SM Redesign: Axeil Edition FINAL

[Foxhound3857]

A bit of thread necromancy here, but I may have found another undiscovered sequence break in Axeil. It is possible to get to Wave Beam without Speed Booster, utilizing both IBJ and a bomb-induced Mockball.

You'll have to use IBJ twice in the shaft leading to Wave Beam, once to get rid of the bomb blocks at the top, and again to actually reach the ledge, and it's a fairly long one, roughly 100 bombs or so to reach the top, so you'll need to have it down pretty good.

Once you reach the top, there's still the issue of the automatic shutter closing on you if you try to run under it normally without Speed Booster, which would force you to reset the room. You can bypass it via a Mockball, but you don't have enough space to set one up normally via a running jump, so you have to instead use what I call Vaulting.

Lay a bomb and roll just to the left or right of it and it will propel you a significant distance in that direction, a mechanic utilized in a few of the morph ball tunnel puzzles. If you continue rolling after you land, you maintain the same speed that the bomb launched you at, and in this case it's enough to sneak under the shutter and claim the Wave Beam beyond.

I can no longer collect it on this run, but I may try to capture this sequence break on video later as a technical demonstration. But for anyone interested, Wave Beam can now be collected as soon as you have Varia Suit, on the way to Crocomire to get Power Bombs. I'll have to experiment further and see what other sequence breaks, if any, early Wave Beam opens up. I'm now wondering if it's possible to reach Gravity Suit without Speed Booster.

[Foxhound3857]

Okay, so the answer to that question would be yes, you can collect Gravity Suit before Speed Booster.

The normal path requires scaling a shift just above the Maridia elevator that puts you right next to Tourian (normally requires Hi-Jump, but can be IBJ'd), and leads to a forked path, one of which holds an E Tank. The other requires Speed Booster to traverse.

The alternate path requires you to find a hidden morph ball tunnel in the room outside the first Missile Pack, which requires Super Missiles to open, and allows you to open the shutter from the other side. The purple room beyond it requires IBJ to reach the ledge in the upper right, where you can find a Missile ten-pack and open a green gate shutter shortcut. Then you take the bottom door immediately beyond that, take the shaft all the way to the bottom (the door on the left leads to the other side of the normal path that requires Speed Booster) and head right into Crateria Depths. The path to Gravity Suit is the same from here.

You don't even need Wave Beam to reach it, so the Wave Beam sequence break, while cool, doesn't really do much for you other than let you collect a couple of extra expansions earlier. But learning that Gravity Suit, assuming you're really, really good at both normal and underwater IBJ, can be collected as soon as you have Super Missiles, without Hi-Jump or Grapple Beam (as they are skipped in 14.1 low% anyway)...that's a pretty significant sequence break, and it might even mean that Varia Suit can be skipped in low%.

Though getting to the Lost Caves without Grapple...I can't remember if it can be done without a Spark Suit. I don't remember how I did it the first time.

[Drewseph]

You can skip grapple. and if I'm correct about my theory... Varia suit as well.

I also updated the patch on my site. changelist includes:

FINAL (03/18/2021)
- Created a checkpoint system for the escape sequence. if you die during the escape, you can
  choose to restart from the end of the Mother Brain fight when the timer begins.
- Fixed tile colors in Maridia.
- Appearance change for some structures in rooms. No change to actual gameplay affected.
- Moved an annoying little zeela in the brinstar fisrt elevator room.
- Shot reflections from missile/locked doors when aiming UP no longer get stuck inside door.
- Hopefully fixed an error where walljumping did work while screw attacking.
- Repointed a Door FX to prevent acid appearing in a norfair room when it should be Lava.
- Fixed an issue with the appearance of glass shards from glass tubes. Shards now appear on both sides when exploding.
- Elevators will auto-center the screen in bigger rooms when activating them.
- Removed death by being out of bounds.
- Fixed error in ceres where samus might get softlocked when ridley pushes player asside. 
- Fixed a glitch where placing a powerbomb destroys Mother Brains pillar preventing the fight from soft locking.
- Fixed several soft lock scenatios during the EPBC
- Fixed a potential hardlock during EBPC when running out of powerbombs during a certain part.
- Fixed a solid wall preventing 100%
- Surprise bug introduces with lava animations speeds fixed. haha
- Fixed issue with zebes explosions occuring in the air while in some rooms.
- Added event states to two rooms once thought inacessable during the escape sequence.
- Fixed a bug with scrolling in the room before Kraid. Spring balling would result in samus off screen death.
- Adjusted platform to prevent getting stuck in water during escape if not knowing about crouch jump.
- Fixed a problem in Metroid behavior with screw attacking.
- Addressed an issue with demorhing sometimes slowing samus down for a few frames.
- Addressed a bug where sometimes demorphing in the middle of a bounce
  meant a full height jump even when tapping the jump button.
- Fixed maridia express elevator unlocking trigger from explored map, to door shell.
- Slope fixes that were causing the player to stop when hitting the ceiling.
- Fixed a crumble exit which might cause softlock.

