Current Play Time: 3:55:09
14.7% item completion, 27 Metroids remaining
Area 3
Navigating this place is scary with all these invincible turret enemies everywhere. There's also these shelled slug enemies that I can't destroy, but they don't pose much of a threat.
The top path is blocked by some big plant that I can't destroy yet.
Oh, there we go... a breakable ceiling... got the Beam Burst Aeion ability. It's just a stronger version of the Wave Beam that autofires. This is how I destroy all the various things that I couldn't destroy before, including that big flower, and those turrets.
I still can't destroy the blocks with the big red light on them yet.
Looks like I can take this elevator down to a separate part of Area 3, or I can use the Beam Burst to destroy that grey thing that's in the way and continue right.
I always want to avoid the elevators until I've fully explored everywhere else I can go, so I'll continue right.
Now I'm in a different environment with a bunch of moving machinery in the background. It's like some kind of mining operation...? I'm seeing a lot of these red glowing rocks now.
Continuing right, it transitions into kind of colosseum looking place. These scenery is so diverse, but it makes no sense.
I'm kinda worried about how far into Area 3 I've gone and still haven't found a single item here yet, besides the Beam Burst.
Got the Grapple Beam. It lets me swing on those light blue glowing blocks, and it also destroys the bright red glowing blocks that I saw a lot of earlier. Also this thing has crazy high range compared to the Super Metroid one.
Oh yeah, I passed by an elevator way earlier too... and now I'm at a 2nd elevator... but I haven't even finished exploring this upper section yet.
I decided on going back to that first elevator I passed by early on. This leads to a very LONG vertical cave...
The enemy combinations here are getting kinda nasty. I find myself using lightning armor a lot more here just so I can run past them without having to deal with them. These spikey shelled enemies can pretty much only be killed after melee countering them.
I found a Metroid shell here, but now I don't know where I'm going, I'm just falling down this long cave without fully exploring the sides of it.
Finally got to the bottom, where there's a save point, an Aeion restore thing, and an underwater ledge I can't get to without the Gravity Suit.
One of the side-rooms in this vertical cave lead to a Gamma Metroid fight, just barely survived after using up my Lightning Armor.
After that is a path that you need Beam Burst and Grapple Beam to get through. I'm glad I came here after exploring the upper section to get the Grapple Beam. Also some cool looking unique background scenery around here.
There's so many enemies that can only be destroyed by Beam Burst or melee counter. I'm low on both Aeion energy and health... This is actually amazingly challenging. It's not often I find a 2D Metroid to be this intense.
Phew... found a health recharge and save station.
..WHAT
I just woke up some really scary giant robot thing, with a glowing red eye. I thought it was gonna go into a boss battle, but the robot just walked away within the background scenery...
Now I ended up in another really long vertical shaft... This place has a lot of shiny ore... I guess Area 3 is a mining facility.
In fact it goes down even farther than the previous one... by now there must be at least like 4 or 5 other paths I could've taken earlier back...
A bunch of times throughout this area I've been noticing some worm creatures crawling around through the background, they remind me of that worm boss from Super Metroid. It's hard to capture this small detail in screenshots though.
Got to the bottom of that huge vertical mining shaft... Now there seems to be a bunch of other possible paths to take... I happened to come across a hidden morph ball tunnel, and that lead to the 2nd Gamma Metroid fight of this area...
This one is of the variety that drops ground-electrifying attacks. It's usually easy to avoid, but sometimes it traps me in a corner.
Oh, damn, it escaped into the previous room... and also I explored this room with bombs and found a morph ball tunnel going in the opposite direction... Holy crap this game really knows how to distract you from the main objective.
That actually just lead down to the bottom part of this room, where I found this is actually where that Gamma Metroid escaped to... so I guess there's 3 possible rooms he could end up in, and you just have to chase him around between the 3 rooms until you defeat him. All these rooms are connected by hidden morph ball tunnels that are a bit tricky to find without Scan Pulse.
From the bottom of that vertical shaft, it u-turns up into another vertical shaft going back up... Some more interesting scenery...
