I’m writing this one fresh off the heels of completing the game, and since it’s a random Friday and I have things to do, I’m gonna try to keep it brief!
First off, I think I finished this game inside of a week, which is exactly what I was hoping would happen. I was feeling a bit down recently because I looked at my list of games that I need to play/finish in comparison to what I actually played/finished this year and I didn’t like what I saw. I kept acquiring games, but I felt like I wasn’t making a ton of headway in any of them. In some cases, I hadn’t even played them for various reasons: time, not having completed the games in the series leading up to them, and in one particularly disappointing case, simple lack of interest. Basically, I felt like I needed a win. I wanted to sneak at least one more game in under the wire, and that’s where Zero Mission comes in.
After finishing Metroid Prime Remastered a few weeks ago, I’ve been in the Morph Ball mood, so that coupled with knowing that Zero Mission was a pretty short game was what drew me to it in the first place. That, and since I have a physical cartridge, there’s minimal kerfuffle involved. Suuurreeee, it’s on Nintendo Switch Online, but the whole idea is to finish games in my backlog. As a physical media freak, playing games on NSO doesn’t carry quite the same weight for me. Besides, I could play on my Analogue Pocket and my Gameboy Player, so it was kind of a build-your-own-NSO situation just with more steps.
This cartridge actually kind of belongs to my friend Ewan who now lives on the other side of the country. I’d love to actually pay him for these GBA games I snagged from him at some point, but Ewan is the type of person who would tell me to go fuck myself if I tried to pay him, because that’s what friends do. Shoutouts to Ewan <3
Early on in the process, I resigned myself to using a walkthrough when needed to just because I simply don’t have as much time to putz around in games as I wish I did, and as I learned, this game would allow for a LOT of putzing if you give it the room to do so. At no point did it feel truly inscrutable, but there were definitely a few occasions where I’m not sure how long it would’ve taken me to actually figure out my next route forward. If I was a ten-year-old playing in the back of the car on a road trip, sounds fun! As an adult with limited time for games, sounds intimidating.
Anyway, logistics aside, this game is remarkable. The GBA graphics hold up very well (both on the Pocket and surprisingly enough, the Gameboy Player on an 40“ LCD screen), and the gameplay is SO smooth. I cannot think of a single other non-Metroid GBA game in which I felt that the world was actually a joy to traverse. I think it really picks up once you get the high jump power-up. At that point, it really feels like the world is your oyster. There are so many other games I’ve played where it feels like a chore to go from one part of the map to another, and honestly, when the game was sending me from Crateria down to Ridley or whatever other hellhole awaited me on Zebes for the first time, my initial reaction was a groan. But as I progressed through the game, it felt like it became almost frictionless to travel between areas. The groans stopped! The world feels both expansive and diverse while also being approachable and easy to digest, meaning that even with my relatively short playtime, I was starting to memorize the map and routes between areas by the end of the game. If you’ll allow me to be a little corny, it felt like I was powering up alongside Samus as the game progressed!
The soundtrack is memorable but a bit sparse in places, which I guess is to be expected from a Gameboy Advance game. One thing that does stand out to me is just how many themes from the classic Metroid series I’m familiar with through things like Smash Bros. and general osmosis despite having played almost no classic Metroid aside from this and Fusion, if that even counts. But I don’t mean to diss the soundtrack, of course. It’s very moody and brooding, which is just what I’d want from a Metroid game. I think it contrasts very nicely with the Metroid Prime soundtrack, which has its moments of brooding, but frequently carries a feeling of wonder and exploration through its music. The music in Zero Mission seems to say “it’s dark. you keep having to go into different holes and caves. everything wants to kill you.” and it’s SO fitting. And without spoiling the rest of my review, the soundtrack REALLY kickede in near the very end of the game and filled me with a sense of power and invulnerability that I haven’t felt in a game in a very long time. Without cheat codes, that is.
