DOES THIS COMMENT NEED TO BE PINNED THIS TIME?? Head to www.squarespace.com/arlo to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code "arlo"
I always took it as her suit using its nanotech/mater-energy conversion to cannibalize other systems to keep her alive. So, it's either lose all your upgrades or die.
@maximini4923 by the time you get it, you've already gotten the aeion cloak, charge beam, spider magnet, and wide beam. So its upgrade #5, which is still early, but by far the latest in the entire series.
It's tricky but you can get Morph Ball before Kraid. It actually makes Kraid super easy. It's the only sequence break I've seen that actually felt like a secret and not a cheat.@@maximini4923
The only time I have seen that the narrative device of losing all your weapons has worked is in DMC, where canonically Dante sells them to pay his debts and I find it a very funny explanation.
Happens in Megaman Legends 2 also: there's a dialogue option where you ask your gf/mechanic where all your stuff is and the response is, "I'm sorry, Megaman, I sold all the stuff I made you to fix our ship/home!"
They even have some fun with it in DMC5, where Dante sells all his weapons again, but in the prequel novel he kills another boss (Balrog) and so he starts DMC5 with that one extra weapon for veterans to experiment with
@@TheRoboKittysells every weapon EXCEPT the best demon doggo Cerberus from DMC3 - he actually kept him all these years no matter how broke he got (I mean c'mon it is his FIRST demonic weapon and Cerberus was extremely polite and good to him!) and lost it only when it broke by pushing beyond its limit during Barlog's capture in DMC5 Prequel Novel that explains why he starts in DMC5 with it.
It's also one of the few rare games out there where you can visit EXACT locations from a previous game. Not like Sonic games where they keep spamming Green Hill levels, but the same geographical location entirely.
TO BE FAIR about “physical amnesia” (mild Dread spoilers) - we find out that it was not a correct explanation and that her abilities were taken deliberately. It’s just that a certain someone may have been trying to mislead Samus.
While this is true, it does not fix the issue of the player going "seriously?!" at the beginning of the game when it happened. Even if you do put in a proper explanation as to why things are this way, if your initial presentation is bad, this is what might stick to the player's mind.
@@Yoshihara72by the time fusion came out most were used to the fact that losing the abilities was part of the game, in fact this is the first time I have heard anyone have an issue with it. Also the game director missed that super Metroid was long as hell and is one of the best metroidvania games ever made.
"What if a Metroid game let you keep some basics, like the Charge Beam, Morph Ball, Space Jump, and Bombs?" Prime 3. You're thinking of Metroid Prime 3. She also keeps the Varia Suit, too, even if that one never serves any purpose. (And gets heavily altered.)
so maaaaaaybe they run it back for Prime 4, too. :D I mean, we don't see samus without the Varia suit in the trailer for that, as far as I'm aware, but that's not saying much.
@@halyoalex8942 Prime 4's trailer displays the charge beam, missiles, and morph ball in the opening area. I imagine they'll probably let you keep those, like in 3.
She started with morph ball & missiles in 2-- which might seem like nothing, but both had to be collected in 1 & super. Just give/deprive her of whatever works for the game or story. This shouldn't be hard.
I feel like a series with multiple planets has the easiest solution of: Previous suit does not protect Samus from the dangers of the new planet, so a different suit is needed that has not been fully upgraded yet. Some suits could even be better at certain things, maybe some start with morph ball, some don't, etc.
That kinda messes with things a bit since this is Chozo tech. And... yeah, that's hard to actively replicate, especially with the Chozo having disappeared. Samus got incredibly lucky when she lost her original suit and was able to get a replacement in Zero Mission, that's not exactly going to happen multiple times. Plus, the entire point of the Power Suit is that it's modular. It's meant to adapt to the dangers of different planets. So that only works if you ignore what's been a core part of the suit since the beginning.
@@LordTyph Doesn't have to be entirely different suits, it could be that adapting a suit to a new environment with some weird extreme element requires recalibration of most upgrades or consuming the upgrades for materials for the adaptation.
@@LordTyph Her latest suit ain't Chozo tech though, it's something the Federation whipped together after the X infected her second suit (and, y'know, mutated into the SA-X).
@@kyotrawell I think the implication in fusion was that her suit was just stripped and reduced down to a bare naked form. If you’re talking about the PED that was more or less made by the federation but it’s still an addition to her chozo suit not a replacement
I like the idea that there's a degree of discomfort Samus gets from upgrades, and that it's cumbersome to go to most missions while fully loaded up. I'd imagine she takes small contracts off screen, like small time crime or something
The Batman Arkham games seemed to subtlely go a route like this. Some upgrades, Batman remarks that an item is bulky or heavy when the player obtains it eventually, remarking that he doesn't like to keep it on-hand at all times.
Honestly this is what I've always imagined she did. Samus has all of her Prime 1 upgrades during the events of Hunters and the beginning of Prime 2, but she only takes what she thinks she needs to get the mission done quick. If she's under the assumption it's just a quick rescue mission, she doesn't need 250 missiles and the Gravity Suit.
Samus, fresh from a fight with Ridley: "Yeah, I'll go bring in this mob boss." Smash cut to her carrying a crying mob boss by the scruff of his suit, having frozen, melted, electrocuted, crushed, blown up, vaporized, and otherwise violated the basic sentient rights of all his minions in front of him. Bonus points: the bounty wasn't enough to pay for the materials she used.
It was established in Other M that the suit needs a degree of mental focus to stay activated. It makes sense to me that, the more powerful the suit, the more draining it is to maintain. Thus, Samus returns the upgrades she acquires where she can.
@@RobotGuy405 Combine that with an idea I read where the rest is stored digitally or something on the ship. Prime 2; loaded up basic SAR loadout and crashed, data corrupted. Super; equipped basic spacestation loadout, upgrades wiped in favor of emergency research data download due to station self-destruction. Prime 1; suit damage renders all previous upgrades incompatible. What we _really_ need to tie it all together is some in-universe acknowledgement that this happens. And it is very annoying.
Ironically, I think the fact that Metroid always explains narratively why Samus loses her abilities is what makes it so noticeable. I played the sequel to Horizon: Zero Dawn recently and when someone asks the main character what happened to all her gear from the first game, she literally just says in an offhand remark that she lost it. Doom Eternal also starts with you literally having only two weapons and doesn’t even bother to explain what happened to your whole arsenal in the first game. The thing is, I barely even thought about how weird that was when it comes to these games. I think Metroid has become such a landmark series with so many infrequent titles that we tend to overanalyze stuff that wouldn’t even be considered in other games.
I'm no Metroid fan, but i'm chuckling to myself at the idea of Samus tripping on an alien rock whilst going ''oopsie.'' in a deadpan voice as she realizes that she lost all of her abilities, again, for the fifth time this week in the middle of a mission, like the Metroid equivalent of the ever-eternal cartoon banana peel gag.
A while ago I caught myself dreaming about a Metroid where you play Samus as an actual Bounty Hunter. Kinda like in monster hunter, you’d get contracts with targets or missions to complete, for example evacuate a target (escape sequence?), defeat a boss, find out what happen to X, etc…, and the gunship is your home base. You get your contracts from there, prepare there, use the gunship to travel to the right planet, and then from there it’s more of a traditional Metroid, with the difference that you need to adapt to the mission by changing your load out, which also gets extended and enhanced as you progress on each planet and find new stuff. No need to make Samus lose her ability, instead the idea is that you can “customize” her based on her needs for the mission. You could unlock 10x as many things as in any other Metroid and still be totally fine since it would all be stored in the gunship for you to equip.
That sounds really cool. Although I think I’d like to see it be more 3rd person similar to something like Other M. I think that play style still has potential just the story stuff was too corny.
Maybe try Star Wars: Bounty Hunter - you play as Jango Fett, and can nab secondary bounties as you work along the plot towards completing Count Dooku's massive bounty on a fallen Jedi (a former apprentice). You have a scanner to check passersby or enemies for listed bounties. If you spot one, they'll give a name and a description of the bounty. Some are only valuable alive, some wanted dead, and plenty wanted dead or alive - a lot are more valuable one way, with a lesser bounty the other.
Thought of the idea of her keeping some abilities but they’d get upgraded versions during the game. Like a Grapple Beam upgrade that lets her grab enemies and throw them ala Gravity Circuit for example. Maybe an upgrade to the Shinespark that could change direction.
That does nothing to gate exploration. The issue with letting her keep abilities is that it messes with the flow of progression, and in the end it'd just cause some sort of ability creep.
I mean it worked phenomenally in the Arkham series. There is a trade off where some abilities are locked off for later but others are available from the start. It gives players a bunch of traversal options from the get go while still allowing things to progress and add on top of it
@@theronrossiter4905 just saying that there was a deliberate choice in removing them all through Metroid NES to Super for all we know. She only decided on keeping them in the Fusion intro, so Regardless though, if she was afraid her old powers could SOMEHOW affect her negatively, she was essentially proven right
Technically, she had her more basic gear, but was attacked by an X-parasite, a creature NO ONE knew about. So she winds up getting 'cloned' by the X while her suit was surgically removed, and those pieces--all infected by the X--became the SA-X.
In the ending of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, we saw Samus return all the Luminoth specific upgrades (Dark and Light Beams, Dark and Light Suits, Dark and Echo visors, Screw Attack, and the Gravity Boost) to the Luminoth and revert back to the Varia Suit; then comes Metroid Prime 3: Corruption and we have several of the upgrades that Samus had at the end of Prime 2 carry to Prime 3 (Charge Beam, Morph Ball Bombs, Space Jump Boots, etc.), so in those two games we did get some continuity for what upgrades Samus had between both games and Samus lost no upgrades at the beginning of Prime 3. I am thinking that Retro Studios will likely do the same for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond because the same happened at the end of Prime 3 where Samus reverts back to her standard Varia Suit and is no longer using most of the Prime 3 upgrades save for the Charge Beam, Missiles, and Morph Ball Bombs.
But, what of... Ship Missiles and Ship Grapple lol? (Joke) Anyway, if you have an automatic inventory tracker, like in an emulator, the only equipment that is removed from the inventory at the end of Echoes is the suits. Though, it would make sense that the Dark, Light, and Annihilator Beams would not be used in Prime 3, given that they have an ammo count (even though charged shots can still be used infinitely, because of door-opening mechanics). But, it doesn't explain why she can't carry over basic missiles...
Other M reminds me of that funny comic I found online of Samus constantly being denied of using the abilities. Only to find out that it was actually Adam in the suit and Samus denying him. Adam: "Okay okay, I get your point!" Samus: "Good."
story wise i think dread's way of explaining samus' ability loss is the best execution of the trope. like moments where samus gets into some sort of accident that she manages to survive with her power suit still functional yet she Just So Happened to have lost her less "essential" abilities can be pretty silly. but in dread it makes perfect sense. raven beak's whole plan is for samus to awaken her metroid abilities by fighting through ZDR, so of course he'd want her to lose most of her abilities while still being able to survive. it ties into how he was implied to have deliberately laid every upgrade, boss and obstacle out in order to achieve his ambitions, basically making him a metaphor for the game designers in a way. so like the convenience of samus Just So Happening to lose stuff like her morph ball while still having stuff like a functional arm cannon makes a lot of sense
Yeah, as much as people laugh about "Physical Amnesia," I thought the reason for Samus losing her abilities in Dread is very reasonable if you stop and think about it. It's win-win for Raven Beak. Either Samus claws her way to full power and her Metroid potential awakens as a result of his "game" or she dies somewhere along the line and he can still just extract the DNA from her regardless.
Personally I think Fusion did it best. Doctors had to surgically remove most of her suit to keep her alive is a pretty good explanation for why she loses everything but the most basic abilities.
While Prime 2's explanation isn't the best you have to give it credit for what it did with that idea similar to fusion it took the upgrades you know and love and gave them to bosses but now their your only way of recovering them unlike the data stations in fusion. Besides the obvious new stuff of course.
I'd give just a little extra point to Fusion over Dread, but those two games were far and away the exception when it came to executing the trope in a way that also made narrative sense. The reason I give Fusion the slight edge is because of how they made it thematically fit with the rest of the game as organically as possible, without it feeling like some grand conspiracy from the start (which I'm not always a huge fan of). I'm sure the Galactic Federation knew they were never going to control Samus normally, but here comes their best opportunity to try to do exactly that: sending her, without her latent abilities, to their Biological Space Lab, where they could control as much as possible to keep her from growing too powerful and once again rising beyond their control. Obviously, it failed, but it wasn't for lack of trying on their end.
At least in the particular game, I think the best way to explain it was in Metroid Fusion. There was an unavoidable reason as to why she lost her upgrades, which also served as to why they couldn't be re-acquired immediately after. And while the idea of "downloading missiles" isn't very convincing, there were various explanations as to why certain abilities wouldn't work on her anymore and/or why some might be delayed. It also had very similar reasons in place as to why Samus shouldn't be getting too many abilities or withholding certain sets of abilities, similar to Dread. For example, with the Metroid DNA injected into her, Samus is now heavily susceptible, which makes it hard for her to be equipped with an Ice-Beam. On the other hand, missiles being detached from her bodily/suit are still OK, so they changed that element from beam to missiles, opening up new types of upgrades. Granted, it might not be the best explanation, but it works well enough to be acceptable.
Eh... I'm okay with how Echoes and Corruption did it, where you start with a few more basic abilities than Prime 1 so it's at least slightly less repetitive. I like the subtle escalation and power creep that rising baseline implies, and the continuity it creates between games.
They did the symphony of the night thing, where they give you the power to tease you, then they take it away. It’s a pretty common way to show off your potential and gives you a comparison when you exceed it.
Echoes made the most sense to me. Prime 1 you get hit with some random electric blast if I remember right (the same element electric troops pelt you with later) and somehow that caused all your items to fry? BS. At least in Echoes you had enemies actually gang up and take Samus down and it made sense how you lost the powerups.
@@pcdeltalink036 You get caught in an explosion as the Orpheus is preparing to blow, and the resulting damage to the Power Suit results in an electrical light show. It's a big enough boom to throw Samus through the air and slam her hard against the elevator wall. Whether that's enough to do that kind of damage is a subjective judgment, but that's the specific cause as presented.
MP3 had a good reason for losing her shit from MP2: She returned it to the Luminoth. All of Samus’s new upgrades in MP2 were Luminoth and also wouldn’t have even been needed. The Dark / Light suits protecting against Dark Aether… which no longer exists. The Light Beam being super effective against beings from the Dark Aether… which again, no longer exists
It is interesting how the trope of Samus losing all her abilities through some plot or story element didn't start to happen until the first Metroid Prime and Fusion. They never explained it for Metroid 2 or Super.
