Two Metroid 2s, two arguments

Metroid II, Nintendo, 1991, is remembered as the awkward one: a Game Boy sequel in which Samus exterminates the Metroids on SR388. The plot fallout runs through Super Metroid and Fusion. The play is a counter, a number of creatures left, and a planet that gets quieter as you succeed. That counter is the game.

AM2R, the fan remake finished in 2016, and Samus Returns, MercurySteam and Nintendo in 2017, both rebuild that hunt and they do not rebuild the same game. One of them is loyal to the isolation and the dwindling count. The other modernises the combat until the extermination can feel like a series of bosses. A remake has to say which sensation it is protecting. These two said different things, which is why both can exist and neither makes the other pointless.

Metroid 2 matters to the series because of what happens in it: Samus is sent to SR388 to exterminate the Metroids, and the fallout from that mission runs through Super Metroid, Metroid Fusion, and everything after.

Going back to it is another story. The Game Boy screen shows almost nothing at once, the art is black and white, and the hardware caps what Samus can do. The map is not the tangled, interlocking maze the series is known for either. Progress comes in blocks. Kill a quota of Metroids, watch the hazardous liquid drop, climb down into the next region, and mostly never come back.

For a handheld, that was probably sensible. You could clear one area in a sitting, switch the machine off, and pick it up later without needing to relearn a labyrinth. It also leaves Metroid 2 feeling unlike the series it helped invent.

So AM2R and Metroid: Samus Returns inherit a genuinely hard job. Neither is just rebuilding an old game. Each has to sort the original into three piles: what is a flaw, what is the game's identity, and what started as a hardware limit but ended up doing something no designer would have planned.

Both remakes start in the same place, with movement. Samus becomes much more agile than the Game Boy ever allowed her to be. Both games import the ledge grab from Metroid Fusion. Both hand the morph ball a button of its own.

Samus Returns pushes hardest on fighting. It introduces a melee counter, throws out fixed diagonal aiming in favor of full 360-degree free aim, and turns second-to-second combat into something busier and more aggressive.

The effect is a different relationship between the player and the planet. The original Samus is stiff and hemmed in. The remade Samus, and the Samus Returns version above all, is precise, confident, and expressive.

All of that feels good in the hand. It also opens the question every remake eventually has to answer: is this an improvement to the original, or a change to how the whole game feels?

The original cycles through a short list of Metroid forms many times over, leaning on the shape of each arena to keep the fights from blurring together. Both remakes set out to give those encounters more substance.

AM2R layers in fresh attack patterns, tighter weak points, and extra moves as you get deeper. Samus Returns does the same kind of work but more lavishly, building fights around conventional boss patterns you are meant to study and beat.

Each game also brings in bosses that are not Metroids at all. AM2R stages a Torizo, a guardian on a door, and a bullet-hell weapons trainer. Samus Returns contributes a punishing mining robot.

Judged as action design, all of this is correct. Fighting the same creature with the same behavior a dozen times reads as padding to a modern player. But every fight that becomes more legibly a boss fight also nudges the game away from anxious pest control and toward mastering set pieces.

Both remakes restock Samus with the series' greatest hits. The Charge Shot, Super Bomb, Super Missile, and Gravity Suit turn up in each. AM2R throws in the Speed Booster and everything shinesparking makes possible. Samus Returns adds the Grapple Beam plus four Aeion powers running off their own meter: one to attack, one to defend, one to slow time, and one to reveal the map.

Samus Returns in particular has almost no patience for leaving you lost. A Metroid indicator pulses harder as you close in. The map is generous. Teleporters shuffle you around inside a region. The scan-style reveal turns hidden rooms and buried secrets into marked destinations.

Taken together, these tools translate Metroid 2 into the vocabulary of the later games. You move more freely, you know more, and you have more answers to whatever is in front of you.

Smoother, certainly. But less like pushing into somewhere alien with only a partial picture of it.

The overall geography survives in both remakes. Stand in a region from the Game Boy version and you will usually recognize its silhouette. What separates the two remakes is the detail poured into that silhouette.

AM2R mostly leaves the existing layout intact, item placements and room shapes included, and builds outward from it: extra areas, a section spent controlling a robot, a tense escape from a weapons lab.

Samus Returns bolts on fewer whole new chunks but rewrites the rooms themselves, hard. Obstacles, routes, locks, and clutter accumulate until plenty of locations no longer look like their originals at all.

