The original Metroid and Castlevania both turn 40 years old this fall. As the two series most responsible for creating the “metroidvania,” we’re taking this occasion to take a comprehensive view of the popular genre. This is Metroidvania Week.
Samus steps into a room she has seen before. She has just regained the Morph Ball ability, opening a path that was previously out of reach, and turns around to retrace her steps. Then the door slams shut and a massive humanoid drone corners her. The familiar room becomes a trap as the bounty hunter scrambles to remember the layout, find an escape route, and survive an enemy she can’t yet defeat. It’s a perfect example of how Metroid Dread takes one of the defining ideas of the metroidvania genre, returning to places you’ve already explored, and makes it feel dangerous again.
For nearly 40 years, Metroid has built its identity around backtracking, but Nintendo has been backtracking into the genre it helped create. The metroidvania formula has spent decades evolving beyond its origins, forcing Nintendo to find new ways to keep up with the games it inspired.
The genre explosion has created a challenge for Nintendo. Its familiar characters and usually stellar gameplay design are not enough to stand out among the many metroidvanias that have emerged over the years. The company is no longer defining the genre so much as competing within it, forcing Metroid to find new ways to make its decades-old formula feel fresh.
Nintendo’s Yoshio Sakamoto, one of Metroid’s original creators, has watched this transformation happen from the beginning. In a 2021 interview with CNET, he acknowledged the abundance of games in the metroidvania genre and expressed gratitude for the developers who took Nintendo’s ideas and made them their own.
“I honestly feel very happy and thankful that what we did back then has been carried on through so many game developers and game designers, creating so many different games,” Sakamoto said.
That evolution is important because Metroid is no longer returning to a formula that only it understands. It is competing against an entire genre that has spent decades refining the ideas Nintendo established. The question for modern Metroid games isn’t whether exploration, ability gating, and backtracking still work. They clearly do. It’s what else can be done with them.
Dread’s answer was to make exploration dangerous.
The EMMI zones take sections of the traditional metroidvania map and turn them into places where Samus is not the most powerful thing in the room. The nearly indestructible robotic sentries trap her inside enclosed areas, and once an EMMI detects her, the normal rhythm of Metroid exploration disappears. Samus has to run, slide, climb, hide, and make split-second decisions about where she can go next. A room that would normally be an opportunity for exploration becomes a survival puzzle.
That is a fantastic twist on the metroidvania format because it makes the environment itself part of the enemy. Players learn these spaces because they may need to escape through them seconds later. A platform that seemed irrelevant suddenly becomes an escape route. A narrow corridor becomes a liability. A door that once represented the unknown becomes a potential safe haven.
Dread uses the metroidvania structure against the player. The interconnected environments that make exploration satisfying also become tools for survival, while the player’s growing understanding of the map becomes just as important as Samus’ growing arsenal. Nintendo took a formula it had been using for decades and found a new way to make players feel inside it.
Metroid Prime 4: Beyond takes a different approach. Rather than changing how the genre approaches exploration, it tries to make Metroid bigger. That ambition is understandable. Open-world games have become one of the dominant forms of modern adventure games, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild demonstrated how effectively Nintendo could rebuild one of its oldest formulas around freedom and player-directed exploration.
The Prime 4 development team considered an open-world Metroid, too, but quickly encountered a problem: Metroid’s progression depends on gaining abilities that expand where Samus can go, which doesn’t naturally mesh with a world where players can roam freely from the beginning. “The core element of ‘gaining Metroid abilities to expand your range of action’ doesn’t mesh well with an open world where you can roam freely from the very start,” the developers said in a Famitsu interview.
The team ultimately created limited areas of freedom connected by hubs, with the Vi-O-La bike providing faster travel between them. The developers also acknowledged that development took longer than expected and that players’ expectations of open-world games had changed during that time. When Retro Studios restarted development, however, the team decided to follow through with the original concept.
The result is a game that expands Metroid without fundamentally changing how its metroidvania structure works. Prime 4 is strongest when it puts players in dense environments filled with secrets, shortcuts, and abilities that change how those spaces can be navigated–its larger spaces can dilute that sense of discovery. A great metroidvania doesn’t need to be enormous: It needs to make players wonder what’s waiting just beyond the next barrier.
The genre has spent decades learning how to make those barriers interesting. Hollow Knight made getting lost feel like the point, Ori and the Will of the Wisps turned movement into a central skill, and Blasphemous pushed the formula toward action-RPGs, just to name a few. Metroidvania long ago ceased being a formula waiting to be followed. It is a foundation developers can use to build something new.
Dread understands that evolution better than Prime 4. Its answer is to turn exploration into a fight for survival, changing how players experience the familiar formula rather than simply making it bigger. Nintendo doesn’t need to abandon Metroid’s formula, but it does need to find new ways to surprise players who have spent decades learning it.
Sakamoto has made clear that the series’ evolution isn’t ending with Dread or Prime 4.
“As long as the character Samus exists, I think her adventure will continue. I feel that Samus should continue her adventure, and that’s something that we would really need to put our best effort into,” he said, while also mentioning how Dread concludes a three-decade-long story. “So yes, as long as your character Samus is loved, I would like to do what I have to do.”
