The Best Way To Get Into Metroidvania Games

​Nintendo has a reputation for making bright, cheery games. Mario hops with joy through verdant obstacle courses¹, Link only dips into grimdark territory about once a decade and Kirby's so wholesome and cute that it's actually kind of weird he's ever depicted as angry. Of their marquee series, Nintendo's only got one that routinely keeps things dark and dangerous: "Metroid." Despite being perhaps the most marginalized of Nintendo's properties², "Metroid" might have a deeper, more lasting influence on video games than "Zelda" or even "Mario."

"Metroid," along with Konami's "Castlevania" series, spawned a genre of games called Metroidvanias. Metroidvanias are 2D sidescrollers with open-world exploration, boss fights and optional collectable upgrades. There are typically many different ways to complete a Metroidvania, and they're well-suited to be finished quickly. The last decade has seen an explosion in the number of available Metroidvanias — it's a genre that's ripe for iteration.

At first glance the name might not seem all that useful as a descriptor. For a while in the '90s people would throw around "Doom clone" to describe first-person shooters, even though those games were increasing in popularity before "Doom." Likewise, the first "Metroid" isn't the absolute oldest of what you might consider a Metroidvania, and it's missing several elements key to the genre's definition. Why not coin a different name? Well, 1994's "Super Metroid" and 1997's "Castlevania: Symphony of the Night" encapsulate every aspect of the genre perfectly. You could say they map out (and that would be appropriate) everything there is to how these games work generally. You couldn't ask for better touchstones, and nobody's come up with a better name anyway.

With the release of "Metroid: Samus Returns" for the Nintendo 3DS, now's a great time to get acquainted with the genre's forebears and best examples. As you can probably tell already, this installment of Fan Service will be a little different from our articles on TV, book and movie series. Usually, Fan Service recommends a watch or read order that will help you get the most out of a series. Here, the intent is to recommend a selection of really good Metroidvanias that demonstrate the genre's core tenets without too much mixing of other game genres.³ The list is broken up into three parts: the best "Metroid" games, the best "Castlevania" games and the best of the rest that fit into the genre. There's a lot of terminology that gets thrown around when talking about Metroidvanias; rest assured you'll get definitions for each.

Ready to learn? Press star— er, read on.

The Short List, Or: Where The Heck Is The Original 'Metroid'?

The map is arguably the most important thing for both a Metroidvania's identity and its mechanics. It's why we've excluded the original 1986 "Metroid" and immediate sequel "Metroid 2: Return of Samus."⁴ Neither of them features a map. You could make a great game today that incorporates all the other elements of a Metroidvania, and if you didn't include a map system, you'd be ridiculed. With the original Nintendo console and the Game Boy, including an in-game map would've been a tall order, but it's not a controversial statement to say that both games would've benefitted from one.

Now, this is by no means a perfect or comprehensive list. All the games here include every element that's distinctive of a Metroidvania, though that isn't to say they all play or look visually similar to one another. Gaming is also a fairly expensive and in certain ways exclusive hobby. Not everyone feels comfortable picking up a game controller. A long list filled with super-challenging games and a torrent of obscure, cheap games on Steam wouldn't exactly be helpful to a newcomer. Some of these will be hard to access anyway, given that they were released for depreciated systems and haven't been ported forward.

All that said, if you're looking for a game to start with, any of the ones in bold will serve you well if you can get your hands on them.

Here are the best Metroidvanias:

"Metroid" series—

• Super Metroid (1994)
• Metroid Fusion (2002)
• Metroid: Zero Mission (2004)

"Castlevania" series —

• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997)
• Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow (2003)
• Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (2005)

Other games —

• Shadow Complex (2009)
• Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet (2011)
• Ori and the Blind Forest (2015)
• Axiom Verge (2015)
• Hollow Knight (2017)

Spelunking With Samus

The biggest influence on "Metroid," stylistically speaking, is the movie "Alien." The parallels are pretty surface level, sure: Both feature female protagonists, face-hugging aliens, long-dead spacefaring civilizations — and, oh, the "Metroid" boss enemy Ridley is just a letter away from Sigourney Weaver's Ripley. Of course, "Metroid" came out in 1986⁵ and it was still an 8-bit Nintendo game, so there's no gore (those looking for something on the level of John Hurt's chest bursting, search elsewhere). Still, compared to "Super Mario Bros." and "The Legend of Zelda," "Metroid" was Nintendo's most mature franchise right out the gate.

