Video Game / Super Metroid

Spoilers for this game will be marked as usual. However, since this is a sequel to Metroid and Metroid II: Return of Samus, spoilers for those two games, as well as their remakes, will be left unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

The last Metroid is in captivity. The galaxy is at peace...

Super Metroid, also known alternatively as Metroid 3 from the intro, is the third game in the Metroid series, both in terms of release order and within the series' chronology (discounting the Metroid Prime Trilogy). It was released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1994, and was the largest game released on the SNES at the time, using a 24-Megabit cartridge (that's 3MB). It was the last Metroid game that Gunpei Yokoi worked on before his departure from Nintendo and death, the first where Yoshio Sakamoto was the main director, and the first with music from Kenji Yamamoto.

Taking place shortly after the events of Metroid II: Return of Samus, Samus has given the Metroid hatchling to scientists aboard the Ceres space colony for further study, in hopes that its energy-producing abilities may be harnessed for non-destructive means. Shortly after leaving, however, Ridley and the Space Pirates attack the space station; killing all the inhabitants and kidnapping the infant Metroid. To stop the Space Pirates from making use of the Metroid for their own vile ends, the bounty hunter gives chase to their rebuilt hideout on planet Zebes.

Where the first Metroid established the formula that's an eclectic mix of action, exploration, and platforming, Super Metroid codified the tenets of its gameplay style to become one of the most acclaimed games of the 16-bit era. To this day, Super Metroid is still cited as a master class in level design — teaching its players game mechanics with subtle use of antepieces — and environmental storytelling — apart from the brief introductory exposition recapping most of the events of the previous two games, almost all the storytelling is done through world-building and on-screen events, many described below.

Super Metroid, like most prestige SNES titles, has spawned a fair number of ROM hacks. Among those are "randomizers" that mix up the item placements and/or map layouts. Perhaps the most interesting of these combines this game with A Link to the Past: Randomizer: any item from either game can be found (though not necessarily used) by Samus or Link, and they exchange items by switching between Hyrule and Zebes. This is accomplished by traveling between four doorways that connect the worlds. Once the player progresses far enough into Link to the Past, Link can move around Hyrule more easily with the help of fast travel; Link can combine those shortcuts with the doors to Zebes, shaving time off Samus' itinerary. The objective here is to defeat both Ganon and Mother Brain, and the ending corresponds with the boss fought last. The most noteworthy repository of non-randomizer ROM hacks (for the entire Metroid series, not just Super Metroid) is undoubtedly Metroid Construction.

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Super Metroid provides examples of:

