>-------------< Super Metroid >-------------< Boss Strategy Guide Version 1.0 Author: Lord Xela Email: lord.xela@gmail.com Date: 11/29/04 Version history Version 1.0: The basic guide, with only one or two strategies per boss. I’ll update it if I’m informed of and/or develop new strategies. If I were trying to be annoying and such, I would put the whole legal spiel here. Instead, so I can get right to the guide thingy of sorts, I’m just going to say if you want to use my guide for something besides what it’s meant for or you want to post it on your web site, ask my permission and give me some credit. My email address is lord.xela@gmail.com so ask me before using my guide for anything other than reading and getting strategies. Just don’t change it or try to use it to make a profit or anything like that. Ok, now that I’m done rambling, let’s get to the actual guide. ============== Boss 1: Ridley ============== Location: Ceres Space Station Required items: None Useful items: None Reward: A timed escape sequence Strategy: There are 2 ways to win this fight: Either hit Ridley 100 times, or have your energy reduced below 30. Either way, Ridley flies off and triggers the self-destruct mechanism of Ceres. You have one minute to escape. Easy, eh? ============== Boss 2: Torizo ============== Location: Crateria Required items: None Useful items: Missiles Reward: Morph Ball bombs Strategy: This fight’s easy enough. Just hit him with missiles until he dies. Just be careful not to fire your missiles rapidly, as there’s a period of about half a second after he’s hit where he’ll be invulnerable. If you run out of missiles or get low on energy, wait for him to fire those little egg-like things and shoot them. They’ll give you energy or missiles. Defeat him for the Morph Ball bombs, which open up access to Brinstar. =================== Boss 3: Spore Spawn =================== Location: Brinstar Required items: Missiles/Charge Beam Useful items: Super Missiles (if you’re sequence breaking) Reward: Super Missiles Strategy: This guy’s a pushover. Crouch into Morph Ball form and hide in either corner of the lowest possible elevation in the room. From there, just wait, dodging the spores he drops if necessary (Note: If you stay in the corner, the spores will miss you, no matter how close they come). When he opens up, jump up quick and fire a missile or charged shot into his core. Repeat until he’s dead. Warning: The more damage he takes, the faster he’ll move, so watch out. ============= Boss 4: Kraid ============= Location: Kraid’s Lair (A subsection of Brinstar) Required items: Missiles/Charge Beam Useful items: Super Missiles Reward: Varia Suit Strategy: Yay! The first kinda difficult boss. At first, Kraid’s just a head sticking out of the ground. He’ll pop up, and just hit him in the head with a regular beam shot. He’ll open his mouth and roar. Shoot his open mouth with a Super Missile (or your most powerful attack in the event of you not having any Supers). Watch out and make sure his arm doesn’t block the shot. After you hit him once, he’ll rise up from the ground, and parts of the ceiling will break off. Jump up on the new platforms, and continue the process of hitting his head and shooting his open mouth. Just keep in mind that now, he walks back and forth, and he can launch his claws and belly spikes at you, so be careful of those. After you get him with 4 Supers (or whatever the normal Missile/charged shot equivalent is), he’ll sink back into the ground, leaving your way to the Varia Suit open. ================= Boss 5: Crocomire ================= Location: Norfair Required items: Missiles/Charge Beam Useful items: Super Missiles Reward: Grapple Beam Strategy: Crocomire has infinite health, so don’t try to kill him. Instead, just hit him in the mouth with whatever you’ve got when he opens it to knock him backwards. Make all efforts you can to do it quickly, so he can’t gain much ground when he charges. When you drive him back far enough, he’ll walk onto a collapsing bridge, and fall into acid, which kills him. After the fight, go left to the spike wall and wait. Then, suddenly... OMG CROCOMIRE IS TEH ZOMBIE! Or not. His skeleton destroys the wall, allowing you to get by and find the Grapple Beam. ================ Boss 6: Phantoon ================ Location: The Wrecked Ship Required