Metroid (universe)

Super Metroid was an especially popular title in the franchise.

Metroid is a series of video games, manga, and other products and a pioneer of the Metroidvania genre of video game created by Nintendo in 1986. Over a dozen games have been made in the game's canon, and characters from the game appear in various other games as well. The series has appeared in several manga, and elements of the games have appeared in television shows. The series takes place in a science fiction universe where space pirates are using a dangerous life form known as a metroid to try and conquer the galaxy. The hero of the story is Samus Aran, a bounty hunter with a strange past invovling a race of bird-like aliens called the Chozo.

Personal

I first experienced the series when I played the original Metroid game somewhere around 1990. Not having a Game Boy, I didn't play Metroid II: Return of Samus when it was popular, although I did briefly play a little on a friend's Game Boy. I next played Super Metroid, probably around 1995 when my brother borrowed it from a friend. I got my own copy not too long after and eventually beat it. With a Game Boy emulator, I next played and beat the second game, then, in the mid-2000s I used a Game Boy Advance emulator to play and beat Metroid Fusion and finally Metroid: Zero Mission. I tried playing the first Metroid Prime, but found the game to be very annoying to control and poorly paced, so I haven't played anything else from the Prime series.

While I admire the game designers for making the main character of the Metroid series a women, I don't like how they've objectified Samus through the years. As early as the first game, they have used a women as reward trope, and by the third game, they ret-conned Samus to be blonde, no doubt to increase her sexual appeal.

Samus's suit has undergone some design changes over the years. In the first game, she wears a power suit, and, in the second game she starts with the power suit, but, upon finding the varia, her suit changes to an increased armor level. This suit adds large orbs on her shoulders which I think are kind of stupid looking, and certainly impractical for a fighter since they would impair her vision. Super Metroid continues the large shoulder ball design, and they get even worse in Metroid Prime. The Fusion suit returns her to a less-ridiculous suit.

Works

Games

Title	Release Date	Original Platform	Rank	Beaten
Metroid	1986-08-06	Famicom Disk System	5	Yes
Metroid II: Return of Samus	1991-11-??	Game Boy	4	Yes
Super Metroid	1994-03-19	SNES	1	Yes
Metroid Fusion	2002-11-18	Game Boy Advance	2	Yes
Metroid Prime	2002-11-18	GameCube	6
Metroid: Zero Mission	2004-02-09	Game Boy Advance	3	Yes
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes	2004-11-15	GameCube
Metroid Prime: Hunters - First Hunt	2004-11-21	Nintendo DS
Metroid Prime Pinball	2005-10-24	Nintendo DS
Metroid Prime: Hunters	2006-03-20	Nintendo DS
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption	2007-08-28	Wii
Metroid: Other M	2010-08-31	Wii
Metroid Prime: Federation Force	2016-08-19	Nintendo 3DS
Metroid: Samus Returns	2017-09-15	Nintendo 3DS