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• 11th-Hour Superpower: The Hyper Beam, absorbed from Mother Brain's own Wave-Motion Gun by the giant Metroid, is granted to Samus during the final boss fight so she can finish off Mother Brain.
• 100% Completion: Every game since this one has a percentage (which in the case of that game and the console Prime games is easy to deduce, since the games have each exactly 100 collectibles). While earlier games in the series, including Super Metroid itself, gave different endings based on completion time rather than percent, percent has since become a factor in determining which ending you get.
• Abandoned Area: The start of the game features an expedition to the ruins of Tourian, the former nerve center of the enemy base. Some of the rusted remnants and shattered glass structures are call-backs to the prequel game. It was Samus who destroyed this command center in the first place.
• Abandoned Laboratory: Tourian from the original Metroid makes a return, and the scenery makes clear that the reason why it is abandoned is because the Metroids escaped and killed off the Space Pirates.
• Ability Mixing:
  • If the player equips the Charge Beam and one other beam upgrade, sets Power Bombs as their secondary weapon, then holds the fire button, they will combine into a Special Attack with effects ranging from Beam Spam to an Orbiting Particle Shield.
  • The Crystal Flash technique. If Samus is critically injured but has at least 10 Missiles, 10 Super Missiles and 11 Power Bombs, the player can hold Down + Aim Up + Aim Down + Fire to convert a Power Bomb into an "energy cocoon" which converts ammo into health.
  • Once Samus has the Charge Beam and Morph Ball Bomb upgrades, entering Morph Ball mode with a fully charged beam will cause her to disperse the energy by laying five bombs at once (which, unusually, do not float in midair like normal).
• Ability Required to Proceed:
  • You need various abilities and equipment to proceed, as par for the course of a Metroidvania-style game. The Morph Ball, Missiles and Bombs are needed to get beyond Crateria, and the Super Missiles, Speed Booster (or the Ice Beam if you prefer—you at least need one or the other), Power Bombs and at minimum three energy tanks are absolutely required to finish the game.
  • There's one point where it's combined with Some Dexterity Required: if you wind up in the optional section where the Etecoons teach you the Wall Jump (and if you happen to save your game there), you must become at least familiar with the ability to escape. This isn't too difficult, but it's notably one of the few places where good control and execution is necessary to advance, as opposed to merely making the game easier and enabling Sequence Breaking.
• Achilles' Heel: Ridley takes double damage from Super Missiles (for some reason).
• Action Bomb: Skrees no longer explode on their own but tunnel underground. They still explode into shrapnel if shot though. Powamps inflate if you get too close and explode into spikes if shot in this state.
• Advancing Boss of Doom: Crocomire, who periodically steps towards Samus, forcing her towards a wall of spikes. It's also combined with Ring-Out Boss, because defeating Crocomire requires that you hit it in its mouth, causing it to step back, until it falls into a pit of acid. The battle's not over until its lifeless skeleton breaks the wall.
• Advancing Wall of Doom: The game features some rising lava pits. They don't kill you right off, but they do sap your health at a fast rate upon contact.
• A.I. Breaker: If you force the Golden Torizo against the wall of the room you fight it in and move close enough to it, then it will stay in place and all of its attacks will miss you.
• Airborne Mook: Kihunters, mochtroids, bulls, covern, atomics, firefleas, they all fly, or at least float. Zebs, zebbos, gamets, geegas, gerutas, mellas, mellows, memu, multiviolas, reos, wavers and holtz are back too, so use that diagonal aiming well!
• All Your Colors Combined: The Hyper Beam is an interesting take on it. While it's actually stolen from an enemy, it will replace all of the other color-coded beams in the inventory, and also causes both Samus and itself to flash different colors.
• Already Done for You: As you make your way into Tourian you come across several enemies the have already been drained by a Metroid, including what appears to be the final miniboss, a third Torizo statue.
• Always a Bigger Fish: In Tourian, Samus runs across a room where a Torizo and several wildlife enemies have been reduced to crumbling dust, including a variety of Sidehoppers that are only vulnerable to Super Missiles. It turns out this is the result of getting their energy sucked dry by the now grown-up Metroid hatchling.
• Always Check Behind the Chair: Some expansions and pickups are well-hidden in unsuspecting areas, enticing the player to check corners and passageways (and the most paranoid player will inadvertedly check the same spots twice) until Samus finds the X-Ray Scope (which reveals fake walls and bombable spots; this even comes handy to return to a previous area after defeating a certain boss).
• Ambidextrous Sprite: Averted, Samus always wields her Arm Cannon with her right arm no matter which side she's facing.
• Ambushing Enemy: Alcoons hide underground and spring up in front of Samus to impede her progress.
• Anachronic Order: This is the third game in the series and the fourth-to-last game in the overall plot. The games were in normal order until the Metroid Prime Trilogy, so this is only applied retroactively.
• Androcles' Lion: At the end of the game, the giant Metroid (which was the infant Samus spared at the end of Metroid II: Return of Samus now All Grown Up) sacrifices itself to rescue Samus from Mother Brain, after having imprinted on Samus beforehand, seeing her as its mother.
• Antepiece:
  • In the second room of the Ceres research station, the first area of the game, there's a small step you have to jump up on, in contrast to the many stairs in the rest of the area. This forces you to jump at least once and get a basic understanding of how the jump mechanics work, before you're pressed by time in the escape out of the area. You also meet Ridley there in a mock boss fight to test out your shooting skills, as the fight will end either when you damage him enough or you lose too much health.
  • The first Metroid has a vertical tunnel at the start of Tourian that requires you to drop down the numerous platforms; the final vertical tunnel during the timed escape sequence is nearly identical, except the platforms are narrower and require you to jump up them under a time limit. The latter tunnel is revisited near the start of Super Metroid and used in a similar fashion: you drop down the platforms on your way to collect the Morph Ball, and making your way back requires you to carefully jump up the platforms and dispatch the Zebesians that are now jumping across the walls. And much later, during the final Escape Sequence, you end up back at this shaft and have to climb it once again, this time under a time limit with lava slowly filling the room.
• Anti-Frustration Feature: A temporary, minor case at the start. Normally, you can only save at save stations (including Samus' ship). But the first section, which is in a different place from the rest of the game, is devoid of them. Although this section is very short and not very difficult, the programmers were still nice enough to autosave your game at the couple of key points before you have access to the stations, so you don't have to redo even that much if you e.g. turn off the console or reset or similar. After that, though, you're on your own.
• Aquatic Mook: This game establishes that Zebes has water too, and it's full of life. This ranges from the fearful owtch to the mostly passive scisers, skultera and powamp to the territorial zoa and oums to the actively hostile mochtroids, evirs and pink space pirates.
• Armless Biped: Sidehoppers, dessgeega still reside in the depths, including new more powerful sidehoppers in new Tourain that still only have two limbs.
• Ascended Extra: This was the first game to give Ridley more prominence, by making him the one who steals the Metroid Hatchling and guards it in Norfair. Ridley also appears on the cover art.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: After being roughly as big as Samus in the first game, Kraid has grown to be room-sized, which is now his canon design and size.
• Attack the Mouth: A mini-boss named Crocomire does not take damage from any attack, but attacking its mouth pushes it back, eventually into a pit of lava.
• Auto-Revive: The Reserve Tanks serve this purpose by automatically refilling some of your Energy Tanks before they all completely go empty. You can also choose to use the Reserve Tanks yourself to get some energy back.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The Super Missiles pack the biggest punch in the game, and can destroy bosses far more quickly than regular Missiles can. However, they are far rarer than regular Missiles (only 50 Super Missiles compared to 230 regular), are fairly slow to fire, restocking ammo is quite difficult (only some enemies drop Super Missile ammo, and Missile Stations don't restock them, only your ship does) and sometimes have unexpected side effects — for example, while they kill Phantoon faster, they also trigger a unique retaliatory attack where he swings a chain of fireballs across the screen eight times in a row. If you can use them well, they are very deadly, though — they're the best way to push Crocomire to his death, for example, because they knock him back the furthest compared to Samus' other options at the time (only a charged Plasma Beam, a late-game item, causes more pushback).
• Bag of Spilling: Samus doesn't retain any of her gear from the previous game except the Long Beam. Unlike later games, there's no explanation for this.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • When you take the first elevator into Brinstar, the area has a blue, rocky design just like it did in the first Metroid, leading you to believe that's how the whole place will look here too. But when you take the second elevator to the main body of Brinstar, it turns out the area has been given a green Jungle Japes redesign.
  • Near the end of Kraid's lair in Brinstar, a fake Kraid appears as a Boss in Mook Clothing; it's the same size as the real one was in Metroid, and even explodes into a cluster of health and ammo refills upon death. However, a few rooms later, you fight the actual Kraid, who is gargantuan in size. The original Metroid had its own fake Kraid, but both Kraids were the same size in that game.
• The Battle Didn't Count: Normally, Ridley defeats Samus soundly on Ceres Station and flies off with the baby Metroid. If he ends up taking enough damage, he'll drop the baby Metroid for a second, but then immediately pick it back up again, and the game continues as normal from there.
• Battle Theme Music: This game marks the debut of Ridley's franctic battle music, as he used a standard boss theme shared with Kraid in the original Metroid. Ridley's theme is also borrowed by Draygon in Super, while Kraid receives a new theme that is shared with Crocomire and Phantoon. Like in the original game, Mother Brain has a unique track for being the Final Boss, and the mini-bosses all share a haunting battle theme.
• Beam Spam: The Spazer Beam triples the output of the other beams (except the Plasma Beam, which it can't be combined with), resulting in a wider field of fire.
• Beef Gate: There are rooms with extremely hot temperatures that will deplete health quickly. While these are generally meant to be impassible without the Varia Suit, skilled players can navigate these rooms quickly enough to avoid death, allowing them to access some powerups early.
• Beware My Stinger Tail:
  • Evirs fire spiked balls from their tails, usually while buried in sand so Samus cannot retaliate. Draygon has a very damaging sting, but has to get close to Samus.
  • This is the first game where Ridley demonstrates his deadly, serrated tail with a spaded stinger. Unlike most attacks, it can damage Samus while she's using the Screw Attack.
• Big Bad: Ridley initially appears to fill the role, having rebuilt the Space Pirates on Zebes and kidnapped the Metroid hatching to use its power. In reality, however, he's just The Dragon to Mother Brain, who has come Back from the Dead and once again serves as the main antagonist of the game.
• Big Boo's Haunt: The Wrecked Ship is a Ghost Ship version, filled with spectral creatures known as Coverns. The boss is the aptly-named Phantoon.
• Big Damn Heroes: The fully-grown Metroid hatchling shows up to save Samus in the final boss fight, stealing Mother Brain's energy to restore hers.
• Bittersweet Ending: The Space Pirates have been destroyed for good, but it comes at the cost of killing the only Metroid that wasn't dangerous (which has repercussions in Other M and Fusion) and permanently destroying Zebes for good.
• Blackground:
  • Draygon's chamber in Maridia. There are some other boss rooms in the game that start off like this, but usually have a background fade in after a short while.
  • The trope is enforced any time the X-ray scope is used. Backgrounds turn completely black to allow the player to better see hidden secrets in the foreground.
• Blackout Basement: The game features a firefly-like alien creature that inhabits dark areas. Trigger-happy players can shoot them if they want to, but doing so will significantly decrease the light in the room.
• Bleak Level: Lower Maridia. It has a remarkably dark color palette for an underwater level, and the music is also very quiet and ominous.
• Blob Monster: Puyo are more like putty monsters, as they stretch out to thin shapes and try to jump on you, except for a group in Maridia that try to avoid you instead.
• Book Ends:
  • The game begins and ends with Timed Missions following boss fights (one with Ridley, the other with Mother Brain.)
  • The first and final minibosses you face are both Torizo statues. There's a third Torizo statue in Tourian right before the final boss, but you don't have to fight it because the Super Metroid has already taken care of it.
  • Mother Brain is the first boss you see, as a memory of Samus from the events of the original Metroid. She returns as the Final Boss.
• Bootstrapped Theme:
  • The game has a couple different boss battle themes that played for multiple bosses. The one that play during encounters with Ridley (along with Torizo, Draygon, and the escape sequences) has become the "Theme of Ridley". The theme that plays during Kraid's battle also has become his battle theme, but as he isn't fought nearly as often, it isn't as apparent.
  • Thanks to Super Smash Bros. Brawl incorrectly labeling it such, the opening and closing credits theme has become "Samus' Theme," despite Samus already having a theme (the Crateria Surface music) in this game. Samus Returns would eventually make it fully official.
• Boss-Arena Idiocy:
  • Draygon's lair is surrounded by turrets that fire balls of plasma at intruders. A few missiles render them inoperable, however, leaving behind bare high-voltage circuitry that can be used to electrocute Draygon in four seconds flat. The boss can also be defeated the old-fashioned way with loads of missiles, but frying it is easier and considerably faster.
  • Crocomire would be completely invincible were it not for the conveniently placed acid pit behind him.
• Boss Arena Recovery: Used to keep the player from running out of Missiles; Other than this, only charged shots effect bosses, and the Charge Beam isn't a required powerup.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: The armored Space Pirates encountered in Lower Norfair, who throw their limbs at Samus and leap all over the place. They can't be damaged until they're coaxed into performing a jump kick and even then they take a ton of hits to kill. On the other hand, with a little practice it becomes easy to keep them in their vulnerable state throughout the fight. Although they respawn, Samus only has to fight them once before the door they're guarding becomes permanently unlocked and she can just jump past them any other time.
• Boss Tease: A statue depicting four creatures guards the entrance to a late-game area. By the time you visit this statue for the first time, you'll likely have defeated one of these bosses, causing its coloured gemstone to fall away and that part of the statue to fade from gold to dark stone. It's easy to guess that you need to defeat the other guardians to open the way, especially since the most prominently depicted creature is Ridley, whom you've already fought and weren't able to defeat yet.
• Botanical Abomination: Spore Spawn is a giant plant creature with a very hard outer shell that protects a vulnerable core.
• Brain in a Jar: Mother Brain starts her fight in the same glass case she was in during Metroid. Once it's broken, however, she reveals a new body and starts fighting directly.
• By the Lights of Their Eyes: Both times the player encounters Ridley, his glowing yellow eyes are the first things to appear, before the room lights up and the rest of his body becomes visible.
• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": "Bulls" do not resemble the animal they are named after at all. They do attack like them however.
• Cast from Hit Points: Using the Shinespark drains your energy with the distance traveled. If you drop to 30 the shinespark is immediately interrupted.
• Catastrophic Countdown: Both times a timed explosive is set, the whole place is shaking and exploding long before the countdown expires.
• Catch and Return: The infamous Golden Torizo can catch Super Missiles and throw them right back at Samus.
• Cave Mouth: The entrance to Ridley's lair is shaped like his mouth.
• Charged Attack: The Charge Beam is introduced in this game, and lets Samus charge up her arm cannon to release a stronger shot. Charged attacks are the only way Samus can hurt bosses without using missiles. She can also hold a charge while spin-jumping to shield herself from certain attacks and deal collision damage when she touches an enemy, consuming the charge.
• Cherry Blossoms: Take a close look at the background in the green areas of Brinstar — you'll notice it's raining sakura petals. This fits with green Brinstar's role as the only more-or-less friendly part of the planet. Among other things, it's home to the only two native creatures that don't try to kill you. Don't get your hopes up for natural beauty elsewhere on Zebes... unless you really like lava and acid.
• Chest Monster: Torizo looks like one of the upgrade-giving Chozo statues, but once you grab the Bombs from its hands and try to leave, the door locks and it stands up. The Golden Torizo much later is less convincing.
• Climax Boss: Ridley once more! This time he sets the entire plot into motion by stealing the last Metroid at the beginning of the game, but when Samus finally catches up to him and defeats him, the Metroid has escaped containment, setting up the last leg of the story.
• Clipped-Wing Angel: After you beat Crocomire, it falls into some acid and all the flesh melts off its body. Then, after an ominous pause, its skeleton crashes through the wall on the opposite side and the boss music starts up again… before the skeleton just collapses.
• Clone Degeneration: Mochtroids are a failed attempt at cloning Metroids. While they can absorb some of Samus' health, they are very weak and will die from any of her ordinary attacks (no need to freeze them and use missiles). They even get killed from using the Grappling Beam on them, which normally damages only the very weakest normal enemies and one specific boss, making the Mochtroids amongst the weakest enemies in the game.
• Co-Dragons: Like in the original Metroid, Kraid and Ridley are the top-ranked subordinates of Mother Brain (and also literal dragons).
• Collision Damage: Ridley's sprite is given almost comically diminutive wings that amazingly still provide him with the ability to fly, because if they were the proper size, the impact detection for collision damage would make him impossible to get close to without being struck by them.
• Colossus Climb: Kraid, during the second phase of its battle. Samus must jump on the spikes he fires from his stomach to reach a platform so she can shoot him.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Beams and doors. With doors, red can be opened with Missiles (or a Super), green with Super Missiles, and yellow with Power Bombs, while blue can be opened with anything. As for the beams, the color coding has no real significance, but exists all the same: The Power/Charge beam is orange, the Spazer is yellow, the Ice beam is blue, Wave beam purple, and Plasma beam green.
• Combat Parkour: Highly skilled play typifies it strongly enough to make this game the Trope Codifier for the 2D platformer genre.
• Combat Tentacles. Subverted. Phantoon has such tentacles but doesn't seem to actually use them in battle.
• Continuity Nod: In the beginning of the game, you travel through the exploded ruins of Tourian from the very first game. You can revisit the escape shaft used by Samus to flee Zebes on her previous visit and remains of Mother Brain's tank. The shaft is used again as part of the escape route at the end of the game. A number of power-ups from the original were kept in their same locations. The Morph Ball, that ceiling-mounted Energy Tank just to its west, the one in Ridley's lair surrounded by the fake floors, and, retroactively, the missile pack under the ruins of Mother Brain's jar, located first in Super Metroid and then again in Zero Mission.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Averted, a first for the series. In previous games, the Varia Suit merely cut damage in half; in this one, it also protects Samus from the convective heat which, without it, quickly overwhelms her in most of Norfair, excepting only those few rooms whose existence is all that makes a reverse-boss-order run possible (and that only barely).
• Convenient Weakness Placement: The Crocomire fight. It's invincible and hitting it with missiles only pushes it back — toward a lava pit which kills it (eventually). Draygon's room can also be used against him, but this is an Easter Egg for clever players; the old-fashioned way works just fine on him.
• Copy Protection: Trying to use a Save Data modifier Game Genie code for the game on an actual SNES will cause a Error screen to show up saying it is a serious crime to copy video games.
• Cranium Ride: There's a large turtle-like creature that will start to bounce around when you stand on it, which can be used to reach an item expansion.
• Critical Annoyance: A loud beeping alerts the player whenever Samus's health goes beneath 30. It's speculated that this noise is what causes the Super Metroid to recognize Samus after nearly draining her suit's energy, and that the same sound causes it to rush to Samus's aid when Mother Brain is about to kill her.
• Critical Existence Failure: Samus' suit explodes when she runs out of health, and in every game it starts beeping an alarm when she's in critical condition. Given the environments she traverses in most of the games, losing her suit would be fatal (if not instantly so).
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Crocomire gets backed into pool of acid and has its skin melted off while it's still alive. What's also horrific is that it survives long enough as a skeleton to get out before dying.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • The Super Metroid makes short work of Samus in Tourian, almost instantly reducing her to 1HP before it (presumably) realizes who she is and backs off.
  • After the Super Metroid's Heroic Sacrifice gives Samus the Hyper Beam to use against Mother Brain, the battle resumes for less than a minute before Mother Brain falls and the Escape Sequence starts.
• Cutscene Boss:
  • The Super Metroid, which is completely invincible; it reduces Samus down to 1 HP and then flies off.
  • Much of the fight with the final boss is taken up by the cutscene of the Super Metroid attacking, then Mother Brain killing the Super Metroid, after which Samus gets the Hyper Beam and the fight becomes a Zero-Effort Boss.
• Cutting Off the Branches: During the final escape sequence, you can take some time to go down a side path and rescue the Dachora and Etecoons, nonviolent creatures that teach you how to Shinespark and wall jump earlier in the game, or you can skip them entirely to save some time. Rescuing them is the canon ending, as they reappear in Metroid Fusion.
• Cyclops: Mother Brain's final form is a monstrous humanoid, but still retains her single eye.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: Ridley. As opposed to other bosses in the game who either have a special weakness or pattern, Ridley doesn't have either (aside from taking increased damage from Super Missiles as expected) and his fight is a brutal, fast-paced slugfest, where there really isn't any special strategy other than reducing his health before he does the same to Samus. This is easier said than done, as he has 18,000 HP, as much as Mother Brain and triple the HP of Draygon, the last major boss preceding him.
• Darker and Edgier: The tone is much more grim and unsettling than the previous two games, with an increased amount of Scenery Gorn and an atmospheric soundtrack.
• Darkest Hour:
  • A giant Metroid appears. You can't kill it with any of your weapons. It latches onto you, and drains your health faster than you being submerged in the acid in Ridley's lair with the Power Suit and nothing more. No weapons can repel that monster. When you're in your very last HP point, it stops, gets off and starts vocalizing. Do you recognize those squeaks? It's the baby all grown up! It then flies off, leaving a clear way to a recharge station.
  • Another comes in the battle against Mother Brain. It uses a beam that not only presses Samus to the wall, it disintegrates her ammo as well. No matter how much you fight, it'll keep doing it until you can't stand anymore, then it batters you up with a few more shots and charges the death beam again. And then the giant Metroid latches onto its face.
• Dash Attack: The Speed Booster and all the abilities that come with it. Only the most formidable of enemies can withstand the impact of a speed-boosted Samus.
• The Day the Music Lied: After Crocomire falls into an acid bath which dissolves its flesh, its skeleton crashes through the wall and the boss music starts up again... then the skeleton collapses.
• Deliberate Injury Gambit: Draygon can be easily defeated by blowing up one of the turrets lining the walls of his boss room, letting him grab Samus, and then struggling in his grasp until he's within Grapple Beam range of those sparking, wrecked turrets. The resulting current will hurt Samus, but flash-fries Draygon in seconds.
• Depth Perplexion
  • Atomics are initially caged off while the wrecked ship is without power, but chase after Samus while passing through all obstacles once power is back on.
  • The rinkas of the first game's Tourain, are back in this game's Tourain. They're not cheap enough to hit you while leaving and entering rooms this time, but otherwise still bypass all obstaces to run into you.
  • Puromi are at least affected by gravity, but exactly what they jump off of is unknown, since they seem to pass through everything.
• Derelict Graveyard: The Wrecked Ship, like the name suggests, is a spacecraft that crash-landed into Zebes a long time ago. It is overrun by the ghostly Coverns and guarded by Phantoon. The whole place is initially under an inoperative state, meaning the Save and Map Stations cannot be used, but this is reversed after Phantoon is defeated.
• Determinator:
  • Crocomire. Even after he's fallen into a lake of acid that strips the flesh from his very bones, those bones themselves make one last attempt to kill you.
  • Ridley will continue to fight even when he's out of health. He doesn't die until enough time has passed or he manages to grab Samus, whichever happens first.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • It's possible to "beat" Ridley on the Ceres Space Station at the beginning of the game. If you deal enough damage without taking too much yourself, he'll briefly drop the capsule with the Infant Metroid, only to grab it again and fly off.
  • The fight with Draygon can be made much simpler if you shoot out one of the cannons on the walls, exposing the electric wiring inside, let Draygon capture you, and then using the Grappling Beam to connect to the wires, channeling the electrical circuit through Samus and shocking Draygon to death.
  • You can turn off upgrades in the menu, and there is a distinct shot type for every possible combination of activated beam weapons, which amounts to 26 different beam animations (since the Spazer and Plasma Beam can't be equipped at the same time without glitches).
  • If by some chance you are able to sequence break all the way through the searing hot caves of Upper Norfair without the Varia Suit and survive, arriving at Lower Norfair will result in a very rude awakening—almost every single room is as hot as the worst parts of Upper Norfair. Only the Crystal Flash and meticulous movement make it possible to reach Ridley and get back.^note The reward for beating Ridley is an energy tank, which completely refills your health. The "fireflea room" contains a second energy tank and, unlike almost every other room in Lower Norfair, isn't heated; it also provides an easy way for players to refill Power Bombs and health without taking much damage. It's not clear if the developers intended the Lower Norfair hell run to be survivable, but some players have speculated that these concessions were made for precisely that reason.
  • During the second half of the final battle, if you stop blasting Mother Brain for a moment, you'll notice that she attacks much more frequently (bordering on Beam Spam) and moves much faster than in the first half. This doesn't make the battle any more difficult—it just serves to show that Mother Brain realizes the gravity of her current situation.
• Difficulty by Region: The European/Australian version makes the Phantoon fight easier by allowing the player to avoid its flame-sweep attack by going into ball form in either corner of the room.
• Disc-One Nuke: Samus becomes a walking powerhouse early in the game if you know what you're doing.
  • The Super Missile, acquired after the first miniboss, is a very powerful attack that can make mincemeat out of most bosses (most notably Kraid), with its low and scarce ammo being its only handicap.
  • The Charge Beam and Spazer Beam, which can be acquired as early as Lower Brinstar and easily rips through most enemies, and it gives you a nifty Pseudo-Screw Attack as an added bonus if you hold a charge and somersault. Combine it with the Wave Beam (which can be acquired in Norfair as soon as you have the Speed Booster and leap across the chasm to it, or even earlier if you're decent enough with the wall jump) and you'll rip through most enemies like wet tissue.
• Disconnected Side Area: There are a few areas partially visible before you can fully access them. Notably, this includes the area where Ridley is eventually fought, long before that battle happens.
• Distress Call: The game starts with a distress signal from the research station to which Samus just delivered the MacGuffin.
• Door to Before:
  • After you defeat the boss of Maridia (though a few rooms before the boss chamber, rather than the boss chamber itself), you can return to the area near the upper entrance. Though you'll probably be going a different way to continue the game, the passage is helpful when circling back to collect items that lie beneath one-way sand pits.
  • The escape sequence takes you behind Mother Brain's room and through the rest of Tourian as it's exploding, then give you a flat path to run down and inadvertently charge up your speed booster. Speed booster blocks allow you to charge through without knowing it — leading you right back to the escape shaft from Metroid, which you came back down through at the beginning of the game, allowing you to enter the former location of the Tourian base from the wrong side.
• Double Jump: The Space Jump is somewhere between this and actual Flight—gravity still affects Samus, but she can Space Jump infinitely, meaning that once she's airborne, she can keep jumping so long as her downward velocity doesn't increase too high.
• Double-Meaning Title: The title refers to both the fact that this Metroid game was released for the Super Nintendo and the supersized Metroid encountered at the end of the game.
• Down the Drain: Maridia is a submerged sector of Zebes, with only some parts of the upper areas being dry. Movement through the water is extremely sluggish without the Gravity Suit. Also taken literally, there's a drain pipe Samus can travel through.
• Downer Beginning: The game opens with Samus recounting her exploits of the first two games, finishing by noting that the Galactic Federation had found the potential to harvest energy from the last surviving Metroid from planet SR388. Shortly after she leaves to hunt new bounty, Samus receives a distress signal from a space colonly. She arrives too late, with all of the scientists already brutally murdered and only the baby Metroid and Ridley remaining. Ridley steals the hatchling to be used by the space pirates after Samus encounters him. One self-destruct sequence later and it's off to Planet Zebes where the majority of the game takes place.
• Dramatic Disappearing Display: The status display itself doesn't disappear whilst fighting a major boss, but the automap display in the top-right corner of the screen becomes completely blank during these fights.
• Drone of Dread: Tourian features long drawn-out notes as Samus makes her way to Mother Brain.
• Dungeon Bypass: Besides the usual Sequence Breaking of the series, the Space Jump (allows for infinite jumping, and destroys anything you touch if the Screw Attack is equipped) and the "Shinespark" technique in this and later 2D Metroid games (run until you get "charged", and then thrust in a chosen direction, jumping extremely high and possibly breaking some walls) provide relaible methods of bypassing major areas.