[MetroidPlayer]

Found something. Mockballing to the hidden way at the left made the camera not pan

[Drewseph]

Thanks, I fixed it. My 6yo son also found the one and only Hard-Lock bug in the game, forcing you to need to start a new file.

If the player enters backward following the green arrow, and does not have any missiles, or super missiles, then the player is stuck. if you make a save at the station, then you are permanently stuck

[Zeke]

Oh cool, an update! That reminds me I never got around to posting my mini-FAQ for EPB. (It was on an SD card I lost, so that was demoralizing, but I've since reconstructed it.) I'll do that as soon as I've got it polished up and replayed EPB to make sure everything's accurate.

On that note, Drew, what exactly is the trigger for [spoiler]the quake that makes the first super missile pack available in EPB? In this new playthrough I beat Spore Spawn and went straight back, but the rocks were still there. I had to go back down and poke around Brinstar some more, and I'm not sure which specific poke allowed the quake to happen.[/spoiler]

[Drewseph]

Oh cool, an update! That reminds me I never got around to posting my mini-FAQ for EPB. (It was on an SD card I lost, so that was demoralizing, but I've since reconstructed it.) I'll do that as soon as I've got it polished up and replayed EPB to make sure everything's accurate.

On that note, Drew, what exactly is the trigger for [spoiler]the quake that makes the first super missile pack available in EPB? In this new playthrough I beat Spore Spawn and went straight back, but the rocks were still there. I had to go back down and poke around Brinstar some more, and I'm not sure which specific poke allowed the quake to happen.[/spoiler]

Did you die, and reload at the creteria save station?  because I have recently watched in LP where the blockade was there, but triggered later on when he was passing by in the endgame.

A hard load from reset will remove the blockade, but if you die on the way to it, and retry, for some reason the PLM won't react on contact o_O

I have been trying to pinpoint the cause but no luck how to fix it yet. its apparently a rare occurrence

[Zeke]

So Spore Spawn itself is supposed to be the only trigger? Innnteresting. I didn't die or do anything funny with cartridge saves, and savestates by their very nature don't forget triggers or anything else between save and load. I'll try taking the same actions in a fresh game and see if it happens again.

[Drewseph]

Actions to repro: Kill spore, go back to crateria, save, trigger quake, Die, yes, and try to trigger quake again.

[M1CR0H4CK3R]

Actions to repro: Kill spore, go back to crateria, save, trigger quake, Die, yes, and try to trigger quake again.

Zeke is asking what exactly triggers the quake...

[Drewseph]

I told him.  A PLM triggers a quake.

[Zeke]

Yes, but as I said, it didn't happen for me and not for the reason you're describing. I never died or loaded a save. That's why I wanted to know exactly what triggers the quake (i.e. what the PLM you're talking about actually checks for), which I assume from your initial response is just Spore Spawn's death.

All that said, I did start a fresh file and so far I can't reproduce the problem, so it was probably just a fluke. I'll let you know if it happens again.

Btw, speaking of save stations, props for getting them to work more than once without leaving the room. That's something that's been bugging me in the original game for years.

[chitose]

I apologize for the post, but I searched for an answer and couldn't find one.

Can someone please tell me how to get through the lost cavern section? I don't know what the poles mean.

[shaktool7]

Try looking in the background for clues. If that doesn't help, refer to this https://clips.twitch.tv/ThirstyWildWheelVoHiYo

[chitose]

Thank you very much for the quick reply :) got through it.

