Metroid / YMMV - TV Tropes

Anti-Climax Boss:
- Those familiar with future entries will likely disappointed by Ridley, who is pathetically weak and static compared to his more dynamic and aggressive boss fights from Super onwards.
- Mother Brain is a stationary target whose only methods of attack are her turret cannons and rinkas. It's a tricky fight, but if you have enough missiles after you destroy the Zebetites, it's far from insurmountable.
Awesome Music: For an NES game, Kraid's Lair is quite possibly one of the most eerily haunting 8-bit themes of any video game track in history.
Breather Boss: Compared to how hard the rest of the game is, especially the level where he resides, Ridley is a ridiculously easy boss fight. He just hops up and down in place while spitting a bunch of fireballs at you. You can just freeze his fireballs in place or just stick right next to the ledge he's on. He can't attack while his fireballs are frozen, so he's a sitting duck for your Ice Beam, Missiles and Screw Attack. This is in stark contrast to virtually every appearance he makes after this game.
Common Knowledge: It is often claimed that the Samus Is a Girl twist was more elegantly executed in the Japanese version by referring to Samus with gender-neutral pronouns in the manual. Supposedly, the English manual's use of male pronouns is an example of clumsy localization. In reality, however, the Japanese manual goes out of its way to refer to Samus with male pronouns several times — even though, unlike in English, it would have been very easy to avoid using pronouns at all.
Demonic Spiders
- Metroids. They frequently appear in swarms, and can move fast and can grab you from any direction, which makes them very tricky to dodge. And if they latch onto you, they can quickly drain all your health in mere seconds, and the only way to break free is to spam morph ball bombs (and even then, it can leave you open to be grabbed by another swarming Metroid nearby—no Mook Chivalry here—or even worse, it can accidentally knock you right back into the Metroid's maw). Oh, and they're immune to all of your weapons except for freezing them with the Ice Beam and pummeling them with missiles—even the Wave Beam and Screw Attack just knocks them back for a second. And if you don't have the Ice Beam? Well... ^note RUN FOR IT!!
- Reos (the bird-like bugs in Brinstar) and Gerutas (their crab-like counterparts in Norfair) are ruthless enemies to deal with, and they're quite common. Until you get the Long Beam, you're a sitting duck for their fast aerial attacks, and they swoop in an arc (and in a game where you can't shoot at an angle), so it's very hard to get a good shot at them without putting yourself in their line of attack. And even when they do descend, they tend to hover just barely above or below your line of fire, and they take four shots to take down combined with a small hitbox. Jumping over them isn't recommended either, because they have a nasty habit of ascending just when you try to go past them. Sometimes they even descend too low for you to dodge them by using the Morph Ball. What makes them even more irritating is that in some tunnels, they pop up in groups, or alongside lots of other local enemies, just to make your life miserable.
- Just forget about Mother Brain, because Rinkas are the true final boss of Metroid. You know what you're in for as soon as you enter the second room of Tourian and immediately take unavoidable damage from Rinkas that spawn near the doorway, and they only get worse when you reach Mother Brain's chamber. There's always more than one Rinka on screen at a time, they respawn endlessly, and they aim directly at Samus's current position when they spawn, preventing her from standing still. Even with the Varia Suit equipped, they shave off a considerable amount of damage with each hit. Worse, they cause knockback, which is all that it takes to knock Samus off the tiny platform that would let her shoot Mother Brain; if Samus gets knocked into the pit of lava in front of Mother Brain, she is trapped there until she can freeze a Rinka and use it as a platform, but she's just as likely to have another Rinka immediately knock her back into the lava as soon as she's out.
Fair for Its Day: The way Samus reveals herself to be a woman, by wearing either a leotard or a bikini, depending how quickly you complete the game, may come off as crude today. But when the game was first released in 1986, learning that you actually played as a woman who had to fend off Space Pirates and parasitic aliens all by herself was pretty huge. One also has to make allowances for the need to clearly depict Samus as being female, instead of her just looking like a man with long hair, given the game was already struggling with some graphical and storage limitations.