E to H

• Early-Installment Weirdness: This game is as close as you can get to the franchise's gameplay properly codified as of Fusion and the Prime games, though there are still a few strange additions that didn't make their way to later games. Beyond the ability to turn upgrades on and off, there's also a sprint button separate from the Speed Booster powerup, shinesparking gradually draining health, the Crystal Flash move to convert ammo into health in an emergency, and diagonal aiming is set to both shoulder buttons (diagonally upwards with the left shoulder and diagonally downwards with the right), with switching between your beam and missile types still entirely set on the Select button. Fusion would remove sprinting and the health-drain from shinesparking, and set priming missiles to holding the right shoulder while making the left shoulder work for firing in any diagonal direction.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: This time Samus doesn't just blow up the space pirate base on Zebes, she destroys the entire planet.
• Easter Egg: If you return to the surface of Zebes after obtaining the Super Missiles but before descending into lower Brinstar (when it's still raining) and use the bombs and super missiles to go into the cave on the right, you can listen to the "arrival on Zebes" music again.
• Elite Four: The game calls attention to its four strongest bosses (excepting Big Bad Mother Brain) with a golden statue of the four clustered together that blocks the entrance to the final level. While the group is not explicitly given a name in the game, some sources refer to them as the Four Guardians (Kraid, Phantoon, Draygon, and Ridley).
• Emergency Energy Tank:
  • The game has these in addition to the standard energy tanks. However, you can also set them to activate automatically upon running out of energy, making them an example of both this and Auto-Revive.
  • The game includes a technique known as the Crystal Flash, the stricter requirements of which can be read here. It eats up a lot of your ammunition, but fully heals you, unlike Concentration, which can only replenish a number of your Energy Tanks based on how many E-Recovery Tanks you've collected (there are only three in the game). Also, unlike the Crystal Flash, which you're safe during and happens rather quickly, you can be hurt while concentrating and it'll take a while, but the rate at which you recover health and ammunition can be improved with Accel Charge powerups.
• Energy Ring Attack:
  • Like in the original Metroid, the Rinka "enemies" look and behave more like ring-shaped beams emitted by Mother Brain's inner defense systems.
  • One of Mother Brain's attacks is spitting ring-shaped beams directly at Samus.
• Equipment-Based Progression: As Samus makes progress, she gets Super Missiles to supplant the normal Missiles, and Power Bombs to supplant the Morph Ball Bombs. The Space Jump completely superannuates both the Wall Jump and Grapple Beam.
• Event Flag: The large crashed ship is supposed to be entered from the west; a boss fight there triggers an event flag which turns the power on. Through heavy-duty Sequence Breaking, it can also be entered from the east, but it will be completely empty until this flag is triggered. Also, the method of reaching Tourian makes a comeback from the first game, with two additional bosses added.
• Evolving Weapon:
  • The Power Suit gets upgraded twice as the game goes on. The Varia Suit, guarded by Kraid, cuts damage in half and cancels out the heat damage from the main areas of Norfair. The Gravity Suit, located in the Wrecked Ship, quarters damage, lets Samus move with her usual speed in liquids, and prevents lava damage in the main area of Norfair but nowhere else.
  • Unlike many of the games, Samus's Arm Cannon retains each and every upgrade she gets. By the end of the game, the Charge Beam, Spazer, Wave Beam, Ice Beam, and Plasma Beam combine into one single, powerful weapon. The only exception is that the Spazer and Plasma beams cannot normally be combined, although they can be combined via a glitch, resulting in the fan-coined Spacetime/Reset Beam, which is invisible and reverts the game world to its original state when used.
• Excessive Steam Syndrome: In the intro level, Samus needs to escape a space station, while avoiding gushes of steam coming out from practically everywhere. If you get hit by the steam, you lose precious time to escape. It happens again during the escape from planet Zebes, only the steam's escaping from the ground itself.
• Expy Choots have different sprites, but behave in the same manner as chute leeches from Metroid II: Return of Samus
• Eye Beams: This game marks the debut of the Gadora, the enemy that guards boss doors. Being a giant eye creature, this is their only attack.
• Eyes Do Not Belong There: Phantoon is a bulbous tentacled ghost creature with a large eyeball inside its mouth.
• Fake Ultimate Mook: The fake Kraid looks like Kraid and goes down in a single Super Missile. The real Kraid is very large and looks intimidating, but he's the Warm-Up Boss.
• Family-Unfriendly Death: Metroid may be more adult-oriented compared to other Nintendo franchises, but even that doesn't explain why Crocomire goes out in such a gruesome manner. Upon beating him, he falls into a pit of acid and screeches while his skin and musculature melts off like candle wax. He manages to survive as a skeleton and lunges towards Samus for one final, desperate attack, only to collapse under his own weight into a pile of bones.
• Fanservice:
  • As usual for the series, beating the game fast enough causes Samus to remove her suit after the credits, leaving her in the underwear she has on underneath.
  • Using the Crystal Flash shows a Sexy Silhouette of Samus as she restores her health.
• Fan Disservice: The alternate way to see Samus in her underwear is to let her health run out, causing her suit to disintegrate around her in the process right before she dies.
• Fast Tunneling:
  • Justified, as skree and metaree drill their way through the ground to get away after dive bombing you, often scattering rocks for extra injury.
  • No clear justification for Owtch, who instantly burrow to get away from you.
• Fetal Position Rebirth: Samus curls up in the fetal position and gets surrounded in a ball of light when using the "Crystal Flash" for emergency recharge.
• Feed It a Bomb: The Metroids will die if you hit them with three Power Bombs. A few other enemies in the game can also be damaged/killed if they're hit with enough Power Bombs.
• Fireballs: You're back on dragon territory, both Ridley, who looks like one, and the creactures actually called "dragons", which look more like lava dwelling seahorses. Also shot by alcoons. Phantoon's seem to be supernatural.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: In Tourian, you will enter a room filled with grayed-out enemies that crumble to dust if touched or shot. In the very next room, you become trapped with one such enemy, which is impervious to your weaponry (except super missiles). In the next second, it gets turned to dust by the Metroid hatchling.
• Floating Platforms: Taking what Metroid II started even further, very few platforms in Super Metroid are elevated without some form of hand wave or justification.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Samus's narration at the very beginning hints that the Metroid's ability to drain energy can also be used for beneficial purposes, implying that the devoured energy can be used afterward. The giant Metroid demonstrates this by transferring life energy and a powered-up beam from Mother Brain to Samus during the final battle.
  • Under normal circumstances, the battle with Ridley on the Space Station ends when he brings Samus to low health, setting off her Critical Annoyance. The same sound sets off when the Metroid Hatchling is draining her energy in Tourian; it recognizes it and stops draining Samus.
  • If you place a Power Bomb near where Mother Brain was in the original Metroid, it'll open up a rather large chamber underneath, much larger than would be expected to be hidden underneath a Brain in a Jar. The revived Mother Brain in Tourian stores her biomechanical body underneath her, suggesting a similar layout.
  • In Maridia, you catch a glimpse of what looks like a Metroid when traveling through a pipe. It's actually a "Mochtroid", a far weaker failed cloning experiment that you face a few rooms later.
  • After defeating Ridley, the next room has the larval Metroid's capsule smashed and empty. It grew large enough to break free and escape to Tourian.
• Franchise Codifier: This game set the definitive template for later Metroid games. It introduced cinematic cutscenes, fleshed out Samus's character with internal narration and defined motivations, added an in-game map, made navigation more linear without sacrificing exploration, allowed Samus to keep all of her beam weapons and combine them simultaneously (instead of being forced to swap), and introduced various new items and skills that later games and remakes of previous titles would incorporate, most prominently the Speed Booster and Shinesparking.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • A small blip can be seen flying away from Zebes at the end of the game if Samus takes the time to rescue the Etecoons and Dachora during the Escape Sequence, indicating that the creatures have safely made it off the planet. This ends up being extremely important in Metroid Fusion, as the animals return in that game and help Adam pilot Samus' ship, saving her life at the very end.
  • During your escape from Ceres at the beginning of the game, one of the doors will actually explode behind you, leaving behind an impassible hunk of glowing hot metal. This one is a lot more likely to go unnoticed, due to all the other explosions and random chaos on screen (and your escape is timed). It's also the only instance of a door exploding in the entire game.
• Friend to All Children: This seems to be a confirmation of elements from the time Super Metroid was released, where Samus is typically portrayed as being quite passionate about the infant Metroid, treating it like her own offspring, unleashing the bowels of Mama Bear after it was destroyed, and entering a state of deep sorrow after she'd cooled down. This hovered around various fiction, including Nintendo Power comics and Manga. The actual game doesn't show her to be that broken up about handing the infant Metroid over to Ceres Research Station and going about her job, but her refusal to kill an non aggressive child who might very well become a benefit to society remains.
• Game Mod:
  • While the definitive history of ROM hacking has yet to be written, one of the oldest total-conversion hacks, Super Metroid Redesign, dates at least from 2004, which establishes the game's hacking scene as perhaps one of the longest-standing outside the fan translation world. There's a wide variety of Super Metroid hacks, ranging from relatively minor gameplay and physics tweaks (Project Base) to radically deuterocanonical and hugely ambitious reimaginings of the entire game and its backstory (Hyper Metroid); while the total number of released hacks is relatively small compared to, say, the Super Mario World scene, the gameplay variety and general quality level of Super Metroid hacks is surprisingly high. This website contains a lot of information on the subject.
  • There are many randomizers, as mentioned in the game description; they can completely reshuffle items and, in some cases, rooms, allowing a new experience each time one plays the game, and often requiring use of some clever, obscure techniques to reach critical items. One of the most interesting is the Super Metroid/A Link to the Past randomizer, which mashes the game up with A Link to the Past: Randomizer (any item can be almost anywhere in either game, as long as its location doesn't render either game unwinnable).
• Game-Breaking Bug: Samus can collect five beam upgrades but only four of them can be active at one time. Apparently, the programmers implemented a fail-safe that prevents the player from using all five beam upgrades because trying to do so would cause a fatal error that permanently disables Samus's beam cannon or even crash the game.
• Game Over: Should you run out of energy, the background disappears and Samus's Power Suit overloads and explodes, leaving her in her underwear as the screen fades to white and transitions to the continue screen.
• Geographic Flexibility: Downplayed, where the parts of the game that were featured in the NES prequel remain the same, but much of the geography has since considerably changed.
• Ghost Ship: The Wrecked Ship, complete with flooding, electrical discharges, ghosts, and weird bouncy things. It also houses the phantasmagorical Phantoon as its main boss.
• Giant Enemy Crab: Scisers are realistically sized, and not that hostile, but are crab like, pretty large and will hurt Samus if she bumps into them.
• Giant Mook: Stronger giant versions of Sidehoppers and Dessgeegas exist in Brinstar, Norfair, and Tourian, all of which are encountered later after their smaller counterparts. The ones in Tourian especially are durable, requiring ten Super Missiles to destroy just one of them.
• Go for the Eye: The door-blocking Gadora are the first instance of enemies in this series that must be hit in the eye. There's also Phantoon, which can only be damaged when his eye is open.
• Gold-Colored Superiority: Samus has to face two living Chozo statues named "Torizo". The second one, aptly named Golden Torizo is the most powerful of the duo, given that it is faster, jumps higher, possesses great strength and can even throw Samus' missiles back at her. Its attacks are also rather devastating. The more damage you deal to it will cause its golden color to fade.
• Grappling-Hook Pistol: The Grapple Beam makes its debut in this game. It's an electric gadget that allows Samus to latch onto certain objects so she can swing around.
• Gratuitous English: Samus's narration over the opening sequence was in English even in the Japanese version. All the American release did was remove the subtitles. (They were re-added for international versions.)
• Grimy Water: There is no suit which protects you from the acid in Lower Norfair. The Varia Suit prevents you taking damage from Upper Norfair's lava, but the acid is still a problem even with the Gravity Suit. In Zero Mission, the acid in Brinstar becomes safe to travel through with the Varia Suit, the lava in Norfair is safe with the Gravity Suit, and the acid in Tourian is never safe.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • The beam-specific charge combos, which are described only in strategy guides and shown in the "secret techniques" Attract Mode video unlocked by a completed game file, and are unlikely to be discovered by accident unless you're messing around with beam settings and Power Bombs.
  • The Varia/Gravity suit combo lets you traverse the lava at the entrance to Ridley's lair without taking damage. Nothing indicates this aside from an Attract Mode video, and most players would be cautious of jumping in there to find out. It doesn't help that most other damaging liquids in the game aren't affected by the suits at all.
  • To access the underwater portion of Maridia, the glass tube there (the one that you pass through while going from Brinstar to Norfair) must be shattered with a Power Bomb. This mechanic appears nowhere else in the game, though the presence of a broken tube at the other end of Maridia may be considered an oblique hint, if you go far out of your way to find it.
  • The unused blocks that act exactly like solid wall tiles but let Samus pass through them would have been nigh-impossible to detect, making anything hidden behind them a matter of luck to find, which is probably why they were cut to begin with.
  • The final save point in Tourian is a Point of No Return, locking you out of 100% Completion on that run if you didn't make a copy of your file beforehand. In the rare circumstance that you reach this point without the Charge Beam (or, less likely, 150 missiles) and at least three Energy Tanks, you can get locked into a situation where Mother Brain is unbeatable due to either not being able to damage the boss or not being able to survive the scripted sequence during it.
  • Phantoon's flame-sweep attack, triggered by Super Missiles, is very hard to dodge and can easily kill you even if you have lots of energy left. However, it can be avoided by using a "Pseudo-Screw Attack" (charging a shot and somersaulting), a technique that's not obvious to new players and normally doesn't offer much protection.
• Harmless Enemy: Trippers, harmless versions of the already non aggressive Rippers that do not have to be frozen to serve as platforms. You can kill them with power bombs, if you want to remove a non threat and make the game more difficult.
• Harmless Freezing: Some targets resist some or even all beam damage but can still be frozen. Previously this would mean the player had a limited amount of time to take advantage of their frozen state, but in Super Metroid this means the player can simply keep shooting them to keep them frozen longer. Otherwise freezing the target is also damaging the target, but the frozen state itself still has no lasting impact on anything's health.
• Heart Container: The energy containers (health) and missile upgrades (ammo). This was the first (and until Metroid: Samus Returns with use of an amiibo, only) game in the series to utilize reserve energy tanks, which will save Samus if all her health is depleted.
• Helpful Mook:
  • The Shaktool, a digging robot in Maridia, helps clear out a path to the Spring Ball upgrade. The robot can hurt you, if you get in its way, and you can destroy it, but there is no need for any of that.
  • Firefleas cause damage on contact but are not aggressive and light up dark rooms. They also die on contact, and their death makes the room dark again. If one has the ice bream, it's possible to turn off all other beams and freeze Firefleas in a helpful location where they won't be bumped into.
  • The Work Robots in the Wrecked Ship take pot shots at you every now and then, but can make useful step stools.
  • Powamps are dangerous to touch and harmfully explode if shot but do not attack Samus otherwise and can be latched onto with the grapple beam.
  • Scisers often reveal passage ways in Maridia that are otherwise invisible to the naked eye.
• Heroic Sacrifice: During the final boss fight, the larval Metroid, now huge, takes a blow for Samus and bequeaths Samus' ultimate weapon.
• Heroic Second Wind: During the final boss fight, Samus will eventually get hit by a scripted attack that deals heavy damage and knocks her to the ground. If she has enough energy remaining, you can make her get back up by tapping up and keep fighting in a weakened state; the boss will keep using its ultimate attack until the threshold where Samus would die from taking another, and she will no longer stand up. The proper second wind comes when the Metroid hatchling makes its Heroic Sacrifice to save Samus's life, restoring her life to full and granting her a powered-up beam to rip Mother Brain to shreds with.
• He Was Right There All Along:
  • The Torizo boss is a Chozo statue which won't attack until you take its item and try to leave the room.
  • The Ridley battles. He waits from the background until Samus tries to approach the baby Metroid.
• High-Voltage Death: The secret way to defeat Draygon is to use the Grapple Beam to grab the electrical current of one of the destroyed turrets while Draygon is carrying Samus around in her claws. Both of them get electrified, and Samus lasts much longer than Draygon does.
• Hitodama Light: Phantoon, the ghostly boss of the Wrecked Ship, appears surrounded by hitodama, and uses them as weapons against Samus.
• Hopeless Boss Fight:
  • The fight against Ridley in the opening. You can make him fumble the Metroid hatchling's container, but you can't stop him stealing it, and you can't prevent him from starting the self-destruct sequence.
  • Samus can't do a single thing to harm the Super Metroid, which effortlessly reduces her to 1 energy unit before it (presumably) realizes who she is and backs off.
  • The second portion of the final fight. Mother Brain's giant multicolored laser is impossible to dodge. When you're hit by it, it will drain any remaining missiles, super missiles, and power bombs, and reduce your health by 300 (600 without Varia). If you can survive another hit with the beam, then you can get up and keep fighting until you get hit by the beam again. Otherwise, you're stuck on your knees, unable to move until the Metroid hatchling arrives and the final phase of the battle begins. Because of the extreme damage of the beam, if you have fewer than 3 energy tanks when you get to Tourian, the battle is literally hopeless: you must survive at least one hit from the beam so that the game can trigger the transition scene.
• HP to 1:
  • The titular metroid reduces Samus' energy to exactly 1 point, regardless of any health tanks she has. This is more of a plot point than any serious danger; while there's nothing you can do to stop the energy drain (apart from not getting grabbed in the first place), at the last possible second the metroid recognizes Samus as the one it imprinted on when it hatched and it lets her go. Luckily, there's no other enemies between Samus and an energy-restoring station.
  • The Final Boss (Mother Brain) resorts to her Laser Brain Attack when dealt enough damage, draining three Energy Tanks (or six, if the player is not wearing the Varia Suit), about sixty-five Missiles, and Samus's entire supply of Super Missiles and Power Bombs. What qualifies it for this trope (given that the player can have up to nineteen Energy Tanks' worth of health by the end of the game) is that not only is it impossible to dodge the attack, but she'll keep doing it until the player's health becomes low enough that one more Laser Brain Attack would be lethal. Furthermore, if the player has more than one Energy Tank remaining, she'll rub in her imminent victory by launching weaker attacks at Samus (who at this point is too exhausted to move) until this is no longer the case. Finally, she'll attempt to finish Samus off with one final Laser Brain Attack - at which point the grown up "Super Metroid" will rush in and save Samus's life. If Samus can't survive the first of the Laser Brain attacks, however, she will die.

