Super Metroid is a little unusual for a Nintendo title, in that it actually acknowledges the previous games as part of a connected story. And yet the greatest accomplishment was Super Metroid, a brilliant game that showed the developers had really studied what did and didn’t work with the first two Metroid games, and created a title that essentially established the Metroidvania subgenre as we know it. You can see this with the likes of The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past and Final Fantasy II (and its sequels), which not only greatly improve in graphics and sound but also in scope and mechanics. During the SNES era, many developers were honing their crafts by iterating on ideas from the previous console generation.
