A Metroid Samus Returns Retrospective 

Ahhh shoot. I'll have to go back and look through them all then. I should've looked further into that. Thanks for the heads up.

Omg!!! I didn't notice that!

Careful being that positive, gonna boost my ego through the roof LOL

I absolutely see this message! One of the perks to being such a small channel is that I get to chat with everyone. I definitely forgot to mention this because I didn't even think of that. Very good catch on those details! This does help bridge that gap even more cleverly than I originally thought, and I already thought it was damn good. Thank you for this!

@@Zerbraxi no prob really enjoyed the video too. i always love hearing talk videos about metroid games and thats how i stumbled upon your channel. your work gets a big thumbs up from me

@@Pokejon2000 I really appreciate it. Thanks!

One of the coolest looking suits in the series by far. The glow is just beautiful.

That's an awesome bit of info! Thanks for sharing that. It ended up working out pretty dang well for everyone involved. *obligatory Lord's of Shadow joke*

Thank you so much! I'm glad you enjoyed. While it might not be for a little while I'm EXTREMELY excited to get back to the Metroid franchise at some point.

I had originally passed on it when it released. Partly because the Switch was already out and I passed on basically anything 3DS related at the time. Also because...well, as I mentioned quite a few times I had STRONG feelings about MercurySteam lol. I'm still genuinely surprised by how much fund I had with it especially given the general reception I had seen at the time. Great experience I'm glad I had and even better music!

Lol!!!

Definitely better Dread for sure.

So after some time away from this, I think I understand what they were going for in terms of tying the shrines into the evacuation. You're right about the galleries being a deeper insight and in seeing that the shrines were effectively a way to systematically wall off sections of the subterranean layers in the planet is a rather interesting rationale to that gameplay mechanic. It's definitely still a bit odd to me, but it's too late to change the core gameplay of Metroid 2 so they had to come up with something. I never thought of that with the Queen Metroid fight. Considering I had played through Metroid 2 AND AM2R, I totally should've realized that Power Bomb trick. Clever. This Ridley fight became my favorite boss fight in terms of mechanics in the entire series after playing this for the first time. Granted it quickly got dethroned by Raven Beak in Dread, but yeah, I love how much this Ridley encounter forces the player to approach it so differently compared to his other encounters.

This was a wonderful response to read. I love the expression of your experiences and how music and sound design played such a deep role there. There's definitely a lot to the sound design of Fusion that I could've gone deeper into. I found your last line a bit amusing. Not because I take offense or anything, but because video game music and video game music is a topic I'm often obsessed with. I listen to game soundtracks more than regular music, podcasts, and audiobooks combined. I can often "feel" so much from a game I've never played just by hearing the original compositions or from remixes on OCRemix or Rainwave.cc. There are countless games I've played for no other reason than I heard their music and NEEDED to know what the story and gameplay was behind the emotion I was already feeling. I'm genuinely obsessed with video game music and it's why in my videos I always make a point to focus on that topic specifically even if not every title has a lot to say about it. Regardless, I definitely miss certain experiences for sure and perhaps Fusion is a good example of that. Honestly though, you mention all of those moments from Fusion, and I can not put a single track or sound to any of those experiences BESIDES the SA-X footsteps. I'll totally give that haunting sound its credit. I still don't remember any of the music from Fusion even after having listened to it on repeat during the editing. Another thing I love to do is listen to a game's soundtrack while I'm writing and editing to help force me into that experience again. I probably hear a game soundtrack about 10 times during the process before publishing and I still can't remember more than 1 or 2 songs from Fusion. I remember more from Samus Returns for sure. A close friend of mine had a similar experience you did with Fusion, and he also disagreed with some of my thoughts towards it. Perhaps its that I had played so many games like Fusion before touching it upon release that things never clicked the same. There could be a plethora of reasons that our experiences in this regard but I love to hear those experiences because it inevitably makes me appreciate a game more even if it did little for me personally.

@@Zerbraxi I, too, am borderline obsessed with video game music, and I often listen to it for atmosphere. Hell, I play the BLADE Barracks theme from Xenoblade X on repeat, in my apartment over a bluetooth speaker because it just has that homey vibe to it, and I consider it MY theme song when starting streams. And listening to a track from a game you've never played, feeling emotion, and wanting to play the game itself to experience the track in its original form, that's how I felt with a ton of games over my lifetime, the most recent being the final dungeon from Skies of Arcadia, I went to play that just to reach that dungeon and feel exactly what it was trying to convey in its home setting. It's a phenomenon that I love experiencing again and again. It also ultimately puts a lot of games on my backlog. But yeah I get it. People have different tastes, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Yo that's awesome! I've still not played through Xenoblade X yet...it's the only Xenoblade I haven't played which I really regret. I do have the game and have the optimization patch downloaded on my WiiU so I do plan to rectify that one day. This conversation though ahs given me an idea. I wonder if a video focused solely on games I played strictly because of hearing the soundtrack first would be an interesting topic.

I would've said it's MORE worth it to play before going through Dread so you can see the evolution of the gameplay. The core story beats of Metroid 2 go largely unchanged from AM2R outside the very end. I'd recommend playing it as long as you're ok with the relatively linear nature and the repetition of many of the Metroid encounters. If you want to have some fun with some very solid gameplay on the 3DS then it's definitely worth checking out.

Now you're just being too nice :)

195 minutes well spent

@@WyvernDotRed Good lord!! All of them?! Wow, I'm very humbled to hear that.

​@@Zerbraxi Yes, all of them, from start to finish (at 1X speed, I don't mess with playback speed). I appreciate how you stick to your opinions and occasionally try new things in the videos. Some parts seemed a little longer than they needed to be, but I enjoyed the series and am looking forward to your next videos. It feels weird watching videos with less than 100 views, especially with this level of quality. The effort you put in shows.

@@WyvernDotRed Again, thank you so much. I also really appreciate the feedback. I'm for sure still figuring out more effective ways of communicating and illustrating points and I am thankful for any criticism that comes. I hope you enjoy what's to come.