I to S

• I Am Not Left-Handed: Mother Brain doesn't whip out her mechanical body until Samus has seemingly won, and has trapped herself in an inescapable room.
• Immediate Sequel: The game recounts the story of Samus finding a baby metroid at the end of the previous game, then explains that she took it to a laboratory, before said laboratory was attacked. The minute she arrives back at the lab is when the game actually begins.
• I'm Melting!: A particularly brutal and graphic example occurs when the mini-boss Crocomire is pushed into a pit of acid. After bobbing up and down a bit trying to get out, it screams at a very high pitch and flesh starts peeling off in gooey streaks until only the skeleton remains.
• Imprinting: As implied at the end of the second game, the Metroid hatchling has definitely imprinted on Samus, even giving its life to save Samus'.
• Improvised Platform: From this game on, the fight against Kraid always features Samus needing to jump on the things Kraid shoots at her in order to reach his face.
• In Case of Boss Fight, Break Glass: Like in the original Metroid, Missiles or Super Missiles are needed to break the glass protecting Mother Brain, which still fails to kill her.
• Inconveniently-Placed Conveyor Belt: Initially, all the machinery in Wrecked Ship, including the conveyor belts in the floors, is turned off due to a lack of electrical power. But after the defeat of Phantoon, the power is restored and all conveyor belts are turned on. Depending on the direction you're going at as you navigate across the area, they either boost your speed while running or become a hindrance to deal with (even with the Speed Booster).
• Inescapable Ambush:
  • One happens early where one obtains the bomb ability. In this case, the door locks after obtaining it, contrary to all other such rooms. This has provided a way for tool-assisted speedrunners to skip the fight, though just barely.
  • The door to Tourian only opens when you defeat the main bosses. One wonders why they would set up the door to their main computer system only when those charged with defending it are dead: the exact opposite would be more secure.
• Instructive Level Design: In the second room, there's a small step you have to jump up on, in contrast to the many stairs in the rest of the area. This forces you to jump at least once and get a basic understanding of how the jump mechanics work, before you're pressed by time in the escape out of the area. You also meet Ridley there in a mock Boss Battle to test out your shooting skills.
• Interspecies Friendship: Samus can befriend creatures in Brinstar who teach her to Wall Jump and use the Shinespark ability. They can be saved from Zebes' destruction through a detour during the ending sequence, and show up again in Metroid Fusion. The Super Metroid also qualifies, given that it performs a Heroic Sacrifice to save Samus' life.
• Invincible Minor Minion:
  • For the only time in the series, Namihe (the worm-like enemies that grow out of walls) are completely unkillable by any weapon Samus has access to, but she can still freeze them with the Ice Beam.
  • Oums (the ammonite-like creatures found in Maridia) are impervious to all forms of attack. Just spring ball over them before they attack.
  • The Work Robots of the wrecked ship cannot be destroyed, but are harmless to touch and can be pushed into crevices to render them harmless.
  • One room in Lower Norfair features Puromi, which leap in and out of the lava to hurt Samus. Of course, this is after she's obtained the Screw Attack, so she can just bypass them this way.
• It's Personal: Samus becomes a Parental Substitute to an adorable baby Metroid and gradually comes to care for the child as her own. When Mother Brain nearly defeats Samus, the Metroid intervenes to save her, and Mother Brain retaliates by killing the now grown up "Super Metroid". Cue Samus going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge and utterly kicking Mother Brain's ass.
• Jump Scare: After the battle with Crocomire, Samus is left stuck by a wall of spikes on her left side. While looking at it, the skeletal remains of Crocomire suddenly break through the wall, only to fall apart when they hit the ground.
• Jungle Japes: Brinstar is overrun by dense, mossy flora. It is home to several insectile creatures, and is home to the large reptilian monster Kraid.
• Kaiju: Kraid Took a Level in Badass, visually, since the last game, having grown several stories tall. Unfortunately for him, he's still the first and easiest of all the bosses.
• Killed Off for Real: This is canonically the game in which Ridley is killed off for good. His appearances in Other M and Fusion are respectively a clone and an X-Parasite copy.
• Kill It with Ice: Freezing is handled differently in this game, as it takes longer to freeze an enemy, instead of each shot freezing and then unfreezing them. By the time they actually freeze, one good shot will kill them.
• Kill the Cutie: Samus's surrogate child gets kidnapped and treated in a somewhat Woobie manner, and then killed off by Mother Brain. Every time the player dies in this game, he/she is treated to an image of the Metroid still calling out to Samus in its little shrieks, too.
• Knockback Evasion: Hitting or shooting an enemy at just the right instant allows you to glitch through it without getting hit (and hence avoid knockback).
• Kung Fu-Proof Mook:
  • Owtch resist most beams but instantly die to the Speed Booster/Shinespark.
  • Holtz are immune to missiles in this game, only in this game.
  • In their shells Yards are immune to everything except Bombs, Power bombs and the Speed Booster, but you are free to run Samus into them while they are in their shells and watch her kick them around.
  • Green Space Pirates will block most beam attacks, but can be done in by bombs and missiles. Pink Space Pirates will block everything except a charged Spin Jump, Speed Booster collision, Shinespark, Screw Attack or the Plasma Beam. Silver Pirates will block everything except the hyper beam, but dodging their attacks long enough will reveal weaknesses in their guard.
  • Boyon and beetom cannot be hurt by beams, but can be frozen.
  • Rippers, ripper IIs, magdollites and fune can only be hurt by super missiles and power bombs, but can be frozen by the ice beam.
  • Super Missiles are the only thing that work on yapping maws and Tourain sidehoppers.
• Laser-Guided Karma: At the end of Metroid II: Return of Samus, Samus spares a baby Metroid that imprinted upon her as its mother. In Super Metroid, the Metroid returns the favor by not draining Samus to death, and then sacrificing itself to save her life in the fight against Mother Brain, triggering the mother of all Mama Bear moments from Samus, who, by the way, now has the Hyper Beam.
• Last Ditch Move: Crocomire will attempt to attack you as a skeleton, but instead collapses and opens the way to new rooms.
• Last of His Kind: The larval Metroid is the last survivor of its species until Fusion.
• Late to the Tragedy: You receive a distress signal from the Ceres Space Colony, only arriving to find all the scientists already dead.
• Lethal Lava Land: Norfair makes a return from the original Metroid, being a complex network with many lava areas; it also averts Convection, Schmonvection because Samus is affected by the sheer heat until she acquires the Varia Suit.
• Letting Her Hair Down: If you finish the game fast enough, Samus will remove her Power Suit at the end. She's shown with her hair tied, but then lets it loose, perhaps in a symbolic way to say that the mission is over for now.
• Limit Break: The Crystal Flash technique, which requires that Samus have fewer than 50 units of energy, no reserve energy, 10 of each missile, and 11 Power Bombs.^note Technically, Samus can perform the technique with only 10 Power Bombs if she's positioned in such a way that she'll pick up an 11th while performing it; the Crystal Flash requires laying a Power Bomb, and then it requires that Samus have 10 each of missiles, super missiles, and power bombs in her inventory once the required button combination is input. However, the timing and positioning to pull this off are extremely finicky, and it would only ever be necessary to do this if she's only collected two Power Bomb upgrades. The player must then lay a Power Bomb and input a rather complicated button combination, without moving or taking damage. Success results in a complete energy recharge. Failure has no special consequence, but given the dire straits one has to be in to perform the technique at all, it's likely that a Game Over isn't far away.
• Living Structure Monster: The doors to a boss room are covered by giant eyes called Gadoras that shoot eyebeams at Samus and must be destroyed before she can enter the room.
• Load-Bearing Boss: A series standard. This game uses it twice:
  • In the Ceres Station antepiece with Ridley, the station's self-destruct timer starts immediately after he steals the Metroid larva.
  • In the game proper, Mother Brain, whose death triggers the timer on the Space Pirates' final sanction.
• Lone Wolf Boss: Crocomire and Botwoon just seem to be part of Zebes' local wildlife, and have no real ties to the Space Pirates.
• Magma Man: They are not man shaped, but Magdollites have the power to turn into magma, and often try to hide in it, though their eyes give them away if you pay attention.
• Mama Bear: The game's story boils down to Samus being on the warpath because the Space Pirates attacked and destroyed an innocent colony, and kidnapped what amounted to her surrogate child, leaving her to pursue them on Zebes once again. At the end of the game, Mother Brain kills the now grown and giantic Metroid right in front of Samus, and subsequently gets blown to bits thanks to her new Hyper Beam.
• Man-Eating Plant: There are large carnivorous flowers. If Samus falls into one's "mouth", it grabs hold of her and deals some damage. To drive the point home even further, their actual name is "Samus Eater."
• Meat Moss: Outside the boss rooms are doors with sentry eyes that attack Samus. There's a barnacle-like substance growing near the eye-doors that is notably there in both underwater locations and extreme heat.
• Metroidvania: Shares the Trope Codifier laurel with Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. It refines the exploratory platformer approach with many more pieces of equipment and upgrades (and tracks how much you managed to collect at the end), and provides a lot of freedom to track down the four Space Pirate bosses, while also having a more obvious progression order than Metroid on the NES did.
• Mini-Boss: Super Metroid has a total of ten bosses: Five main and five mini. The first four main ones (Kraid, Draygon, Phantoon, Ridley) guard the gateway to the Final Boss (Mother Brain) and play two major battle themes. The minibosses are less powerful, and use a less tense battle music.
• Miracle-Gro Monster: There isn't much difference when an infant Metroid matures to its larval stage in most cases, but the "baby" Samus spared ends up growing to an unprecedented size, even counting the higher forms as they were depicted in Metroid II: Return of Samus. It also grows differently, as it has no indication of approaching Alpha Metroid status, though later games imply that the true, natural evolution to the Alpha -> Omega Metroid line is only possible on SR-388 (or places that emulate that atmosphere). Metroid: Other M suggests that the larva's enhanced size is due to it being an immature queen.
• A Molten Date with Death: This is how Crocomire is defeated (although what Crocomire falls in is considered acid, it's the same principle). Samus must back Crocomire onto an unstable bridge, which then collapses under Crocomire's weight and causes it to fall into the acid below. This results in a very gruesome death with Crocomire's skin visibly melting off its bones. Amazingly, it manages survive long enough to get out and break down the spike wall it was trying to back Samus into, but by that point, it's nothing more than a skeleton and dies right afterward.
• Monster Threat Expiration: Ridley subverts this. You briefly encounter him at the start of the game, and usually he'll end up reducing you to twenty energy before flying off. However, it's possible to deal him enough damage to cause him to flee voluntarily.
• Mook Maker: Air Tubes are openings in the floor and ceiling which regularly spawn flying enemies, making progressively faster and more damaging mooks the deeper into Zebes you go. This is actually nice since they usually die in one hit and drop health recovery items.
• Multiple Life Bars: In addition to featuring collectible Energy Tanks, each representing a set of 100 units of energy for Samus, the game adds the Reserve Tank system, a secondary health storage method that could be triggered manually or when Samus runs out of energy in her main tanks.
• Mutually Exclusive Power-Ups: Compared to the first and second games, this game downplays the trope. While Samus can carry both the Spazer and Plasma Beams, only one can be equipped at a time, where previous games required you to actually go and pick up a beam powerup again if you wanted to switch back to it.
• My God, What Have I Done?: The first time Samus encounters the now fully grown Metroid larvae, it attacks her, bringing her energy down to almost nothing. Just before it finishes her off, it recognizes Samus as the person it imprinted on at the end of Return of Samus and backs off, making a noise of regret.
• Near-Villain Victory: During the final battle with Mother Brain, she uses the Hyper Beam, an unavoidable and devastating attack against Samus. Once Mother Brain starts doing this, she uses this attack and Chip Damage until Samus is unable to stand. Just as she's winding up for the killing blow, the last Metroid suddenly appears and attacks Mother Brain, saving Samus' life; it then transfers the Hyper Beam to Samus as it heals her, letting Samus defeat Mother Brain for good.
• New Game Plus: Through a series of events which involve combining the spazer and plasma beams, it is possible to reset everything in the entire game, except for the items you have collected. From this point, the game can be saved over, and you can even play through the prologue again with all of your items. The only cost to doing this is losing all of your missiles - Samus is given a set amount to reinact the flashback scene during the prologue, and then they are taken away. However, because you can easily re-collect everything over and over, it's possible to end up with well over 250 Super Missiles, and so many energy tanks that the count graphic overlaps the other files on the file select!
• New World Tease: Early in the game, you can access Norfair ahead of time, complete with the tense, brooding music it plays. But as soon as you step outside of the elevator rooms, you'll be greeted by a blast of heat that drains your health quickly as you stand in it. You have to go back and get the Varia Suit (unless you don't mind some risky Sequence Breaking).
• Night of the Living Mooks: Covern are said to be the souls of creatures who died on the Wrecked Ship and were turned into evil spirits. They chase all natural life away from the wreck. Samus can bomb and shoot them out of her way but they will not stop appearing until the vehicle's power is turned on.
• No Kill like Overkill:
  • The first game concluded with Mother Brain's self-destruct timer blowing up the Pirate base, but leaving the surface intact. This time, the self-destruct causes a massive, Zebes-Shattering Kaboom, with the only survivors being Samus and the helpful critters (the Etecoons and the Dachora) if you take the time to save them, which is considered canon.
  • After weakening Samus with her "rainbow beam", Mother Brain prepares an additional one to kill her as opposed to using her weaker attacks. This is implied to be a conscious decision on her part, seeing as she's willing to use her weaker attacks to knock Samus' energy down to almost nothing once it's clear an additional rainbow beam will kill her.
• Non-Malicious Monster
  • A plausible interpretation of Crocomire, who doesn't attack you unless you attack him or approach too close.
  • There are several other monsters that can also damage you if you approach them the wrong way, but otherwise won't hurt you and can help you (which may be required to do a 100% run); these include Shaktool (which will clear away the sand in the way of the Spring Ball) and Kame/the Tatori (which can allow you to reach the Energy Tank), both in Maridia.
  • Kago will only attack if you shoot their nests, and even then mostly congregate around it rather than actively pursue you.