items: Missiles/Charged Beam Useful items: Wave/Spazer/Charge Beam (It does the most damage to him) Reward: Gravity Suit Strategy: If you have them, equip the Wave, Spazer, and Charge Beams, and de-equip the Ice Beam. This guy’s probably the second hardest boss in the game, second only to Ridley himself. Anyway... On to the strategy. Phantoon is a huge floating head with a single eye in the center. The only way to hurt him is to wait for his eye to open and hit the eye with a charged shot/Missile/Super Missile. He has 4 attack patterns. The first one is this: He’ll float around the room with his eye closed in a figure 8, dropping blue flames on you. You can shoot the flames for energy and ammo refills. At the end of this pattern, he’ll pause, open his eye for a split second, and launch a ring of blue flames. Try to dodge the ring, and don’t bother trying to hit him. As soon as this pattern’s over, he’ll switch to pattern 2. In this pattern, he’ll appear randomly with his eye open and drop flames on you from the ceiling. He stays still while doing this, so now is when you want to hit him. If you use a charged Wave/Spazer/Ice Beam shot, he’ll resume pattern 1. If you use the same attack but without the Ice Beam aspect, he’ll go into pattern 3, in which he flies around the screen randomly, letting you hit him 2 more times, after which he resumes pattern 1. If you hit him with a Super, he’ll switch to pattern 4. In this pattern, he’ll appear in the top center of the screen and swing waves of blue fire at you. You can dodge it by hiding in the corner in Morph Ball form, but switch corners each time, or he’ll be able to hit you. After this pattern, he’ll resume pattern 1. The Wave/Spazer/Charge Beam method is definitely the best of all of these, however, as it does the most damage. Using it, he dies in only 12 shots. Note: Any Charged shot that doesn’t use all 3 (Spazer, Ice, and Wave) and Missiles will all knock him into pattern 3, but the Spazer/Wave is the most powerful, so use that one. =============== Boss 7: Botwoon =============== Location: Maridia Required items: Missiles/Charge Beam Useful items: Wave/Spazer/Ice/Charge Beam Reward: Access to Draygon Strategy: This guy’s a pushover. He has 2 attack patterns. The first one is to come out of one of the holes in the wall and swim around randomly before entering another one. When he does this, aim for his head with your most powerful attacks. His only other attack is to stick his head out of a hole and fire little green things at you. Dodge them and hit him in the head some more. After a while, he’ll die. Note: If you stand on the far left of the screen, he can’t touch you with his random swimming, so stay there. It’s easier that way. =============== Boss 8: Draygon =============== Location: Maridia Required items: Missiles/Charge Beam Useful items: Grapple Beam Reward: Space Jump Strategy: This boss has 2 strategies. The easy one, and the hard one. The hard one comes first. Hard version: Destroy the little electricity cannon thingies on the walls with Missiles (or Supers) so they’ll stop shooting at you and wait for Draygon to appear. He’ll dive down at you from the side, swooping across the arena. Roll into a ball and avoid him while he’s doing this. When he stops swooping, he’ll come toward you slowly on ground level instead, releasing little gray sticky things that trap you. Plant a Power Bomb when you see him start to spit them out and wait for it to go off. It’ll destroy them. Then just hit him in the stomach with whatever weaponry you’re choosing to use for the fight. Repeat this as necessary until he dies. Note: The more injured he is, the faster he’ll move, so watch out. Easy version: This technique is only usable if you have the Grapple Beam, which you’ll probably have if you’re this far. Start the battle the same way, by destroying the little electricity cannons and waiting. Dodge his swoops, but when he starts spitting out the little gray things, let yourself get hit by one. He’ll grab you and start moving around the screen in a spiral that constantly gets wider and higher. When you’re close enough to one, grab onto a broken electricity cannon with your Grapple Beam. If done right, he’ll stop, and you’ll both get hurt, but he gets hurt more and faster. He’ll die after you take about 1 energy tank worth of