The first game is also extremely confusing. "Metroid" and its sequels are all presented as open worlds, and unlike "Zelda" there are no self-contained dungeons. Without levels or stages, "Metroid" is one of those home console games that couldn't have worked in an arcade — it's just too big and no one in their right mind would keep plunking quarters down to continue getting lost in alien caves.

Without detailed in-game maps, it is easy to get sidetracked in the original "Zelda" and in "Metroid," the latter doubly so. First, "Metroid" is a 2D sidescroller, meaning the "map" you need is actually an ant farm-like cross section. Second, "Metroid" is extremely limited in its color palette and it straight up recycles room designs in places, meaning you're practically guaranteed to ask yourself "Have I been here before?" a whole lot throughout the game.

Still, the first "Metroid" got a lot of things right and went on to be popular enough for sequels. Bounty hunter Samus Aran's journey through the spooky caves of Planet Zebes left an impression on players, and getting lost was mitigated by the fun of item collection. Key to every Metroidvania game is the power climb, where you start the game with very little health and few options for offense and mobility. Exploration yields upgrade items fairly regularly. Later "Metroid" installments would get better at subtly guiding you to these upgrades (and at hiding them), but even in the original a dead-end tunnel would probably offer a pack of missiles for your trouble.

The second "Metroid" game wasn't exactly an improvement over the first, as it also had repetitive rooms made worse by the 4-color grayscale palette available on the Game Boy. The first amazing "Metroid" game — and probably the best one — came later.

It was 1994's "Super Metroid," and it basically got everything right. The expanded capabilities of the Super Nintendo hardware made it possible to have an in-game map accessible from the pause screen and allowed the designers to make each area visually distinct. The upgrade items are more plentiful and creative, the bosses are tougher and the whole game world is designed to nudge players along and remind them when to backtrack without outright telling them where to go. Aside from some brief snippets at the beginning of the game, the story is entirely show-don't-tell. Right at the end of the game it tells you how quickly you completed it and what percentage of the items you found, a carrot dangled in the hopes you'll want to replay it instantly.

It'd be another 8 years before fans would get another proper "Metroid" game, so they replayed "Super Metroid" a lot. By the early 2000s people were competing for the fastest "Super Metroid" completion times, uploading their proof to the internet. A community started to grow online.

In order to improve their completion times or experiment with different competition categories (for instance, collecting all the upgrade items or as few of them as possible), players probed the game for ways to bypass sections or to collect items early. For example, most players will collect the wave beam after they get the grapple beam, using the latter to swing across a gap. A moderately skilled player can collect the wave beam early by utilizing the wall jump move, which is available to players from the start of the game. In the context of a Metroidvania game, these bypasses and skips are known as "sequence breaks." The "Super Metroid" competition is still kicking — at the time of this writing, a new world record time was set just under a year ago.

The fervor of the "Metroid" community spread to other games and helped foster today's speedrunning culture, where pretty much every video game is guaranteed to have a small group of people dedicated to getting the fastest completion times. At "Awesome Games Done Quick," a bi-annual speedrunning marathon held to benefit charity, "Super Metroid" is always one of the last games they play. "Super Metroid" still attracts a large audience, especially when it's staged as a three- or four-way race between top competitors. Today, even a normal all-items "Super Metroid" speedrun takes advantage of sequence breaks,⁶ and riskier moves can add a lot of legitimate drama to speedrun races.