• Noob Bridge: The Trope Namer is the infamous collapsing bridge in Brinstar, where the game requires you to dash across a bridge, in a game where dashing isn't an obvious action. Many newcomers will go onto forums asking how to cross the bridge, to the ire of many veterans. It is possible to cross without the run button, but extremely difficult as it requires precise timing and is more of a challenge than a proper solution.
• No-Sell:
  • Mother Brain is the only creature in the entire series to manage to recover from a Metroid life drain attack, though it weakens her enough for Samus to kill her shortly thereafter.
  • The Golden Torizo in Norfair does its best to nullify both types of missile. He'll just dodge regular missiles, whereas if you use super missiles, he catches them and wings them back at you. However, this animation leaves him unable to dodge or grab another, letting him be pummeled with missiles until he finishes the throw.
• Nostalgia Level:
  • When first landing on Zebes, you backtrack through the last part of the first game, where you fought Mother Brain and escaped the time bomb.
  • The Morph Ball is in the exact same place as the first game.
  • Several segments of Ridley and Kraid's hideouts resemble parts from the first game. There's even a "Fake Kraid" like before.
  • The new Tourian is an upgraded version of the first. The battle with Mother Brain even goes the same until she whips out her mechanical body.
• Not Quite Flight:
  • The Space Jump provides you with unlimited Double Jumps while somersaulting if they're timed right.
  • The Shinespark will rocket you in a single direction until you hit an unbreakable obstruction or until your energy, which the technique consumes in proportion to the distance traveled (the only game in the series with this drawback), becomes too low. It can also only be done in places open enough for the Speed Booster to activate so a charge can be stored.
• Nothing Is Scarier:
  • The Ceres space station. The background music is just the ambient drone of computer systems. The entire area is lit in a dull, blue light. As you proceed, you come across the corpses of scientists, but with no sign of what actually killed them. The tension slowly builds until it finally climaxes when Samus enters a seemingly-empty room. The room is completely silent, save for the Metroid chirping in the corner. The game leaves the player in suspense for many seconds before finally revealing that Ridley is the station's attacker.
  • When Samus first arrives on Zebes, the music, sound effects, and environment take on properties unique to this part of the game. There are no enemies, the music is hushed and ominous, there's a thin haze in the air and vermin everywhere, as if the place hasn't been disturbed or set foot upon in years. This lasts until you reach Old Tourian and re-acquire the Morph Ball, which sets a spotlight on you and causes parts of the planet to come to life. Back up in Crateria, Space Pirates are everywhere, and a "Torizo" disguised as a Chozo Statue suddenly wakes up and attacks you after getting the Bombs.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: There is a third Torizo statue in Tourian that seems as though it will be another miniboss battle, but Samus doesn't have to fight it—it disintegrates as she passes it. It's revealed why on the next screen: the Super Metroid got there before she did.
• Oh, Crap!: Avoid attacking Mother Brain after she kills the Super Metroid and you obtain the Hyper Beam, and you will see that she moves much more quickly and shoots much more frequently. This doesn't make the battle any more difficult though: it's just there to show that Mother Brain realizes what's going on, and is rightfully terrified of you.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: Well, as close as the SNES sound chip could do:
  • Chanting is part of the music in the intro when you start a new game.
  • There's ominous chanting during certain parts of the game meant to raise tension—such as when the Space Pirates first show up after a long segment of absolutely nothing happening.
• One Bullet at a Time: For the first time Samus can actually use the rapid fire missile attack. This trope remains in play with power bombs however.
• One-Time Dungeon: The Ceres Space Colony, which is only playable during the prologue of the game. The only fight you deal with there is Ridley and escape.
• One-Winged Angel: You blast away at Mother Brain in her storage container, like in the first game, until the case explodes and she drops to the floor, dead. And then she grows a body.
• Open-Ended Boss Battle: Ridley on Ceres Station. If you lose, he'll fly off with the baby Metroid. If you win, he'll drop the baby Metroid, and then immediately pick it back up again and fly off.
• Opening Boss Battle: After descending into the Ceres Space Station, the very first enemy the player faces is Samus' Arch-Enemy, Ridley. He's however there to steal the Baby Metroid rather than pick a fight, so after a certain amount of damage is dealt to either the player or himself (more likely the player), he'll fly off with the Baby. This also triggers a Self-Destruct Sequence, forcing the player to escape and pursue Ridley to Planet Zebes.
• Opening the Sandbox: As shown in this video analysis by Game Maker's Toolkit, the game holds your hand a bit longer, as the game railroads you down a pretty linear path until you get the Ice Beam and Power Bombs and work your way back to your starting ship, essentially making a giant loop. From this point, not only can you revisit every area you've been previously, but whole swathes of the map are now open to you to explore freely.
• Orbiting Particle Shield: Samus can perform a number of secret Special Attacks by imbuing the energy of her beam weapons into her Power Bombs.^note Used by disabling all beam upgrades except the Charge Beam and one other, then equipping Power Bombs as her secondary weapon and holding the fire button. The Ice Beam variant produces four charged shots that orbit Samus and freeze anything they collide with.
• Outside-the-Box Tactic: Draygon, who can be killed with a lot of missiles...or you can shoot out the cannons on the sides (exposing the power cables underneath), let the boss grab you, then use the Grapple Beam to grab one of the exposed power cables, electrocuting the boss to death rapidly. Again, you take damage from grabbing the power cable, but the boss takes far more.
• Palette Swap: There are enemies who are palette swaps of each other, though the game also mixes it up by making some common enemies larger instead.
• Pause Scumming:
  • The game has a slow fade between gameplay and the pause screen (and vice-versa), during which gameplay continues for a second, but Samus's death at 0 health cannot be triggered during the transition. This has been used in a TAS with frame-perfect repeating pausing and careful rationing of health from a Reserve Tank to keep Samus alive through health-draining heated rooms.
  • Using the X-Ray Scope will freeze time, but not the Mercy Invincibility timer of some of the bosses. If used while these bosses are being hit by a plasma shot, this allows damaging them multiple times with the shot, a technique known as "microwaving".
  • While underwater, pausing at the right time while jumping with the Gravity Suit, and unequipping it, allows the player to abuse the game physics to "gravity jump", jumping higher than the game would normally allow.
• Personal Space Invader: Beetoms hop on Samus and begin draining her suit's energy once they get comfortable. The kinetic energy of a missile or bomb will remove them though. Mochtroids can't even attach to Samus and can be dealth with by beams, but nonetheless invade her personal space and can fly, even underwater.
• Plant Aliens:
  • Cacatacs are walking cacti. Also unlike real cacti, they are found mostly in moist environments, rather than arid ones.
  • Samus Eaters are giant metal eating flowers that you have to jump out of when they take breaks in between chewing, if you happen to fall in one, or get pulled in by a yapping maw.
  • The Spore Spawn is a cheapened example, as its alien traits(moving, living underground, etc) are the result of genetic engineering. It is an not an Earth plant regardless.
• Player Death Is Dramatic: The first game in the series to do this, giving Samus a detailed death animation and Fade to White when she runs out of health, without any death jingle.
• Point of No Return: Once you've saved at the second save point in Tourian, you can never go back to the other areas of Zebes unless you use Sequence Breaking, without any warning. It's possible to render the game Unintentionally Unwinnable without said sequence breaking, should you have too few energy tanks to survive Mother Brain's Hyper Beam attack.
• Post-Defeat Explosion Chain: Large normal enemies turn into a cloud of explosions upon defeat.
• Power Cable Attack: It's difficult to pull off, but there's a trick that allows the player to kill Draygon by having Samus bring electricity from an electrified source by using her Grapple Beam as a linking cable while she's being seized airborne by the boss. She will take a lot of damage, but so will the boss until its death.
• Power Glows: The Charge Beam, Speed Booster, Screw Attack, and Hyper Beam all make Samus glow to varying degrees and are easily some of her most powerful abilities. Especially the Hyper Beam, where Samus starts glowing for several seconds after acquiring it to let you know that's she become much more powerful.
• Power Up Letdown: The four reserve tanks. While far from useless — they are an extra 400 points of health after all — their relative complexity, such as the fact that you have to fill them manually like certain similar Sub-Tanks, with them serving as "extra energy" like fairies, makes one wonder why they couldn't have simply been another four energy tanks.
• Puzzle Boss:
  • Crocomire forces you to keep shooting at its mouth when it's open in order to force it back onto some crumbling blocks and send it falling into the lava. Particularly nefarious because there's no boss life meter, so it's hard to tell you're not really doing any damage, and because Crocomire keeps advancing towards you, essentially healing itself. Apparently, with some creative jumping, you can actually end up behind Crocomire, causing it to back itself up all the way to its death. Inversely, don't use Power Bombs against Crocomire. Crocomire does not like Power Bombs.
  • Draygon is easily beaten by breaking one of the weapon turrets, letting Draygon grab you, and then shooting your grappling beam into the broken turret. There's a massive electrical discharge that hurts you, but fries Draygon a lot quicker.
• Quicksand Sucks: All the quicksand pools are in Maridia, meaning that all the quicksand in the game is also underwater. The Power Suit protects Samus from drowning, but it still causes her to be stuck and take damage from spikes that may to be placed at the bottom of a quicksand pit.
• Railroading: Many areas are cut off unless you have a certain weapon or ability on hand. The more you gather, the more and more the game opens up. For example, you at least need the Morph Ball, Missiles and Bombs to get to Brinstar and explore from there, and the Super Missiles, Speed Booster and Power Bombs are required to finish the game. You also need to collect three energy tanks at minimum in order to survive the fight with Mother Brain in the end.
• Reduced to Dust: In Tourian, you come across rooms filled with desiccated husks that were creatures fed upon by the metroid hatchling. Upon touching one of these husks they disintegrate, turning to dust.
• Remixed Level: You can see the old Tourian as well as the starting location of the original Metroid. Parts of the new Brinstar also reuse design elements of Kraid's hideout. Metroid: Zero Mission, being a remake of the original games obviously has similar rooms, but it also has some re-done sections from Super Metroid (or rather pre-done, as the game takes place chronologically before Super Metroid). Of particular note is a series of rooms that occupy the same location as the Wrecked Ship in Super Metroid, and have textures completely unlike the other nearby rooms. It would seem to be that they are indeed a section of the Wrecked Ship, buried under the Chozo ruins. The destruction of the Pirate Mothership in the end of the game probably revealed the buried ship.
• The Remnant: The Metroid Prime series makes the Space Pirate forces in this game into this retroactively. After the massive losses the Pirates took from the Federation Marine Corps in both Prime 3 and Federation Force, the Zebes cell is the last outpost they hold. The future appearances of Space Pirates in Other M and Fusion are artificial clones designed to be emotionless and unintelligent.
• Reverse Shrapnel: The Power Bomb combos. Charging a single beam and then switching to morph ball with power bombs highlighted will result in one of these for each beam. Ice Beam has four iceballs circling Samus, while Plasma and Wave shoot to the corners of the screen and come back, and Spazer makes it rain lasers.
• Ring-Out Boss: Crocomire has to be defeated by shooting at its mouth when it's open to knock it back gradually into the acid pool at the end.
• Rise to the Challenge: The game's version of Norfair has several rooms where lava rises as soon as you enter. (Or in one case, as soon as you grab an upgrade at the far end.) In lower Norfair, Samus will also have to deal with acid that rises from the rooms that neither of her suits will protect her from. There's also rising acid in part of the final Escape Sequence, but it's kind of redundant since you're already running to escape an exploding planet, and because it's at the end of the game, your suit's been upgraded enough that the lava doesn't restrict your movement, and you have so many spare energy tanks that the damage inflicted by the acid is negligible, so it's really only there to make you panic.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: The final battle against Mother Brain depicts her destroying the Metroid Larva, which was trying to protect Samus in the first place. As it dies, it gives Samus the Hyper Beam, an insanely-powered, wall-piercing rainbow gun. So Samus, after being thrown around by Mother Brain like a chew toy, turns the tables and goes on a rampage against her, reducing Mother Brain to dust, and the planet Zebes soon after.
• Run, Don't Walk: This game has a run button, which is even the basis for the infamous "n00b bridge." Possibly as a result of the scores of new players that were deterred by this bridge, subsequent games in the series all did away with a dash button entirely, instead allowing the Speed Booster powerup to trigger automatically after running the required distance.
• Same Plot Sequel: While it has a lot of its own additions, such as the Baby Metroid as a plot point and the new Space Pirate leaders Phantoon and Draygon, the game's plot progression retreads a lot of the same ground as the original Metroid (and by proxy Zero Mission). Space Pirates steal a Metroid and bring it to their fortress on planet Zebes with the intention of breeding Metroids as bioweapons, so Samus Aran is hired to stop them. She goes to Brinstar, where she defeats Kraid and acquires the Varia Suit; she goes to Norfair, where she defeats Ridley and acquires the Screw Attack; she activates statues based on Kraid and Ridley in order to enter Tourian; she fights her way through the Metroids in Tourian and defeats Mother Brain; and finally she escapes Zebes before a time bomb explodes.
• Sand Is Water: When the Gravity Suit is acquired, the water in Maridia no longer renders Samus sluggish. However, flowing sand pits underwater still slow her down.
• Savage Setpiece: There's a turtle-like creature and its adorable babies in a certain room in Maridia. While they're normally utterly harmless, if you attack the little ones, the mother will immediately spin around in her shell after you. Climb on her shell while she's spinning and she'll launch upwards, allowing you to reach an Energy Tank and a Missile Expansion.
• Scenery Gorn: Old Tourian, the wreckage of the first game's Tourian, as well as the wrecked ship.
• Scenery Porn: The game showcases a beautiful setting despite its dark story, as seen right when you land on Zebes when it rains and head to the old Tourian. Often overlaps with Scenery Gorn.
• Sea Serpents: Botwoon is serpentine at least, and though realistically sized is still bigger than Samus and quite quick.