@@rbraunbeck96 she doesn't start with the PED suit though. she begins with the Varia suit but only with the Charge Beam, Space Jump Boots, and Morph Ball with Bombs - no Missile Launcher until the first major upgrade. even after getting corrupted by Phazon and the timeskip she keeps everything including any Energy Tanks and Missile Expansions you got on the Olympus or Norion.
The way Prime handled it is silly, but Fusion made it work great. Samus doesn't just lose her abilities, she is actually physically weaker from the coma and metroid transplant she just got out of. My favorite upgrade though is the upgrades missiles that you get in Fusion, which only exist because the Federation pulled a little sneaky on her and reverse engineered the chozo tech from her super missiles. It's a nice bit of storytelling.
Other M's justification made sense, they just... like most things, didn't execute it well enough to get people to buy that. Samus is basically crossing the "police line do not cross" tape and joining an official investigation without a badge or any official permission. She's armed to the teeth with gear that could easily blow their men away - accidentally or not - if she decides to go off the books and do her own thing. Under anything but direct order, she's a liability. So she has to be kept on a tight leash. They nailed all of that. Where they fell short was making it seem like she could just switch her gear on any time. If Adam had some direct link to her suit and fully locked her out of her powerups, then he would have to give the authorization, even in a life or death situation. The obvious go-to is the hot area, where you're forced to burn alive traversing a few rooms before he finally lets you have the suit upgrade. Throw in some flimsy reasoning with the radio signal cutting out, and by the time you reach the hot area you can't get the authorization through, and can't go back for it. Bad foresight or not knowing the hazards ahead are easier to justify than "I guess I was just SO loyal to Adam that I didn't turn my fireproofing on until he told me to do it". I don't personally love how it turns something that's normally used as a reward after a fight into a gift you get at various unpredictable points in the story without really doing anything to "earn" it directly, and obviously it brings up inconvenient questions (good job using your ice power to help us kill that monster! Now turn it off before you freeze one of my men.) but it's better than nothing. But I mean, as far as a blanket "nothing" justification goes, I think a similar one makes sense as to why Samus reverts back to baseline between every game, whether or not she's bonked on the head and forgets it all. Fully powered up, she's on a whole different level than even the military's finest. That's not exactly something I think the Galactic Federation is happy to have walking among civilians. So she would have to give up her WMDs and Everything-proof Shields and Nearly Unlimited Energy Supply between missions, also possibly as historic relics of a long-lost advanced alien civilization that she just happens to be connected to by birthright. Scientists are probably quite interested in studying that tech, and it's not hers just because she found it first. The suit and its basic features are hers to keep; presumably she's had them for a long time, or the suit's specially designed just for her so even as some alien relic it's clearly meant for her alone, but all those destructive and dangerous weapons and weird powerups (even morph ball) could be considered simply not her property to keep, or too dangerous for a civilian (even a bounty hunter) to have. If she's not on a mission, she has to give it up. Bam. Perfect reason why she's only allowed to bring very simple gear along with her. (Well, better than a bonk on the head, anyway)
Fun fact in the only Castlevania Game to get a direct sequel The main character Soma Cruz actually does end up losing all his Special abilities and weapons in between games because he subconsciously felt he no longer needed to hold on to all that magic.
10:58 My problem with that approach is that it doesnt feel as natural. "I can turn into a ball now so I'm going to be looking for crawlspaces" or "I can jumper higher so I'm going to climb everything" feels way better than "this weapon can break yellow blocks". The former feels like actual progression, the latter feels like I just found a key but they've put it inside a gun to make it look cooler.
The point of a Metroidvania's progression is to go from zero to hero The problem with letting a player start a sequel with the same powerset as the first is that you have to up the strength of everything around you to compensate, causing a neverending cycle where we find ourselves as powerful enough to destroy the multiverse with a single Charge Beam, facing off against an eldritch deity whose mere presence goes beyond our understanding of trivial ideas such as "space" and "time" There's no better way to optimize the gameplay loop of going from zero to hero than to literally start from zero with every game I agree that a balance could be found in making certain movement abilities permanent, but I also see the potential of that leading me to feel more powerful than I should To say it another way, I believe the current strategy is the safest strategy. Pursuing anything else requires balancing risks and rewards I like the current status quo. I like feeling like nothing and then feeling all-powerful. It's probably one of the reasons why I have so much playtime in a game like Terraria. But I also believe it perfectly suits the Metroidvania genre
Yeah. Lore wise it's not ideal, but it works so well gameplay wise that I think I prefer Samus somehow tripping on a rock and dropping all her abilities every game (not literally tripping and dropping everything, but some other kinda BS explanation like "physical amnesia" or "samus exploded so now her power suit is broken")
@@Printerpenguin There is an idea, get rid of the (time line). Metroid can still have stories but they have to be standalone. Why do I say this, Koji Igarashi of Castlevania fame stated that he regrets the time line of the series.
@@orangeslash1667 Imagine a world where, after Hunters, we got a game for each new Bounty Hunter's origin Turn "Metroid" into the name of a universe of characters and stories
@@orangeslash1667No. Metroid is unique BECAUSE it has a clear, continuous story. If you take away that, you remove a huge part of what makes the series stand out.
That’s one thing I appreciate about Prime 3 is that you don’t loose absolutely everything. You still keep the charge shot, space jump, and morphball and bombs. And you even get the missile launcher and grapple beam very quickly at the beginning. And I think that the inclusion of the hyper mode abilities that you unlock make for some upgrades that aren’t the same old things we are used to.
Crazy ideas: Samus starts with the same secondary abilities from the previous game in the timeline. But none of them are useful in the new environment. She has only so many “slots” on her suit, so as she finds new, useful abilities, she has to swap out an old ability with the new useful one. Kind of cool: you could still fire the wave beam at the beginning of echoes, but it’s just…not useful for anything. Of her primary abilities, the morph ball is the hardest. The missiles and even charge beams can be explained as “depleted” and just don’t make the replenishment accessible until later. But the ball is a defining part of her, hard to explain losing it over and over, and yet really useful for gating progression. My suggestion is… have her lose the morph ball, but later in the game, and only the ball. You can gate the early morph ball passages with other stuff so they aren’t useful. By the time you can pass them, you’ve lost the ball. Then you regain ball and can finally get there.
YES. Maybe in the next 2D game after dread, there just aren't any spots where she can conveniently grapple things, or there's no lava zone until you've already had to use the rest of your slots on other things
@@henryhere thinking about it further, almost all the abilities can either be explained as needing some depleted resource (double or gravity jump), or as no longer being effective in the new environment. For those that don’t work with either of those, you could even have Samus lose each of them at different points, and then have a subplot to restore it. The gating in the game can be like a puzzle box, where you need a combination of them to get through, so you still have the morph ball, but not the grapple beam. Then you have the grapple beam, but not the morph ball. Then you need to find Missles. You never lost the launcher but you haven’t found any ammo yet.
I like this concept. I think it would be great if movement based abilities could be maintained while combat abilities are changed at will throughout the game. I personally would love to see a mechanic in which using a certain combat ability is too dangerous (i.e. the energy siphoning from Dread) and must be disciplinarily applied for the good ending.
If I remember correctly, in Metroid Prime 3, they do exactly what you explain as a solution, to a small extent at least. You have the basic charge beam and morph ball right from the start, and you never lose them. Just be glad that the Long Beam from Metroid 1 is a permanent upgrade that lasts for all eternity 😂
I like the idea that Samus has a bunker somewhere where she stores everything but her standard kit: Power Beam, Charge Beam, Morph Ball, Bombs, Varia Suit, Missiles and Grapple Beam. In some special cases (like on Aether, she returns all the Luminoth tech to them before leaving) she will leave it behind.
I think the loss of capabilities at the beginning of Metroid games is a subtle but effective way of providing encouragement. Giving the player a taste of the “toys” they can utilize early game only to have them stripped away will create an eagerness to get them back and once they get a taste of the power they each bring, they want more. And eventually you become more powerful than you could have ever imagined.
Sure, except even since Metroid NES... Samus is the most feared and powerful "Space/Bounty Hunter" in the galaxy. But is always starting "weak" enough to be killed by anything. And of course... the "enemy" is the resource just like Metal Gear where you are an "elite" commando infiltrating a massive organization with nothing but a pack of smokes.
This is why I love this channel. All your content is great but the fact that you're such a big Metroid fan is what will keep me around forever. Thanks for always being so Arlo!
I have an idea. The Chozo are essentially gone, the civilization and culture that samus grew up with for most of her life is no more. And when she finds all of these upgrades and power ups, they are a remnant of what once was, artifacts and relics of a people who will never come back. Maybe as a service to her adopted family, out of respect for those who took her under their wing, she sees using these items for more than she needs them to be dishonoring the Chozo's legacy. Therefore, she returns everything that she collects (and does not need) to a chozo stronghold, a final resting place if you will. Where they are sealed away, so no one can miss use them in the future. And so the chozo may finally rest in peace. No its no longer samus being clumsy and or the writers robbing her. Now its Samus getting to show more of her noble side, or even a more emotional side. Its now a part of her motivation and builds on her character. Imagine having a heartfelt moment at the end of the newest metroid game where you get to see her return everything she found, getting to see her morn that her family can never see how far she's come.
I like that in theory. In practice though, a lot of the planets she visits tend to have an explodey mishap by the end of the game - or a couple games later. Zebes, SR388, ZDR, Dark Aether, Phaaze, etc
@@JohntheSchreiner Well to be fair, the stronghold I had in mind would've been in a secret location, likely with several robust security measures and in a far corner of the galaxy. She wouldn't be putting them back where she found them considering many weren't secure, from enemy hands, or as you mentioned having the original location wiped from existence. The Chozo were a very busy species, they likely have dozens of such locations that have been forgotten about.
There was a throwaway line in the beginning of MegaMan Legends 2 where Roll's like "I needed to repair damages to the ship, so I had to sell all your weapons, I'm so sorry MegaMan :( :(" That was pretty cute and made sense in-universe.
Raven Beak thinking to himself, "Shit, I turned off her upgrades. I need to come up with an excuse as to why it happened before she clues onto me!" "p h y s i c a l a m n e s i a." Samus: "Yeah, sure. I guess that makes sense."
To be fair, once you're settled and done with all the hectic intro stuff, Corruption does start you with Space Jump, Morph Ball, Bombs, Charge Beam, and Missiles. Even the Grapple Lasso from Norion. And Grapple Swing is literally the first item you get afterwards.
I could totally see a realistic explanation being "Samus is required to not use her Varia Suit due to it requiring massive repairs" or something like that, at which point she dons an entirely new suit for the first time in eons. And then once it's repaired later during the story, she can just get it back and regain all her powers, though the new suit you got partway has its own effects to it that gives it its own value. I would find it quite easy to believe that her suit is so battered from extensive use that it needs some maintenance close to a time-sensitive mission lol
@@seanewing204the suit was actually technical and biological from the beginning It's why it regenerates from the fusion suit into the dread suit in the first place It was apart of her from the start
@@Kanny64 Oh here's a good plot point. Samus gets hit by an enemy with a new experimental weapon that gives life to biological matter. Her suit comes to life and becomes her enemy.
Simple fix, just write in that it's for archeological reasons: The upgrades Samus finds on these planets are considered artifacts, and Samus' ethical code is to return them to their people once they are no longer necessary for survival. In the case of Chozo tech, she _is_ the rightful inheritor of these artifacts and at the end of each mission she researches them at her technoarcheology lab (would also make sense to give her a research partner who continues studying them while she's on mission. Hunting for Chozo tech and archaeology also gives her a pretty good reason to keep going on bounty hunting missions.
@@sectorcodec It seemed like both were bothering Arlo, but to differing degrees. Taking the Chozo Technoarcheology thread and establishing it as a game system can resolve both concerns, though: e.g. Samus connects to the lab from the gunship which opens a loadout screen of legacy Chozo tech for players to equip. It could be introduced at the end of the tutorial with only basic options available (choose 1 offensive - missiles or morph ball bomb; 1 one mobility - space jump or grapple beam) which would have the added benefit giving players a branching path immediately out of the tutorial area based on what they chose. Throw in some "lab resource" collectibles to the game used to unlock more legacy Chozo tech equips (and new modifications) and eventually gain access to all legacy Chozo upgrades. I think such a system would make a great complementary addition to finding brand new Upgrades throughout the planet... Maybe the lab resources could entirely replace the "tank" Upgrades so instead of a boring +5 Missile Capacity, players would instead choose their own upgrade.
Here's my hook pitch for a 2D Metroid concept that is utterly impossible, but could maybe work in terms of gameplay: all of Samus' potential upgrades are laid out before her, but she can only take the one she wants most at the start, and has to earn them all back as she goes, and she can do so in whatever order she wants without breaking progression. I'm thinking A Link Between Worlds item system-ish, where you eventually need to have them all, but you can pick them up at your leisure throughout the game and prioritize the ones that look like the most fun to you.
Breaks the entire formula yet makes a ton of sense. This would work with the abilities grouped in just the right way. Maybe collecting one pickup locks you out of the other pickup's area until a later time. This would allow for a good portion of the boss order to be shaken up authentically. This would require every boss to have multiple balance levels corresponding to the stage of the game you're in which would be more difficult but doable. Damage reduction suit vs more damage beam/movement speed as a choice, anyone?
That would be pretty neat. It’d add a lot of replay value if each “starter upgrade”’s path naturally took you to a different area. Like, if you picked high-jump, you’d be able to jump up a cliff near the start that takes you to a blue glowy area, while if you picked the screw-attack, you’d be able to destroy a wall that leads you to a brown cavern area. Like naturally taking you along very different pathways just through the item’s inherent properties.
So I'm a little confused by this video because, Samus already isn't losing EVERYTHING at the start of each game. Each game already has Samus starting more powerful than the last, which I'm very surprised Arlo doesn't already know as he is clearly a massive fan of the series. (Unless I'm completely misunderstanding the point Arlo was making.) Here is a list of abilities that she starts with in Dread that are not at the start of Metroid 1: Missiles, Long beam, Ledge grab, High jump, Wall jump, Slide, and Counter. Of that list wall jump, slide, and counter are the only ones that have never been explicitly listed as upgrades. Additionally the morph ball and charge beam have been starting items for several of the previous games. And that's not even including the fact that at her base Samus in Dread is faster and more agile than ever before.
It really doesn't bother me at all. It gives you excitement to stumble across something. You're like what's in this next room, GASP the Screw Attack YES!!! Now I can go back and get this and that and go this way that was blocked off.