This ties a bit into world traversal, but I found the game play to be basically addictive. At all times, I wanted to be playing Zero Mission. I had to find the next area or grab the next power-up. Despite the constant upgrades, I never truly felt safe safe, despite playing on easy mode. If you’re not paying attention, you’ll get burned for running into an area without taking a second to gather your surroundings on at least a few occasions. And burn I did! Sometimes literally! On easy mode, the bosses were a bit easy… until they weren’t. Kraid and Ridley fell pretty handily and I thought “oh, well playing on easy should be more about the exploration anyway!” And then I stumbled into the Mother Brain fight and felt like God’s favorite idiot because my god, I was not prepared. That fight is chaotic as hell. If there’s a trick to beating it without just tanking a ton of damage, I never found it. Thankfully I was pretty well kitted out by that point, so tank I did.
Following that, you get to what ended up being my favorite part of the game, which was the stealth section as Zero Suit Samus! I had no idea this was here. And I’m certainly no expert on Metroid, but I get the feeling that this didn’t exist in the original game. Either way, it rips. A+ addition. Samus feels so powerful at the end of the game and you think nothing can touch you, so because this is a Metroid game, they’re gonna take away all of your stuff! The genuine fear I felt running from the Space Pirates in their mothership with nothing but the weak security blaster contrasted so strongly with how I’d felt not 15 minutes of in-game time before. But then… oh boy, and then… you get your fully powered up Power Suit. Holy shit. Running through that giant ship cutting through the Space Pirates like butter, I learned the true reason that the Space Pirates call Samus “The Hunter.” They didn’t stand a chance. Absolutely pathetic against the might of my Plasma Beam and Power Bombs. Mecha Ridley gave me a little trouble, but not enough to even be worth discussing. And as I mentioned earlier, a bombastic reprise of the Metroid theme kicks in when you regain your suit and you get goosebumps all over your body because you realize that in that moment, we are SO back.
I think my final completion time was 3:48. Not too bad for a game that is supposedly about four and a half hours long according to How Long To Beat. However, my item collection percentage was a paltry 43%, which I find a bit embarrassing. I thought I was doing pretty well, and when I completed Prime, I ended up having like a 75% collection rate or something, so I figured I was just a phenom. But nope, gotta go back and play Zero Mission again sometime and do better! It isn’t that novel for a game to show you your completion time after you beat it, but that coupled with the item collection percentage tells me that this game is short because it WANTS you to go back and play it again. It rewards higher collection percentages with different cutscenes and info revealed to the player, so I think that all tracks. I also thought my completion time was a little lower than I would’ve expected, but I think that’s a function of the walkthroughs I used. There were a few places where I missed a short cutscene or event that showed me that a new path had opened, and there isn’t really any way of getting that info again without reloading a save. And I frequently didn’t even know that I’d missed anything! If I wasn’t using walkthroughs, I could’ve wandered around for an hour or more each time checking every single surface in every single room for a blessed block that I could bomb and find a secret way forward.
I find that these reviews I’ve been writing have generally been very positive, but I think that’s mostly a function of:
- I’ve recently realized that I’m more willing to put down a game I don’t like and remove it from my proper “backlog,” so I’m most likely to write reviews for games that I liked enough to play through to the end
- I’m negative enough in my day-to-day life so I don’t need that energy coming into something that brings me joy
- I’m writing these for me an me alone, so if you don’t like them, you can screw attack off somewhere else! :D
That said, Metroid Zero Mission absolutely rocks. If I didn’t have such a large backlog and other gaming plans, I’d revisit it very soon! But I think I’ll have to wait a while because I’m needed elsewhere. Beating this only inflamed my Metroid obsession, so maybe the next stop on my hype train is Samus Returns! How Long To Beat says that’s about 11 hours, so I could probably knock it out before the end of the year. But I also ended up getting Prime Hack set up and running on my Steam Deck, so maybe it’s time to continue with my journey through the Prime series. If this experience has taught me anything, it’s that maybe I should try to finish more games throughout the year so I don’t beat myself up in December again! But it’s all for fun anyway, so what am I getting all worked up about?
Also, I think I’m going to stop saying “I’m gonna keep it brief!” at the beginning of these. I’m incapable of being brief. Sigh. Thanks for reading <3