One thing the article reminded me of was the almost hallucinogenic quasi-repetition in the game's map. For a Gameboy game in 1991, it had a huge area to explore

One thing the article reminded me of was the almost hallucinogenic quasi-repetition in the game's map. For a Gameboy game in 1991, it had a huge area to explore, and all that was packed into a tiny 2 megabit cartridge, with less than half of that reserved for level layouts. I recall the game having a lot of strange dead ends and misleadingly familiar passages because of how level layout data was re-used. The low-level details of how the game stored its level data is documented here: https://wiki.metroidconstruction.com/doku.php?id=return_of_samus:technical_information:level_data_banks https://wiki.metroidconstruction.com/doku.php?id=return_of_s...