LogFAQs > #887220507

transcience posted...

think of it as replay value. you're never finding that your first time but it gives you more interesting ways to explore the game

Not really because it's not exploration to shoot missiles at every block in the game. Bombing corners and other kinds of potential shortcut areas, sure, but that one Ridley shortcut is just in the middle of the ceiling. If there was a scanner like in SM then it would be fine, but I can't imagine exploring and finding that in ZM. Unless there's a way to come up on the back from the other side... which is actually very likely considering how ZM is designed. So I would take that back in that case.

And yeah it's clear that SM and onwards were definitely designed with intentional sequence breaks left in. That's fine, it's still rewarding. But they do also have a design philosophy that very strongly allows for really new shortcuts too, so any sequence break you find FEELS like your own invention. Specifically, any gating they do is limited to a few small instances at most, so that if you DO manage to find a way around a gate, you can proceed relatively freely. This is why you can skip the Varia suit in ZM - there are only a handful of small fire rooms, even though theoretically they could've made all of lower Norfair and Ridley fire since you "should" have the Varia suit by then anyways (which is what Fusion and Metroid Prime do I think).
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_foolmo_
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