The other-m thing is actually a localization error, what's happening in the original Japanese is that she was talked down to when she was told not to use powerbombs so out of spite she's not using anything but her base abilities unless Adam begs her to as to not get herself killed
Let Samus keep her abilities (specific ones), but in the early game using them comes at a cost like health (which is technically the suits energy). This use of health as a resource for abilities has been done a lot in plenty of games but in Metroid it might just be an interesting change. Plot point- Sylux has hacked into Samus's suit and infected (corrupted? o: ) the computer systems with a virus. This causes her suit to activate emergency systems, like in MP3 on Phaaze, which disconnect all her hacked abilities from her life support systems. For gameplay- this means that her abilities (whatever were chosen for you to have at all at the start) dont go away, but if you want to use them it'll have some sort of drawback like an instant cost of health because you reconnected it to the suit for a moment, or vulnerability, whatever. Maybe if that includes a more late game ability the drawback is worse. Through the game you can collect items to reduce the drawbacks to anti-virus the suit, and maybe you do find another item and can reboot it free of the virus. The same could be true for weapons like a beam or super missiles. You wanna use it? it'll hurt. Sortof building on the risk using phazon beam too much in MP3 too. This could allow for some fascinating level design where you can place shortcuts or intentional sequence breaks for the player and that lets the player choose to use the infected ability to explore more or defeat enemies better OR take a different route or use weaker weapons. Edit: Maybe even give abilities and weapons with a cost so high you CANT use them right away, like if you try to super missile itll do a whopping ammount of health to you and you have to collect more energy tanks or whatever item reduces the cost before you can even try to use it.
Prime Hunters had Samus start with missiles, morph ball, bombs, and even the boost ball. The way the game handled roadblocks was to introduce a whole bunch of weapons that could open new specific doors, and I think that worked very well. Alternatively, there could be another way to implement losing her abilities. How about a game where she starts out fully powered, plasma beam, gravity suit and everything, but she loses some of those abilities over time? And at a low point of the game you would feel completely vulnerable and isolated and have to claw your way back to full power again with the potential help of some new upgrades that would have been teased before by obstacles that you could not cross even at maximum power earlier?
One idea was since samus is a bounty hunter, perhaps there was a bounty on the technology she was also collecting. (Even in Metroid prime before she loses the basic power ups she still doesn't have like ALL the upgrades she left the previous game with)
I've always thought that, at bare minumum, Samus should start each game with the Morphball and Charge Beam, since those are both such essential parts of her identity and moveset, across the series. Missiles at the start would be nice too, but since they have limited ammo anyways, their early-game absence is easy to explain away as "Samus didn't lose her missile launcher, she just doesn't have any missiles on her at the moment." (Also applicable to Morphball Bombs).
I think whether or not she keeps the Morph Ball or not varies from game to game. I like that Dredd waited so long to give it out. You always get it so early that it's as if you always have it.
I think some of the future games will use Samus' Metroid powers messing with her suit as a reason for downgrades. Who knows honestly but as long as they keep it fresh like how upgrades were spaced in Dread (and new ones were gained too) it should be fine. It's a staple of the series by now, like Peach getting kidnapped by Bowser, or Link starting with three HP. Also the newer games in the main series do a good job of explaining it - Fusion has Samus literally lose her power suit because of the X, and the sound effect at the end of Dread's opening implies that the suit got drained when Samus' metroid powers awakened, hence why she looks at her hand afterwards
I think it's a bit more drastic because we've had games where she has a starter kit - Return of Samus starts with Morph Ball, permanent Long Beam (now a staple), and many Missiles. Prime 3 starts with Morph Ball, Missiles, Charge Beam, and Varia Suit, same as Prime Hunters! It would make sense if she gets a starter kit for the mission
So, you don't actually lose the morph ball in Prime 2. And in Prime 3, you don't lose morph, bombs, or (I think) missiles. In fact, Prime 3 doesn't even explain why Samus is lacking abilities in the first place. And personally, I like starting with nothing. Especially in Dread since they added the slide mechanic. All they had to do to make a small hole inaccessible is make sure it isn't flush with the ground. It also allowed them to create one-way gates for players without the morph ball. Also you should totally try the Dread randomizer, it's top-tier.
Since prime 4 finally got it’s release announced i recently started playing prime 3 to conclude the trilogy. In this game you do start with charge shot, double jump, morph ball, and i want to say morph ball bombs as well. I suppose this is an exception to the larger topic of this video being on the entire metroid franchise, but theyve done it once and it worked well. The game starts at a federation base or mother ship being assigned a mission, assuming shortly after the events of prime 2, and no major attack occurs in the opening sequence to remove samus’ abilities. So this one game it does seem like went with the ‘discard abilities only relevant to the previous mission’ route
I think figuring this out would certainly help them justify releasing more Metroid games for us to enjoy. I'd like to see Samus keep most of her items, but have elements of the environment inhibit her ability to use them. It can even be hand-wavy, like some electical jamming or energy field as long as it facilitates the level design. Design the biomes around those elements. One of the big detriments to losing all the abilities each time is that it's hard to feel all that excited when getting them back. So we're not losing as much as you'd think in terms of progression if we say it's no longer necessary. In contrast, imagine a whole game where you haven't lost your gear and finding just one or two actual new abilities. That would be so hype!
I’ve never found the wall jumping in Super Metroid to be that hard tbh. I don’t think people realize the potential it unlocks when you get really good at it. It can be very game-breaking which is something that’s been missing in recent games say like Dread for example.
the reason you NEED to be stripped from your abilities is because one of the defining things about the metroidvania genre is powerup based progression, if you hack super metroid to start with all of your abilities you can go basically anywhere right from the start.
Maybe we can have it as a “oh no my suit got hacked and it needs to slowly update to get my stuff back” kind of thing you know like when the apps on your phone need to update and they have to be done one at a time?
That would work with any game set before fusion. With the fusion suit th powers are part of her DNA now, like go play fusion and you'll see what I mean. Sure her suit can still accept data that turns into abilities, but it still is the power suit, which is biological now, having it's DNA changed to accommodate the power
@@dravendarkplays9607 still could work considering how crazy sci-fi can get sometimes a DNA reset isn't the craziest thing that would be done to her in this franchise
I'd like to point out some of this has happened. The Long Beam has been standard in every game post-1/ZM, Charge Beam was available off the bat for Prime 3 / Other M, the Morph Ball is default in Other M, Prime 2 / 3 / Hunters and Metroid II (but weirdly given in an almost immediate room in Samus Returns), and II, Returns, and Dread all start you with missiles. Like, looking at the non-remakes post-Fusion, Other M, Dread, Prime 2/3 all already started trying to do this.
I mean you can kinda ask that of any video game character who just loses their abilities or their powers by the next game and it usually cause it would make things too easy or it wouldn’t be interesting if you started off with everything because then where would the fun be just being able to do everything from the start cuz honestly that sounds more boring to me having nothing to unlock
They could make it armor and level based like wow. You keep your abilities each expansion and learn a few more but can’t progress till you level up and get better gear
@@inspectorvoid Witcher 2 sort of did that. If you import your save, you will start with the ultimate armor set from the previous game if you had it, but now it's like 2 levels better than the starter armor, so you have an advantage for maybe the first of hour of the game before you find stuff that's better.
I like the idea of a Metroid game with a specific enemy that steals some of Samus’ equipment at various scripted points of the story that she has to find and recover. That way she has a different complement of abilities at different points that open access to different areas based on the combination she has at a given time.
An idea: Have all your abilities at the start, but paths are locked off not by item requirements, but by other means. Like, you must defeat a boss in an area to get the key access to other areas, or destroying a thing in one area opens up paths in other areas, or maybe paths are opened up by unlocking upgrades to abilities you already have, like you always have the grapple beam, but you then unlock the long-grapple beam.
I think revisiting the corruption narrative would work with this idea of losing abilities part way through. Imagine starting with ALL of her powerful abilities, but over time you’re getting corrupted and each ability is changed into a different ability and you have to work to cure the corruption to get it back. So you gain a new ability but lose an old one changing your exploration, only to regain that lost ability and ultimately have a net increase in abilities. Imagine you start with the grappling beam that behaves normally but it’s corrupted to where it can’t grab normal attach points but becomes a life drain hook that can only grab living organisms and rip off their limbs and stuff. You lose some navigation but gain a power where maybe you have to grapple a flying creature to enter a new area. Eventually you’re cured of that ailment so now you have a normal grapple beam that can also target enemies and interact more dynamically. Same with the double jump where after it’s corrupted you lose the double jump but it instead lets you hover for a while letting you reach further and new places but not as high anymore, until it’s restored and now you can go really high AND far. Could be cool.
I think it's pretty simply a need for more creativity with the upgrades (one easy example: regular missiles don't work underwater, so you need waterproof missiles to clear obstacles).
Ive been playing through Dread again these past few days and I think it might be my favorite Metroid Game. She just feels so fluid and her animations make her look athletic and nimble. All the crazy flips, slides and sprints look sleek and believeable with this version of Samus. It just feels sooo good to play. Fantastic game!
Idea for Metroid, bare with me: Something Devil May Cry does that I think is often overlooked is Dante's moveset only get's more complex with each game and it became such a sticking point for players that Nero being the new default protagonist had to happen while Dante is for veteran players or players who want something mechanically rich to sink their teeth into. If the next Metroid treated Samus like Dante and kept her abilities and expanded on them making her complex to play but offered a simpler more traditional progression for a new character I'm curious how the playerbase would feel about that.
@@lalehiandeity1649 Legend of Zelda is a little difference because Nintendo has never really cared about continuity between games and when they did eventually address continuity it was explicit that it was a new link almost every time. Metroid on the other hand has always continued story continuity between games (except for the Prime games which are all but officially separate from the 2D games).
To me, the two big problems that makes us have to keep losing our powers is "The Taste of Power" and "Game Literacy Graduation". The Metroid series is a semi-horror game, and the best way to make someone feel unsafe is to make them feel exposed, and the best way to do that at the beginning of the game is to let them have power, and then strip it away. The drop from Thrive to Survive. I do agree that dropping that in the middle of the game, say by making Samus enter a Pirate Encampment without her Power Suit, would be a neat break from the usual. However, with very long development times, we reach another problem: despite the 4 on Metroid Prime 4, because it'll be 4 years since Metroid Dread, this might be someone's first Metroid game. Loading them up with all the bells and whistles, double-jumps and grapples, could overload a player who hasn't played all of the other games. And with Nintendo's penchant to vault their own games over time, to re-release them at full price 2 decades later, one cannot go back to the old games easily to "train" their video game literacy. The metroid series as it stands is very good a confirming that you've mastered the current set of tools before granting a new one.
The reason why Samus Aran disposes her Powers & Abilities after every game is because she doesn’t want all the strong power to get into her head and make her get crazy. Just like how Mega Man X after every game he disposes all his Special Weapons & Armour Parts from Dr Light to avoid going maverick.
Yeah, but shes a bounty hunter And those additional abilities would let her do her job better Youd think she would at least put them into storage or something
Considering the threats out there, ditching them because "it might go to my head" would be a foolish reason to lose those upgrades... Putting them away would be safer in case they are needed in the future.
Weird to compare to Mega Man X because there are multiple games where X will start with his armor set from the previous game. Also he has kept some abilities over time - he never gave up the regular dash, after a few more games he also stopped giving up the air dash. Would have made more sense to compare to regular Mega Man, where the reason is that Mega Man is still a house keeping robot and so armors down and returns to his house work after defeating Wily.
I think you hit the nail on the head with the "length of release" argument. Nintendo recognized that if they space out releases enough, they can get away with reusing elements because the community sentiment is "well we're just glad we're getting attention." Of all the Nintendo franchises, Metroid is the one that has innovated probably the least in its existence. Prime and Other M (the gameplay, not the story) were awesome ways to mix up the presentation, but we've never gotten the "Link to the Past to Ocarina" or "Mario 64 to Sunshine" kind of total gameplay overhaul. Maybe Metroid doesn't need it, but some more experimentation would be cool to see.
I disagree. Banjo Tooie was too bloated with abilities, many that weren't very useful. There's a lot to be said for a smaller and more useful pool of moves.
One idea i have about this subject is thst instead of necessarily losing the abilities would be that because of the enemy/plot reason she is put in the back foot makes her suit to jam or slightly damage making *SOME* functions on the suit snd instead of getting the full upgrade back, Samus has to find components to repair her suit, and maybe that way we could sequence break the game in different ways, maybe even a mini section where Samus has to leave her suit behind for a second to somewhat repair it, with characteristics similar to the what the gameplay of Smaus in the armor once somewhat repaired woukd be, like crawling through small spaces or using some explisives that simulate the morph ball bomb or charge shot I might be rambling too much but i like the idea for a reason of losing her abilities
A few solutions. •Speedbooster: Make it consume energy to use, until a fragile power up removes that limitation. You can do short bursts (like, half a screen) by default, but not enough. •Power Bombs: Have Samus be worried Power Bombs are too dangerous, & don't seem necessary, so leave them on the ship. Next game, something could damage the door, so there's an explanation why you can't just go back for them. Next game, one goes off & destoys the ship, so she stops stocking them. •Suits: Easy. New world has new hazards (super acid, instead of lava, for example), so they're not enough. Power creep already is a problem with this, though. •Missiles: limited stock, & when they're gone, you have to find ammo, which early enemies don't have. This gives a risk/reward for not using them, so you can unlock later routes early, if you hold onto them. Counter, enemies that eat your whole supply to be defeated & can't be otherwise, but don't respawn, so do you let them chase you every time, or end the annoyance, but limit exploration. Communicating this one could be tricky, though. Refilling on the ship is still a possible issue, too.
I remember one of the Castlevania games - I want to say it was Dawn of Sorrow, which is a direct sequel to another game - having the main character come back a year after the first game and they give an excuse for not having all of your powers from the first game that's along the lines of he lost all his first game powers because he thought he lost them at the end of the first game. If he had simply tried them out between the games, they would have worked. It was otherwise a great game, and that pair of games had about 100 different powers each - one from each distinct type of enemy you fight - so I get why you don't have them, but it was a kind of crazy excuse
I can think of two semi-original ways to do something like this. The first is a security checkpoint. Lots of real world high security facilities do this, so why not have the game set in a Federation military spacestation the way they did with Metroid Fusion, but when Samus first arrives everything is normal and so she has to hand over all her high level weapons to the security guards, keeping her basic gear like the morphball but leaving her weapons (except the arm cannon because that's built into the suit) because why would she need them on a safe secure station filled with allies? And then when the station is attacked and/or everything goes to hell she has to find an alternate route back to the main entrance to collect her gear. An extreme version of this could even have her leave her armour behind and do the first section of the game as Zero Suit Samus. My second idea would involve intelligent loot drop modification. In most of the metriod games you can get ammo for almost any weapon you have from basic enemies, even mindless bugs drop missiles. Imagine a game when Samus's ship is shot down and crashed on a planet and she has to explore to find the parts to repair it (hey that sounds like Pikmin!). Her ships ammo store is destroyed so she still has her basic exploration abilities as well as the ability to use missiles and morph bombs and the like, but no ammunition for those weapons, and the only enemies that drop that ammo are the ones who use it, So if you want missiles you need to hunt space pirates carrying missile launchers (assume it was the space pirates that shot her down in the first place), you want power bombs you have to lure some sort of bomb crawler out of its hole and kill it (have it chase you through a morph ball maze to an open area), etc. This would also play into the idea of ammo scarcity as a practical gameplay consideration, you can blow all your missiles to make that boss fight extra easy, but if the enemies that drop them spawn infrequently you might have made the next part of the game harder because there's no easy way to restock. And you can balance the power curve on that one by having her eventually repair her ship to the point that it starts making ammo again, ( maybe only in limited amounts to begin with) until eventually you can restock at the ship to full power. This could also work as a fix for wasting ammo, for example if after a point you can get a limited number of missiles at the ship every time you go back you wouldn't completely softback the game by wasting all your missiles and then finding your progress blocked by a missile door, and that number increases as you further repair the ship.
