Nov 5, 2007
Our industry may thrive on franchises, but for every mega-popular sequel there's bound to be 10 utter failures. Most of these botched follow-ups flounder and die because they're poor games, but would you believe there are (gasp) totally decent sequels that came and went without so much as a pat on the back?
Countless sequels have been forgotten, but these are the games that, for one reason or the other, failed to stay in our hearts and minds. Some attained a small level of popularity and then disappeared; others were barely a blip on the radar. But they all deserve a second chance, so we're digging up their rotting corpses and parading them around the webtubes until someone decides to notice.
The game: Metroid II: Return of Samus (Game Boy)
Sequel to: Metroid (NES)
Why you didn't play it: Hm, could the barf-green Game Boy screen have anything to do with it? We put up with that awful, unlit monitor because we were kids and didn't know any better - anyone born after 1990 likely looks at it and ralphs their own glob of green goo. The game's never been remade or colorized, a true sign that even sequel-happy Nintendo doesn't care about revisiting Samus' first trip to the Metroid homeworld.
Why you should have: Ugly "colors" and lack of map aside, this was a much tighter game than the first. Instead of room after pointless room, the planet was cut into digestible chunks that only opened up after a certain number of Metroids had been killed. This made it a much easier game to actually play. True, it wasn't as open an experience as the first game, but we admire this one for shaking things up. The final battle against the Metroid Queen deserves remembrance alone.
We want this brought back, remade, whatever it takes. It's the only game that has Samus doing what we all assume she should be doing in the first place - eradicating Metroids. It also happens to contain a major plot point for Super Metroid, one of the greatest games of all time.
Can we quit dicking around with brain games and get a proper 2D Metroid on DS now?
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