Going to try and keep this one as a reasonable, to the point Game Journal(Spoilers, I failed), but I'm glad I could play both these games after finishing that tome of a Metroid Dread review. At the end of this I'll have my "Dread Review Debriefing", but before that, let me talk about some things I actually enjoyed.

Metroid II gets better with age, and better when you come to it as a willing participant

My palette cleanser after Dread was Metroid II. I ended up using so many Metroid II examples that it felt appropriate to give it a quick play through. This time I played with the EJRTQ Colorization, which I quite liked. I kinda wished I played with Azurelore Korrigan's color Patch(you should read this page and other things she wrote, even if you're not planning on using it) as she's maybe Metroid II's #1 defender, but the patch I had did the job fine. Metroid 2 doesn't need color, but I've played it monochrome enough to justify a little experimentation. I felt like it actually added to the game and it made it clear that the world wasn't actually just the same grey tiles, over and over again? I think a case could be made that being less confused is actually a downgrade, but I think I was confused enough!! 😭

...Aesthetically though there is something about the pure monochrome look. Probably the best way to do a first play through.

"We got to the point where Metroidvanias were "Ah yes, I got the GREEN COLORED DASH, which will break GREEN BLOCKS, and I can find all the spots I missed by checking my map. It's an ATTACK and a MOVEMENT OPTION--" and like idk at that point the genre was cooked for like a decade."

As usual, with these posts, I start by going off on twitter(Don't worry about this though, I'm just gonna rehash all of it here), this time about Metroidvania, and as usual it's time to salvage a messy thread from a dying platform.

Animal Well is apparently good(It's Sylvie Lime, but for normies.) and with that, comes the think pieces and opinions on what the nebulous and poorly named genre of Metroidvanias is and how they should be, mechanically.