I think it'd be interesting if because of Samus's initial suit malfunction, she got stuck in morphball mode for the first part of the game. Like, she's limited to this basin of an area she can't even look over the lip of, but when she's finally able to stand up properly and jump around again, she climbs out of the basin and sees the rest of the locations she'll get to explore (a very Breath of the Wild style opening, if you would).
The Prime series was actually really good about this. Even Prime 2, where Samus loses a lot of her power ups at the beginning lets her keep VarianSuit, Charge Shot and Morph Ball. Prime 3 went a step further, even.
Honestly, I think I like the way Echoes did it with the Ing stealing Samus's equipment for themselves; not only did it give an excuse for why her stuff is missing, but seeing her own abilities get used against her as boss fights (barring a few hiccups here and there) felt like a fun twist to also explain why you get Powerup A from Boss B.
It also makes sense they could do it at that time, because she was in their native realm without proper possession protection (The light beacon), so them stealing her abilities could easily be seen as them trying to possess a powerful host but the suit shielding her from the worst of it.. At least due to getting out as quickly as she did.
I feel like the most elegant narrative option would be for her new suit to "reject" her upgrades: She'd collect them to complete each game / mission and shed them after completion of each mission to sort of "come up for air". In terms of gameplay, I wouldn't want to see it as some sort of "poison timer" or anything but focus more on the player choice of mixing and matching which one's she should be holding or putting back when considering how to approach each obstacle would be neat...
To be fair, they tend to let us have missles, morph ball or varia suit from the start a bit more often nowdays, with dread letting both missles and a new slide mechanick that make up for the lack of morph ball.
I like the ethos that different games provide a different feel to the player by providing different powerups earlier versus later. Do you get Space Jump before Screw Attack, or after? How late do you get Morph Ball? Do you get Wave Beam or Plasma Beam first? How late or early the player gets Grapple Beam determines everything about its utility. Plus, what power ups are "baked in"? Do we get Power Grip for free? Does Morph Ball come with Jump ball? Is Climbing free, or do we earn it as a spider ball feature? Can we Run, or is speed booster automatic? Does Long Beam exist? Plus, you get unique power ups that can be added to the rotation if they ever make their return. Diffusion Missiles, Storm Missiles, Boost Ball, Sequence Bombs, Ice Missiles, Reserve Tanks, Fourth Suits, X-Ray, the list goes on. The main reason Samus loses everything at the start is simply because the developers love coming up with unique answers to this exact question. I'm a hundred percent confident that a high-five is exchanged every time a Metroid developer puts power bombs before ice beam or whatever.
I think we look to Prime 3 for an example. Samus's base arsenal can be Charge Beam, Missiles, Morph Ball, and Bombs with no explanation for why she doesn't have her other abilities and I think that's fine. We just don't *give* an explanation. We agree on a base set, and don't think too closely about why Samus doesn't have her Gravity Suit or Plasma Beam again
3:35 the original megaman looses all the boss weapons he acquired and megaman x looses those and his armor upgrades between games, up until X6, where he actually keeps the armor from the previous game. But they wrote in a narrative reason for OG megaman, he straight up discards the boss powers because they make him crazy with rage or something like that, so he gets rid of them to go back to normal
I personally think that a game where Samus keeps all her abilities from the previous game CAN work, you'd just have to find a way to hand-wave the level of E-Tanks and Missiles that she got, because without a Save Transfer or something, there's no way to know how many the player got, so the minimum is fine to start with. Also, while not exactly a Metroidvania game, Banjo-Tooie proved that you can make a sequel to a game that had a major feature of collecting new abilities, by keeping them all for the 2nd game and just gaining all-new abilities and upgrades on-top of everything from the first game.
Can't wait for Sylux to hit Samus with the stolen "Parking Ticket Shock Coil", locking all of her weaponry until she can find scattered space DMV booths and pay the associated fines.
Here's an idea. A Metroid game where you go into a facility and the initial boss fight ends with Samus' suit getting some kind of computer virus on it. As the game goes on you LOSE health and missile count and abilities. It would be even cooler if the game didn't even let you know that the virus was there for a while. You would just be playing and be like "I swear I used to be able to carry more missiles" and only officially fills you in when you lose your first suit ability. Like you are grappling across a chasm and the grapple fails and you go falling down and discover your grapple no longer works and discover the problem after running some diagnostics on your suit. There would be moments where you were trying to open up a specific door and not be able to, only to find another way around it. Or enemies that are no challenge at the beginning of the game, only to have those same enemies become harder to kill later in the game, or have to be killed using entirely different methods. So you are fighting your way back to your ship because you know you can do a hard reset on your suit systems there, but the closer you get, the more you find you are using stealth to avoid enemies that should have never been a problem before. This all crescendos in a boss fight AT THE LANDING PLATFORM WHERE YOUR SHIP IS where you are frantically and desperately trying to kill this boss while avoiding attacks that will obliterate you at this point. Good thing you have been getting extremely good at dodging attacks because you will need every bit of timing and attention to pull this off. Finally you get back inside your ship and reset your suit back to full power. Awesome. But turns out, after 20+ hours of fighting with your abilities slowly draining away this was only the MID-BOSS. You still need to go back into that first facility to finish the mission so you head back. You laugh as you casually annihilate enemies that only a few minutes ago you were actively avoiding because they would be a challenge. You blaze through the map, going through doors that you had to go the long way around last time. You get back to the facility and as you get deeper in you discover that the virus has taken over doors, turrets and environmental systems throughout the facility. You keep moving further in and discover that the "computer virus" is actually the manifestation of a weird alien fungus after it has gotten into the systems of the facility. It has also infected the organisms in the facility and they now come in distinctive archetypes that are immune to more and more of your weapons. Your beams are opening less and less doors and being less and less effective against the enemies. You have to go around, shutting down the computer systems and sampling the different "strains" of the virus so you can compile an anti-virus which you use to upgrade parts of your suit, finally restoring yourself to full abilities within the facility. Finally you find yourself beating the final boss having gone from prince to pauper to prince again and having a compelling story and reason to lose and regain your abilities and still getting to enjoy each part of the journey. I would play it.
I am surprised it was not mentioned in the video but an example of a Metroid game where Samus starts off with some left over abilities is Metroid II you start off with some missiles, morph ball and bombs right out the gate.
@@somehelluvafanboy8357 I just looked it up and you are correct. I could of sworn it was starting item alongside the morph ball. Its been a hot min since I played the OG M2 XD
Ways to work around this: - Option 1: send her to a new environment where the current arsenal doesn't serve well. Have new upgrades augment existing kept abilities so that you keep gameplay progression and story continuity without the ability loss gimmick. - Option 2: atmospheric or emp-like issue dampens suit abilities. Varia suit chozo tech needs time to analyze and adapt to create new beams and tech or restore her arsenal. - Option 3: All abilities kept, but progression is unlocked through story as you figure out which new planet to travel to. Rather than new upgrades the player unlocks rhe next set of hyperspace coordinates for the next location.
I think the main issue with the Metroid series isn't so much losing your abilities at the start of each game, it's going through the new game to collect those same old abilities. I haven't played too many Metroids, but I've beaten Zero Mission, Dread, and Prine Remastered, so I have a decent-sized lexicon of the games' mechanical structure. Like I said, the games tend to give you the same general abilities (morph ball, ice beam, speed booster) that the entire aspect of discovery is robbed of the player the moment they hit play. New zone too hot? Varia Suit. Gap too wide? Grapple Beam. Regular Missiles won't open door? Super Missiles. I think the devs have dug themselves into a creative rut by relying too much on these tired abilities, and not allowing themselves to actually design something new. In my opinion, I think the last thing they actually did that was really new were the Aeion abilities. Consider for a moment, Link's typical arsenal pre-Wild era. What could be considered part of his standard kit are bows, boomerangs, and bombs. Yet in each game, they never feel tired because some new mechanic improves on their utility. In the Oracle games, you had a controllable boomerang. WW let you target up to 5 things. PH let you add elements to it by tossing it through torches. It's this sort of innovation and creativity that Metroid seems to lack in my eyes. Give the Morph bombs elemental properties that you can toggle between, give Samus traction boots in an icy biome so she negates ice physics. Expand on the Space boots so instead of just a double jump, it's an actual booster tied to a fuel gauge that refills when you touch solid ground, just SOMETHING that's mechanically innovative!
I think the Varia Suit you get in Super Metroid and the Varia Suit that you see in the opening cutscene of Metroid Dread happen to be the same Varia Suit, whereas the Varia Suit in Metroid Fusion is different entirely. Sequence of events: 1.) Get orange/yellow, genuine Chozo Varia Suit in Super Metroid 2.) Lose Varia Suit to the X; receive a Metroid Vaccine, giving you the Fusion suit 3.) Varia Suit becomes the SA-X 4.) Get a new yellow-green/magenta Varia Suit received from an unrelated X 5.) Absorb an SA-X, that gives you all of your abilities from Super Metroid 6.) New suit obtained from the SA-X that had absorbed your old Varia Suit coincidentally happens to be orange/yellow in color 7.) Chozo Power Suit heals in between the time of Metroid Fusion and Metroid Dread, with the Metroid DNA receding (as confirmed by developers) 8.) The Varia Suit in the opening cutscene or Metroid Dread and the Varia Suit you find later in the game are both orange/yellow Conclusion: You reabsorb the Same Varia Suit from Super Metroid from the SA-X in Metroid Fusion, which gets carried over into the beginning of Metroid Dread. The weird orange suit at the end of Metroid Fusion is a true Chozo Varia Suit, whereas the yellow-green one is a cheap copy from an X, hence the difference in coloration.
It has never bothered me that Samus starts from 0 in every game, I think that's part of the fun. I actually loved how in Metroid Dread you need to play for a while to get thw morphball and the bombs, that makes yo appreciate more those habilities that in other games you are like "mmm yeah, she can do that..." because you already have it
I'm going to give a wild idea. Not just taking away Samus' abilities at the start, take away her suit as well! Damage or completely destroy her suit and have the first half of the game with her in her Zero Suit. Then explore and collect components for us the players to choose which part of the suit repair first, no specific power unlock. She can then partially wear the repaired part of her armor while remaining in Zero Suit, but limit or remove certain Zero Suit abilities if the player choose so. If the player focus on repairing the main hand canon first, slow Zero Suit down and make her less agile. Fix boots first, jump further or allow for walking on certain hazard. But don't tie the players down either, let them remove these repaired parts to regain certain Zero Suit abilities.
You can just institute a rule: by military order Samus can only start with a scanner, a standard shooting weapon, and the ability to run, every other movement utility must be gained by upgrades present in the area so as to not violate new galactic laws
What if Samus stays at max power and as she's defeating space pirates ends up rescuing a child they had kidnapped. She decides to train the child to be able to survive in the harsh galaxy. Switching back and forth through different challenges, the child learns and gains abilities. So Samus stays the same, but you can play through the new side kick as a way to have that item and power upgrade progression.
DOES THIS COMMENT NEED TO BE PINNED THIS TIME??
Head to www.squarespace.com/arlo to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code "arlo"
as long as squarespace doesnt make my website lose it’s progress every time i check on it😂 sure!
Shantae has existed for as long as Metroid I think and has plenty of sequels
I always took it as her suit using its nanotech/mater-energy conversion to cannibalize other systems to keep her alive. So, it's either lose all your upgrades or die.
Hey Arlo, you should talk about the Knuckles series on
Paramount +
3:29 THE MESSENGER
EVERYONE PLAY THE MESSENGER NOW
The way dread handled morph ball, and added the slide, really justified it to me.
Oh yeah the fact that you get it so late, it's just so satisfying when you fiiinally find it
@@zachywacky1I don't remember getting it late, is it not like the third upgrade you get or something
@maximini4923 by the time you get it, you've already gotten the aeion cloak, charge beam, spider magnet, and wide beam. So its upgrade #5, which is still early, but by far the latest in the entire series.
It's tricky but you can get Morph Ball before Kraid. It actually makes Kraid super easy. It's the only sequence break I've seen that actually felt like a secret and not a cheat.@@maximini4923
I really like that the slide can continue for longer than usual when samus slides into a long tunnel
The only time I have seen that the narrative device of losing all your weapons has worked is in DMC, where canonically Dante sells them to pay his debts and I find it a very funny explanation.
Happens in Megaman Legends 2 also: there's a dialogue option where you ask your gf/mechanic where all your stuff is and the response is, "I'm sorry, Megaman, I sold all the stuff I made you to fix our ship/home!"
Dante being a broke, irresponsible bastard with godlike power has to be one of the best parts of the game.
They even have some fun with it in DMC5, where Dante sells all his weapons again, but in the prequel novel he kills another boss (Balrog) and so he starts DMC5 with that one extra weapon for veterans to experiment with
@@TheRoboKittysells every weapon EXCEPT the best demon doggo Cerberus from DMC3 - he actually kept him all these years no matter how broke he got (I mean c'mon it is his FIRST demonic weapon and Cerberus was extremely polite and good to him!) and lost it only when it broke by pushing beyond its limit during Barlog's capture in DMC5 Prequel Novel that explains why he starts in DMC5 with it.
@@brandonquist8394Roll is NOT Rockman's girlfriend. She's his sister.
One thing i liked about Banjo-Tooie is how you had every single move from Kazooie from the start. Not a lot of games do that.
It's also one of the few rare games out there where you can visit EXACT locations from a previous game. Not like Sonic games where they keep spamming Green Hill levels, but the same geographical location entirely.
I would say not for the simple reason of "getting" them.every move you have at the end you had at the beginning. @cg1906
Tears of the kingdom and link between worlds. @@Lugbzurg
@@cg1906 in mario you don't gain abilities as the game progresses, so it's not the most comparable.
@@cg1906 never played banjo so I can't answer your question. but since they said "at the start" I assume there's some sort of progression.
TO BE FAIR about “physical amnesia” (mild Dread spoilers) - we find out that it was not a correct explanation and that her abilities were taken deliberately. It’s just that a certain someone may have been trying to mislead Samus.
While this is true, it does not fix the issue of the player going "seriously?!" at the beginning of the game when it happened.
