Castlevania vs. Metroid

 I haven’t played a huge amount of Metroidvania games in the past; outside of actual Metroid and actual –vania I’ve played 2, I think, maybe 3. The first one I ever played was Poacher by Yahtzee Croshaw of Zero Punctuation fame, although playing that game gave a feeling of familiarity with the exploration, back-tracking, and respawning monsters so it’s possible that I have played Metroidvania games before that and simply forgotten about them. Anyway, when it comes to the question of which is better, Castlevania or Metroid, I can’t answer that, but I can answer the similar question of which one I prefer personally. So I’m going to do just that...

I’m pretty sure it was a Metroid game I played first, and that game was actually Metroid Prime and I’m not sure whether that counts given that’s it’s 3D and therefore not strictly a Metroidvania game. Then again whether it counts or not doesn’t really matter because this game is unplayable to me. Why? Because of the control scheme.

Metroid Prime is a first-person shooter on a console system with dual thumbsticks on its gamepad. You know what the standard control scheme for this type of game is; left thumbstick for player movement (walk forward, walk backward, strafe left, strafe right) and right thumbstick for camera movement (look up, look down, look left, look right). Simple, isn’t it? Not in Metroid Prime.

In Metroid Prime the controls are left thumbstick for walk forward, walk backward, look left, look right; and the right thumbstick is for absolutely nothing, or at least nothing involving the core gameplay loop. What you have instead of the right thumbstick is two of the shoulder buttons. Press one of the shoulder buttons and Samus stands in place unable to walk in any direction and the left thumbstick can then be used to aim up or down, which itself is a pain because the camera will snap back to horizon level as soon as you release the thumbstick. On the other hand, if you press the other shoulder button, Samus’ gaze will be stuck staring in one direction with the ability to strafe being applied to the left thumbstick.

These. Are. Terrible. Controls. Making Metroid Prime a completely unplayable game to me. With nearly 15 years of playing first person shooters on consoles (Halo, Half-Life, TimeSplitters, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Perfect Dark, Star Wars: Battlefront, Doom, Fallout, BioShock, and Oddworld: Stranger’s Warth, to name a few) the use of thumbsticks for camera control are just as good as mouse aiming to me, but I’ve tried to break into Metroid Prime on 5 or 6 separate occasions to no avail because I simply can’t get passed this awful control scheme.

I wouldn’t mind how unintuitive the default control scheme was as long as I could change it to something that normal people can use but Metroid Prime doesn’t even give me that simple luxury as you can tell by the fact that I’ve just spent an entire page criticising it. Anyway on to my first Castlevania game.

It will probably come as no surprise that my first Castlevania game was the one that co-established the genre of Metroidvania, and that’s Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Now like Metroid Prime, I didn’t really like SotN the first time I played it and actually gave up within the first hour, but unlike Metroid Prime, the second time I tried playing it a few weeks later I lost 4 or 5 days to the game as it sucked me in so much that I just had to try and get 100% completion (or rather 200% in this case). So in first impressions, Castlevania wins because SotN quickly became one of my all-time favourites, whereas Metroid Prime makes me want to microwave the tiny disc.

After that my experiences of both franchises were had mostly within the NES and SNES classic editions. So when it comes to the original Castlevania vs. the original Metroid. The clear winner to me is the original Castlevania, because it’s the one that I could actually stomach for more than 10 minutes. I certainly tried to play through the original Metroid even with a full game map on my laptop and the NES classics save-state feature, but for reasons I can’t really put into words, I just couldn’t get very far in it. I’m not really sure why, it might have something to do with the idea of “Nintendo hard” combined with a Metroidvania style of gameplay made it just unenjoyable.

Compare that with the original Castlevania. That game was also “Nintendo hard” but with the more linear progression, I had a much better experience, because no matter how hard the stage was, I was safe in the knowledge that this is the right way to go and this level of difficulty is intentional, whereas in Metroid I was always thinking “this section is very hard, but so are all sections I can go to at the moment.” I was never sure where was the safest way to go, and with the fact that the original Metroid doesn’t have save states. Of course, neither did Castlevania, but that was entirely linear so it didn’t matter. Overall the original Metroid I found to be basically tedious that I gave up because I quickly became bored, while the original Castlevania I found to be exciting and challenging, but gave up because it just became too hard for me in the later stages, even with the NES classics save state feature. Castlevania wins this round as well.

