129 missile capacity, and 8 super missile capacity, and 5 energy tanks.
Area 5
View Spoiler »
This is kind of a lush, tropical jungle area... which makes no sense underground but whatever, it looks cool.
The beginning is very linear, ailroaded on a straight linear path so far, and got to an Alpha Metroid fight in shallow water. Then there's an underwater section, where I'm seeing some stuff that I'll definitely need the Gravity Suit for... space jumping and bomb jumping both don't work underwater without it.
Then I get to a really cool looking ruins area... and I drop down through some crumble blocks and get the last Aeion ability, Phase Drift... so this is how I get past crumble blocks in this game, instead of speed dashing, I'm just slowing down time for everyone except Samus.
Then it starts to open up a lot more... I found a hidden path to the left of a save point, and this goes to a big waterfall room that has a bunch of different paths... or at least it seemed to, but it's mostly all stuff that I can't go through yet.
So actually I'm still on a linear railroaded path for now... There's some really good floral background scenery here.
Up further past the save point is an elevator going up. Suddenly the music changes to the Super Metroid Maridia theme... now I get what this area is going for thematically. Although the dry parts of it kinda have more of a Brinstar feel.
There's a left door, and an upward right door... the right door goes to a vertical path leading to a choice of 2 doors and ANOTHER upward elevator... now we're getting into "too many choices" territory again.
Right of the 2nd elevator... just a dead end room for now. A lot of annoying enemies here that require Beam Burst to take out and are too hard to avoid.
Left of the 2nd elevator leads to the Plasma Beam. Now I can get through those organic looking green doors, and also all those enemies that required Beam Burst to kill, I can now kill them with regular Plasma shots.
A bunch more ways to go... I found a 3rd upward elevator as well as a path up above passed some crumble blocks leading to some loot.
I guess I'll take this 3rd elevator now since it's closer.
Another big room that is partly underwater... The music has changed again back to a more creepy tone.. and there's ruins among the tropical atmosphere here.
Again, there's ton of different ways to go, I just went through a green door near the top at random before thoroughly exploring this huge expansive room. Here there's an energy tank, and a narrow horizontal path through spikes that I don't know how to get passed yet.
Woah, the background up at the top part of this huge room, where all the waterfalls are, and you can see the sides of the ruins... this looks AMAZING with the 3D scrolling.
Finally found the 2nd Metroid of Area 5... a Gamma Metroid fight in a lava room, passed a bunch of lightning armor obstacles. These Metroids fights are getting pointlessly easy at this point. They don't scale at all with how powerful Samus gets.
Wow, this one huge room stretches out like almost the entire length of the rest of this area's map combined... I can't even fit the entire map of this room in the map screen.
This huge single room even loops around down to where the 2nd upward elevator that I found and haven't taken yet leads up to... This level design is really interesting. Also, it's hyping up all of the remaining abilities I don't have more than ever now, with sections requiring the Gravity Suit, Power Bomb, and the Screw Attack... I'm guessing the Power Bomb is probably next, since I saw a Metroid Larva shell next to a yellow door.
Found another Gamma Metroid... I'm glad that multi-room gimmick was only a thing for the Gamma Metroids in Area 3.
Okay this is weird... I've now been everywhere I can go in this huge upside down U shaped room... and I only have 2 Metroids, and every other path in this area seems to be inaccessible... unless there's a crumble block path or plasma beam door way earlier on that I forgot about.
Well, I see one other Plasma Beam door that I might now be able to access... if that doesn't lead anywhere, I'm gonna have to go back to the Chozo Seal.
Oh wait, there was actually a door to the bottom right of that 3rd elevator that I didn't notice before for some reason, back in the Maridia music area.
Gravity Suit! What a strange coincidence that I end up finding this in the absolute last place I look.
And then I went back to an underwater place where I needed the Gravity Suit, and there I got the Screw Attack!
Suddenly, all these normal enemies that were difficult and time-consuming to avoid are now like nothing.
Even with the Gravity Suit's increased defense, Zeta Metroids can still be dangerous if you aren't careful.
It shouldn't take long at all now to go through the rest of this area. I love how much faster you can navigate through everything once you have more of your abilities back.
It took me until now to realize you actually can't melee counter the ice version of those flying swooper enemies. I'm just so strong now that I don't usually need to counter at all.
Found the last 2 Metroids in this area easily.
The ball maze after you lower the poison water in Area 5... this is the most confusing one yet.
After getting everything that I possibly can in Area 5 without the Power Bombs, I'm at 73.9% completion for this area. Wow, still a long way to go...