EDIT: Finished the hack. I'm really bad, but the hack is very good. Minor nitpick is the amount of grey doors that you can't go through until the escape.

69.5% item collection. 14:33 time.

[sbelmont85]

Original post here deleted,

I went back and was more thoughtful about my review ... review on the hacks release page updated.  I finished playing the final version and have spent more time trying to be thoughtful in my review and personal opinions. I removed the details on my recommendations from the review I provided on the release page to prevent any spoilers, placing them here.

[Recommendations]
The following things I found really frustrating, tedious, or a disappointment and that if changed I think would make this an even better hack and possibly give it a more unique touch.  In order of importance are the following recommendations.

[spoiler]

1) Consider adjusting the more difficult to execute and lengthy speedboost break placements and make them more accessible at end game.  Possibly making an upgrade to increase the shinespark charge timeout and reduce the shine-charge run distance both by getting the screw-attack upgrade.

2) Consider adjusting the more unforgiving maze puzzles.  Possibly having one or two progress places in the mazes where if you fall through a crumble block it doesn't set you back to the beginning of the game but only part way.  Make the double bomb jump off corner ledges in vertical columns with crumble blocks below more forgiving such as by placing a non-respawning bomb block on top of the crumble block (giving you a single second chance before falling through) or changing the challenge into diagonal jumps with an open block above the jump locations and ledges on the either side.  Another idea is to make the power bomb jump much higher to be used more easily, in place of double bomb jump with regular bombs, at the cost of expending ammo. Or possibly making power bombs magnetic so the morph ball can still move or travel slightly in any direction like over a ledge but is held in place until the power bomb goes off.

3) Consider adding a few more sequence breaks and make current ones a little more forgiving such as early wave beam with a room door between ibj and speedgate. A difficult but doable morphball puzzle maze with possibly a wavebeam gate to get spazer before speedboost would be nice too. Possibly make gray doors be opened by either the in game event normally or by 20 or 25 Super Missiles, which would make it difficult but doable to get certain items early, like beam combo and plasma beam.  This would also prevent reflecting supers off doors, making things such as Ridley fight a little more challenging.

4) Consider making the beam upgrades more of a joy for end game play and unique for your hack. Some ideas are: Getting the beam combo doubles the fire rate of single shots, auto shots, halves the time of to charge for charged shots, and give a 25% fire rate increase to all missiles. This would also make Metroid fights a little less frustrating. (Maybe rename Combo Beam to something like "Power Cannon" to indicate it's more than just allowing beams to be combined).  Another idea would be when obtaining combo beam would enable grapple beam to attach to any enemy, freezing the enemy in place and dealing damage over time, in essence all enemies would become crumble grapple blocks with varying time depending on their amount of health.

[/spoiler]

I know you can't please everyone, and I don't expect the hack to, but I think these changes would keep its intended level of difficulty, enable more replayability, and be more enjoyable by most players.


Drewseph, thank you for all your hard work and time providing an AMAZING and FREE game for us all to enjoy playing.

[M1CR0H4CK3R]

Drewseph, I put a public summary on your hacks page, I figured putting the nit picky details here would be better.

First off I want to say thank you!  This is an amazing hack.  I can't praise it enough, and honestly I can't complain, I know from a software development and reverse engineering standpoint the level of work and quality put into this is really astounding. 


I also, in my opinion, think there is still some room for improvement and only offer the below personal perspective if it's something that could give some good ideas to make change and with no expectations, just thanks for listening.


