Metroid Larva Pixel Art

I got over my art block.

This is just a bit of practice in pixel art, it seems very interesting, and useful

This is my little baby girl. I just got her today. What should I name her?

Octo-ber #17: Very little is known about the Short-Arm Flapjack Octopod, but it is distinct enough from other umbrella octopuses to establish a separate genus.

How about a enderman holding a Metroid (in the larva form)?

Another finished commission!

So it occurs to me I should probably post my Metroid fanart to tumblr if I want the mortifying ordeal of people on tumblr knowing about my Metroid fanart. I'll try not to flood the tag with my several months' work all at once, so here's the first one to start with.

Little metroid larva, what will you grow up to be~

I sometimes see people claiming that Dread indirectly ruined Samus' relationship with the Baby due to the reveal that she has Thoha DNA, which presumably means that the reason why it mistook her for its mother was not due to imprinting but genetic programming

First off: Dread never says this, anywhere

Secondly: while it can be easy to consider this as an unwanted implication, one born from Dread's admiteddly rushed finale that really liked to throw new twists and concepts at you without really elaborating on them or their consequences, I think that the people who believe in the former assertion do so while forgetting that, according to the game, Samus has both Thoha AND Mawkin DNA in her

While the former may incentivize Metroids (or at least their larvae) to follow orders the latter should have the opposite effect, pushing them to see her as an enemy

Considering the presence of both DNA strands in her it's unlikely that Metroids would behave exclusively one way or the other towards her: it's possible that they'd feel confused upon encountering Samus or, as I like to believe, that the opposing effects of both DNAs cancel each other out, thus making the Metroids act neutrally towards Samus...which for the creatures usually means with generic aggression as the Metroids are just naturally inclined to attack any life form they come across, just not due to viewing them as enemies specifically like they would the Mawkin but rather simply by viewing them as food

Of course from the Baby's POV it would see Samus as just another life form that it just happened to mistake for its mother

Of course I'm sorta doing the writers' job for them a bit here, but what I'm trying to say is: Dread itself never states or tries to imply that the only reason why the Baby bonded to Samus was due to her genetics, at worst it could be an unfortunate implication that can be dismissed through the use of other information the game gives us

"Samus spared the Baby because she couldn't bring herself to shoot an infant!"

Tell that to all the Baby Sheegoths, Baby Bloggs and, y'know, all the Metroid larvae (which are still infants as demonstrated by the Metroids' life cycle) she's killed over the years

She spares the Baby because it had mistaken her for its mother. That's the reason why she couldn't bring herself to shoot it, because of its display of pure innocence. It's a slight difference but an important one

Samus Returns actually depicts it perfectly: she was going to kill it, but after seeing how innocently it chirped about, having already imprinted on her. Had it tried to attack her she wouldn't have hesitated to shoot, baby or not

Yeah, that's fair.

The Baby is not just a baby in the sense that it just hatched: it displayed a behavior similar to an innocent baby animal. You're right that the SR cutscene paints it very well, as it focuses on Samus keeping the gun pointed at it but clearly conflicted between "this is the last Metroid, this thing will be dangerous, I need to complete my mission" and "but... but it's just a child... it's not doing anything to me... look, it's chirping and it sounds happy to see me... could it be that Metroids can be innocuous?"

The Sheegoths attack Samus on sight and they're vicious so fuck them, they get their back shattered :P

(still, if Samus spared The Baby because it was completely docile, that doesn't explain why she fried Crocomire :<)

i just finished super metroid today. i think bookends to a game are cool, but not when they highlight the fact that you are exactly where you started with nothing to show and in fact things would have been better if you never did anything at all and just stayed home.

the game starts with the player answering a distress call on ceres and facing ridley, who escapes with a metroid larva that samus saved in the previous game and was quite attached to her. then the first bookend: a self-destruct sequence on ceres activates for some reason and you have to escape.

samus follows ridley to planet zebes and the rest of the game happens. you explore and shoot aliens and find gear that lets you explore more places to shoot more aliens. it's a very fun game actually!

in the final bit, your old metroid larva pal (now grown up) is mortally wounded in the process of saving you after you awaken the final boss by shooting the jar it's in. defeating the final boss then starts THIS planet's self-destruct sequence for some reason. so there's your other bookend; you can spend it running to your ship and thinking "so... nothing i did in this game had any benefit, huh?"

when you answered the distress call you didnt save ceres, or even stop ridley. your metroid pal thrived on zebes, feasting like a king and growing huge, maybe even breeding. YOU activate a dormant monster, which causes the death of the metroid and then, minutes after, the planet and everything on it.

when i started playing the game i was feeling the standard colonialism video game discomfort, like. why am i killing these aliens. that seems ethically dubious. theyre just chilling in their native habitat. many of them are hostile, but im an intruder in their territory, of course they are! i didnt expect the game to validate this feeling so completely.

the framing doesn't register the bleakness though. as you fly away from the explosion the game exclaims "MISSION SUCCESS!" and i just sat there thinking, what mission? what success?

if my "mission" was to stop whatever ridley's plan with the metroid was (can ridley plan? he seems to be just a big space pterosaur) then you do succeed, by killing ridley (a while earlier), and the metroid, and everything else on zebes, and zebes. you got some suit upgrades and weapons, so that's cool i guess. don't think too much about the intelligent civilization on this planet that made them, or the artifically constructed environments they had built.

this is admittedly a very 2023 way of thinking about this game, but if you ask me, the bigger statement is that this wasn't the 1994 way of thinking about it. i guess it is a really fun game, after you manage to quiet the moral questions in your head, and before they all come rushing back up at you again.

