You can't play Super Metroid for any length of time without admiring the game's polish. In brief, Super Metroid is probably the most carefully designed game I've ever seen. From the incredibly detailed enemies and the huge, powerful boss fights to the hidden elevators, myriad secret passages and densely packed levels to the amazing physics engine and in-game cutscenes, the attention to detail and overall quality--the creator's clear refusal to do anything the "easy" way, the way that might compromise the gameplay at the cost of immersion--oozed from its every pore. Little things like the power bomb beam stacking working differently, the bosses not simply requiring the most recently acquired item, the world design that was so different from the classical platformer, like seemingly useless tricks like holding down cancel while selecting to select an item for one use, like the shinesparking and walljumping techniques that were not bugs as they were in so many other games, but features explained by the creatures of the world, made the experience all the more unique and compelling. And the powerups--the Speed Booster, Screw Attack, the Gravity Suit, the Grappling Hook--make the already deep game even deeper, adding wonderful complexities to every route and opening up new gateways to new areas that were almost like new worlds. My quest to find the missile packs and my determination to complete the game with as high a percentage as I could manage meant that I had the opportunity, and the desire, to pore over every nook and cranny in the game, to go through every room and explore the haunting, fantastic, living, breathing planet.
And it all contributed to the sense of truly unmatched immersion that was begun when I set foot on Zebes, and didn't end until I got to my ship--no long stretches of text or pretentiously drawn-out dialogue interfered with my experience, no occasions on which I lost control of Samus made me passively watch the game instead of playing it, and, in short, nothing made me play the game the "right" way. The idea that there is one valid way of playing Super Metroid is alien to the game's very concept.
But what finally pushed the game, for me, from mere greatness to untouchable perfection was the way that the game's depths--its elaborate physics engine, its freedom from unnatural barriers, its huge world and its keen, urgent call for exploration--led naturally into speed tricks, sequence breaks, and out-of-"order" playing. Even something as simple as infinite bomb jumping--trivial from a timing perspective compared to many of the other tricks--opens up hundreds of new routes and new gameplay ideas, and makes every out-of-reach item not just a trophy to be returned for later, but a fresh challenge. Can I get super missiles without fighting Spore Spawn? What about his Super Missiles? Without power bombs? Can I get those two missile upgrades I've been longing for in Crateria before I even enter? With walljumping? Do I really need the High Jump boots to get to Kraid, or is there another way? The answers to every question on that list is yes, and they're just a few of the questions that can pop up in the first ten minutes of the game (if you're a speedy, anyway).
I don't even want to think about how much time I spent on those tricks, since I usually didn't save. By the end of my first game, the in-game clock reported that it had taken me over fourteen hours. My rate of item completion? 87%. After all my combing and searching, after spending literally over a month on the same game, I had missed 13 items, and as I later found out hadn't even discovered every room yet.
That's my story. For me, Super Metroid was (and is) an unparalleled, infinitely replayable experience, every runthrough fresh and meaningful in its own way, its every aspect polished until it gleams.
