In Metroid, you play as the bounty hunter Samus Aran, who is sent to the planet Zebes to wipe out the space pirates, and destroy their leader, Mother Brain. They are harvesting the parasitic life-forms of the planet, called Metroids, and plan to use them for scientific experimentation and hopefully as a weapon. To enter the space pirate base, Samus must first hunt down and kill two of their leaders, Kraid and Ridley. Upon doing so, Samus discovers that the pirate base has been taken over by the Metroids, and fights her way through to Mother Brain, who, once defeated, sets off a time-bomb, which Samus barely escapes.
The character of Samus Aran is interesting because she is one of the first female protagonists in gaming. The game has multiple ending screens based on how quickly you completed the game, and completing the game faster reveals Samus's true gender (throughout the game she is fully suited, and neither the game nor manual mentioned her gender). Playing as a female character was unheard of back in those days, when women in video games were things to be saved or otherwise, the hero's motivation.
The gameplay is classic NES platforming with a twist. Instead of the game being broken up into straightforward levels, there are a few giant sections that you will have to explore and backtrack through. It essentially puts you in a maze at point A, tells you what point B is, but not where you will find point B or how to get there. From the start, you will naturally start going right, only to be met with a wall, with a hole too low for you to walk into. By going back, you will find the morph ball upgrade to the left of where you started, which allows you to roll up into a ball, and now you can pass the wall. This part of the game is a brilliant way to teach the player about power-ups, how they will be needed in order to progress, and that the game will not follow a straight line.
The game also features great atmosphere and personal development. Every area of Metroid is dark, unsettling, and threatening. The whole of this game is subterranean and it really feels like it. Enemies are almost entirely consistent of the natural creatures that live on Zebes. In the main area, you will find all sorts of insects that crawl around uninterested in you, or actively trying to kill you. And kill you they will, because at the start of this game, you are mostly helpless. Your beam attack only reaches a few measly measly meters away, and you have only thirty health. But collect weapons upgrades, health upgrades, and new attacks (such as the famous screw attack) and by the end of the game, you will feel empowered.
Metroid, like so many other of the experimental games of the era, is not perfect. The lack of a map system makes navigation nearly impossible, as many areas look alike. The game very much makes you feel like a rat in a maze. The jumping is somewhat floaty, but this is forgivable since level design is made to work around it. There are a few flaws in the level design though. Vertical passageways are long and tedious to climb and a fall may send you back to the bottom. There is one room that can only be accessed by blowing a secret hole in the floor, but going down there will yield no rewards and will likely become impossible to climb out of.
Despite its flaws, Metroid is one of the best games on the NES. It, along with The Legend of Zelda, helped invent gaming from the 90's onward. It has become one of Nintendo's most prolific and celebrated franchises, with such adored titles as Super Metroid, Metroid Fusion, and Metroid Prime. The original received a remake on the Game Boy Advance called Zero Mission, which both expanded the story and improved the graphics and controls. Metroid shall always be remembered as a progressive title on a system famous for having many of them.
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