In 2002, Nintendo released two "Metroid" titles: "Metroid Fusion" for the Game Boy Advance and "Metroid Prime" for the Gamecube. "Fusion" is a direct follow-up to "Super Metroid" — the biggest departure is in the ways it handles story and exploration. Progress in "Fusion" is more carefully gated so as to funnel the player through certain story scenes — there are only a few instances where sequence breaks are possible. "Fusion" is less popular as a speedrunning title as a result. "Metroid Prime" took the exploration and item collection ethos of "Super Metroid" and applied them to a first-person shooter. Though some would consider the games Metroidvanias, "Prime" and its sequels cut down on sequence breaking (most that are possible are achieved only through glitching the game) and the move away from a 2D perspective is a huge departure from the feel of the original games.

The first follow-up to "Prime" in 2004 was accompanied by "Metroid: Zero Mission," a modernized remake of the first "Metroid" for the Game Boy Advance. That game hews closer to "Super Metroid" in its design, including ample opportunities for sequence breaking (though many are clearly inserted by the game's designers). Still, like "Fusion" before it, "Zero Mission" is a little heavy-handed in telling players where to go next. It's not the best "Metroid" game, but second-best behind "Super Metroid" isn't bad at all.⁷

When The Castle Became, Well, More Like A Castle

"Castlevania: Symphony of the Night" came out three years after "Super Metroid," and everybody's mind immediately must've gone to that old Reese's Peanut Butter Cup routine: Hey, you got your "Super Metroid" in my "Castlevania!" Hey, you got your "Castlevania" in my "Super Metroid!" Thus, the genre's portmanteau was born.

First, an honorable mention should go to 1986's "Vampire Killer," the second "Castlevania" game (though not in title, obviously). Released in the same year as the original "Metroid," it was the first "Castlevania" game to embrace an open game world, making it a precursor to "Symphony of the Night" and by some definitions the first Metroidvania in the series proper.⁸

In the eleven years between "Vampire Killer" and "Symphony of the Night," "Castlevania" games changed up their structure a bit, ranging from open-world to individual levels to branching pathways and so on. Early on, the series was known first and foremost for its hack-and-slash style combat — and there's a reason why people can't agree which one's the hardest. For some, that difficult combat was satisfying enough as-is.

When Konami designer Koji 'IGA' Igarashi took lead responsibility on what would become "Symphony of the Night," he felt that "Castlevania" had gotten stale. Releasing another linear game with punishing combat would not do, so Igarashi looked to other games. In an interview with Eurogamer, Igarashi claims to have taken inspiration primarily from "Zelda" and not "Metroid," but making an open-world 2D sidescroller begs the "Metroid" comparison regardless.

Igrarashi also mixed up the "Castlevania" formula by granting players more variety in the power climb. The main character in "Symphony of the Night" ditches the mainstay whip for a variety of weapons, there are unlockable vampire abilities comparable to the armor upgrades in "Super Metroid" and there's a layer of experience point-based role playing game (RPG) style systems on top of it all.

When "Symphony of the Night" came out on the Playstation in 1997, it was a 2D game competing against the early 3D installments in other popular franchises — keep in mind, it was sandwiched between "Super Mario 64" in '96 and "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time" the next year. It took a while to find its audience, eventually garnering enough sales and praise to warrant being selected as a "Greatest Hits" title. Igarashi went on to make more "Castlevania" titles following in the footsteps of "Symphony of the Night," with 2D development moving over to handheld consoles at around the same time 2D "Metroid" titles moved there. "Aria of Sorrow" and its sequel "Dawn of Sorrow" stand out as the two best "Castlevania" handheld titles.⁹

The last original 2D "Castlevania" with Igarashi's involvement came out in 2008, four years after the debut "Metroid: Zero Mission." Both Konami and Nintendo seemed to lose interest in Metroidvania-style gameplay at this point — Konami continued "Castlevania" with a few 3D action-adventure installments and Nintendo quietly shelved any plans for another 2D "Metroid" after the "Prime" trilogy was completed.¹⁰

Metroidvanias That Are Neither 'Metroid' Nor 'Vania'

Right around the time Konami and Nintendo lost their taste for 2D games, independent game development was starting to pick up steam. Newer, cheaper tools and accessible online distribution platforms made 2D game development much more affordable.