Here's the list in detail from my summary review on the hacks page.

```
1) [Minor Improvement] The game is very linear; it's designed to prevent the player from deviating from the intended route. The fast travel system is great, but why not remove all the things that prevent you from getting access to the fast travel gates, recommend removing the speed boost blocks and maybe just place the rooms behind a pink 25 missile door.  So once you get to a fast travel door the player is reward with being able to use it. If you are trying to make the player experience ALL the map before using the fast travel gate first, place some of the doors behind room design restrictions such as requiring ibj, grapple, high-jump, gravity, space-jump speed-boost to get to the room, which rewards those with better skills to access the fast travel rooms early. Once most of the powerups are attained, then finding the gate unlocks have more freedom of choice.  The map layout is awesome but it also really could use map and route edit to allow for more sequence breaks while getting powerups, using specific techniques to makes the game more fun for challenging the player.  A reward for skill to get items early or in a different order would greatly increases replayability.  Sequence breaks to include, ibj, wall jumps, gate glitches, and possibly others.  One example in Norfair, doing an ibj to get early wave beam, you have to do the ibj twice, 1st to break the blocks and 2nd to  get up there, then only to find that you need to do a mochball to get under the speedgate in time. And if you fail at the speedgate you have to exit the room reset the sequence and start over, maybe remove the speedgate or place a room transition before the speedgate so for those who can accomplish the 2 ibj's can make progress to attempt to bypass the speedgate and get the reward easier. :)  (The biggest thing here is add a few more sequence breaks and make current ones a little more forgiving such as early wave beam.)

2) [Major Improvement] Fix some of the game mechanics that make the game feel like they are just designed punishment for the player as opposed to a joy to play.  Examples such as space jump always being able to be used like in project base, and make bomb jump easier would improve the hack.  I finally got the hang of the ibj with this hack, but it had very tight tolerance to get it working. Consider adding in many of the project base features and moves, backflip, fast morph, speed mochball, no speed loss on jump land while holding dash, etc., They allow the player more freedom of movement and enjoyment moving through the environment, just my opinion on though.  All the chain-sparks were unnecessarily hard for my skill as a veteran, but not expert, player and I think impossible for less experienced players. I know it's no excuse that I now play mostly on a smartphone touch screen, but it makes many of the chain-sparks too hard without save states. There are too many places shine spark is required that is hard to get charged to get access to various rooms, recommend possibly increasing the blue suit timeout or remove it completely, like if you are charged with blue suit, it doesn't go away unless you use it or get hit by an enemy, or possibly have beam combo + space jump create a shinspark damage to blocks.  Also, increase fire rate for all beams.  Getting the beam upgrade and beam combo didn't feel like that much of an improvement because of how slow they fired, recommend making the beam combiner also add additional increased fire rate for the individual weapons and don't reduce the fire rate for combined beams, maybe just leave the charged combined beam rate where it is. Increase plasma's damage output and reduce charge beam charge time.  (HUGHE FIX NEEDED, The biggest issue here is how many and how difficult a lot of the SPEEDBOSTS & SHINESPARKS break placements are, and it's hard to skip them not knowing they are a small ammo upgrade.)

3) [Major Improvement] Nerf all the puzzles! Even as a longtime experienced SM player, most of the puzzles are not fun, near impossible with MANY retries because of all the crumble blocks setting you back to the BEGINNING of the puzzle.  They just feel like a chore and are very time consuming with little reward.  Even when known how to complete them, they usually feel out of place for the environment and more of a "the designer just put it here to make you feel miserable and spend an exorbitant amount of time." A good idea is place more bomb blocks instead of so many crumble blocks and / or have crumble block places only set you back a little bit in the puzzle as opposed to the beginning of the maze.  The timing puzzle to get screw attack is downright exhausting, make it a little easier to distinguish the trimming between each of the times for each switch, increase the tolerances to reach each of the timers, and REMOVE the downhill fall between the middle and right side of the maze.  I almost couldn't complete this and even then I usually had to spend 20+ minutes just to accomplish this one.  Edit: I would still nerf required route puzzles by removing more of the crumble blocks and replace with bomb break blocks. Consider only keeping the optional items, pb, missiles, supers with hard puzzles but give significant upgrades, such as 10-20 for the amount of ammo added and possibly make the puzzles much easier to solve with an end game equipment upgrade as described here below.  Having hi-jump boots which gives spring ball is a huge help in the puzzles where you have to jump up over crumble blocks. It would be a real improvement to have the areas with vertical falls and crumble blocks below be more open above the morphball bomb/jump position, so you could bomb or spring ball diagonally over easier without having the precise vertical jumps with a likely fail results in starting the puzzle over.  What would really help is a near end game power-up to solve the puzzles much easier.  So early game these bonuses are a huge plus for the well skilled, but for end game making it easier for most players.  One idea is to add in a non-magnetic spiderball that can grab any surface a wall jump can be performed on to the space-jump upgrade. This upgrade is a late game powerup so I don't think this would make it overpowered.  (HUGHE FIX NEEDED,The biggest issues here is many puzzles are to unforgiving with a complete start over with a single mistake and too many crumble blocks in vertical columns that don't all diagonal bomb jump, and it's hard to skip them not knowing they are a small ammo upgrade.)

4) [Medium Improvement] Make some small edits to all the misstep fall locations resulting in death or a very lengthy redo of the room progression.  For the grapple-beam required places, add in more platforms between grapple places that prevent falling too far and in between high death places, such as room below and right after getting grapple, the acid room, have a few platforms in the middle.  They were too many and too punishing where a misstep fall ended in an almost death, such as in acid, or a huge retrace such as falling in a large room and then needing to retrace the entire room or multiple rooms to recover.  Make small edits to fall locations in Maridia, such as the rooms below the beam combiner where all the large open sand falls are and the tall room to the right below Draygon.  I think simply fixing space-jump to always recover no matter how far you fall would be a big fix. (The biggest issue here is large rooms that in a single misstep cause a huge restart in working your way back to where you were.)

