TASaturday #4: Super Metroid (SNES)

For this TASaturday #4, we picked one of the most iconic and beloved games on the SNES, played by many players around the world: Super Metroid! Actually, it’s one of the games which has the most speedruns and Tool-Assisted Speedruns on this console, and for good reasons. For starters, it’s considered one of the best games on the SNES, which means there are lots of people interested in it (both as speedrunners and fans of speedruns).

It allows for some quite impressive feats and tricks, but also, it’s a rather large game. It’s not quite an open-world game, though Super Metroid does give a lot more freedom to the player than most modern games (even within the Metroid series). That  means the possibilities for speedrunning are simply limitless.

And that’s one of the reasons there’s so many speedruns of Super Metroid: because of route planning. Chosing a different itinery, taking a specific item before another, visiting a boss before another… all those decisions can radically change the outcome of a speedrun, and allow for major time saving. It also adds a lot of variety, which is a great plus for viewers: by watching two speedrunners playing Super Metroid, you might get to see two very different runs.

There’s also the various “ways” to speedrun the game: 100% run (with all items), lowest % run (with as few items as possible), with/without sequence breaking tricks, etc… There’s lots of different speedruns for Super Metroid, which is another reason this game is so popular among speedrunners and speedrun fans.

And for this week’s TASaturday, we picked up a very special kind of run: the “reverse boss order” one. What this means is that the TASer went and fought the various bosses of the game in the total opposite order than what the developers intended. Of course, there’s alread some speedruns where some bosses are beaten in the wrong order, but this TAS goes even further!

The most difficult part isn’t quite beating the bosses without the proper equipment; actually, it’s going through some sections of the game without them. Just try and explore Norfair without the Varia suit, and you’ll see… and that’s exactly the kind of thing this TASer goes through in this run.

Ever since we started TASaturday, we wanted to feature a Super Metroid TAS at least once, and this specific run is definitely one of the best for the game. It’s actually one of the recommended TAS for newcomers over at TASVideos.org (we strongly recommend you go and check out the videos there, that’s where we pick up all the TAS from, each week!)

And now, without further ado, here’s the Super Metroid “reverse boss order” TAS by Saturn:

For more information about this run, please click here!

Next week, we’ll be back with a funny/surprising TAS, that even people who don’t like football will enjoy!