Even if you do put in a proper explanation as to why things are this way, if your initial presentation is bad, this is what might stick to the player's mind.
@@Yoshihara72by the time fusion came out most were used to the fact that losing the abilities was part of the game, in fact this is the first time I have heard anyone have an issue with it. Also the game director missed that super Metroid was long as hell and is one of the best metroidvania games ever made.
@@jkdreddwhat does the Game director have to do with losing abilities?
"What if a Metroid game let you keep some basics, like the Charge Beam, Morph Ball, Space Jump, and Bombs?"
Prime 3. You're thinking of Metroid Prime 3. She also keeps the Varia Suit, too, even if that one never serves any purpose. (And gets heavily altered.)
so maaaaaaybe they run it back for Prime 4, too. :D I mean, we don't see samus without the Varia suit in the trailer for that, as far as I'm aware, but that's not saying much.
@@halyoalex8942 Prime 4's trailer displays the charge beam, missiles, and morph ball in the opening area. I imagine they'll probably let you keep those, like in 3.
Even in Prime 2, you kept some abilities after the Ing steal them like the charge beam and morph ball.
Prime Hunters as well. The only new abilities in that game you got were the new weapons actually.
She started with morph ball & missiles in 2-- which might seem like nothing, but both had to be collected in 1 & super. Just give/deprive her of whatever works for the game or story. This shouldn't be hard.
I feel like a series with multiple planets has the easiest solution of:
Previous suit does not protect Samus from the dangers of the new planet, so a different suit is needed that has not been fully upgraded yet. Some suits could even be better at certain things, maybe some start with morph ball, some don't, etc.
That kinda messes with things a bit since this is Chozo tech. And... yeah, that's hard to actively replicate, especially with the Chozo having disappeared. Samus got incredibly lucky when she lost her original suit and was able to get a replacement in Zero Mission, that's not exactly going to happen multiple times.
Plus, the entire point of the Power Suit is that it's modular. It's meant to adapt to the dangers of different planets. So that only works if you ignore what's been a core part of the suit since the beginning.
@@LordTyph Doesn't have to be entirely different suits, it could be that adapting a suit to a new environment with some weird extreme element requires recalibration of most upgrades or consuming the upgrades for materials for the adaptation.
@@LordTyph Her latest suit ain't Chozo tech though, it's something the Federation whipped together after the X infected her second suit (and, y'know, mutated into the SA-X).
@@kyotrawell I think the implication in fusion was that her suit was just stripped and reduced down to a bare naked form. If you’re talking about the PED that was more or less made by the federation but it’s still an addition to her chozo suit not a replacement
I like the idea that there's a degree of discomfort Samus gets from upgrades, and that it's cumbersome to go to most missions while fully loaded up. I'd imagine she takes small contracts off screen, like small time crime or something
The Batman Arkham games seemed to subtlely go a route like this. Some upgrades, Batman remarks that an item is bulky or heavy when the player obtains it eventually, remarking that he doesn't like to keep it on-hand at all times.
Honestly this is what I've always imagined she did. Samus has all of her Prime 1 upgrades during the events of Hunters and the beginning of Prime 2, but she only takes what she thinks she needs to get the mission done quick. If she's under the assumption it's just a quick rescue mission, she doesn't need 250 missiles and the Gravity Suit.
Samus, fresh from a fight with Ridley: "Yeah, I'll go bring in this mob boss."
Smash cut to her carrying a crying mob boss by the scruff of his suit, having frozen, melted, electrocuted, crushed, blown up, vaporized, and otherwise violated the basic sentient rights of all his minions in front of him. Bonus points: the bounty wasn't enough to pay for the materials she used.
It was established in Other M that the suit needs a degree of mental focus to stay activated. It makes sense to me that, the more powerful the suit, the more draining it is to maintain. Thus, Samus returns the upgrades she acquires where she can.
@@RobotGuy405 Combine that with an idea I read where the rest is stored digitally or something on the ship. Prime 2; loaded up basic SAR loadout and crashed, data corrupted. Super; equipped basic spacestation loadout, upgrades wiped in favor of emergency research data download due to station self-destruction. Prime 1; suit damage renders all previous upgrades incompatible.
What we _really_ need to tie it all together is some in-universe acknowledgement that this happens. And it is very annoying.
Ironically, I think the fact that Metroid always explains narratively why Samus loses her abilities is what makes it so noticeable.
I played the sequel to Horizon: Zero Dawn recently and when someone asks the main character what happened to all her gear from the first game, she literally just says in an offhand remark that she lost it. Doom Eternal also starts with you literally having only two weapons and doesn’t even bother to explain what happened to your whole arsenal in the first game.
The thing is, I barely even thought about how weird that was when it comes to these games.
I think Metroid has become such a landmark series with so many infrequent titles that we tend to overanalyze stuff that wouldn’t even be considered in other games.
I'm no Metroid fan, but i'm chuckling to myself at the idea of Samus tripping on an alien rock whilst going ''oopsie.'' in a deadpan voice as she realizes that she lost all of her abilities, again, for the fifth time this week in the middle of a mission, like the Metroid equivalent of the ever-eternal cartoon banana peel gag.
Surprisingly accurate for Metroid games if I'm being honest
You nailed it, and now it’s in my head 😂
sideshow bob rake gag except every time it happens you can see missile upgrades scattering like rings in a sonic game
@@edfreak9001 YOU JUST PERFECTLY DESCRIBED HOW I IMAGINED MY OWN COMMENT'S SCENARIO HOLY DAMN-
Varia Suit Malfunction
A while ago I caught myself dreaming about a Metroid where you play Samus as an actual Bounty Hunter.
Kinda like in monster hunter, you’d get contracts with targets or missions to complete, for example evacuate a target (escape sequence?), defeat a boss, find out what happen to X, etc…, and the gunship is your home base.
You get your contracts from there, prepare there, use the gunship to travel to the right planet, and then from there it’s more of a traditional Metroid, with the difference that you need to adapt to the mission by changing your load out, which also gets extended and enhanced as you progress on each planet and find new stuff.
No need to make Samus lose her ability, instead the idea is that you can “customize” her based on her needs for the mission. You could unlock 10x as many things as in any other Metroid and still be totally fine since it would all be stored in the gunship for you to equip.
That sounds really cool. Although I think I’d like to see it be more 3rd person similar to something like Other M. I think that play style still has potential just the story stuff was too corny.
Maybe try Star Wars: Bounty Hunter - you play as Jango Fett, and can nab secondary bounties as you work along the plot towards completing Count Dooku's massive bounty on a fallen Jedi (a former apprentice).
You have a scanner to check passersby or enemies for listed bounties. If you spot one, they'll give a name and a description of the bounty. Some are only valuable alive, some wanted dead, and plenty wanted dead or alive - a lot are more valuable one way, with a lesser bounty the other.
That would suck because it wouldn’t be Metroid-like.
i mean we know what happened to X!
Sounds like Metroid + New Zelda with how it has the philosophy of open-ended puzzles and every solution being the "correct" one.
Thought of the idea of her keeping some abilities but they’d get upgraded versions during the game. Like a Grapple Beam upgrade that lets her grab enemies and throw them ala Gravity Circuit for example.
Maybe an upgrade to the Shinespark that could change direction.
What would be sick!
That does nothing to gate exploration. The issue with letting her keep abilities is that it messes with the flow of progression, and in the end it'd just cause some sort of ability creep.
Yeah but general combat is not the problem. The problem is progression, like how morph ball lets you get to different areas by rolling through holes
@@babulbi it's funny because this idea was literally in Metroid prime 3
I mean it worked phenomenally in the Arkham series. There is a trade off where some abilities are locked off for later but others are available from the start. It gives players a bunch of traversal options from the get go while still allowing things to progress and add on top of it
The one time Samus kept all of her stuff, the SA-X was born. She may be on to something.
That was over 3 games in, though you might call out Prime where she forcefully loses it, but still
@@somehelluvafanboy8357 Prime 2, they got stolen by the Ing. At least they were split up among them unlike the SA-X, I guess
@@theronrossiter4905 just saying that there was a deliberate choice in removing them all through Metroid NES to Super for all we know. She only decided on keeping them in the Fusion intro, so
Regardless though, if she was afraid her old powers could SOMEHOW affect her negatively, she was essentially proven right
Technically, she had her more basic gear, but was attacked by an X-parasite, a creature NO ONE knew about. So she winds up getting 'cloned' by the X while her suit was surgically removed, and those pieces--all infected by the X--became the SA-X.
Not gonna lie dude at a distance the thumbnail looked like Samus was going for a slam dunk.
I thought the same thing 😅
Need a Mario Hoops sequel with Samus as an unlockable character.
Samus losing her power ups every game is a meme so old it might as well be as old as the Rubix Cube
Now I need fanart of Samus doing the Venom slam dunking on Spiderman pose
@@zombiemanjoshI want Soken making Metroid remixes RIGHT NOW.
In the ending of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, we saw Samus return all the Luminoth specific upgrades (Dark and Light Beams, Dark and Light Suits, Dark and Echo visors, Screw Attack, and the Gravity Boost) to the Luminoth and revert back to the Varia Suit; then comes Metroid Prime 3: Corruption and we have several of the upgrades that Samus had at the end of Prime 2 carry to Prime 3 (Charge Beam, Morph Ball Bombs, Space Jump Boots, etc.), so in those two games we did get some continuity for what upgrades Samus had between both games and Samus lost no upgrades at the beginning of Prime 3.
I am thinking that Retro Studios will likely do the same for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond because the same happened at the end of Prime 3 where Samus reverts back to her standard Varia Suit and is no longer using most of the Prime 3 upgrades save for the Charge Beam, Missiles, and Morph Ball Bombs.
I hope they do something like that at the end to make Metroid 2 make more sense
But, what of... Ship Missiles and Ship Grapple lol? (Joke)
Anyway, if you have an automatic inventory tracker, like in an emulator, the only equipment that is removed from the inventory at the end of Echoes is the suits. Though, it would make sense that the Dark, Light, and Annihilator Beams would not be used in Prime 3, given that they have an ammo count (even though charged shots can still be used infinitely, because of door-opening mechanics). But, it doesn't explain why she can't carry over basic missiles...
Other M reminds me of that funny comic I found online of Samus constantly being denied of using the abilities. Only to find out that it was actually Adam in the suit and Samus denying him.
Adam: "Okay okay, I get your point!"
Samus: "Good."
Brawl in the Family. I loved that comic growing up.
Brawl in the Family. Classic.
That outro might be the hardest I’ve laughed at any Arlo video. “I don’t remember how to drive a car!” 😂😂
story wise i think dread's way of explaining samus' ability loss is the best execution of the trope. like moments where samus gets into some sort of accident that she manages to survive with her power suit still functional yet she Just So Happened to have lost her less "essential" abilities can be pretty silly. but in dread it makes perfect sense. raven beak's whole plan is for samus to awaken her metroid abilities by fighting through ZDR, so of course he'd want her to lose most of her abilities while still being able to survive. it ties into how he was implied to have deliberately laid every upgrade, boss and obstacle out in order to achieve his ambitions, basically making him a metaphor for the game designers in a way. so like the convenience of samus Just So Happening to lose stuff like her morph ball while still having stuff like a functional arm cannon makes a lot of sense
Yeah, as much as people laugh about "Physical Amnesia," I thought the reason for Samus losing her abilities in Dread is very reasonable if you stop and think about it. It's win-win for Raven Beak. Either Samus claws her way to full power and her Metroid potential awakens as a result of his "game" or she dies somewhere along the line and he can still just extract the DNA from her regardless.
Personally I think Fusion did it best. Doctors had to surgically remove most of her suit to keep her alive is a pretty good explanation for why she loses everything but the most basic abilities.
While Prime 2's explanation isn't the best you have to give it credit for what it did with that idea similar to fusion it took the upgrades you know and love and gave them to bosses but now their your only way of recovering them unlike the data stations in fusion. Besides the obvious new stuff of course.
I'd give just a little extra point to Fusion over Dread, but those two games were far and away the exception when it came to executing the trope in a way that also made narrative sense.
The reason I give Fusion the slight edge is because of how they made it thematically fit with the rest of the game as organically as possible, without it feeling like some grand conspiracy from the start (which I'm not always a huge fan of). I'm sure the Galactic Federation knew they were never going to control Samus normally, but here comes their best opportunity to try to do exactly that: sending her, without her latent abilities, to their Biological Space Lab, where they could control as much as possible to keep her from growing too powerful and once again rising beyond their control. Obviously, it failed, but it wasn't for lack of trying on their end.
At least in the particular game, I think the best way to explain it was in Metroid Fusion. There was an unavoidable reason as to why she lost her upgrades, which also served as to why they couldn't be re-acquired immediately after. And while the idea of "downloading missiles" isn't very convincing, there were various explanations as to why certain abilities wouldn't work on her anymore and/or why some might be delayed.
It also had very similar reasons in place as to why Samus shouldn't be getting too many abilities or withholding certain sets of abilities, similar to Dread.
For example, with the Metroid DNA injected into her, Samus is now heavily susceptible, which makes it hard for her to be equipped with an Ice-Beam. On the other hand, missiles being detached from her bodily/suit are still OK, so they changed that element from beam to missiles, opening up new types of upgrades. Granted, it might not be the best explanation, but it works well enough to be acceptable.
"releasing games at a consistent pace"
"like castlevania"
i wish
Eh... I'm okay with how Echoes and Corruption did it, where you start with a few more basic abilities than Prime 1 so it's at least slightly less repetitive. I like the subtle escalation and power creep that rising baseline implies, and the continuity it creates between games.
They did the symphony of the night thing, where they give you the power to tease you, then they take it away. It’s a pretty common way to show off your potential and gives you a comparison when you exceed it.
Echoes made the most sense to me. Prime 1 you get hit with some random electric blast if I remember right (the same element electric troops pelt you with later) and somehow that caused all your items to fry? BS. At least in Echoes you had enemies actually gang up and take Samus down and it made sense how you lost the powerups.
@@pcdeltalink036
You get caught in an explosion as the Orpheus is preparing to blow, and the resulting damage to the Power Suit results in an electrical light show. It's a big enough boom to throw Samus through the air and slam her hard against the elevator wall. Whether that's enough to do that kind of damage is a subjective judgment, but that's the specific cause as presented.
MP3 had a good reason for losing her shit from MP2: She returned it to the Luminoth. All of Samus’s new upgrades in MP2 were Luminoth and also wouldn’t have even been needed. The Dark / Light suits protecting against Dark Aether… which no longer exists. The Light Beam being super effective against beings from the Dark Aether… which again, no longer exists
It is interesting how the trope of Samus losing all her abilities through some plot or story element didn't start to happen until the first Metroid Prime and Fusion. They never explained it for Metroid 2 or Super.
Did they even explain it in prime 3?
