Hyper Metroid is often cited as one of the best Super Metroid romhacks. And look, I’m one of the biggest Metroid fans out there. I even know Metroid’s first name. He goes by Samus.
And I’ve become pretty familiar with Samus and his escapades. I’ve played most mainline Metroid games. The only ones I can think of that I haven’t played are Prime 3 and Other M. Someday I’d like to get around to Prime 3. I can’t really say the same for Other M, but hey, whaddya gonna do.
So I decided I’d finally dip my toes into the wide world of Metroid romhacks. And Hyper Metroid was the first one I decided to go with.
Right off the bat, my favorite quality-of-life improvement over Super Metroid. Samus’ default beam cannon has auto-fire. It’s so nice not having to spam the button when I’m farming enemies for health/ammo.
I also love the progression. You aren’t going to each region in the same order as Super. You’re going to Norfair, then Brinstar, then the Wrecked Ship, it’s all over the place, I love it. Upgrades are also given outside of the traditional order and it really threw some curve balls when it came to what item I expected to get and what it actually gave.
I guess talk about the progression leads into the most distinctive part of this hack, how open the map is.
People praise Super Metroid for how open it feels, but it’s actually pretty linear if you look back after beating it. There’s a lot of branching paths, but they’re all shallow. You might see a few doors you can go in after entering a new area, but once you explore a lot of those paths, they close off until you get a new power-up, leaving one or two clear paths forward.
Hyper Metroid has a wide-variety of deep, open paths.
You’ll get lost. A lot.
It’s extremely easy to get a new power-up, and have no idea where to go next. I remember when I unlocked Super Missiles, I was completely overwhelmed and didn’t know where I should go. By that point, I had explored maybe half of each region, with tons of unexplored areas on each map.
I guess this gets at a problem of Super Metroid rather than Hyper Metroid specifically, but the map screen isn’t built for a game this open. If I could open the map and see which doors needed to be unlocked with Super Missiles, I could route a path through the current region at a quick glance and be on my way. But as it stands, I just have to explore every single point on the map where my auto-map cuts off and see why I didn’t progress any further.
“Oh this door needs to be opened by a Power Bomb, not a Super Missile.”
“Of course, I forgot I needed the Gravity Suit to jump this high.”
“I was such an idiot, why didn’t I remember that this one door is gray for some reason???”
And even if it did track door-opening-requirements, there’s another problem.
You can’t view a region’s map other than the one you’re in.
So if you want to see the Wrecked Ship’s map, you have to go over there. And if you’re in the depths of Norfair, that’s gonna take you like 5 minutes.
5 agonizing minutes of backtracking the same path you’ve trodden down a dozen times in vain hopes to find a single Super Missile door you haven’t blasted open yet.
Metroidvanias of the modern age are great in allowing you to transverse huge maps in the blink of an eye. Bloodstained has a huge (mainly) horizontal map. But it’s not too much of a pain to go through because of the plentiful fast-travel points.
Now I can understand how some people might prefer a well-interconnected world to one that “gets lazy” and just plops down fast travel points every now and then.
But man, in a romhack like this, where backtracking is the name of the game, it gets boring.
And I ain’t gonna mince words here, it’s what stopping me playing the game.
I’ve been trying to finish more games, but when a game asks me to aimlessly wander the poorly-labeled map, I have to cut my losses at some point.
Would I Recommend It?
Hyper Metroid is a pretty good romhack. Maybe I’ll even finish it some day. But you really should be prepare for a lot of backtracking through mazes to find the single door or morph-ball tunnel that you missed.