Area 6
View Spoiler »
The start of this area... it's an unusually long trek through the purple hub area before you even get to the Chozo Seal...
In fact, this might not be the only Chozo seal in this area... this first one I found is a bit higher up than the other poison water path that I earlier.
It seems like a large portion of this area is in the purple water environment... Then at the top right I got to some yellow tinted area... There's a giant slug moving around in the background...
Then when I get to a Chozo Statue with a new ability, the giant robot (who I now know is named Diggernaut) shows up in the background and vaccuums up the whole statue+item and runs away.
There's a couple ways to go up here, but I saw the Metroid Larva shell at the upper right, so I guess I'll go that way first.
I ended up finding the 1 Metroid I needed for that first Chozo Seal very quickly... I dunno if it's worth exploring this upper section yet when I don't have the Power Bomb...
The path kept going after that, and I found the 7th energy tank and some more loot, but then it ended at a dead end with poison water... Even with my Gravity Suit, I can't survive going down in there for more than a few seconds.
The other path from that Zeta Metroid room lead back to the purple area... and then I went back up to the sandy area to explore around more thoroughly, and yeah, there's a bunch of loot up here I can get with the Screw Attack. It seems like the Screw Attack might actually be optional... cuz so far I think it's only been needed for extra loot.
Oh shit... putting the 1 Metroid into this Chozo Seal didn't exactly lower the water, it just moved it... Now the entire path I came from through Area 5 is flooded with poison water, and there's a new way to go.
Got to another Chozo Seal right after that, requires one more Metroid.
Hmm... this is strange. The path just looped back up to where that first Metroid fight was, where I couldn't go earlier because of the poison water... now I have no idea where to go... and the Chozo Seal can't help me this time.
It turns out there's now another Metroid in that same room that I fought the previous one in.
Sheesh... the Omega Metroid is really hard in this game. It took me a while to learn to predict all of its moves, and even then sometimes I wasn't able to start space jumping fast enough to dodge him. On the 3rd try, I used up all my super missiles, and got down to like my last energy tank when I just barely beat him.
I guess Area 6 is pretty short, and most of it consists of the purple area...
Woah... what is this creepy music right now... I think I'm getting close to the Area 7 elevator, but now the music has changed to this really creepy ambient theme that sounds like organic squishy noises or something. I have no idea what to expect.
It seems like this creepy atmospheric area is just a really hard morph ball maze that makes you use all of your Aeion abilities except for Scan Pulse. All of the enemies here require Beam Burst to get rid of, and it's really hard to conserve aeion.
Oh, actually I did find another way to go... That Aeion puzzle is probably just an optional path for an Aeion expansion tank.
Diggernaut boss battle... I've heard a lot about this, even though I've been trying to avoid spoilers. All I know is this boss battle is apparently very puzzley and a lot of people don't like it because it's too slow or something.
lol this boss is silly. It's definitely more of a puzzle boss than anything. He's easy once you figure out what to do, but he does so much damage that even the smallest mistakes are very costly. I thought that was a really fun boss.
Power Bomb... the last ability in the game. This is what takes up the 3rd weapon slot when you hold R.
The game makes you demonstrate the Power Bomb right away, using it to get rid of the robot's corpse blocking the way... then there's an optional puzzle for a Power Bomb tank, that you can only get if you learn the Spidershark ability, where you get hit by your power bomb while holding L in morphball mode.
After looping around through that side path with the Power Bomb boss, I found an elevator... going UP to the next area... I guess Area 6 is the deepest part of the planet, and the remaining 3 Metroids are all going to not have a Chozo seal?
Area 7 Introduction
View Spoiler »
I just made a run for it and stopped at the nearest save point... there's a LOT more mechanical Beam Burst only enemies around here that even the Plasma Beam can't kill... I dunno what to expect with these last 3 Metroid fights.
At this point... I considered going back and re-exploring all the earlier areas, since I have all the abilities now... but then I realized there's still the blue spikey rocks that I won't be able to get passed. I already know how I'll get passed them thanks to having beaten the original Metroid Ii... so I may as well wait until that point before doing the big backtrack cleanup of every area.
Here's my completion % of each area, without doing any backtracking through previous areas (except for that one time I went back to Surface before finishing Area 1):
- Surface: 57.1%
- Area 1: 35.7%
- Area 2: 50.0%
- Area 3: 47.6%
- Area 4: 57.1%
- Area 5: 73.9%
- Area 6: 66.7%
Actually I probably could've gotten more in Area 6 if I backtracked through it after that previous boss... oh well.
No comments:
Post a Comment