@@OmniGundam777 New suit because of Phazon
@@rbraunbeck96 she doesn't start with the PED suit though. she begins with the Varia suit but only with the Charge Beam, Space Jump Boots, and Morph Ball with Bombs - no Missile Launcher until the first major upgrade. even after getting corrupted by Phazon and the timeskip she keeps everything including any Energy Tanks and Missile Expansions you got on the Olympus or Norion.
@@rbraunbeck96 no, I knew someone would say that, but I’m pretty sure you don’t actually lose any items you have before you get the phazon suit.
The way Prime handled it is silly, but Fusion made it work great. Samus doesn't just lose her abilities, she is actually physically weaker from the coma and metroid transplant she just got out of.
My favorite upgrade though is the upgrades missiles that you get in Fusion, which only exist because the Federation pulled a little sneaky on her and reverse engineered the chozo tech from her super missiles. It's a nice bit of storytelling.
Other M's justification made sense, they just... like most things, didn't execute it well enough to get people to buy that.
Samus is basically crossing the "police line do not cross" tape and joining an official investigation without a badge or any official permission. She's armed to the teeth with gear that could easily blow their men away - accidentally or not - if she decides to go off the books and do her own thing. Under anything but direct order, she's a liability. So she has to be kept on a tight leash. They nailed all of that.
Where they fell short was making it seem like she could just switch her gear on any time. If Adam had some direct link to her suit and fully locked her out of her powerups, then he would have to give the authorization, even in a life or death situation. The obvious go-to is the hot area, where you're forced to burn alive traversing a few rooms before he finally lets you have the suit upgrade. Throw in some flimsy reasoning with the radio signal cutting out, and by the time you reach the hot area you can't get the authorization through, and can't go back for it. Bad foresight or not knowing the hazards ahead are easier to justify than "I guess I was just SO loyal to Adam that I didn't turn my fireproofing on until he told me to do it". I don't personally love how it turns something that's normally used as a reward after a fight into a gift you get at various unpredictable points in the story without really doing anything to "earn" it directly, and obviously it brings up inconvenient questions (good job using your ice power to help us kill that monster! Now turn it off before you freeze one of my men.) but it's better than nothing.
But I mean, as far as a blanket "nothing" justification goes, I think a similar one makes sense as to why Samus reverts back to baseline between every game, whether or not she's bonked on the head and forgets it all. Fully powered up, she's on a whole different level than even the military's finest. That's not exactly something I think the Galactic Federation is happy to have walking among civilians. So she would have to give up her WMDs and Everything-proof Shields and Nearly Unlimited Energy Supply between missions, also possibly as historic relics of a long-lost advanced alien civilization that she just happens to be connected to by birthright. Scientists are probably quite interested in studying that tech, and it's not hers just because she found it first.
The suit and its basic features are hers to keep; presumably she's had them for a long time, or the suit's specially designed just for her so even as some alien relic it's clearly meant for her alone, but all those destructive and dangerous weapons and weird powerups (even morph ball) could be considered simply not her property to keep, or too dangerous for a civilian (even a bounty hunter) to have. If she's not on a mission, she has to give it up. Bam. Perfect reason why she's only allowed to bring very simple gear along with her. (Well, better than a bonk on the head, anyway)
Fun fact in the only Castlevania Game to get a direct sequel The main character Soma Cruz actually does end up losing all his Special abilities and weapons in between games because he subconsciously felt he no longer needed to hold on to all that magic.
10:58 My problem with that approach is that it doesnt feel as natural.
"I can turn into a ball now so I'm going to be looking for crawlspaces" or "I can jumper higher so I'm going to climb everything" feels way better than "this weapon can break yellow blocks".
The former feels like actual progression, the latter feels like I just found a key but they've put it inside a gun to make it look cooler.
The point of a Metroidvania's progression is to go from zero to hero
The problem with letting a player start a sequel with the same powerset as the first is that you have to up the strength of everything around you to compensate, causing a neverending cycle where we find ourselves as powerful enough to destroy the multiverse with a single Charge Beam, facing off against an eldritch deity whose mere presence goes beyond our understanding of trivial ideas such as "space" and "time"
There's no better way to optimize the gameplay loop of going from zero to hero than to literally start from zero with every game
I agree that a balance could be found in making certain movement abilities permanent, but I also see the potential of that leading me to feel more powerful than I should
To say it another way, I believe the current strategy is the safest strategy. Pursuing anything else requires balancing risks and rewards
I like the current status quo. I like feeling like nothing and then feeling all-powerful. It's probably one of the reasons why I have so much playtime in a game like Terraria. But I also believe it perfectly suits the Metroidvania genre
Yeah. Lore wise it's not ideal, but it works so well gameplay wise that I think I prefer Samus somehow tripping on a rock and dropping all her abilities every game (not literally tripping and dropping everything, but some other kinda BS explanation like "physical amnesia" or "samus exploded so now her power suit is broken")
@@Printerpenguin There is an idea, get rid of the (time line). Metroid can still have stories but they have to be standalone.
Why do I say this, Koji Igarashi of Castlevania fame stated that he regrets the time line of the series.
@@orangeslash1667 Imagine a world where, after Hunters, we got a game for each new Bounty Hunter's origin
Turn "Metroid" into the name of a universe of characters and stories
@@PneumaAsh not bad
@@orangeslash1667No. Metroid is unique BECAUSE it has a clear, continuous story. If you take away that, you remove a huge part of what makes the series stand out.
That’s one thing I appreciate about Prime 3 is that you don’t loose absolutely everything. You still keep the charge shot, space jump, and morphball and bombs. And you even get the missile launcher and grapple beam very quickly at the beginning. And I think that the inclusion of the hyper mode abilities that you unlock make for some upgrades that aren’t the same old things we are used to.
Crazy ideas: Samus starts with the same secondary abilities from the previous game in the timeline. But none of them are useful in the new environment. She has only so many “slots” on her suit, so as she finds new, useful abilities, she has to swap out an old ability with the new useful one. Kind of cool: you could still fire the wave beam at the beginning of echoes, but it’s just…not useful for anything.
Of her primary abilities, the morph ball is the hardest. The missiles and even charge beams can be explained as “depleted” and just don’t make the replenishment accessible until later. But the ball is a defining part of her, hard to explain losing it over and over, and yet really useful for gating progression. My suggestion is… have her lose the morph ball, but later in the game, and only the ball. You can gate the early morph ball passages with other stuff so they aren’t useful. By the time you can pass them, you’ve lost the ball. Then you regain ball and can finally get there.
YES. Maybe in the next 2D game after dread, there just aren't any spots where she can conveniently grapple things, or there's no lava zone until you've already had to use the rest of your slots on other things
@@henryhere thinking about it further, almost all the abilities can either be explained as needing some depleted resource (double or gravity jump), or as no longer being effective in the new environment. For those that don’t work with either of those, you could even have Samus lose each of them at different points, and then have a subplot to restore it. The gating in the game can be like a puzzle box, where you need a combination of them to get through, so you still have the morph ball, but not the grapple beam. Then you have the grapple beam, but not the morph ball. Then you need to find Missles. You never lost the launcher but you haven’t found any ammo yet.
This sounds better than anything so far
What if you can combine old abilities with new abilities to create something new like you could in super metroid.
I like this concept. I think it would be great if movement based abilities could be maintained while combat abilities are changed at will throughout the game. I personally would love to see a mechanic in which using a certain combat ability is too dangerous (i.e. the energy siphoning from Dread) and must be disciplinarily applied for the good ending.
If I remember correctly, in Metroid Prime 3, they do exactly what you explain as a solution, to a small extent at least. You have the basic charge beam and morph ball right from the start, and you never lose them.
Just be glad that the Long Beam from Metroid 1 is a permanent upgrade that lasts for all eternity 😂
6:34 I must find a way to work "PHYSICAL AMNESIA!" into a conversation someday.
Can I be a fly on the wall when you do?
Mom: Go do the dishes.
Me: Oh- OH, PHYSICAL AmNeSiA!!
That happens after some accidents where you gotta learn how to walk again. Kinda dark, but easy conversation right there
I like the idea that Samus has a bunker somewhere where she stores everything but her standard kit: Power Beam, Charge Beam, Morph Ball, Bombs, Varia Suit, Missiles and Grapple Beam. In some special cases (like on Aether, she returns all the Luminoth tech to them before leaving) she will leave it behind.
I think the loss of capabilities at the beginning of Metroid games is a subtle but effective way of providing encouragement. Giving the player a taste of the “toys” they can utilize early game only to have them stripped away will create an eagerness to get them back and once they get a taste of the power they each bring, they want more. And eventually you become more powerful than you could have ever imagined.
Sure, except even since Metroid NES... Samus is the most feared and powerful "Space/Bounty Hunter" in the galaxy. But is always starting "weak" enough to be killed by anything. And of course... the "enemy" is the resource just like Metal Gear where you are an "elite" commando infiltrating a massive organization with nothing but a pack of smokes.
This is why I love this channel. All your content is great but the fact that you're such a big Metroid fan is what will keep me around forever. Thanks for always being so Arlo!
I have an idea.
The Chozo are essentially gone, the civilization and culture that samus grew up with for most of her life is no more. And when she finds all of these upgrades and power ups, they are a remnant of what once was, artifacts and relics of a people who will never come back. Maybe as a service to her adopted family, out of respect for those who took her under their wing, she sees using these items for more than she needs them to be dishonoring the Chozo's legacy.
Therefore, she returns everything that she collects (and does not need) to a chozo stronghold, a final resting place if you will. Where they are sealed away, so no one can miss use them in the future. And so the chozo may finally rest in peace.
No its no longer samus being clumsy and or the writers robbing her. Now its Samus getting to show more of her noble side, or even a more emotional side. Its now a part of her motivation and builds on her character. Imagine having a heartfelt moment at the end of the newest metroid game where you get to see her return everything she found, getting to see her morn that her family can never see how far she's come.
I like that in theory. In practice though, a lot of the planets she visits tend to have an explodey mishap by the end of the game - or a couple games later. Zebes, SR388, ZDR, Dark Aether, Phaaze, etc
And get this man a shield!
How many Varia and Gravity suits does she have stockpiled in there I wonder
Like the theory but she also had get slme power ups by defeating bosses or absorving them. Also,not all her power ups are Chozo origin.
@@JohntheSchreiner Well to be fair, the stronghold I had in mind would've been in a secret location, likely with several robust security measures and in a far corner of the galaxy. She wouldn't be putting them back where she found them considering many weren't secure, from enemy hands, or as you mentioned having the original location wiped from existence. The Chozo were a very busy species, they likely have dozens of such locations that have been forgotten about.
There was a throwaway line in the beginning of MegaMan Legends 2 where Roll's like "I needed to repair damages to the ship, so I had to sell all your weapons, I'm so sorry MegaMan :( :(" That was pretty cute and made sense in-universe.
That physical amnesia bit caught me off guard, that was funny.
Raven Beak thinking to himself, "Shit, I turned off her upgrades. I need to come up with an excuse as to why it happened before she clues onto me!"
"p h y s i c a l a m n e s i a."
Samus: "Yeah, sure. I guess that makes sense."
To be fair, once you're settled and done with all the hectic intro stuff, Corruption does start you with Space Jump, Morph Ball, Bombs, Charge Beam, and Missiles. Even the Grapple Lasso from Norion. And Grapple Swing is literally the first item you get afterwards.
I could totally see a realistic explanation being "Samus is required to not use her Varia Suit due to it requiring massive repairs" or something like that, at which point she dons an entirely new suit for the first time in eons. And then once it's repaired later during the story, she can just get it back and regain all her powers, though the new suit you got partway has its own effects to it that gives it its own value.
I would find it quite easy to believe that her suit is so battered from extensive use that it needs some maintenance close to a time-sensitive mission lol
New Game + idea. She gets to use her previous suit with all her powers and abilities so you can power through the game for a 2nd playthrough.
Isn't she fused to the suit now, though?
@@seanewing204the suit was actually technical and biological from the beginning
It's why it regenerates from the fusion suit into the dread suit in the first place
It was apart of her from the start
Or what if she simply doesn’t have those abilities ready for a mission because the plot happens on what was supposed to be a day off?
@@Kanny64 Oh here's a good plot point. Samus gets hit by an enemy with a new experimental weapon that gives life to biological matter. Her suit comes to life and becomes her enemy.
Simple fix, just write in that it's for archeological reasons:
The upgrades Samus finds on these planets are considered artifacts, and Samus' ethical code is to return them to their people once they are no longer necessary for survival.
In the case of Chozo tech, she _is_ the rightful inheritor of these artifacts and at the end of each mission she researches them at her technoarcheology lab (would also make sense to give her a research partner who continues studying them while she's on mission.
Hunting for Chozo tech and archaeology also gives her a pretty good reason to keep going on bounty hunting missions.
I think Arlo is less bothered by the reasoning for it, more the gameplay ramifications
@@sectorcodec It seemed like both were bothering Arlo, but to differing degrees.
Taking the Chozo Technoarcheology thread and establishing it as a game system can resolve both concerns, though: e.g. Samus connects to the lab from the gunship which opens a loadout screen of legacy Chozo tech for players to equip.
It could be introduced at the end of the tutorial with only basic options available (choose 1 offensive - missiles or morph ball bomb; 1 one mobility - space jump or grapple beam) which would have the added benefit giving players a branching path immediately out of the tutorial area based on what they chose.
Throw in some "lab resource" collectibles to the game used to unlock more legacy Chozo tech equips (and new modifications) and eventually gain access to all legacy Chozo upgrades.
I think such a system would make a great complementary addition to finding brand new Upgrades throughout the planet... Maybe the lab resources could entirely replace the "tank" Upgrades so instead of a boring +5 Missile Capacity, players would instead choose their own upgrade.
Here's my hook pitch for a 2D Metroid concept that is utterly impossible, but could maybe work in terms of gameplay: all of Samus' potential upgrades are laid out before her, but she can only take the one she wants most at the start, and has to earn them all back as she goes, and she can do so in whatever order she wants without breaking progression. I'm thinking A Link Between Worlds item system-ish, where you eventually need to have them all, but you can pick them up at your leisure throughout the game and prioritize the ones that look like the most fun to you.
Breaks the entire formula yet makes a ton of sense. This would work with the abilities grouped in just the right way. Maybe collecting one pickup locks you out of the other pickup's area until a later time. This would allow for a good portion of the boss order to be shaken up authentically. This would require every boss to have multiple balance levels corresponding to the stage of the game you're in which would be more difficult but doable. Damage reduction suit vs more damage beam/movement speed as a choice, anyone?
Sounds like a rogue like.
I’d play it
That would be pretty neat. It’d add a lot of replay value if each “starter upgrade”’s path naturally took you to a different area. Like, if you picked high-jump, you’d be able to jump up a cliff near the start that takes you to a blue glowy area, while if you picked the screw-attack, you’d be able to destroy a wall that leads you to a brown cavern area. Like naturally taking you along very different pathways just through the item’s inherent properties.