Fan Nickname: Since most of the enemy names were All There in the Manual, lots of nicknames sprung up.
- The most famous of which are "spagetti-os" for the Rinkas in Mother Brain's chamber.
- Energy Cheerios has also become popular, thanks to the Grumps.
- The game itself is often called "NEStroid" to distinguish it from the series itself.
Goddamned Bats: The Geegas in Kraid's lair are a pain in the neck to deal with. They are very fast, they spawn indefinitely in the rooms where they appear in, and they either knock you into pits of acid or constantly harass you by flying at you two or three at a time. It doesn't help much that they can also hurt you while you are going through a door.
Good Bad Bugs:
- Inputting the password "ENGAGE RIDLEY MOTHER FUCKER". The results are hilarious, if suicidal. (Among other things killing Ridley) That said, this is purely a Game-Breaking Bug when playing on the Nintendo 3DS, going so far as to completely brick the console on certain firmware versions should you attempt to do so. So don't. The code can also crash NES emulators if you use it on the re-release version of the game, though it simply exits out of the game with little more than an error message in the Nintendo Switch Online NES library.
- The password system is designed to handle a lot more data than necessary. Typically, only the bosses beaten, power-ups collected, number of missiles, play time, and starting location are needed. However, other memory addresses can be manipulated as long as the password checksum adds up. That's how passwords like the one above alter the functionality of the game.
- The Door Glitch that allows Samus to phase through walls and execute many a Dungeon Bypass.
- Bomb Boost Jumping, a movement bug where Samus lays a bomb, unmorphs, then jumps at the peak of the bomb's boost, allows her to gain an extra square of height on her jump, which enables things like early Ice Beam acquisition or other sequence breaks.
- Enemies could be baited through doors into other rooms. When combined with the Bomb Boost Jump, this allows Samus to skip Ridley and Kraid altogether by luring a Reo into the bridge room and using it as a platform to boost Samus to the door to Tourian.
Hilarious in Hindsight: Because of the way in which the international version's password system is coded, it's possible to enter DRAGON BALL Z Dragon Ball z and ODDISH TAUROS MEWTWO VULPIX as valid passwords— despite the fact that neither Dragon Ball Z nor Pokémon actually existed at the time of the game's release (the Dragon Ball manga had already been running for two years and the anime had just started, but the Dragon Ball Z anime itself wouldn't begin until 1989).
- The manual states that Samus's space suit "can absorb any enemy's power." Unless this is referring to energy and missile refills rather than upgrades, it isn't as accurate as it would be for, say, Mega Man. But many years later, in Metroid Fusion and Dread, Samus actually absorbs abilities from the bosses she defeats.
It Was His Sled: Suffice to say, there's a reason Samus is the Trope Namer for a certain trope.
Memetic Mutation: See here.
Narm: Some of the sound effects in the Famicom Disk System version can be this; most prominently the Screw Attack sounding like an electronic fart, along with Kraid/Ridley sounding like they say "OW!", and Mother Brain making a noise resembling an angry chicken, whenever they get hit.
Nightmare Retardant: In contrast to his fearsome redesign from Super Metroid and on, Ridley's cartoon alien design looks downright goofy in this game, which isn't helped by his rather easy fight. Same with Kraid's impish stature compared to his titanic redesign and, to a lesser extent, Mother Brain's less detailed appearance (if thanks to Graphics-Induced Super-Deformed) compared to later games.
Once Original, Now Common:
- While Metroid kickstarted the Metroidvania genre and gave players in 1986 a massive world to explore (while subverting platformer conventions) compared to other games of the era, many of its groundbreaking aspects are harder to appreciate today as later sequels and Metroidvanias refined and iterated on them. Today, the game shows its age next to its successors with its floaty physics, sluggish pace, Cut and Paste Environments, clunky controls, and lack of features like an in-game map or fast travel. Newcomers to the Metroid series are often recommended to start with Metroid: Zero Mission instead.
