So really the main challenge of original Metroid is not finding all the hidden items or beating any of the bosses or navigating any of the sections of the game map, though all of those things certainly have some level of challenge. However the primary challenge trumps all of those elements, and the main challenge is actually having the patience for the grinding required to refill all your energy and missiles.
The game’s password system will remember how many missiles you had when you died, however the only way to get a password is to get game over, and the only way to get game over is to...get to zero health. To die, either accidentally or on purpose. Meaning that every time you enter your password, you start with the basic starting energy amount of 30 EN, as if you had just died. Which you technically did.
So, getting ready for that big boss fight, are ya? You know you could kick his ass if you had full energy? Well this is what you have to do. And really it’s not getting full energy that’s the problem -- I found that for me the best place to farm energy refills is one floor down from where this pic was taken, in the corridor where you get the Long Beam. There are 3 Reos in there and they sometimes give you health refills that give you 20 EN back instead of the usual 5.
It’s really the missiles that are the problem. You get missile refills way less frequently than energy refills, and they only refill 2 at a time. So it takes a super long time to refill them if you have a capacity of 200+ towards the end of the game. The tradeoff being that you can keep your missiles if you get game over while they are full. But by the time you’ve grinded your way to full missiles, you more than likely have full health again! Meaning you could go die on purpose to get the password, or you think “oh the hell with it, I have full everything, I might as well just go try the boss right now” and then you do it and you die and you’re back to square one at 30 EN and however many missiles you had left.
At some point in the tedium of farming for missiles, you start to actually try to tally how many missile refills you need to get in order to fully refill. So you pick up your phone and you’re like “Siri, what’s 230 minus 119, divided by 2?” except Siri interprets that as “230 - (119/2)” rather than what it should be, which is “(230-119)/2,″ so Siri tells you 170.5 instead of 55.5 and you’re like “wtf Siri, that doesn’t sound right at all” and then when you realize what happened, you start wondering if there is a way to get Siri to understand parentheses and other weird calculator stuff and then you realize that all you wanted to know in the first place was how many missile refills you needed, and if you had spent all this time grinding instead of futzing with Siri you would be closer to your goal by now. By at least, like, 2 missiles.
But no, you decide to take a picture of your screen and go blog about it instead.
I could have been grinding this whole time.
This is why I shouldn’t play Metroid high.
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