Still a bit high off the fun had with Metroid: Other M, I got into discussion with a friend of mine at a Chinese Buffet on how I’d handle a sequel to Metroid. The big problem with the franchise now is it’s gotten a bit bloated, though I primarily blame that on Retro studios insisting on a trilogy. One game on the platform was more than enough, we didn’t need to go right into a second.

To discuss further, the chronology of Metroid before the release of Prime went as thus.

• Samus lands on Zebes, where she discovers the Metroid and the Space Pirate plot to use the creature as a weapon.
• After defeating the Mother Brain and Space Pirates, Samus heads towards planet SR-388, the homeworld of the Metroid, to wipe them all out. After defeating the queen she happens upon the final Metroid egg that bursts forth with a new one. However, instead of attacking her it imprints Samus as its mother.
• Samus takes the Metroid to the Galactic Federation, where they study it and discover its properties can be used for the good of all mankind. Not long after she leaves, however, the station she dropped it off at is under attack by Space Pirates. They steal the Metroid and Samus has to march back to Zebes and defeat the Space Pirates once more, but in the final confrontation with the new Mother Brain the Metroid Hatchling dies. Zebes is blown up and the final Metroid has died. Samus has successfully completed a campaign of extinction.

That’s a pretty small chronology and doesn’t leave much room to squeeze something else in. However, Metroid: Prime taking place between the first two games is forgivable. It is completely plausible that, once the Space Pirates were thought to be defeated, Samus saw no reason to wipe out an entire species of creature.

However, you’d think after the events of Metroid and then seeing what something as volatile as Phazon can do to a Metroid in Prime would give her the impetus to say “Okay, now these things need to go down”.

Of course, Retro chose instead to release two more games in this time span. Or maybe it was Nintendo. Either way, it seems a bit ridiculous that it would take so long for Samus to decide to go and wipe the Metroids out. So now we have Echoes and Corruption making Samus seem either indecisive about wiping them out, or saying “Hm, looks like I have some free time on my hands, guess I’ll go on a crusade of mas extinction now”.

Yet trying to create a game after the events of Super Metroid presents a bit of a problem. After all, the series is called Metroid, and yet the creatures are now extinct. To involve them in the game you’d have to either come up with a way to bring them back or do like Prime did and fit it between the events of other games. Unfortunately, the prologue to Super Metroid also makes fitting it between the second and third games, not to mention the fact that there’s only one left. So unless you figure out a way to make a game about keeping the final Metroid safe that Samus conveniently forgot to report in the beginning of Super Metroid you have continuity issues.

Metroid: Fusion and Metroid: Other M tried their best to come up with good reasons. In the case of Fusion it was a small sample of DNA the scientists had taken. In fact, this is one of the better routes to go, except Other M already has the military in charge of a cloning project (getting the DNA material from a completely different source).

For my friend and I, there are now three potential routes you can take with the ongoing Metroid story. In Fusion Samus is carrying some Metroid DNA within her as a means of saving her life. You can now take that and go even more Alien: Resurrection than Other M had managed and have the Galactic Federation take Samus Aran’s DNA and try to clone her, doing your best genetic work to try and pry the two apart. There is an alternate faction, but I’ll get into that a little later.

The two concepts I and my friend came up with also address another problem, which is the removal of items. Other M‘s attempts to remove the player’s abilities has been met with a lot of anger and frustration. There are some players that are fine with what they tried, such as myself, but nothing beats finding the ability on your own. So our concepts addressed this in their own way.

My own individual idea tackled it by having Samus discover another Chozo colony, and also where the Space Pirates would have gotten their idea for bio-weapons in the first place. If we are to keep Prime as canon then we can assume the Space Pirates are just as much scavengers as they are inventors. We also know that after years of warfare the Chozo were driven to peace, the discovery of Phazon being one of such things (though they had never necessarily sought to use it as a weapon themselves).

So create a Chozo colony from before they had united in peace and chose to leave the galaxy. Create a facility that was dedicated to weapons research, and the one weapon that drove them over the edge being the Metroid itself. The facility seems innocent and abandoned well enough at first, but the security system could identify Aran’s weaponry, regard it as not being registered and thus forcefully remove it. Now she is in a decades long abandoned facility and has to get her weapons back (while possibly discovering some new prototypes). Not long she begins to find evidence that Space Pirates had tampered with the facility as well as the fact that the Chozo could never wipe out the Metroid menace.

The planet could possibly be infested with Metroid now, allowing the series to continue with its title creature, or Samus could be forced to destroy them all again. Either way, you get to involve the Chozo, get a look at them in a more violent state, and also involve the creature without destroying canon.

Additionally, you can simply continue the franchise with or without the Metroid itself. When people hear Metroid the first thing that comes to mind is Samus Aran, not the creature itself.

My friend thus came up with the concept of having a game built around the idea of Samus getting captured instead. It is a very plausible excuse to get rid of her equipment, especially since she has a habit of heading towards any distress beacon she can find. It would be no problem for the Space Pirates to set one up and then ambush her, capturing her and removing the armor, and thus all of her abilities.

In addition, the enemies can now be centered around Samus Aran’s abilities, with foes capable of using the screw attack, morph ball, grappling beam and many other technologies, as well as bastardizations that the Pirates see as “improvements”.

Also, remember that Alien: Resurrection concept from earlier? Of taking the DNA from Samus and trying to separate a Samus and Metroid clone? The Space Pirates are the perfect group to try for such a thing, and also lack any and all compassion. Imagine finding a room full of reject clones and failures. Hey, it could even be a very disgusting looking boss or set of foes!

In the end, however, I think the worst thing that can be done with the Metroid franchise is to make it more Mario and less Zelda. We should only be getting one or two of these games a console generation, and part of that is because of how limited the universe really is if you stick to throwing the Metroid itself into every game.

Even so, the only downside of these little brain storm exercises my friend and I have are that we end up wanting to play the games after we had come up with them. Thus is the risk of talking games at a Chinese Buffet, I guess.

Who knows, though? I never would have thought you could make a good Metroid sequel after Super Metroid, despite how badly I wanted to see one. Yet Prime proved me wrong, as did Other M. Maybe someone else will come along and surprise me further.

Discuss this topic in the forums