• Secondary Character Title: Averting the Antagonist Title from the original game, Super Metroid is often speculated to not only refer to the usual "Super X" snowclone common to Super Nintendo Entertainment System games, but also the super-powered grown up and gigantic version of the Metroid hatchling that saves Samus at the end of the game.
• Sequence Breaking: Super Metroid is famous for being full of tricks that allow you to break the game wide open:
  • Samus' wall jump mechanic allows her to rapidly scale a single vertical wall (no opposite wall even necessary) and visit game sections early without the necessary upgrades. The Wall Jump can be used to collect Power Bombs and the Wave Beam before the Grapple Beam, the Spazer Beam and X-Ray Scope without the Hi-Jump Boots/Ice Beam, reach Kraid early, and get into the Wrecked Ship without the Grapple Beam and thus collect an early Gravity Suit. This also lets you get to Draygon without the Grapple Beam via getting the Gravity Suit early, letting you get the Space Jump and complete the game without an intended collectible. In future games in the series (barring Metroid: Zero Mission), Samus needs a second wall to jump off of in order to use the move continuously.
  • This game introduces the Shinespark, a secret technique (but also one required for collecting every item) where Samus stores the energy from a Speed Booster dash and uses it to charge in one direction until she collides with a surface, ignoring gravity. It can be used to bypass areas that would otherwise require items like the Grapple Beam and Space Jump. It's limited by the amount of space Samus needs to activate the Speed Booster, and the Shinespark can only be stored for a few seconds, but there are ways to circumvent the limitations.
  • For an unintended trick, the "mock ball"/"mach ball" allows Samus to move at dashing speed while in Morph Ball form, allowing her to reach certain areas without needing the Speed Booster, letting her get the Super Missiles (skipping the need to fight Spore Spawn) and Ice Beam early on. There are numerous walkthroughs and speedruns online that show how it can be done.
  • It is possible to skip the first Torizo via the arm-pumping glitch (which enables Samus to more faster by adjusting her aim rapidly), but this trick is exclusive to the European/Australian version—Samus was made faster to adjust for the 50hz signal, thus letting her narrowly escape the room.
  • The Energy Tank in the blue part of Brinstar can be reached by damage-boosting from the knockback of a nearby enemy. By using a quick Shinespark, Samus can collect the Energy Tank in the pink portion of Brinstar much earlier and without the Gravity Suit.
  • In Norfair, once you have the Speed Booster, it's possible to use its speed to leap your way to the Wave Beam before you get the Grapple Beam. For extra irony, this allows you to sequence break past a one-way gate to another part of Norfair, which grants you early access to not only the Grapple Beam, but the Power Bombs as well.
  • A glitch commonly known as the "Green Gate Glitch" involves a Shutter with a green light that is on the left of the machine. Samus must jump and fire in a certain area of the Shutter to make it lift from the wrong side.
  • The Speed Booster, Hi-Jump Boots and Power Bombs can be collected later than usual if other sequence breaks are performed, although the Hi-Jump Boots can also be skipped altogether. The Speed Booster can also be skipped altogether by using the Ice Beam to freeze a Puyo or a Mochtroid to clip through a Pit Block in the room before Botwoon, causing them to crumble, and allowing Samus to skip the Speed Booster Blocks normally needed to reach the rooms.
  • The Super Metroid can be avoided in Tourian through dodging with the Space Jump, or with the usage of a Shinespark.
  • It's possible to tackle the four main bosses of the game (Kraid, Phantoon, Draygon, and Ridley) in reverse order. It's excruciatingly difficult because it requires traversing Norfair without the Varia Suit, meaning the heat on any screen containing lava, including the entire region where Ridley resides, deals constant damage to Samus (and therefore requiring both extremely skillful navigation and extremely shrewd resource management). It also requires traversing Maridia without the Gravity Suit, meaning the player has to do all kinds of weird manoeuvres that aren't normally possible to climb the underwater area. Needless to say, every single energy tank, power bomb, and super missile is much more important than it is in an ordinary run (you'll need to do several Crystal Flashes to survive Norfair).
  • One player did a minimalist TAS run and exploited an out of bounds glitch that allowed him to beat the game in seven minutes.
• Sequential Boss: Mother Brain has three different phases. First you fight her like in the first game, as just the brain protected by turrets and zeebetite barriers. After you beat her and examine the body, she rises out of the floor on a robotic body. After dealing enough damage to her, she'll use an extremely powerful attack to reduce you to low health, after which the Metroid hatchling shows up to save the day. But then she comes back to life again, albeit this time she's a Zero-Effort Boss thanks to the Hyper Beam. And then you have to escape the planet before it blows up.
• Sexy Silhouette: When performing the secret "Crystal Flash" move, Samus's Power Suit briefly disappears and she is surrounded by a cocoon of energy. At the center, a nude Samus remains in the fetal position until the recharge is complete.
• Shark Tunnel: Brinstar has a section where it crosses over Maridia, where a short glass tube separates them. A well placed Power Bomb shatters the glass, allowing more free travel between the two. As a Call-Forward, Metroid: Zero Mission's expanded endgame features a similar (albeit not underwater) glass tube connecting the Space Pirate Mothership and the ruins of the temple in Chozodia, which can also be shattered with a Power Bomb after you've reacquired your power suit from the temple to open a way back to the rest of Zebes.
• Shock and Awe: Samus can shoot open the turrets mounted on Draygon's boss room, leaving an electrified open socket. If Samus then allows herself to be grabbed by Draygon, she can electrocute him by latching on to the exposed wiring with the Grapple Beam. This damages Samus slightly but defeats Draygon much more quickly than she would with any of her other weaponry.
• Shoot Out the Lock: This is one of the series' main shticks. This game introduced Power Bomb and Super Missile locks (in addition to the color-coded beam-based locks and missile shields) for the first time, as well as "Gadora", a door shaped like a huge eye, that would typically guard boss rooms.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: The Spazer Beam is a shotgun-like upgrade to every other beam in the game (except the Plasma Beam, which mostly outclasses it), turning the beam into a triple-shot.
• Shoulders of Doom: This was the first game to feature the Varia Suit in its iconic form, in that it combines both the large-shouldered shape from Metroid II and the color scheme from the first game.
• Shout-Out:
  • One of Samus' abilities is called "Moonwalking", though it can be turned off in the options menu.
  • After defeating Spore Spawn, Samus is locked off in a room by a Super Missile door. The only way out is down a green pipe.
  • The Tatori, Jr. enemies in Maridia look exactly like Buzzy Beetles.
  • Samus gains a move from Super Robot fame: the Shinespark.
• Show, Don't Tell: One of the game's most praised qualities. Outside of the opening text from Samus, there are no other pieces of dialogue or text in the entire game (apart from the notifications of the self-destruct sequences at the beginning and end of the game). There are still tons of details and pieces of foreshadowing in the environment that give players an idea of what is happening/has happened and keep them emotionally invested in the story.
• Skippable Boss:
  • The Spore Spawn can be bypassed via a complex trick with the Morph Ball, letting you get Super Missiles without having to fight it. To add insult to injury, you can use those Super Missiles to grab the capacity upgrade it guards, leaving Spore Spawn as the least-fought boss in speedrun categories.
  • With tool-assistance (it's not humanly possible to perform the amount of frame-perfect inputs necessary to move fast enough), Torizo is skippable by leaving the room where you get Bombs before the door locks.
  • The only progression item Crocomire guards is the Grapple Beam, which can be circumvented by using wall-jumping and Shinesparking to get Power Bombs and traverse both the Wrecked Ship and Maridia. Once you get the Space Jump behind Draygon, the Grapple Beam is rendered obsolete and Crocomire is skipped.
  • If the boss locations are randomized (the boss rooms remain the same, but which boss is encountered changes) and Draygon is defeated before visiting Maridia, it's possible to reach the Maridia boss room from "Cacatac Alley" and avoid Botwoon altogether.
• Smashing Survival: Draygon can be fought without the Grapple Beam, but he can inflict significant damage if he webs and grabs Samus. The game doesn't mention that you can mash buttons to escape before he strikes.
• So Near, Yet So Far: The entrance to Tourian is one of the first places you can visit in Crateria, but it's blocked off by a statue that won't move until you defeat the four bosses it depicts.
• Sound-Only Death: Possible to invoke with Crocomire. Although pushing him into the acid results in a rather graphic death scene, you can just walk away after knocking him in before he starts melting. Doing so has his death be completely offscreen, meaning that you can't see it, but you can still hear him scream, not knowing what's actually happening if you don't look.
• Space Pirates: The Zebesian Space Pirates return in this game, and they even get to do some actual piracy by boarding the space colony and pilfering its precious Metroid cargo, although they spend the rest of the game firmly entrenched on Zebes. Super Metroid is also notably the first Metroid game to portray rank-and-file Pirates (namely Zebesians and Kihunters) onscreen, as opposed to just the Pirate leaders Kraid, Ridley, and Mother Brain.
• Special Attack: Some abilities are not mentioned anywhere in the manual and, unlike the Wall Jump or Shinespark, aren't taught in-game. However, some of them show up in the game's Attract Mode.
  • Spin Jump Attack, also known as the Pseudo-Screw Attack, which allows Samus to hurt a single enemy if she spin jumps while a full charge of the Charge Beam is being held. Connecting with an enemy inflicts damage and consumes the charged shot, but unlike the Screw Attack, this does less damage, and Samus will be hurt like normal if the damage isn't enough to destroy the enemy. This technique can also be used defensively in some cases — it offers temporary invulnerability against Phantoon's projectiles, which is quite welcomed since some of Phantoon's attack formations sweep the entire screen. This also damages some enemies that otherwise can't be damaged without some other items: for instance, it's normally not possible to damage purple Space Pirates without the Screw Attack or the Plasma Beam, but two applications of the Spin Jump Attack will dispatch them at the cost of significant damage to Samus.
  • Five-Bomb Drop, which causes Samus to drop five bombs at once if she morphs into a ball while the Charge Beam is held and releases it. Depending on how long the charge is held, the bombs are launched at different trajectories.
  • Crystal Flash, which allows Samus to utilize weaponry reserves to recharge her energy in a pinch. Also counts as a Limit Break, since it can only done under very specific conditions and only with 50 or less units of health remaining.
  • Each beam by itself, when combined with the Charge Beam and a Power Bomb, has a special maneuver which usually creates some sort of Sphere of Power or effect that surrounds Samus and damages enemies. They're all done the same way, but each has a different effect. Also doubles as a Mutually Exclusive Powerup, because the other beams must be turned off for the specifically chosen one to work.
• Spectacular Spinning: Samus's normal jump is a vertical leap, but if she jumps while moving horizontally fast enough, she instead somersaults through the air, which also lets her Wall Jump and (if she has the Charge Beam) use the Spin Jump Attack to damage enemies. Later, Samus also gains the Space Jump and Screw Attack, two very useful abilities which can only be used during a spin jump; the former enables infinite aerial jumps, while the latter turns Samus's somersault into a powerful weapon that can decimate enemies.
• Speedrun Reward: As with previous games, the ending slightly changes depending on how much time it takes the player to complete the game. You need three hours or less to see Samus in her leotard. The game clock only advances when you have control of Samus. During cutscenes, as well as traveling through doors, time is not counted.
• Sphere of Power:
  • Power Bombs create a round, ever-expanding explosion that hurts nearly every enemy onscreen.
  • Each beam upgrade has a Special Attack that creates protective circular beams around Samus.
  • The Crystal Flash creates a spherical light around Samus, but with a healing ability rather than a destructive one.
• Spikes of Doom:
  • The game has spikes in a few places, including under lava and acid! Luckily, some spikes are fake and won't hurt you if you touch them, and the fake spikes can be destroyed. Without the X-Ray Scope, you're playing with mines trying to see which set of spikes are fake and which real.
  • The spikes in the Wrecked Ship are harmless until the power gets turned back on, which happens after Samus beats Phantoon.
  • There is a chamber called "A Bridge Too Far" (or, more colloquially, the Noob Bridge) amongst fans. If you try walking across the bridge, it crumbles underneath Samus, and if you try to jump across and only shortly land every now and then on the bridge, you will hit the spikes in the ceiling just above the bridge. What you're supposed to do is hold the run button (something unique to that game); this gets you across without falling through.
• Spike Shooter: Cacatacs swell up before shooting off thorns in five different directions.
• Suddenly-Harmful Harmless Object:
  • The various defunct robots in the Wrecked Ship segment come to life and attack your character when the power come back up.
  • You know those Chozo statues that Samus gets stuff from? Two of them try to kill you at different points in the game.
• Sudden Soundtrack Stop: In the opening cutscene, the intro theme plays throughout Samus handing the baby Metroid over on Space Station Ceres. When she leaves the station said theme stops dead when she picks up the station's distress signal and has to fly back immediately.
• Super Not-Drowning Skills: Like in nearly all games in the franchise, Samus can stay underwater for any duration she wants, without drowning, thanks to her Power Suit. However, movement and visibility in water are both highly limited, until one receives the Gravity Suit, as which point the water's actually just there to look fancy.
• Super-Speed: The Speed Booster, introduced in this game, causes Samus to speed up dramatically after running for long enough, letting her run past descending gates and crumbling floors, while barreling through certain blocks and any enemies in her way. Cancelling the dash lets her store a Shinespark, an aimable charge attack.
• Super Spit:
  • Kihunters can spit acid.
  • Magdollites have the power to turn into magma, and then spit parts of themselves at you.
  • Kraid gains a rock spit attack in this game, but stops using it after being shot in the mouth.
  • Draygon can spit out glue to hold Samus in place.
  • Mother Brain's One-Winged Angel form can spit bombs.
• Super Title 64 Advance: The game has the prefix "Super" for Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It has sometimes been said to refer to the sized-up hatchling as well.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Crocomire, who is defeated by being backed onto an unstable bridge and having its skin gruesomely melted off in acid. After it vanishes off-screen, the ominous pre-boss room theme starts playing. After Samus runs over to the spiked wall, the boss theme starts playing again, which seems to indicate that Crocomire is still alive and ready for a second phase. The skeleton of Crocomire breaks through the wall to leap at Samus... only to comically collapse and die before it can do anything else.

