The limitations of the Game Boy prevent Mario Land 2 from true greatness, but there's still a lot to love it for.

The worlds, thirty years later, are unlike anything we've seen in a 2D Mario game since. Instead of the usual "biomes" we see in traditional Mario titles we get the inside of a big Mario robot, a world where you're shrunken down to the size of an ant, and space! There aren't a ton of levels but each of them have a hook tied directly to those concepts, so they're all decently memorable. And you have more weird shit going on like jumping in a hippo's snot bubble to float to the goal, insane dreamlike scenarios that you'd never see in the series now. The open map exploration is cool too and gives the game a nice sense of discovery.

Wario's Castle is the most memorable level and that's because you are forced to start from the very beginning every time you die, even if you've reached the three phase boss battle at the end. It's a pretty steep increase difficulty from the rest of the game but it's a welcome challenge and fun to see yourself get the hang of it. What is unwelcome is losing all of your golden coins after dying, and needing to replay all the previous boss levels to get them back and access Wario's castle - I confess I didn't bother with this and just used a save state.

I think the best way I can describe my experience with Super Metroid is recounting when I tried to get a particular hidden missile capsule that I found in the wall. It was a long vertical area and I noticed that the only way I was going to get that was to use my speed boost and shinespark all the way up, but there was also a very specific window between platforms that I needed to squeeze through in order to get there. After a few tries I made it all the way up and got the missiles, feeling like an absolute king that I was able to solve that all by myself and that I had honed my shinespark abilities to such an extent.

Of course this isn't a necessary part of the game, it's a hidden secret that I could have walked by. Hell, using shinespark at all is pretty much entirely optional. But this feeling of discovery and experimentation is exactly what makes Super Metroid so captivating. The game handles progression in such a satisfying way with the introduction of new abilities and the encouragement to take risks and explore. I feel like everyone will play this game at least a little bit differently.

There are certain elements of Super Metroid that show their age - the unintuitive swapping of weapons comes to mind, as does sometimes unresponsive and (very) frustrating mechanics such as the wall jump - but it was easy for me to look beyond this since there was always just something else that would pull me right back in. And wall jump is rendered pretty much pointless by upgrades you get later on, so the sense of progression is very rewarding.