Zero Mission’s A Metroidvania Masterclass

Maybe the best paced metroidvania? Hands out power ups at a perfect clip. And just one of the best feeling video games to control. Goes a long way in just feeling satisfying to run around and shoot. Makes Metroid 1 playable in 2023!

Fun puzzles in each room, big difference from Castlevania where you walk down a hallway and stab zombies to level up. I love the vibes of vania, bats and skeletons are my thing!! But after a month of bouncing around really enjoying Symphony, Aria, and Circle (which owns you gotta try it!!) a whole lot, Zero Mission clicked in a way those never did. I think I might be a troid man now.

I love Hollow Knight dearly but I would trade the 5 hours of being lost for a button that just told me what to do. The Dead Space Objective Line gets a lot of flack in some corners but not from me.

Lots of incident, which is weirder when games don’t have stuff going on. Individually crafted rooms instead of long stretches of hallways, story and atmosphere without words. Love it.

Tons of personality and humor here without using text. I love the space pirate who steals the upgrade from you real fast at the very end, and pretty much everything they do during the ending sequence. That one guy tried to jump in front of the ship to stop Samus!! That’s crazy!

The epilogue stage after you blast off planet was a huge surprise, I totally fell for it waiting for credits. I could have been done at that point, but a little bonus area at the end felt like a treat! The stealth stuff there is a little broken but you can mostly run past everything if you have to so its fine. The power trip through the ship when you get your stuff back is so worth it. And the S+ video game thing here of dying sets you back at most a minute if you’ve been saving helps a ton.

I will almost always prefer a fun and light game to an oppressive one. I’m still also a Dark Souls 2 man after all. I can totally see why adding a map that shows you mostly where to go and making things generally easier would rub some people the wrong way. I know people whose best memories of the NES are physically drawing maps of the worlds of Metroid and The Legend of Zelda. That’s never been me. Zooming through this planet blasting dudes and grabbing an upgrade every 20 minutes that my map pointed me towards is pretty much exactly what I’m looking for from this genre. There are higher highs to be found in Hollow Knight, but what if there were no lows? Zero Mission is like a perfect 8 or 9 for two hours with no dips. That owns.

None of the boss fights feel great, mostly just a resource test to make sure you’ve found enough energy tanks.

Kind of feels like a Metroid Greatest Hits. You find all of the big upgrades and fight all of the series bosses and you’re out in an afternoon having understood 75% of the Metroid franchise now. The Gameboy Advance is a miracle.

Final playclock was 2 hours 20 minutes with 66% items found. As always I’ll end this with, “hey i’ll play fusion probably” but man I tried and the opening is just like 5 minutes of cutscenes and a bunch of text lol, who needs that from Metroid? I wanna find missiles!