"Metroid" and "Castlevania" fans looking to scratch the itch could either resort to ROM hacks or user-modified versions of earlier installments, or they could look to the indie games scene. By 2010 Metroidvania was a well-established term, and a glance at the search results on Kickstarter will tell you everything you need to know about the explosion in the genre over the last decade.

"Shadow Complex" got a lot of buzz when it came out in 2009, in part because it was published by the studio that made "Gears of War" and its story was credited to the ever-problematic sci-fi author Orson Scott Card. As presented in the game, the story is absolute fluff: some guys who look like Cobra Commandos are leading an assault on the US Government from a secret base hidden in the mountains, and your character's girlfriend got kidnapped by them. The game itself closely follows the mold of "Super Metroid," with some modern accommodations in terms of controls and the novel addition of a gun that lets you make your own platforms, allowing for some tricky sequence breaks. It got re-released in 2015 and, story aside, it's a whole lot of fun.

"Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet", released in 2011 for Xbox 360 and PC, is a stylish Metroidvania with an art style reminiscent of the flat shading in "Samurai Jack." It has a heavier focus on puzzle solving mechanics and your player avatar in the game is a tiny little UFO. You're able to move in any direction, so navigation and combat feel significantly different from most games in the genre.

"Ori and the Blind Forest" places an emphasis on the fluidity of your movement. Rather than use traditional boss encounters to vary the game's pacing, "Ori" has demanding timed platforming sequences where every jump and dodge is the the difference between life and death (not too dissimilar from the countdown clock sequences in "Metroid" games, come to think of it). If you watch a speedrunner play "Ori," it feels like they rarely set foot on the ground. "Ori" is already slated to receive a sequel.

"Axiom Verge" is an individually-made indie game, designed from the bottom up by Tom Happ. It probably lifts the most from "Metroid" of any of the games on this list, paying homage in art style and level design. When you transition between rooms, the game scrolls across the screen the same way it does in "Metroid" and "Mega Man" games, a stylistic touch that drags the nostalgia right out of you. The combat borrows liberally from "Contra," and "Axiom Verge" goes a step further in embracing its retro feel by including a weapon that lets you "glitch" objects and enemies in the game.

"Hollow Knight," the newest game on this list, is a gorgeously animated adventure. Compared to the lonely cave journeys in "Metroid" and the vampire theatrics of "Castlevania," "Hollow Knight" explores a somber, gloomy world populated by colorful characters — all of whom are cool/cute-looking bug creatures. You can't equip all the charm upgrades you find at once, adding an interesting level of customization and strategy. And the music, yeesh.

The Future

Early reviews of "Metroid: Samus Returns" make it seem like a worthy installment in the series, having pulled back on the narrative storytelling that the series never seemed to be all that good at anyway. Nintendo's already announced a new "Metroid Prime" game for the Nintendo Switch, but hopefully a warm reception for "Samus Returns" could warrant another classic installment there too.

Koji Igarashi has been hard at work on a new Metroidvania game, "Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night" since 2015. He left Konami in 2014 after a few years of creative frustration (he's not the only developer who has had a less-than-great break with the company). Igarashi turned to Kickstarter for funding. At $5.5 million in backing, "Bloodstained" briefly held the record for the most money raised for a video game on the platform. It looks a lot like "Castlevania" — so much so that Igarashi and his team will have to be careful about the monsters and ghouls they include — and it's due out in 2018.

Indie teams are certainly going to keep making Metroidvanias and smashing the genre's tenets up with other gameplay elements for years to come. Whether we'll see more installments in the series that popularized the genre remains to be seen, but it's cool to know there are already so many good ones out there to play. If Nintendo actually makes enough Super Nintendo Classics to meet demand, lots of kids are going to get their first crack at "Super Metroid" very soon. Here's hoping they have as much fun with it as kids of the '90s did.