T to Z

• Tactical Suicide Boss:
  • If Phantoon would stay phased out and shooting at Samus instead of periodically materializing in the middle of the arena, he'd be untouchable. Though Phantoon may not be able to stay phased permanently –- it may be like how whales have to surface every so often to breathe; they'd never get harpooned if they just stayed deep underwater, but it isn't possible.
  • Spore Spawn would be invincible if it never opened to reveal its vulnerable insides. Justified in that this creature probably isn’t sentient.
  • If Crocomire never opened his mouth to roar, he would be untouchable. But he could also possibly qualify as a "dumb animal" driven solely by instinct.
• Techno Wreckage: The Wrecked Ship is a crashed spacecraft on the surface of Zebes, located in the lakein the eastern part of Crateria. Killing Phantoon causes its power to go back online, activating the machinery inside.
• Teleporting Keycard Squad: The game does this twice — with the same boss (Ridley) and the same Plot Coupon (Baby Metroid) both times.
• Temple of Doom: Ridley and company inhabit what appear to be ruins of Chozo civilization, deep within Zebes.
• Temporary Platform:
  • There are floor tiles that will collapse, but take a half-second to do so. And then there are near-Fake Platforms that collapse almost instantly. The "near" part is important, as there is just enough time to be able to jump off of them if you're really fast. The latter are usually used to create corridors that required a Speed Booster dash to traverse, but they also make for convenient one-way passages.
  • There are grapple points that disappear a few seconds after latching onto them with the Grapple Beam.
• Thwarted Coup de Grâce: When Mother Brain stuns Samus, she charges up an additional rainbow beam only to be attacked by the Super Metroid. Mother Brain recovers from the energy drain while the Metroid tends to Samus.
• Theme Music Power-Up: After the titular Metroid rescues Samus, is killed by Mother Brain, and confers the Hyper Beam to Samus, the music from Crateria plays in the background, and Samus begins to glow.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Mother Brain tries to kills Samus with her Laser Brain Attack when the Hunter's HP is nearly zero. But then she ends up on the wrong end of another such smackdown when she murders the giant Metroid, which is the infant Metroid from Metroid II: Return of Samus/Metroid: Samus Returns all grown up and trying to protect Samus. Mother Brain earns herself a Hyper Beam-fueled Roaring Rampage of Revenge from the creature's human adoptive "mother." The final shot decapitates Mother Brain, exploding her cybernetic combat body; her severed head turns to gray powder as it hits the floor.
• Timed Mission: There are two timed Escape Sequence missions in the game. The first is the self-destruction of the Ceres station, and the second is the explosion that destroys planet Zebes.
• Tin-Can Robot: There are a handful of these in the Wrecked Ship. They are round cylinders with legs and no arms.
• Touch of Death:
  • Acquiring the Charge Beam allows Samus to damage weak enemies by spin jumping into them while the beam is charged.
  • Colliding into most enemies while using the Speed Booster/Shinespark in any capacity will kill them.
  • The Screw Attack electrifies Samus when she jumps without needing to charge up, letting her kill almost anything she touches without taking any damage.
• Translation Convention: Interestingly, the Japanese version of the game treats itself as if it were a localized Hollywood Sci-Fi movie, with Japanese text translated below the "original" English dialogue and the menus left untranslated other than the config menus.
• Trick Boss: There's a tiny version of the boss Kraid in the room before you fight the real, two-TV-screens-tall Kraid. This is both an "easy" Trick Boss and a Homage to the original Kraid from the first Metroid game. Also, since (like real bosses, though not as much) he dumps large amounts of health and ammo when he dies, the fake Kraid also serves to replenish your strength for the real thing. There's also a fake Kraid wandering around the lower sections of Kraid's Hideout in the original Metroid. He can be taken out with a mere single missile and has a different palette, but otherwise looks the same as the real deal.
• True Sight: The X-Ray Visor shows you hidden passages and invisible objects.
• Turns Red: If the player hits Phantoon with a Super Missile, he will go into an enraged state and spam a difficult attack while becoming immune to damage until he stops. This can be avoided by using only regular missiles and charged shots on him.
• Uncommon Time: Ridley's boss theme (also used for several other battles and the escape from Zebes) is in 10/8 with a few bars of 4/4 and 3/4 thrown in here and there, and Mother Brain's is in 7/8.
• Underground Monkey: Half a dozen different colours of Space Pirates, of increasing power, from the wimpy grey Pirates in Old Tourian to the nasty red variant in Maridia that require the Plasma Beam to harm. There are also a pair of gold Pirates that serve as sub-bosses before Ridley's room.
• Underground Level: The game set the tradition in itself and subsequent installments to combine this trope with a compatible setting. Maridia is a network of flooded caves, while Norfair makes a return from the first game as a lava cave.
• Under the Sea: Much of Maridia is submerged, and some of the areas have falling bodies of sand that further increase the difficulty of proper mobility. The Gravity Suit makes exploration of this area much easier.
• Underwater Boss Battle: The flooded caverns of Maridia contain a miniboss and a major boss, though since Samus has the Gravity Suit by this point (or at least is intended to), she's not particularly hindered by the battles being entirely submerged.
  • Botwoon is the miniboss, an aquatic serpentine creature that swims around the arena, entering holes in the background to hide. Its head is the only part of it that can be hurt.
  • Draygon is the major boss, a crustacean-like creature who swoops through the arena quickly and can grab Samus with his claws. His soft underbelly is his weak point.
• Unending End Card: The game hangs on an endless starfield screen saying "See you next mission".
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay:
  • Shortly after defeating Crocomire, the player runs into a platform which ramps upward, a long pit and blocks that can only be broken by the Speed Booster. Samus has to apply semi-realistic momentum by running towards the ramp and jumping off it to gain enough height and distance to reach the Grapple Beam.
  • The "secret" method to beat Draygon is the only place that you can grapple onto live wires, with no real indication that you can other than the block the turret sits on being similar in appearance to a standard grapple block.
• Unexplained Recovery: Ridley and Kraid return for this sequel despite being blown up by Samus in the original game, and no explanation for this is given within the game. Only Ridley gets somewhat of an explanation for his recovery by future installments of the franchise. The same applies to Mother Brain, which is very visible because the ruins of her original boss arena are visited at the beginning of the game.
• The Unfought: The third Torizo, when you enter the Super Metroid's chambers in Tourian. The Super Metroid has already killed it and the player is attacked by the comically large and invincible Metroid instead.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: If you save at the final save point in Tourian (which is a Point of No Return) without the Charge Beam and with anything less than 150 missiles or so, you will not be able to beat Mother Brain's second form and must restart the game. Likewise, if you reach Mother Brain with less than three Energy Tanks, her unavoidable eye-beam attack will kill you every time before the game can trigger the giant Metroid's rescue.
• Unique Enemy:
  • Maridia has the most unique creatures out of any area, possibly a Truth in Television reference to the wide variety of life found in the oceans:
    • A bizarre walker by the name of Shaktool carves a path through a wall for the player that eventually leads to the Spring Ball upgrade.
    • A unique turtle creature called Tatori can be found with its young in a tall cavern. Standing on its back can give Samus early access to the room's Energy Tank and Missile Expansion, but touching its young will make it attack her.
    • The Oums are ammonite-like creatures that impede Samus' progress through a hallway, but are otherwise pretty harmless. They only appear in this one segment.
    • A red Skultera only appears in a single room that connects to Brinstar. Asides from its color, it's identical to the other Skulteras found throughout the game.
  • The hallway just before Ridley has two silver "ninja" Space Pirates. The only other place they appear is during the escape sequence, where they are instantly eviscerated by Samus' Hyper Beam, though those are technically a different variety of the other space pirates in the escape, with less HP and more vulnerabilities compared to the "true" ninjas faced in Norfair — though in most cases players will probably barely notice those last two enemies in the game because Samus's only weapon at that point kills them instantly. (But that would make them yet another unique enemy, amusingly.)
  • There is a unique Geemer colored like Samus's Varia Suit which mimics her movements above a particular room in Crateria. If you leave the room, it will be gone when you reach its spot. It doesn't do anything or drop anything special, it can't hurt you, and there is no explanation for it.
• Utility Weapon: Every weapon you get (beyond the basic Power Beam, which can still open basic blue doors) will help you bypass a specific obstacle.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Tourian, home of the Mother Brain like in the original Metroid. Now there's the added bonus of also being the place where you finally see the Metroid infant, only it's no longer an "infant", having progressed to a gigantic larva!
• Video Game Caring Potential: If you choose to, and if you even bother to go off the beaten path to look around while the planet is exploding, you can rescue Dachora and the Etecoons during the final escape sequence, practically the only two friendly species to Samus throughout the entire game, and who even gave her demonstrations of certain techniques. Fusion reveals that this is canon, with the ending to Fusion showing that they pilot Samus' ship during the escape sequence, effectively saving her life.
• Wall Crawl
  • Scisers are underwater crab-like aliens that can crawl up walls and on ceilings. But Samus can finally attack diagonally, so they're not much issue.
  • Classic crotch monsters like Novas, Violas, Zeelas and Zoomers also return to crawl on the walls of Zebes again, as well as the new "Zeros", which are great for getting power bomb ammunition.
  • Grey, yellow and pink space pirates are capable of climbing walls, jumping between them and shooting at Samus from them.
• Wall Jump: The wall-jumping ability is taught to Samus Aran (and, by extension, the player) by some creatures she finds in the caves, but she can use it from the beginning of the game. Its main purpose is actually to facilitate Sequence Breaking, as mastery of the technique can allow you to climb up using a single wall indefinitely and break the game wide open. As a result, the mechanics of it differ greatly from most games, with the inputs needing to be sequenced rather than done simultaneously like in, say, Super Mario.
• Warmup Boss: The first enemy you face is an old enemy, Ridley. Unfortunately, you're at minimum strength and he's a giant flying Space Pirate dragon. Thankfully, since he’s there to commit theft rather than to pick a fight, he flies off after either of you takes too much damage (more likely you). When you fight him again later, it's a much different story.
• Wave-Motion Gun: The Hyper Beam, which is actually an attack taken from Mother Brain by the now-adult-sized Metroid that you saved on SR 388 in Return of Samus, who, after realizing you are its mother, gives it to you after draining Mother Brain of (most of) her energy. It is only used for a short time during the final boss fight and brings the once-powerful creature to its Yugo-sized knees.
• Whack-a-Monster: A variation. Botwoon is a snake-like miniboss that pops up from holes in the wall. To damage it, you must shoot it in the head when it peeks out of one of the holes to spit projectiles at you.
• Wham Line: Or rather, "Wham Sound Effect". The chirping noise that the Super Metroid makes before it releases Samus serves as a cue for the player that it was the Metroid larva from the beginning of the game. This trope is also in effect In-Universe: the last thing the larval Metroid heard from Samus before being kidnapped was the siren of her "danger" alarm, which is what causes the Super Metroid to realize who she is and let her go.
• Where It All Began: The pathway to the final area is fairly close to your ship and the first places you visit on Zebes (Ceres Station, the very first area of the game, is destroyed) and there's even a secret path near your ship that's effectively a second pathway to the final area, meaning you're very likely to be passing by your ship (possibly grabbing a save and fill-up while there) when doing a 100% items run (depending on your route).
• Wings Do Nothing: Alcoons do jump from up from underground, but do not make use of their wings when doing so, or anything else other than flapping back and forth as they walk.
• The Worf Effect: The Metroid hatchling can not only take out enemies Samus can barely scratch in seconds, but it is completely invincible to her bombs, power bombs, ice beam and everything else she can use normally. This escalates when Mother Brain then kills the hatchling without even using her strongest weapon... which was luckily transferred to Samus by the hatchling before it died.
• X-Ray Vision: The X-Ray Visor lets you see hidden passages, identify what parts can be destroyed with projectiles, and expose fake spikes.
• You Can't Thwart Stage One: At the start of the game, you encounter Ridley making off with the Metroid hatchling. Nothing you can do can stop him. If he beats you, he'll escape to Zebes with the larva. If you beat him, he'll drop the larva, then pick it up again and escape to Zebes anyway.
• Zeerust: The Wrecked Ship is similar to something one would find in old sci-fi movies—especially the design of the walking bipedal robots.
• Zero-Effort Boss: The last phase of the Mother Brain fight, in which Samus obliterates her with the newly-acquired Hyper Beam while being restored to full health beforehand.

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