The last two games I could compare are the two games on the SNES classic, Super Metroid and Super Castlevania IV, the latter of which gets my vote for silliest title, because it’s actually the first game to bare the title “Super Castlevania”, but the fourth Castlevania game overall; although even that isn’t accurate if you include the Game Boy releases. Anyway Super Castlevania IV, is just the original Castlevania gain except longer and easier, although only easier by comparison, I still had to use save-states to get through the game in less than a year. Yes, unlike the original Castlevania, I actually beat this one, and generally found the experience mostly enjoyable, except for the final stage with its four boss fights in a row; that was fucking hard and took me the better part of a day to get through them all, especially the first one with its bullshit hit-boxes. Anyway Super Castlevania IV was pretty good, I liked it. That’s all I’m going to say about it because I don’t want to have to keep saying the words “Super Castlevania IV”; seriously, that title is really stupid.

Anyway, Super Metroid; the second game that co-established the Metroidvania formula. Like its Castlevania counter-part it took me two tries to get into this game, but unlike its counterpart, I was sick of it by the end and gave up before beating it. The first few hours were pretty good, although I was finding that it had a bad habit of dropping me down a hole that I couldn’t climb up or puching me through a door that I couldn’t reopen from the other side leaving me trapped in a new section of the map which I couldn’t come back from. It’s been a while since I’ve played SotN, but I’m almost certain at any point in the game, you could easily backtrack all the way to the front gate if you so wished, with maybe one or two exceptions. But Super Metroid kept doing this to me and it was getting annoying. I wouldn’t mind if it was a case of trapping me through a door but then having a small puzzle shortly after resulting the door opening permanently. For the game that established the Metroidvania genre, there are many instances where my backtracking was deliberately prevented long portions of the play-time.

That was simply an annoyance. The thing that stopped me finished and pushed me into giving up came much later. I was in the final area; well not the “final” final area, but the last of the main sections of the map I needed to open up. The bit that you get to through the wrecked ship; it was called Meridia. I had mostly explored Crateria, Brinstar, and the Wrecked Ship, I had a large chunk of the Norfair to get to through a big pool of lava that I couldn’t get out of on the other side yet, and I had most of Meridia to explore. I had two ways to get into Meridia. The first one was through the wrecked ship and didn’t seem to go anywhere, and the second was through the glass tube towards the edge of Brinstar, that didn’t seem to go anywhere. Through both of these entrances I kept finding myself in situations that was simply unequipped to deal with, usually involving that substance that I couldn’t jump properly in, even with the Gravity Suit and Varia Suit. There was even one section, a single room, with doors on either side, a single collapsing grapple attachment on the top and a pool of this sludge between the two doors. I fell into this pool, and was unable to jump out of it again, the grapple attachment had already collapsed and there was nothing in the room doing me any harm, all I could do to get out of this room was reset the console. That is bad design, not game should have a situation where the only way out is quitting the game a restarting, unless it’s some kind of Undertale-style gimmick, but this was not an Undertale-style gimmick. This was just the game saying fuck you, and it pissed me off.

That’s not my only complaint I have of Super Metroid though. The in game map, more often than not, I found to be completely fucking useless. It’s all very well showing us the rooms that we’ve been to and all the ones that we’ve yet to explore, but the map tells you absolutely nothing about how each room is connected, where all the doors are, and which ones have actually been opened yet. Also, useful as it is to show us where items are for collecting by placing a dot in whichever square the item is located in, but it becomes pretty useless once you’ve picked the item up and dot just stays there, forever confusing the map and turning it into to a mess. Also there’s no differentiation between items you can pick up and recharge stations just to make it even more confusing. Clearly Castlevania wins the SNES round as well.

Those are the only Metroid games I’ve played; the original, Super Metroid, and Metroid Prime. None of which I’ve finished and only one of which I actually got any enjoyment out of, temporary as that enjoyment was before the experience was soured for me. Castlevania on the other hand, the original I enjoyed but didn’t beat, Super Castlevania IV I beat and really enjoyed, and Symphony of the Night is one of my favourite games. I’ve also played Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, which is basically a Castlevania game in everything but name; I did enjoy Bloodstained, but I only got the bad ending and left it at that, but either way referring back to the original question, I think it’s abundantly clear I prefer Castlevnia.