So I'm a little confused by this video because, Samus already isn't losing EVERYTHING at the start of each game. Each game already has Samus starting more powerful than the last, which I'm very surprised Arlo doesn't already know as he is clearly a massive fan of the series. (Unless I'm completely misunderstanding the point Arlo was making.)
Here is a list of abilities that she starts with in Dread that are not at the start of Metroid 1: Missiles, Long beam, Ledge grab, High jump, Wall jump, Slide, and Counter.
Of that list wall jump, slide, and counter are the only ones that have never been explicitly listed as upgrades. Additionally the morph ball and charge beam have been starting items for several of the previous games. And that's not even including the fact that at her base Samus in Dread is faster and more agile than ever before.
It really doesn't bother me at all. It gives you excitement to stumble across something. You're like what's in this next room, GASP the Screw Attack YES!!! Now I can go back and get this and that and go this way that was blocked off.
The other-m thing is actually a localization error, what's happening in the original Japanese is that she was talked down to when she was told not to use powerbombs so out of spite she's not using anything but her base abilities unless Adam begs her to as to not get herself killed
Let Samus keep her abilities (specific ones), but in the early game using them comes at a cost like health (which is technically the suits energy). This use of health as a resource for abilities has been done a lot in plenty of games but in Metroid it might just be an interesting change.
Plot point- Sylux has hacked into Samus's suit and infected (corrupted? o: ) the computer systems with a virus. This causes her suit to activate emergency systems, like in MP3 on Phaaze, which disconnect all her hacked abilities from her life support systems.
For gameplay- this means that her abilities (whatever were chosen for you to have at all at the start) dont go away, but if you want to use them it'll have some sort of drawback like an instant cost of health because you reconnected it to the suit for a moment, or vulnerability, whatever. Maybe if that includes a more late game ability the drawback is worse. Through the game you can collect items to reduce the drawbacks to anti-virus the suit, and maybe you do find another item and can reboot it free of the virus. The same could be true for weapons like a beam or super missiles. You wanna use it? it'll hurt. Sortof building on the risk using phazon beam too much in MP3 too.
This could allow for some fascinating level design where you can place shortcuts or intentional sequence breaks for the player and that lets the player choose to use the infected ability to explore more or defeat enemies better OR take a different route or use weaker weapons.
Edit: Maybe even give abilities and weapons with a cost so high you CANT use them right away, like if you try to super missile itll do a whopping ammount of health to you and you have to collect more energy tanks or whatever item reduces the cost before you can even try to use it.
Prime Hunters had Samus start with missiles, morph ball, bombs, and even the boost ball. The way the game handled roadblocks was to introduce a whole bunch of weapons that could open new specific doors, and I think that worked very well.
Alternatively, there could be another way to implement losing her abilities. How about a game where she starts out fully powered, plasma beam, gravity suit and everything, but she loses some of those abilities over time? And at a low point of the game you would feel completely vulnerable and isolated and have to claw your way back to full power again with the potential help of some new upgrades that would have been teased before by obstacles that you could not cross even at maximum power earlier?
One idea was since samus is a bounty hunter, perhaps there was a bounty on the technology she was also collecting. (Even in Metroid prime before she loses the basic power ups she still doesn't have like ALL the upgrades she left the previous game with)
2:10 That's why Banjo Tooie is such a great game. You keep ALL the abilities from Banjo Kazooie. And you never lose them.
I've always thought that, at bare minumum, Samus should start each game with the Morphball and Charge Beam, since those are both such essential parts of her identity and moveset, across the series.
Missiles at the start would be nice too, but since they have limited ammo anyways, their early-game absence is easy to explain away as "Samus didn't lose her missile launcher, she just doesn't have any missiles on her at the moment." (Also applicable to Morphball Bombs).
Prime 2 and 3 both had those at the start of the game so I think Prime 4 will too
"yup time to play dread again" is the realest feeling ever.
I think whether or not she keeps the Morph Ball or not varies from game to game.
I like that Dredd waited so long to give it out. You always get it so early that it's as if you always have it.
I think some of the future games will use Samus' Metroid powers messing with her suit as a reason for downgrades. Who knows honestly but as long as they keep it fresh like how upgrades were spaced in Dread (and new ones were gained too) it should be fine. It's a staple of the series by now, like Peach getting kidnapped by Bowser, or Link starting with three HP. Also the newer games in the main series do a good job of explaining it - Fusion has Samus literally lose her power suit because of the X, and the sound effect at the end of Dread's opening implies that the suit got drained when Samus' metroid powers awakened, hence why she looks at her hand afterwards
As a Metroid fan I always wondered why this happens but I don’t complain
Kinda like why does Peach always get kidnapped.
@@otakumarcusdoes she? Pretty sure has been a long time since she had
@BARALover96 2017 but that's the most recent game aside from wonder
I think it's a bit more drastic because we've had games where she has a starter kit - Return of Samus starts with Morph Ball, permanent Long Beam (now a staple), and many Missiles. Prime 3 starts with Morph Ball, Missiles, Charge Beam, and Varia Suit, same as Prime Hunters! It would make sense if she gets a starter kit for the mission
So, you don't actually lose the morph ball in Prime 2. And in Prime 3, you don't lose morph, bombs, or (I think) missiles. In fact, Prime 3 doesn't even explain why Samus is lacking abilities in the first place. And personally, I like starting with nothing. Especially in Dread since they added the slide mechanic. All they had to do to make a small hole inaccessible is make sure it isn't flush with the ground. It also allowed them to create one-way gates for players without the morph ball. Also you should totally try the Dread randomizer, it's top-tier.
Since prime 4 finally got it’s release announced i recently started playing prime 3 to conclude the trilogy. In this game you do start with charge shot, double jump, morph ball, and i want to say morph ball bombs as well. I suppose this is an exception to the larger topic of this video being on the entire metroid franchise, but theyve done it once and it worked well. The game starts at a federation base or mother ship being assigned a mission, assuming shortly after the events of prime 2, and no major attack occurs in the opening sequence to remove samus’ abilities. So this one game it does seem like went with the ‘discard abilities only relevant to the previous mission’ route
Butternut Squash? Yes Please!
Squish Nutbutter! No thanks?
I think figuring this out would certainly help them justify releasing more Metroid games for us to enjoy. I'd like to see Samus keep most of her items, but have elements of the environment inhibit her ability to use them. It can even be hand-wavy, like some electical jamming or energy field as long as it facilitates the level design. Design the biomes around those elements.
One of the big detriments to losing all the abilities each time is that it's hard to feel all that excited when getting them back. So we're not losing as much as you'd think in terms of progression if we say it's no longer necessary. In contrast, imagine a whole game where you haven't lost your gear and finding just one or two actual new abilities. That would be so hype!
I’ve never found the wall jumping in Super Metroid to be that hard tbh. I don’t think people realize the potential it unlocks when you get really good at it. It can be very game-breaking which is something that’s been missing in recent games say like Dread for example.
Agreed
the reason you NEED to be stripped from your abilities is because one of the defining things about the metroidvania genre is powerup based progression, if you hack super metroid to start with all of your abilities you can go basically anywhere right from the start.
Maybe we can have it as a “oh no my suit got hacked and it needs to slowly update to get my stuff back” kind of thing you know like when the apps on your phone need to update and they have to be done one at a time?
That would work with any game set before fusion. With the fusion suit th powers are part of her DNA now, like go play fusion and you'll see what I mean. Sure her suit can still accept data that turns into abilities, but it still is the power suit, which is biological now, having it's DNA changed to accommodate the power
@@dravendarkplays9607 still could work considering how crazy sci-fi can get sometimes a DNA reset isn't the craziest thing that would be done to her in this franchise
I'd like to point out some of this has happened. The Long Beam has been standard in every game post-1/ZM, Charge Beam was available off the bat for Prime 3 / Other M, the Morph Ball is default in Other M, Prime 2 / 3 / Hunters and Metroid II (but weirdly given in an almost immediate room in Samus Returns), and II, Returns, and Dread all start you with missiles.
Like, looking at the non-remakes post-Fusion, Other M, Dread, Prime 2/3 all already started trying to do this.
I mean you can kinda ask that of any video game character who just loses their abilities or their powers by the next game and it usually cause it would make things too easy or it wouldn’t be interesting if you started off with everything because then where would the fun be just being able to do everything from the start cuz honestly that sounds more boring to me having nothing to unlock
They could make it armor and level based like wow. You keep your abilities each expansion and learn a few more but can’t progress till you level up and get better gear
@@inspectorvoid Witcher 2 sort of did that. If you import your save, you will start with the ultimate armor set from the previous game if you had it, but now it's like 2 levels better than the starter armor, so you have an advantage for maybe the first of hour of the game before you find stuff that's better.
I like the idea of a Metroid game with a specific enemy that steals some of Samus’ equipment at various scripted points of the story that she has to find and recover. That way she has a different complement of abilities at different points that open access to different areas based on the combination she has at a given time.
TLDW: Arlo didn't play Prime 3
An idea: Have all your abilities at the start, but paths are locked off not by item requirements, but by other means. Like, you must defeat a boss in an area to get the key access to other areas, or destroying a thing in one area opens up paths in other areas, or maybe paths are opened up by unlocking upgrades to abilities you already have, like you always have the grapple beam, but you then unlock the long-grapple beam.
I think revisiting the corruption narrative would work with this idea of losing abilities part way through.
Imagine starting with ALL of her powerful abilities, but over time you’re getting corrupted and each ability is changed into a different ability and you have to work to cure the corruption to get it back. So you gain a new ability but lose an old one changing your exploration, only to regain that lost ability and ultimately have a net increase in abilities.
Imagine you start with the grappling beam that behaves normally but it’s corrupted to where it can’t grab normal attach points but becomes a life drain hook that can only grab living organisms and rip off their limbs and stuff. You lose some navigation but gain a power where maybe you have to grapple a flying creature to enter a new area. Eventually you’re cured of that ailment so now you have a normal grapple beam that can also target enemies and interact more dynamically.
Same with the double jump where after it’s corrupted you lose the double jump but it instead lets you hover for a while letting you reach further and new places but not as high anymore, until it’s restored and now you can go really high AND far.
Could be cool.
I think it's pretty simply a need for more creativity with the upgrades (one easy example: regular missiles don't work underwater, so you need waterproof missiles to clear obstacles).
Love your creativity, it's inspiring!
Ive been playing through Dread again these past few days and I think it might be my favorite Metroid Game. She just feels so fluid and her animations make her look athletic and nimble. All the crazy flips, slides and sprints look sleek and believeable with this version of Samus. It just feels sooo good to play. Fantastic game!
Idea for Metroid, bare with me: Something Devil May Cry does that I think is often overlooked is Dante's moveset only get's more complex with each game and it became such a sticking point for players that Nero being the new default protagonist had to happen while Dante is for veteran players or players who want something mechanically rich to sink their teeth into. If the next Metroid treated Samus like Dante and kept her abilities and expanded on them making her complex to play but offered a simpler more traditional progression for a new character I'm curious how the playerbase would feel about that.
I don’t really like the idea of a new Samus. Metroid is her story, yknow?
@@thatonespooder1513You mean like how The Legend of Zelda is Link’s story? Oh wait…
@@lalehiandeity1649 Legend of Zelda is a little difference because Nintendo has never really cared about continuity between games and when they did eventually address continuity it was explicit that it was a new link almost every time. Metroid on the other hand has always continued story continuity between games (except for the Prime games which are all but officially separate from the 2D games).
Gets
@@pseudopod Doesn’t mean you can’t swap Samus out for a new character.
To me, the two big problems that makes us have to keep losing our powers is "The Taste of Power" and "Game Literacy Graduation". The Metroid series is a semi-horror game, and the best way to make someone feel unsafe is to make them feel exposed, and the best way to do that at the beginning of the game is to let them have power, and then strip it away. The drop from Thrive to Survive. I do agree that dropping that in the middle of the game, say by making Samus enter a Pirate Encampment without her Power Suit, would be a neat break from the usual.
However, with very long development times, we reach another problem: despite the 4 on Metroid Prime 4, because it'll be 4 years since Metroid Dread, this might be someone's first Metroid game. Loading them up with all the bells and whistles, double-jumps and grapples, could overload a player who hasn't played all of the other games. And with Nintendo's penchant to vault their own games over time, to re-release them at full price 2 decades later, one cannot go back to the old games easily to "train" their video game literacy. The metroid series as it stands is very good a confirming that you've mastered the current set of tools before granting a new one.
The reason why Samus Aran disposes her Powers & Abilities after every game is because she doesn’t want all the strong power to get into her head and make her get crazy. Just like how Mega Man X after every game he disposes all his Special Weapons & Armour Parts from Dr Light to avoid going maverick.
Yeah, but shes a bounty hunter
And those additional abilities would let her do her job better
Youd think she would at least put them into storage or something
Considering the threats out there, ditching them because "it might go to my head" would be a foolish reason to lose those upgrades...
Putting them away would be safer in case they are needed in the future.
Untrue, there are explanations almost every time. Only games that that applies to are 2 and Super, and you never know, Prime 4 might explain 2.
I'd like the thought of Samus keeps her powers & abilities in her ship.
Weird to compare to Mega Man X because there are multiple games where X will start with his armor set from the previous game. Also he has kept some abilities over time - he never gave up the regular dash, after a few more games he also stopped giving up the air dash.
Would have made more sense to compare to regular Mega Man, where the reason is that Mega Man is still a house keeping robot and so armors down and returns to his house work after defeating Wily.
I think you hit the nail on the head with the "length of release" argument. Nintendo recognized that if they space out releases enough, they can get away with reusing elements because the community sentiment is "well we're just glad we're getting attention." Of all the Nintendo franchises, Metroid is the one that has innovated probably the least in its existence. Prime and Other M (the gameplay, not the story) were awesome ways to mix up the presentation, but we've never gotten the "Link to the Past to Ocarina" or "Mario 64 to Sunshine" kind of total gameplay overhaul. Maybe Metroid doesn't need it, but some more experimentation would be cool to see.
Banjo tooie did it best. Keep all upgrades from previous game and just keep getting new ones
I disagree. Banjo Tooie was too bloated with abilities, many that weren't very useful. There's a lot to be said for a smaller and more useful pool of moves.
@@mjc0961 yeah but at least it didn't make you relearn the old ones
One idea i have about this subject is thst instead of necessarily losing the abilities would be that because of the enemy/plot reason she is put in the back foot makes her suit to jam or slightly damage making *SOME* functions on the suit snd instead of getting the full upgrade back, Samus has to find components to repair her suit, and maybe that way we could sequence break the game in different ways, maybe even a mini section where Samus has to leave her suit behind for a second to somewhat repair it, with characteristics similar to the what the gameplay of Smaus in the armor once somewhat repaired woukd be, like crawling through small spaces or using some explisives that simulate the morph ball bomb or charge shot
I might be rambling too much but i like the idea for a reason of losing her abilities
Yes, that’s how Metroid-vainias work. Video over
Prime 3 did this actually. Morph ball and bombs, varia suit and charge beam. Missiles were either a part immediately, or the first upgrade you got.
