Brinstar part 3
okay so I'm in norfair... everything is pinked out and I'm pretty sure there's nothing left to explore her for now... so back through the only elevator out of Norfair, leading back to Brinstar...
found the X-Ray scope at that one blue sidepath in Brinstar with the fireflies lighting up a dark room... spent a while trying to get across here by just using frozen enemies as platforms earlier... but now I can easily get across with the grapple beam... found the x-ray visor, which you needed to use right away to find the path leading out of here...
and yeah a lot of other stuff to get in Brinstar too, including a side path near that one missile in a pinked-out area that I needed the grapple beam for... it's entirely unmapped... since this game doesn't show any indication of doors in the map's room outlines either, this path was really well hidden... wouldn't have found it without the x-ray visor. it lead to a power bomb expansion.
and that path below where I think you got the first power bomb... a watery hallway that you need the gravity suit to get through.
okay so I ended up going to the 3rd/eastern most crateria elevator... found a small ball path to the right of the elevator with xray... it just leads to a dead end with a super missile door I can't get passed... who knows... maybe i'll be coming back that way later on?
finally at east crateria... I recognize this place for sure... no point in exploring the water at the bottom at this point probably... but I do anyway... lol the structures down here look like ladders but you can't climb them... found a morph ball path with the xray, had to jump-ball to get to... a lot of high up stuff I can't get to either... did some umihara kawase swinging off a flying beetle, and saw a grey door high up that I'll probably exit out of at some point...
Wrecked Ship
whoa this place has that same eerie atmosphere as the beginning of the game... the save point doesn't even work... and a ghost monster appears in front of it if you wait there...
a lot of the doors here are grey... and ghosts just show up infinitely at a slow rate, no matter where you go...
omg this place... ALL of the ways you can go are hidden in obscure breakable walls that would've taken me like an hour to find without the xray visor... and so far most of them lead to dead ends that seem like they'd continue further if I got the power back on... found an unpowered map console...
what the hell... this phantom boss is more forgiving than I thought... I couldn't figure out the right timing to kill his super fast fire wave attack, and got down to like my 2nd last energy tank, and he left some health for me just then and also healed me more when I jumped into him to get the health that was behind him?
died here and lost all my progress since brinstar... welp...
guess this time i'll backtrack after exploring the wrecked ship and before the boss... I didn't lose that much... 2nd attempt I still couldn't figure out the pattern for that fast attack, but managed to beat him through brute forcing and throwing super missiles at him every chance I get... 15 was enough that I could waste some and still make it...
now even though the power is back on and I got the map... there's still a lot of unmapped paths in this place I gotta find... dunno where to start, so I just started exploring blindly not knowing which paths would be optional and which paths would be progress...
ended up back in east crateria at the upper level... managed to get across doing some platforming over small floating platforms and horizontal flying platform enemies... knowing how easy it is to fall here and have to go all the way back around makes this really intense... I don't even know what there is up here, other than this single dot that's just in a blind blue spot between this upper level and the lower level... oh wait, there's ground here all along lmao
got inside that upper east crateria room... it leads back into Wrecked Ship, and at a place where you can find the gravity suit.
also wtf there's another lower (middle) wrecked ship door from east crateria and it just seems to lead to an empty hallway within Wrecked Ship that serves no purpose?
found the east Wrecked Ship exit that leads back out to the furthest eastern section of Crateria... and here there's an elevator leading to Maridia...
this area is more flooded than the other east crateria section... you can't even get up across the platforms here if you don't have the gravity suit yet... you can really tell you're getting closer to the flooded base, Maridia now...
Wrecked Ship has made me paranoid and now I'm x-raying literally every surface... I should just go back to my usual strategy of only investigating suspicious dead ends/corners.
Maridia part 1
wow this place is fucking huge... that's right I did come here before and managed to get the map at the bottom left... now I'm in from the top right Crateria elevator... up here it's just a sandy, beachy stage, but then it opens up and most of its sections are submerged... there's a morph ball maze here that is made much easier with the xray visor, but still kinda tough...
couldn't go anywhere from this big open spot that is half-submerged and the other half too high to get up to without the screw attack... except for a green door to the right that leads you down a long shaft, where you pass right through another section that you haven't been to yet, and I saw a glimpse of what might've been a metroid?
now I'm back at the bottom of Maridia... managed to make it up a really hard wall jumping section to get to an unmapped part at the lower right... seriously there's even flying enemies that ambush you at the top, make you fall and have to redo the 5 consecutive wall jumps again.. I managed to take some of them out with missiles and made it up after like 20 more attemps... there's a really scary part after that where you're falling down a shaft where most of the platforms are one-way insta-break ones, and it seems like it's really easy to fall back down below the wall jump area and have to redo all that again... but I made it to a right side door...
... and getting up that hugely difficult wall jumping section eventually leads to... the spring ball! fuck yeah
btw this underwater quicksand is REALLY good at being hard to jump out off. it reminds me a lot of Metroid 1... but it's only in these few rooms I think.
right... so now the bottom half of Maridia is fully re-explored.. the remaining blue sections of Maridia are still pretty huge... gonna stop here for now, after retracing my steps in Norfair and Brinstar, going through all of Wrecked Ship and like a 3rd (probably not even, considering there's probably still unmapped places I haven't been to ontop of the remaining blue... next session will be the 2nd half of Maridia, followed by probably a quick sweep up of Brinstar, Norfair, and Crateria before finishing the game... not sure how close I'll get to 100% since this is a guideless run and it's very likely I'll miss some obscure missile hidden in the ground or something.
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