- Female video game protagonists (and characters who weren't just a goal to be won) were rare in the 1980s, making the reveal of Samus's gender a shocker for the time. In the decades since Metroid's release, many games have had women as lead protagonists or major supporting players, thus most people today likely won't see what all the fuss was about. And of course, by now everyone knows the twist.
Quicksand Box: The game has no map and gives you no hints and not much of a sense of direction. Without a player's guide, it's frustratingly easy to get lost or simply end up with no idea where to go next.
Remade and Improved: Metroid is a complete and total groundbreaker in the history of video games. With its emphasis on exploration, and its famous revelation, it helped create and name the Metroidvania genre of gaming. However, its remake Metroid: Zero Mission is seen as superior in every way, fixing dated level design, including a map, and generally bringing a game made in the early days of gaming up to more modern standards. Many fans now recommend skipping the original entirely and playing Zero Mission instead.
Scrappy Mechanic:
- No matter how many energy tanks you collect, Samus will always start with exactly 30 health when loading a password. To avoid Fake Difficulty and getting killed within seconds of walking in a room with tougher enemies, players must give in to Fake Longevity by farming weaker enemies for health (which takes even longer after getting your first missile expansion, since enemies will often drop missiles instead of health regardless of how many missiles you're currently carrying).
- The in-game environments all look very similar to each other due to the NES's limitations, and there is no in-game map, making it very easy to get disoriented and forget where you've already been.
- The fact that unlike in later games, the Ice and Wave Beams don't stack; forcing you to choose one of them only and go to their respective Chozo Statues — which, for reference, are very far apart — if you ever want to change them. On the one hand, the Wave Beam goes through walls and alleviates the issue of enemies that are too high or precarious to reliably hit with the Ice Beam, but does diddly squat to Metroids. However, despite being much more cumbersome to use due to its Denial of Diagonal Attack, the Ice Beam is required not only for making platforms to get to new places and items, but are also required to kill the aforementioned Metroids. Later games — and indeed, this game's own GBA remake — would let you have the advantages of both beam types simultaneously, but here? No such luck.
Self-Imposed Challenge: Beating the entire game with only the bare minimum of power-ups; the Morph Ball, the Morph Ball Bombs, no Energy Tanks, and only collecting one Missile Expansion; not counting the extra Missiles you automatically get from beating Kraid and Ridley. It's possible, but it makes an already-challenging game downright nightmarish to get through, since Samus can only take a couple of hits before being reduced to atoms. It also makes Tourian absolutely murderous to deal with, since you need absolutely perfect timing and reflexes to evade the Metroids. One can take this challenge even further by choosing Ice Beam instead of Bombs; this makes Tourian even worse, since it leaves the player with no way to free themselves from a Metroid if it latches on.
Suspiciously Similar Song:
- The music playing in Ridley's Lair and Tourian sounds like the Castle music from Super Mario Bros..
- The Tourian/miniboss theme is lifted straight from "The Gnome" movement of Modest Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition".
That One Boss: If Ridley and Mother Brain are too easy for you, then Kraid will more than make up for it. His attack pattern is merciless; he is constantly shooting spikes from both the front of his body and his back, with only a brief pause every three volleys of attacks. Unless you have superhuman reflexes and/or patience, you will take a lot of damage during the fight. It only takes 25 Missiles to kill him, but Kraid's horns and stomach spikes can easily block your shots and Missiles^note and he can quickly turn around if you get behind him; leaving precious little room for you to attack him between his own volleys. Oh, and if you die while fighting him? Kraid can switch to a second attack pattern the next round, which can catch a new player off-guard.
That One Level: Lower Norfair / Ridley's Lair. It has some of the nastiest enemies in the game and is guaranteed to grind any newbie who dares set foot in it without the Varia Suit and/or Screw Attack into dust. Thankfully, Ridley himself is ridiculously easy compared to his level, but just getting to him is another matter entirely.

YMMV / Metroid

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