Both remakes plant more ability gates inside each region, which makes the game behave more like the rest of the series. Samus Returns is the stricter of the two, with barriers demanding a particular item or even a particular beam. AM2R is happier to let you walk past an item or break the sequence.

The original's skeleton survives in both games. Samus still clears a quota of Metroids to open the route down. What both remakes add is a real motive to climb back through territory you already cleared.

Samus Returns scatters teleport stations across SR388. AM2R introduces a distribution center in the back half, with pipes that fire you into earlier regions. Either way, a new ability turns an old dead end into a reachable item.

That loop is one of the reliable pleasures of the series. Spot an obstacle, file it away, earn the tool, come back, collect. It is satisfying and easy to read.

The absence of that loop is part of what gave the original its mood, though. Metroid 2 plays as a one-way descent into the Metroids' home, not as a puzzle box you tour efficiently.

Metroid 2 specifies remarkably little. The liquid barring your way is never named and never colored. AM2R decides it is lava. Samus Returns decides it is purple acid.

The two games read the backgrounds differently as well. AM2R mines the original tilework for hints and grows fiction out of them. Pipes become a water treatment plant. A region stuffed with beam pickups becomes a weapons testing facility. From those seeds it assembles a firmer account of the Chozo civilization that shaped the planet.

Samus Returns commits to less. Its environments tend to read as another variation on collapsing ruins: far richer than the Game Boy could manage, but not always saying more.

Reading the old pixels and deciding what they implied is unavoidable work for a remake. The danger is the gap between an interpretation that explains the world and one that merely dresses it.

Recovery is a small system with a large effect on how a game feels. Metroid 2 keeps health and ammo stations apart from save points. Finish a bad Metroid fight and you are left limping across the map on scraps, hoping to reach a save before something finishes the job.

AM2R simplifies that: save stations top up health and ammo, and dead Metroids leave behind generous pickups. The game gets easier, but a little of the post-fight nerves survive.

Samus Returns keeps recharge and save stations separate, then undercuts the distinction with invisible checkpoints on both sides of every boss fight, plus pickups from dead Metroids. The anxious walk home disappears.

As a convenience, that is kinder. As an experience, it deletes something specific: the drained retreat after surviving a dangerous animal, hoping nothing else finds you first.

Cataloging the changes is the easy half: movement, bosses, upgrades, maps, backtracking, recovery, visual detail. The hard half is asking what those changes do to the player.

Metroid 2 feels dark, intrusive, and uncomfortable. Where most Metroid games play like a large puzzle waiting to be solved, this one plays like breaking into somewhere you were not invited and going deeper into a nest.

The cramped screen works like a flashlight beam in a black room. Enormous caverns are impossible to take in through that keyhole, which makes Samus feel tiny. Tunnels press in. The steady one-way descent leaves you conscious of how far you are from the ship and how close you are to the lair.

Some of that came out of hardware constraints rather than intent, but the result is still the result. Strip out the confinement, the isolation, and the dread, and a remake can keep every corridor while losing the game.

Played closely, Metroid 2 behaves like a horror game about an unmapped planet. Several deliberate choices hold that reading up.

Metroid husks double as navigation and as warning: find one and a fight is close. They also build dread. Once you have learned that a husk means a Metroid is coming, the game inverts the lesson, ambushing you in an open corridor and only showing you the husk afterward.

Late in the descent it breaks its larger promise too. For hours, killing Metroids drops the liquid and opens the way down. Then the liquid rises instead, and Samus has to turn around and hunt a new kind of Metroid.

Those reversals are what keep SR388 feeling hostile instead of tidy. You learn the system, and the planet declines to honor it.

More on this: Metroid Dread steers you and calls it freedom

The soundtrack makes the intent unusually clear. The main cave shaft carries a hopeful, propulsive theme tying you back to the ship. Go down into the lairs and it gives way to quiet, dissonant, spooky writing, odd electronic noise, stretches of silence, and Samus's footsteps.

Plenty of retro games, Game Boy titles very much included, chase a hummable tune. Metroid 2 is willing to be thin and unpleasant instead. That restraint is what sells the sense of descending somewhere you should not be.

Samus Returns usually respects this, with faithful remixes, though it sometimes borrows tracks from elsewhere in the series. AM2R is less consistent, trading some of the eerie texture for upbeat Prime-flavored music.

