Sequence breaking: Super Metroid vs. Zero Mission

To illustrate exactly what makes Super Metroid special when put up against other games in the series, I’m going to compare it to its closest cousin, Zero Mission. Specifically I’m going to show an intentional sequence break from each game and point out why Super’s is cool and awesome and why ZM’s… uh, kind of isn’t.

First, Zero Mission. Here’s a scene we all know from about three minutes into the game:

Without the Long Beam, Samus can’t break any more of these blocks. The door is inaccessible for now. Which is fine, considering the waypoint on her map is up the shaft anyway. This is obviously a door she’s not supposed to to through yet. When she goes up the shaft she’ll find the Long Beam, and the player instantly thinks “oh, now I can destroy those blocks down there”. Which, again, is convenient considering her new waypoint is now beyond this door.

Except, nope! Samus can skip the Long Beam entirely by shooting through the floor right here. Aha, a sequence break! I’m getting away with something! …but, wait, why does this little path exist, other than to allow the player to skip the Long Beam? The answer is… it doesn’t. And a seasoned Metroid player’s first instinct is going to be to take a minute and search for another way into that door… which I am, and I did. I found this little path within seconds of looking for it.

On top of that, the #1 reason players like to sequence break is to save time. Skipping the Long Beam doesn’t save any; the minute or two it takes to go up and get it more than makes up for all the added half-seconds you’d spend fiddling with Samus’s position for the rest of the game to get close enough to bad guys to kill them. So we’ve got a break which isn’t much fun to discover and doesn’t serve a purpose outside of making the game harder.

Now let’s look at a(n in)famous Super Metroid sequence break. We all know this room:

I’ve got the Gravity Suit in this picture, but pretend I don’t, because you can’t have it before you first encounter this room. Samus can’t make the jump to the pillar, and she can’t wall jump up it underwater. There are grapple blocks along the ceiling, however; obviously this room is impassable without the Grapple Beam.

Except, nope! The previous room has room enough to charge a shinespark, and using one to cross the moat lets you skip the Grapple Beam entirely!

The first thing you’re going to say is, “Brick, that’s not an intentional sequence-break. It’s something crazy players came up with that the designers never figured on.” But I don’t buy it. The designers knew what a shinespark was. They knew Samus could do it horizontally, and in mid-air. They had to know these things; they drew the sprites and coded the mechanics. They also knew how much distance Samus would have to run in order to charge a shinespark; a space equal to about the amount of room Samus has to run in the room before the moat. (No short charging required, although given the mechanics of the short charge I’m betting the designers knew about that, too.) Somebody built that room. They knew what Samus was capable of. There are a dozen things they could have done to prevent this shinespark. There’s a dozen more they could have done to force the player to need the Grapple Beam elsewhere in the game. They didn’t do any of those things either.

Now here’s the pure genius of this break: no normal player will ever, ever discover it. Just to reach this room, a player has to have already collected the Power Bombs, at very least. A normal player will have already explored Upper Norfair, which means they have the Speed Booster and Grapple Beam already. Indeed, most of the point of getting the Speed Booster is to open the path to the Grapple Beam in the first place. In order to get to this location with the correct gear the player has to leave Norfair after getting the Speed Booster but before getting the Grapple Beam. You have to do it on purpose; it’s a deliberate act. A few seconds of trial and error will not uncover this break.

The result is: if you tell someone who has played ZM how to skip the Long Beam, they’ll say “Cool, I didn’t know that.” Tell someone who has played SM how to skip the Grapple Beam, and they’ll say “Wait what? You can do what?” We’ve seen that reaction right here on this forum many times!

That’s just the surface. Where Super Metroid really pulls ahead are Samus’s two “hidden” abilities: the wall jump and the shinespark.

These are things a new SM player doesn’t even know to try. They are not intuitive and they are not very easy. The game teaches Samus how to do these things, but not near the beginning of the game (where sequence breaking is most noticeable and most useful) and not precisely how powerful the moves are. I think most SM players only wall jump once to get out of the etecoon pit, then never do it again.

Some players though, continue using the move through the rest of the game. As they go back through the game world to hunt for the last 10% of their items, they start noticing things they could have done earlier if only they’d known. Next time they play, they try it. They get a couple missile packs before they’re supposed to. They get the Wave Beam early without realizing they’d done it. They surprise themselves.

ZM has wall jumping and shinesparking too, but the player already knows how they work now. The designers had to make their world in such a way that they could guide these old players through the correct sequence, so they had to make those two abilities less useful. The “nerfed” wall jump really frustrated some people (myself included).

I think ZM has a move that could have worked, though: the power grip. Instead of being an item, make it an ability Samus has from the beginning. Instead of being automatic, make some action on her part required (say, she has to be within 5-6 pixels of a ledge, aim up at it, and then press jump) so players probably won’t discover it on their own. Find a natural way to teach the player how to do it in an area where it’s the only option of escape, and put the teacher late enough in the game that the player’s already passed up most of the cool stuff they could have done with it. Give back that sense of, “Okay, I’m in Brinstar searching for items and I’ve seen about six places that power grip would have come in handy, had I only known about it. Next time I play I’m going to try it!”

So there it is. The reason Super is regarded as great and its successors as flawed isn’t because it established a norm that the others don’t live up to, but because it establishes its own norm and then subverts it. It’s the sense of new, weird things you weren’t expecting, and then discovering that these things have actual, powerful ramifications in the game world. It’s the difference between a level designer knowing that a ledge is just barely within reach if a player knows how to wall jump to get on top of it, and a level designer laying down a path of shootable blocks. The ledge looks natural, the shootable blocks don’t. The ledge leaves some ambiguity; am I getting away with something? Am I off the rails? Did the designer miss this? The shootable blocks don’t.

That’s why I feel ZM almost gets it right. It’s not that they didn’t try; it’s that they tried too hard. “Hey guys, market research shows x% of players didn’t like Fusion because it didn’t have sequence breaks. Make sure to design the next game with sequence breaks, okay?”