damage. Easy, right? =================== Boss 9: Gold Torizo =================== Location: Lower Norfair Required items: Charge Beam Useful items: The most powerful charged beam attack (Wave/Ice/Plasma) Reward: Screw Attack Strategy: Remember the Torizo that was guarding the bombs at the beginning of the game? This guy’s almost the same. He just has a few new attacks, a lot more energy, and he can catch your Missiles/Supers and throw them back at you, so avoid using those. Just hit him with your most powerful charged attack (which hopefully at this point should be Wave/Ice/Plasma) about 10 times until he dies. Make your best efforts to dodge his attacks, though it’s not completely necessary to dodge them all as you’ll probably have 7+ energy tanks by now. If you run low on energy, shoot his little egg things that he throws at you from time to time for a refill. ======================== Boss 10: Ridley... Again ======================== Location: Lower Norfair Required items: Missiles/Charge Beam Useful items: The most powerful charged beam attack (Wave/Ice/Plasma) Reward: An Energy Tank (Kinda lame for the hardest boss in the game, eh?) Strategy: Ugh. This guy’s a real pain. The main reason being because he’s got very random attack patterns. He’ll do the following things: Bounce around on his tail trying to catch you in his claws, spit fireballs from the top of the room, and dive at you, trying to ram you. There really isn’t a strategy here, except to have really good reflexes and not get hit. Get used to his attack patterns. If you see him fly off the screen but don’t see fireballs, start space jumping so you can avoid his swoop. And try not to fall off the arena, as there’s acid underneath it. If you sucessfully beat him, you get *gasp* a whole Energy Tank! What a prize. ============================= Boss 11: Mother Brain, Part 1 ============================= Location: Tourain Required items: Missiles Useful items: Ice Beam Reward: Access to the fight with Mother Brain, part 2 Strategy: For those of you who’ve beaten Metroid 1 (or Zero Mission, for that matter), this should be easy. All you have to do is shoot your way past the Zebetites (They take 4 Supers each), and blast Mother Brain’s jar with Missiles until the front breaks. Then just hit her in the head with Missiles until she dies. Prepare yourself for round 2. Note: You can freeze the Rinkas with the Ice Beam, making the fight a bit easier if you want to. ============================= Boss 12: Mother Brain, Part 2 ============================= Location: Tourain Required items: Missiles/Charge Beam Useful items: None Reward: A cutscene Strategy: Holy s-! Mother Brain’s mutated into a huge... dinosaur... thing. BUT. Don’t get paranoid. It’s still an easy fight. The new Mother Brain has 4 attacks: She can shoot one of those little eye-lasers that the Space Pirates shoot (she shoots it at head level, so don’t worry about it), she can fire little blue rings of energy (jump to dodge them), she can drop little bombs that explode when they get near the bottom right corner of the room (jump to dodge them), and when she’s low on energy, she’ll fire what seems like a line of explosions that does heavy damage (jump to dodge this one too). When she gets even weaker, she’ll use a move that reduces your energy by 3 full tanks, drains your ammo, and paralyzes you. Be sure that you have a bit more than 3 energy tanks when you see her charging up for this move though, because if you don’t have enough, it’ll kill you, and if you have too much, she’ll do it again. When she takes a step toward you, you’ve finished this form of Mother Brain. Sit back and watch the cutscene. ============================= Boss 13: Mother Brain, part 3 ============================= Location: Tourain Required items: Hyper Beam Useful items: None Reward: A timed escape sequence Strategy: Fun time! Aim diagonally upward and hold down the fire button. The Hyper Beam slaughters Mother Brain in about 30 seconds. Don’t even bother dodging her attacks (if she even gets any off), just kill her. After the fight, you have 3 minutes. Get off the planet. Fast. You don’t want to have to fight her all over again, do you? Congratulations! You beat Super Metroid! Sit back and watch the ending sequence. Satisfying, isn’t it? This guide was produced by Lord Xela. © 2004