Maridia part 2
The big middle sections of Maridia has some wall-jumpable skips... actually feels like these paths were intended by the developers...
holy shit that epic discovery... while wall jumping up some part (I'm a lot better at that now btw), I saw a crab enemy walk into an invisible morphball sized path that I wouldn't have even thought to look with the xray scope otherwise... they totally placed that enemy there on purpose. found super missile upgrade.
huh... there's a one-way shortcut back to Brinstar (the east Crateria exit) at an unmapped path at the northwest...
I'm actually really impressed with the design of this place... it just hits so many if my "amazing level design" things. The hidden paths are well hidden, but aren't unreasonable to find at all with all of the tools given to you at the point in the game that the developers expect you to be at...
holy shit I didn't remember this at all... the middle section of Maridia has a kind of hard to get to upper path, after a very hard grappling section... it's this maze of breakable/unbreakable blocks with metroids trapped inside them... seems like you have to deal with fighting the metroids in order to get through the maze and can't just avoid freeing them.
I'm still missing a lot of blue in Maridia, but I just ended up on this path to the boss and decided to keep going and save that for later... got to a worm boss that comes out of one of the holes and flies around.. it's really hard to hit but easy to dodge.. had to use all my missiles on it. then there's this really big long room that expects you to grapple through all of it but you can actually wall jump through most of it a lot more easily.
fell through a fake spikey floor to get to the unmapped path leading to the boss... this is so zelda 1 I love it
holy fuck... that dragon boss took me SO many tries to beat... I think I got the hang of his pattern, but even then it's so hard to dodge I just can't do it consistently enough...
finally after coming back to the save point fully charged with 125 missiles and 25 super missiles, I managed to barely beat him at my last energy bar with just 20 points of health left... for a while I was like... do I need to do something different to kill him or what? but no, just pummel him with missiles while hoping you can avoid most of his swoop attacks and avoid getting caught in his grey balls he throws out... like this alone would be hard already without the turrets on the walls constantly shooting at you... this is the kind of difficulty I want the Metroid series to go back to...
got the space jump.
looks like that boss path was the right way to go after all... it's a dead end and now a bunch of the grey doors you couldn't access before are now accessable. The uppermost blue path is one of those grey doors... you need the space jump to even get there. and here there's a room where it turns grey behind you, and there's a bunch of pink versions of those ant alien enemies.. these ones I can't seem to kill with any of my weapons.. I encountered them earlier in Maridia as well.. definitely late game enemies now...
got the plasma beam in this room, and now I CAN take down these pink enemies easily. there's a little organic tunnel before that room with a bunch of Metroid eggs? that you need to kill.. and you can really see the difference in how easier it is to kill enemies with the plasma beam here.
went back through Maridia from the bottom and went to all of the other side paths I could've gone on my way to the boss the first time... that all of these areas are way to easy now with the space jump + plasma beam. there's a room with a turtle and a bunch of baby turtles, they are "friendlies" that can hurt you.. the big turtle spins around in its shell to fly up really high and acts as a platform so you can get to a single timed grapple block with an energy tank ontop.. pointlessly easy with space jump... some big empty cave room near the upper middle with only weak enemies and nothing else.. except a hidden path that leads to a long wrap dead end path eventually leading to a missile and super missile... a few more missile upgrades...
and it looks like I'm 100% done with Maridia from what I can tell. I took the unmapped shortcut back to Northeast Brinstar... and other than one blue part still left to do in southwest Brinstar, there's nothing else to do except go check out Norfair again... There's no blue left in Norfair so it's really hard to know where to start looking... nothing bolded here so... I guess I'll just go for that one unfinished unmapped room at the southeast... Kraid's lair...
Norfair part 3 - Ridley's Lair
I love the atmosphere here... The music for the Kraid's Lair part of Norfair is the M1 Norfair music... the layout and atmosphere of this place is similar to Norfair in M1 but different... it acknowledges all of the overpowered items you've gotten by this point in the game and has tougher enemies that screw up your space jump... these yellow variants of the ant aliens take a charged plasma shot to kill them...
A Chozo statue lowered the acid for me... then I fought another Chozo statue boss, it seems tougher... it dodges my missiles now.. but it can't stand up to charged plasma shots. Got the screw attack after that easy miniboss... now all of a sudden most of these tougher Norfair 2 enemies are nothing.
welp... I'm officially stuck... Keep in mind this whole Norfair 2 area is unmapped... so it's basically like drawing your own map in M1 except the game draws it for you... still can't seem to find the way to the boss room.. got a bunch of new items (including the screw attack after the Chozo boss), and was smashing through all kinds of walls/ceilings to find paths, only to end up going in a complete loop back to the elevator...
reset back to my last save since I went back too far and am now back in Norfair 1... I'm now at 5:49
I went to check out this one area off to the right of Norfair 2 that looks like it goes up and exits back to Norfair 1 or something... then I found that one notorious hidden wall that the Xray visor doesn't see through.
It's just a really creepy dark cave area where the rock structures look like a monster... found my 10th energy tank from space jumping around..
Didn't bother going the rest of the way up that path just yet, because it doesn't look like it leads to Ridley at all... I retraced my steps a bit and found a door that I overlooked (couldn't tell where it was based on the map), that leads to the path to Ridley...
The atmosphere just gets better and better... like it doesn't repeat at all like M1 does. All these super powerful enemies are pretty easy with the screw attack... but then I have to fight some grey ant alien guys... and they are only vulnerable when they are yellow.
Finally I get to Ridley... I kind of get his pattern but it's still really hard to dodge while getting some hits in... it's in a vertical room that really takes advantage of the fact that you have space jump/screw attack and ridley can fly... your screw attack does nothing on it, and you can mostly only hit it while it's high up in the air and not swooping down at you with its tail/claws, but even up there it can still attack you with fireballs and get a good combo on you if you happen to lose your screw attack at the wrong time.
well shit. I got game over twice so far... 2nd try I had a full 10 energy tanks, 150 missiles, and 40 super missiles... still couldn't beat him... he started getting REALLY hard once he became very red and I couldn't dodge his attacks anymore, literally just hits me instantly whenever I come out of space jump... and I actually used all my super missiles and got down to my last few missiles too. I wonder if well aimed charged plasma shots would be better than rapid-fired missiles, especially since with only getting one shot in instead of several, you'd have more time to focus on dodging. I really love this difficulty though and I can tell that the failure is entirely my fault.
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