushing boundaries, inter-series as well as internal to individual games, is quitting while you’re ahead.  The more you disguise the same tropes, the more the disguise is going to look like a pair of Groucho glasses (I’m looking at you, Pokémon).

It became tragically ironic when Other M eschewed the eschewing a couple years later, perfectly displaying the danger of trying too hard to justify gameplay with narrative.  Instead of Samus losing her abilities and finding them all over the course of the game, we had Samus lacking military authorization to use them and progressively activating them only as instructed by the general in charge – ostensibly because of their sheer firepower and the danger they would pose to other soldiers (who, to be fair, are usually absent or already dead when Samus arrives on the scene).  But this explanation fell apart in the worst possible way when Samus couldn’t or wouldn’t activate a purely defensive function of her suit in a life-threatening situation.

Ultimately this was one of the most damning incidents in Other M’s plot, and it definitely didn’t do the rest of the story any favors when fans leveled criticisms against it for portraying an abusive relationship between Samus and her “father figure” commanding officer.  It’s far from the only culprit involved in the game’s overall mixed-at-best reception, but it is the best example I can imagine of pushing too far to explain things that don’t need to be explained.

I think there’s this assumption among game writers that the old tropes and tricks, such as starting your protagonist from scratch in the sequel without any previous power ups, are just too juvenile to work in a game meant to be taken seriously.  But titles like Other M make me wish developers would accept more often that sometimes it is enough to say “here it is” and leave the rest to be explored.  I would contend that if gamers wanted everything in the experience to be told to them rather than left to be determined, they would be reading novels or going to movie theaters.

There’s nothing wrong with pre-determined narrative experiences, of course, but video games have the unique potential to create that tension between what the developer presents and how the player handles it.  Perhaps it’s not always a bad thing when the gameplay doesn’t quite align with the story, and perhaps it’s not universally desirable for them to be mangled to fit in with each other?

When you as a player make something happen in a game that maybe wasn’t quite intended, that contrasts with what is pre-determined by cutscenes, it’s a reminder that this is an experience where you too have a degree of control.  I think that’s an important aspect to the appeal of video games as a whole, and that’s powerful.