Music in a remake is not decoration. When the original used sound to keep you uneasy, a more energetic replacement quietly rewrites the scene it plays under.

Metroid 2 builds dread through its environment as well. The deeper Samus goes, the scarcer ordinary creatures become. The upper caves teem with alien life. The lower reaches are close to bare. In the stretch before the Queen Metroid, regular enemies are gone entirely.

The emptiness can be read more than one way. Perhaps nothing else can survive at this depth. Perhaps the Metroids ate everything and installed themselves at the top of the food chain.

Then you find a wrecked Chozo statue deep inside the lair. Every earlier statue sits protected behind blast doors. This one is in pieces, its head off its body, the Ice Beam shoved aside. No dialogue is needed to get the point across.

AM2R holds on to most of this. Its lower regions are emptied out and the broken statue survives, though the Ice Beam has moved earlier in the progression. Samus Returns keeps less. The final statue is missing or well hidden, and the approach to the lair is still packed with standard enemies in a loud gauntlet.

Once the last boss falls, Metroid 2 does something you do not expect: it stops. Samus meets a baby Metroid that imprints on her as its mother, and rather than finishing the extermination she spares it and leaves the planet with it.

A game that spent hours making you alone hands you a companion for the walk out. The baby clears obstacles ahead of you, and the music turns calm, unfamiliar, and reflective. No enemies, no puzzles, just room to think about what you did.

That closing stretch recasts everything before it. Samus was dispatched to wipe out a species that other people would later weaponize, and Metroid Fusion goes on to suggest the extinction wrecked the ecosystem and cleared space for something worse. The mission is supposed to sit badly.

One well-known defense of Metroid 2 argues, roughly, that a game built on killing ought to be willing to make the player uneasy about it. Metroid 2 manages that without a line of dialogue.

Samus Returns is much more relaxed about killing. Its whole emphasis is combat: 360-degree aiming, boss fights in phases, Aeion powers, the melee counter, and cinematic flourishes where Samus finishes a Metroid with style.

The escape sequence shows what that costs. Rather than protecting the quiet exit alongside the baby Metroid, Samus Returns fills it with more fighting and one more boss. The reflective score is buried under the action, and a scene about doubt becomes another test of skill.

The counter introduces a strange thematic wrinkle as well. The premise is that you have traveled to an alien homeworld to erase a species, yet the headline mechanic reframes most kills as self-defense against something that swung first. Great in the moment, but it takes the edge off the discomfort.

The complaint is not that Samus Returns is a weak action game. It is that some of its best modern ideas pull against the thing that made Metroid 2 its own.

None of this makes the original untouchable. Metroid 2 has genuine problems and a remake ought to solve them. The claim is narrower: a good remake uses modern craft to deliver the original intent more powerfully, rather than preserving the visible content and landing somewhere else emotionally.

What is the value of the same Metroids if you no longer dread running into one in a dark corridor? What is the value of the same floor plan if you never feel small, lost, or intrusive walking it?

Both remakes drag Metroid 2 toward the series' comfort zone. AM2R lands near Zero Mission and Super Metroid. Samus Returns blends classic structure with a modern, combat-forward style. Both are enjoyable on their own terms.

But it is worth entertaining the idea that Metroid 2 wanted a different mechanical toolkit because it wanted a different result. Remade as a familiar, empowering, comfortable adventure, the series' darkest chapter stops being dark.

AM2R is a remarkable piece of fan work and a good time to play. Samus Returns has plenty going for it too. The trouble is not that either game is worthless.

The trouble is that a remake tends to become the way everyone plays the old game. Once that happens, an original that was already awkward and already misread gets even easier to write off.

That is what makes this kind of design so delicate. A remake is not only new controls, new art, new boss patterns, and a new map. It is a decision about what future players will believe the old game was for.

With Metroid 2, the thing worth protecting is not any particular hallway or limitation. It is the feeling of climbing down into an alien nest on an errand that should never feel heroic. Lose that and you have repaired the game and flattened it in the same pass.

In the Flockbay app, describe a hunt with a visible count of creatures left and a map that opens as the count falls. Play it. Then ask for the same hunt with a parry and a melee counter. If the second version is more exciting and less like a hunt, you have made the MercurySteam choice. Know which one you meant.

An AI metroidvania maker and a metroidvania template are the right size. One region, not a planet.