Through the holidays and the start of this year I’ve been replaying the Metroid Prime games. It’s something I’ve been intending to for years and to my horror it has been 10 years since I played these games. That’s a lot of time. But it was a very fun experience to play these again and they definitely hold up.

What I found interesting was that I actually liked Prime 2 more than the first game. Prime 2 does have some frustrating boss design and weirdly placed backtracking. Like the game randomly sends you back to a previous area to find a power up so you can progress in the area you were in. But still, I enjoyed the vibe of Prime 2 a lot more.

The planet of Aether was more alien and sci-fi and the atmosphere was dark and superb. Like the beginning section with the undead federation soldiers was just perfect. Dark Samus was also a really cool and imposing villain. The bosses were also more fun and varied than in Prime 1. There was of course some jank like any boss involving the morph ball and Cykka Larva was a bastard to keep track of.

Another interesting bit was that I actually got lost a few times in both games. I don’t remember that happening back in the day, but here I genuinely got lost a couple times and had to look up where I needed to go. Most times it was me going to the right direction and then missing something obvious like a hole in the wall, turning back and getting lost. Dumb ol’ me.

But yeah, the Prime games are awesome! Glad I kept my WiiU so I could play them. I didn’t however replay Prime 3. I got nothing against that, but I had my Prime fill after playing through two games back to back.

Metroid: Baseless Speculation

So I was playing AM2R, and I noticed how dinosaur-like the later forms of the metroid species are. It led me to think then of Ridley and Kraid for similar reasons of dinosaur-likeness. Then I thought about how dinosaurs were the ancestors of birds here on Earth, and remembered that the Chozo are an avian-species-but-from-space, and I started to ask myself on what gives with all these dinosaurs and birds from space in the Metroid universe.

Then I started to get ideas. Baseless ideas of speculation. So now I will proceed to vomit these ideas onto a post.

Concept: For millions of years, the Chozo and their ancestors have been visiting Earth. This had to have been some time after the extinction event that nearly wiped out every last dinosaur, OR, the Chozo ancestors might even have caused the dinosaur species to evolve on Earth. They had been experimenting with the various genetics of Earthly species, particularly with the remnants of the genetic line of dinosaurs and birds, influencing the evolutionary paths of the many different bird kinds to resemble their own specie’s diversity. In my mind, they would have enabled the dinosaurs to thrive in the new evolutionary form of birds. Meanwhile, they preserved samples of DNA from this evolutionary line and used that to cultivate a dinosaur revival of sorts on other planets (probably Zebes and ZDR at the least, considering that’s where the Kraid species has been encountered). I would speculate that Ridley’s species is an enhanced version of the pterodactyl (that metamorphises from the smol birb creature from Other M), and Kraid’s species is an all new kind of dinosaur-like creature, both genetically revived and crafted by the Chozo. Additionally, I speculate that the Chozo outright used dinosaur DNA to help construct the metroids and their evolutionary path. I know that the Alpha and Gamma forms are more insect-like, but note how these stages and even the infant and larva stages have those claw-like mandibles reminiscent of dinosaur claws.

Additionally, since the Chozo have been described as being helpers to developing species throughout the galaxy over the eons, I believe that the Chozo must have been visiting all areas of the Earth even throughout the eras of human civilization, granting knowledge and wisdom to various cultures. A notable example might be the early Egyptians, who share hieroglyphic architectural aesthetics with the Chozo, and I speculate even named one of their oldest and most well known gods of knowledge and wisdom, Tehuty/Thoth the Ibis-headed god after the Thoha tribe who visited them and whom they may have venerated as perhaps divine beings from the stars. Not to mention depicting Ra and Horus as falcon-headed gods. The Chozo visiting other regions to share more secrets in these older times may have even inspired the widespread veneration of wise and powerful bird entities among other cultures (such as the ravens Huginn and Muninn in Norse mythology, the eagle in Indigenous American culture, the wise Owl of Athena/Minerva of Grecco-Roman mythology, and general winged divinities across cultures such as Abrahamic angels).

Again, this is baseless speculation, but honestly, the idea of Chozo being an extremely old and benign spacefaring species that helped humanity along with many other young species in the galaxy across the eons is an extremely intriguing concept to me and I will stand by this as my headcanon.

Do you ironically find the classic larval metroids more threatening than alpha, gamma, zeta, omega, or queen, despite the larvae being less advanced from the other stages? Considering they have the main threat of being able to latch onto you to drain energy, whereas the later stages just damage you normally.

It's a bit of a tradeoff in the sense that the drain takes awhile, whereas the evolved Metroids can hit like a truck.

HD Chozo Memories - Metroid: Samus Returns

Inktober day 23 - Larva Metroid

alien