Found the 3rd metroid in a big room that connects the 2nd huge vertical shaft with the first one from earlier.
Continued exploring the bottom right vertical sections... got to this underwater puzzle for a missile expansion.
It looked like it might just barely be possible to get it without the Gravity Suit, and I was right. I got it after like 20 attempts, only just barely, by using the touch screen to quick-morph into a ball in midair, spider up the rest of the wall, and then spring jump up to it before the missile block respawns.
One of the paths I missed up at the top of this bottom section of Area 3... it's one of those crumble block bridges, like in Super Metroid... I have no idea how to get passed this right now.
Found a couple more Metroids in this section... one of is in a lava room where you have to spider ball across the underside, almost dipping into the lava. Fortunately, after dying to this metroid, it respaws you at a place where you don't need to do this slow spider ball section over again.
Now I have 5 of the 10 Metroids in Area 4... I'm pretty sure I've explored everywhere I can go now in this first lower section of Area 3... Now to finally go back up to where I was and take that 2nd elevator down.
Oh, but then before even going down that 2nd elevator, there's another path a bit past that, it goes down into ANOTHER long vertical section.
It goes in a U turn down and goes back up... there's a lot of grappling required to get up through this area.
This leads to a big 3-room Gamma Metroid fight where you have to chase him between rooms a few times before you can kill it.
Also I found some blocks that looks like they probably need Screw Attack + Space Jump to destroy.
There, now I've been everywhere else except down that upper right elevator... this leads to a really cool looking orange-tinted area with some new background scenery I haven't seen before...
What's this gem formation I just landed on? This looks weird... And every time I land on some part of it, some of the crystals fall off.
And then there's a dead end at the bottom with a door I can't open. The map doesn't even show a door there... Weird... like the only reason to come down here seems to be for this Teleport Station. I think I bombed around everywhere... I'm almost temped to use Scan Pulse here lol cuz it's so weird that there would be nothing else down here. besides some cool scenery.
Explored the rest of this section... got an Aeion Tank (so that's what those yellow cube things are), and another Gamma Metroid... and the path went further down into some more samey looking Metroid fight rooms going between the rooms requires a bit of exploration.
Then it goes to a grapple platforming over lava section, leading to the 10th metroid I need in Area 3... Also found the 4th energy tank. Also I passed by ANOTHER elevator going down, but I don't know how to get to it... there's obviously still more to this area that you're supposed to come back to explore later.
For some reason, this is like, the one section of Area 3 where there's no convenient loop around shortcut and it's a long way back to the nearest Teleporter...
After lowering the water, there's a couple of little morph ball maze puzzles with missile expansions before getting to the elevator to the next area. I'm still not sure how to deal with these yellow exploding ant enemies, other than using Lightning Armor.
My Area 3 completion % after thoroughly exploring everywhere is 47.6%.
Area 4 Introduction
These poison water sections keep subtly changing as I go further down... now there's like metallic structures that seem to be built around the poison waterfalls.
Huh... this place only requires 1 Metroid. The map seems smaller than the previous areas as well, based on the teleport map that I saw coming in here.
Ugh, more of these parasite swarms... they're incredibly slow to deal with unless you just use Lightning Armor.
Got to a non-poisoned area with a Save Station. This place looks like some kind of ore storage facility. This place looks really pretty.
These environments just keep getting more and more interesting. This game looks so amazing in 3D.
At this point in the game, the normal enemies are becoming quite a nuisance. I don't even know how to kill those grey rock enemies at all, and a bunch of them can only be killed efficiently when using Lightning Armor or Beam Burst, which means I actually care about watching my Aeion supply now, in addition to my health. Missiles have never been a problem though. I always get plenty of missile drops and I never come close to running out of them now that I'm at like 94 capacity.
Also, did I mention how HUGE this game is? I'm playing very thoroughly, trying to find all the metroids and items that I can without using Scan Pulse or backtracking to previous areas, and so far my file is only at 21.3% completion, after 6 and a half hours. This game is longer than any other Metroid by a large margin. After I beat this, I think it'll be a while before I come back to it and attempt Hard Mode and the speedrun endings.
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