A few solutions.
•Speedbooster: Make it consume energy to use, until a fragile power up removes that limitation. You can do short bursts (like, half a screen) by default, but not enough.
•Power Bombs: Have Samus be worried Power Bombs are too dangerous, & don't seem necessary, so leave them on the ship. Next game, something could damage the door, so there's an explanation why you can't just go back for them. Next game, one goes off & destoys the ship, so she stops stocking them.
•Suits: Easy. New world has new hazards (super acid, instead of lava, for example), so they're not enough. Power creep already is a problem with this, though.
•Missiles: limited stock, & when they're gone, you have to find ammo, which early enemies don't have. This gives a risk/reward for not using them, so you can unlock later routes early, if you hold onto them. Counter, enemies that eat your whole supply to be defeated & can't be otherwise, but don't respawn, so do you let them chase you every time, or end the annoyance, but limit exploration. Communicating this one could be tricky, though. Refilling on the ship is still a possible issue, too.
I remember one of the Castlevania games - I want to say it was Dawn of Sorrow, which is a direct sequel to another game - having the main character come back a year after the first game and they give an excuse for not having all of your powers from the first game that's along the lines of he lost all his first game powers because he thought he lost them at the end of the first game. If he had simply tried them out between the games, they would have worked. It was otherwise a great game, and that pair of games had about 100 different powers each - one from each distinct type of enemy you fight - so I get why you don't have them, but it was a kind of crazy excuse
I can think of two semi-original ways to do something like this.
The first is a security checkpoint. Lots of real world high security facilities do this, so why not have the game set in a Federation military spacestation the way they did with Metroid Fusion, but when Samus first arrives everything is normal and so she has to hand over all her high level weapons to the security guards, keeping her basic gear like the morphball but leaving her weapons (except the arm cannon because that's built into the suit) because why would she need them on a safe secure station filled with allies? And then when the station is attacked and/or everything goes to hell she has to find an alternate route back to the main entrance to collect her gear. An extreme version of this could even have her leave her armour behind and do the first section of the game as Zero Suit Samus.
My second idea would involve intelligent loot drop modification. In most of the metriod games you can get ammo for almost any weapon you have from basic enemies, even mindless bugs drop missiles. Imagine a game when Samus's ship is shot down and crashed on a planet and she has to explore to find the parts to repair it (hey that sounds like Pikmin!). Her ships ammo store is destroyed so she still has her basic exploration abilities as well as the ability to use missiles and morph bombs and the like, but no ammunition for those weapons, and the only enemies that drop that ammo are the ones who use it, So if you want missiles you need to hunt space pirates carrying missile launchers (assume it was the space pirates that shot her down in the first place), you want power bombs you have to lure some sort of bomb crawler out of its hole and kill it (have it chase you through a morph ball maze to an open area), etc. This would also play into the idea of ammo scarcity as a practical gameplay consideration, you can blow all your missiles to make that boss fight extra easy, but if the enemies that drop them spawn infrequently you might have made the next part of the game harder because there's no easy way to restock. And you can balance the power curve on that one by having her eventually repair her ship to the point that it starts making ammo again, ( maybe only in limited amounts to begin with) until eventually you can restock at the ship to full power. This could also work as a fix for wasting ammo, for example if after a point you can get a limited number of missiles at the ship every time you go back you wouldn't completely softback the game by wasting all your missiles and then finding your progress blocked by a missile door, and that number increases as you further repair the ship.
I think it'd be interesting if because of Samus's initial suit malfunction, she got stuck in morphball mode for the first part of the game. Like, she's limited to this basin of an area she can't even look over the lip of, but when she's finally able to stand up properly and jump around again, she climbs out of the basin and sees the rest of the locations she'll get to explore (a very Breath of the Wild style opening, if you would).
The Prime series was actually really good about this. Even Prime 2, where Samus loses a lot of her power ups at the beginning lets her keep VarianSuit, Charge Shot and Morph Ball. Prime 3 went a step further, even.
Honestly, I think I like the way Echoes did it with the Ing stealing Samus's equipment for themselves; not only did it give an excuse for why her stuff is missing, but seeing her own abilities get used against her as boss fights (barring a few hiccups here and there) felt like a fun twist to also explain why you get Powerup A from Boss B.
It also makes sense they could do it at that time, because she was in their native realm without proper possession protection (The light beacon), so them stealing her abilities could easily be seen as them trying to possess a powerful host but the suit shielding her from the worst of it.. At least due to getting out as quickly as she did.
I feel like the most elegant narrative option would be for her new suit to "reject" her upgrades:
She'd collect them to complete each game / mission and shed them after completion of each mission to sort of "come up for air".
In terms of gameplay, I wouldn't want to see it as some sort of "poison timer" or anything but focus more on the player choice of mixing and matching which one's she should be holding or putting back when considering how to approach each obstacle would be neat...
To be fair, they tend to let us have missles, morph ball or varia suit from the start a bit more often nowdays, with dread letting both missles and a new slide mechanick that make up for the lack of morph ball.
I like the ethos that different games provide a different feel to the player by providing different powerups earlier versus later. Do you get Space Jump before Screw Attack, or after? How late do you get Morph Ball? Do you get Wave Beam or Plasma Beam first? How late or early the player gets Grapple Beam determines everything about its utility. Plus, what power ups are "baked in"? Do we get Power Grip for free? Does Morph Ball come with Jump ball? Is Climbing free, or do we earn it as a spider ball feature? Can we Run, or is speed booster automatic? Does Long Beam exist?
Plus, you get unique power ups that can be added to the rotation if they ever make their return. Diffusion Missiles, Storm Missiles, Boost Ball, Sequence Bombs, Ice Missiles, Reserve Tanks, Fourth Suits, X-Ray, the list goes on.
The main reason Samus loses everything at the start is simply because the developers love coming up with unique answers to this exact question. I'm a hundred percent confident that a high-five is exchanged every time a Metroid developer puts power bombs before ice beam or whatever.
I just started editing videos, and I admire all the work you do with the puppet and the sound and the editing. You're a trooper.
I think we look to Prime 3 for an example. Samus's base arsenal can be Charge Beam, Missiles, Morph Ball, and Bombs with no explanation for why she doesn't have her other abilities and I think that's fine. We just don't *give* an explanation. We agree on a base set, and don't think too closely about why Samus doesn't have her Gravity Suit or Plasma Beam again
3:35 the original megaman looses all the boss weapons he acquired and megaman x looses those and his armor upgrades between games, up until X6, where he actually keeps the armor from the previous game. But they wrote in a narrative reason for OG megaman, he straight up discards the boss powers because they make him crazy with rage or something like that, so he gets rid of them to go back to normal
I personally think that a game where Samus keeps all her abilities from the previous game CAN work, you'd just have to find a way to hand-wave the level of E-Tanks and Missiles that she got, because without a Save Transfer or something, there's no way to know how many the player got, so the minimum is fine to start with.
Also, while not exactly a Metroidvania game, Banjo-Tooie proved that you can make a sequel to a game that had a major feature of collecting new abilities, by keeping them all for the 2nd game and just gaining all-new abilities and upgrades on-top of everything from the first game.
Can't wait for Sylux to hit Samus with the stolen "Parking Ticket Shock Coil", locking all of her weaponry until she can find scattered space DMV booths and pay the associated fines.
Here's an idea. A Metroid game where you go into a facility and the initial boss fight ends with Samus' suit getting some kind of computer virus on it. As the game goes on you LOSE health and missile count and abilities. It would be even cooler if the game didn't even let you know that the virus was there for a while. You would just be playing and be like "I swear I used to be able to carry more missiles" and only officially fills you in when you lose your first suit ability. Like you are grappling across a chasm and the grapple fails and you go falling down and discover your grapple no longer works and discover the problem after running some diagnostics on your suit. There would be moments where you were trying to open up a specific door and not be able to, only to find another way around it. Or enemies that are no challenge at the beginning of the game, only to have those same enemies become harder to kill later in the game, or have to be killed using entirely different methods. So you are fighting your way back to your ship because you know you can do a hard reset on your suit systems there, but the closer you get, the more you find you are using stealth to avoid enemies that should have never been a problem before. This all crescendos in a boss fight AT THE LANDING PLATFORM WHERE YOUR SHIP IS where you are frantically and desperately trying to kill this boss while avoiding attacks that will obliterate you at this point. Good thing you have been getting extremely good at dodging attacks because you will need every bit of timing and attention to pull this off. Finally you get back inside your ship and reset your suit back to full power. Awesome. But turns out, after 20+ hours of fighting with your abilities slowly draining away this was only the MID-BOSS. You still need to go back into that first facility to finish the mission so you head back. You laugh as you casually annihilate enemies that only a few minutes ago you were actively avoiding because they would be a challenge. You blaze through the map, going through doors that you had to go the long way around last time. You get back to the facility and as you get deeper in you discover that the virus has taken over doors, turrets and environmental systems throughout the facility. You keep moving further in and discover that the "computer virus" is actually the manifestation of a weird alien fungus after it has gotten into the systems of the facility. It has also infected the organisms in the facility and they now come in distinctive archetypes that are immune to more and more of your weapons. Your beams are opening less and less doors and being less and less effective against the enemies. You have to go around, shutting down the computer systems and sampling the different "strains" of the virus so you can compile an anti-virus which you use to upgrade parts of your suit, finally restoring yourself to full abilities within the facility. Finally you find yourself beating the final boss having gone from prince to pauper to prince again and having a compelling story and reason to lose and regain your abilities and still getting to enjoy each part of the journey. I would play it.
I am surprised it was not mentioned in the video but an example of a Metroid game where Samus starts off with some left over abilities is Metroid II
you start off with some missiles, morph ball and bombs right out the gate.
Idt you actually get the bombs right away, they're in the gold temple
@@somehelluvafanboy8357 I just looked it up and you are correct. I could of sworn it was starting item alongside the morph ball.
Its been a hot min since I played the OG M2 XD
Ways to work around this:
- Option 1: send her to a new environment where the current arsenal doesn't serve well. Have new upgrades augment existing kept abilities so that you keep gameplay progression and story continuity without the ability loss gimmick.
- Option 2: atmospheric or emp-like issue dampens suit abilities. Varia suit chozo tech needs time to analyze and adapt to create new beams and tech or restore her arsenal.
- Option 3: All abilities kept, but progression is unlocked through story as you figure out which new planet to travel to. Rather than new upgrades the player unlocks rhe next set of hyperspace coordinates for the next location.
I think the main issue with the Metroid series isn't so much losing your abilities at the start of each game, it's going through the new game to collect those same old abilities.
I haven't played too many Metroids, but I've beaten Zero Mission, Dread, and Prine Remastered, so I have a decent-sized lexicon of the games' mechanical structure.
Like I said, the games tend to give you the same general abilities (morph ball, ice beam, speed booster) that the entire aspect of discovery is robbed of the player the moment they hit play.
New zone too hot? Varia Suit.
Gap too wide? Grapple Beam.
Regular Missiles won't open door? Super Missiles.
I think the devs have dug themselves into a creative rut by relying too much on these tired abilities, and not allowing themselves to actually design something new. In my opinion, I think the last thing they actually did that was really new were the Aeion abilities.
Consider for a moment, Link's typical arsenal pre-Wild era. What could be considered part of his standard kit are bows, boomerangs, and bombs. Yet in each game, they never feel tired because some new mechanic improves on their utility. In the Oracle games, you had a controllable boomerang. WW let you target up to 5 things. PH let you add elements to it by tossing it through torches. It's this sort of innovation and creativity that Metroid seems to lack in my eyes. Give the Morph bombs elemental properties that you can toggle between, give Samus traction boots in an icy biome so she negates ice physics. Expand on the Space boots so instead of just a double jump, it's an actual booster tied to a fuel gauge that refills when you touch solid ground, just SOMETHING that's mechanically innovative!
I think the Varia Suit you get in Super Metroid and the Varia Suit that you see in the opening cutscene of Metroid Dread happen to be the same Varia Suit, whereas the Varia Suit in Metroid Fusion is different entirely.
Sequence of events:
1.) Get orange/yellow, genuine Chozo Varia Suit in Super Metroid
2.) Lose Varia Suit to the X; receive a Metroid Vaccine, giving you the Fusion suit
3.) Varia Suit becomes the SA-X
4.) Get a new yellow-green/magenta Varia Suit received from an unrelated X
5.) Absorb an SA-X, that gives you all of your abilities from Super Metroid
6.) New suit obtained from the SA-X that had absorbed your old Varia Suit coincidentally happens to be orange/yellow in color
7.) Chozo Power Suit heals in between the time of Metroid Fusion and Metroid Dread, with the Metroid DNA receding (as confirmed by developers)
8.) The Varia Suit in the opening cutscene or Metroid Dread and the Varia Suit you find later in the game are both orange/yellow
Conclusion: You reabsorb the Same Varia Suit from Super Metroid from the SA-X in Metroid Fusion, which gets carried over into the beginning of Metroid Dread.
The weird orange suit at the end of Metroid Fusion is a true Chozo Varia Suit, whereas the yellow-green one is a cheap copy from an X, hence the difference in coloration.
It has never bothered me that Samus starts from 0 in every game, I think that's part of the fun. I actually loved how in Metroid Dread you need to play for a while to get thw morphball and the bombs, that makes yo appreciate more those habilities that in other games you are like "mmm yeah, she can do that..." because you already have it
I'm going to give a wild idea. Not just taking away Samus' abilities at the start, take away her suit as well! Damage or completely destroy her suit and have the first half of the game with her in her Zero Suit. Then explore and collect components for us the players to choose which part of the suit repair first, no specific power unlock. She can then partially wear the repaired part of her armor while remaining in Zero Suit, but limit or remove certain Zero Suit abilities if the player choose so. If the player focus on repairing the main hand canon first, slow Zero Suit down and make her less agile. Fix boots first, jump further or allow for walking on certain hazard. But don't tie the players down either, let them remove these repaired parts to regain certain Zero Suit abilities.
You can just institute a rule: by military order Samus can only start with a scanner, a standard shooting weapon, and the ability to run, every other movement utility must be gained by upgrades present in the area so as to not violate new galactic laws
What if Samus stays at max power and as she's defeating space pirates ends up rescuing a child they had kidnapped. She decides to train the child to be able to survive in the harsh galaxy. Switching back and forth through different challenges, the child learns and gains abilities. So Samus stays the same, but you can play through the new side kick as a way to have that item and power upgrade progression.