```

If I've misstated something or maybe had old information from an old version please let me know and I'll correct the review.  I'm replaying the latest, final, version now to see if I missed anything, which is for the first time I'm able to get ibj working.

Again thanks for listening, thank you for a great game!

First off, this game was designed for EXPERTS, so VETERANS like yourself are not the intended audience. Second of all, there IS a HUGE sequence break in the game, but doing it makes the game twice as difficult, and getting every item becomes impossible (unlike in MSZM, where you can ONLY get every item by doing a sequence break for PBs, and getting X-Ray the first time you see it; however, MSZM is the hardest non-kaizo level hack out there, although it is one of my favorites, and is even more difficult than this hack). Finally, there's a reason why this is marked as FINAL - there are no more major bugs to fix, and the game is 100% catered to its intended audience, and thus complete. Due to this, it is highly unlikely that your 'gripes' will be taken into consideration at all.

[sbelmont85]

First off, this game was designed for EXPERTS, so VETERANS like yourself are not the intended audience. Second of all, there IS a HUGE sequence break in the game, but doing it makes the game twice as difficult, and getting every item becomes impossible (unlike in MSZM, where you can ONLY get every item by doing a sequence break for PBs, and getting X-Ray the first time you see it; however, MSZM is the hardest non-kaizo level hack out there, although it is one of my favorites, and is even more difficult than this hack). Finally, there's a reason why this is marked as FINAL - there are no more major bugs to fix, and the game is 100% catered to its intended audience, and thus complete. Due to this, it is highly unlikely that your 'gripes' will be taken into consideration at all.

Gotcha,  I'm playing again and the final version is much more polished from my past experience with 1.52  I think going into the game with the right expectations would be the biggest help... knowing that's it designed for "Expert" level is good to know.

Maybe when I'm much more comfortable with Axeil I'll try out MSZM.

[Zincoshine]

There is a pretty massive soft lock in the middle of Brinstar. I'm surprised this hasn't been found until now, considering how easy it is to stumble into it. Basically, there is a hollow pipe. If you stand on it you fall down and into another room with a locked door immediately to the left. From there, you will end up walking towards the east along a very linear path for what seems like forever until you reach a dead end and realize that the whole area you just traversed since falling down that pipe is actually a linear dead end with no way out.

Maybe when I'm much more comfortable with Axeil I'll try out MSZM.

A guy named advancedpillow fixed this last autumn and posted it on romhacking. The fix was very recently uploaded to metroidconstruction. You might want to play that instead. https://metroidconstruction.com/hack.php?id=706

First off, this game was designed for EXPERTS, so VETERANS like yourself are not the intended audience.

No, it was designed for veterans, it says right there on the metroidconstruction page. Funnily enough, from my experience with this so far, it is actually designed for everyone except veterans or "speedrunners" as they are also called.

[MetroidNerd#9001]

Could you post some screenshots to show us exactly where this softlock is? Your description of the location is rather vague.

[RT-55J]

You are not softlocked.

[Zincoshine]

Could you post some screenshots to show us exactly where this softlock is? Your description of the location is rather vague.

sure, here you go. https://imgur.com/3KFEhs2 The red i drew indicates the area I'm trapped in. The yellow arrow indicates the one way path that took me into that area.

edit: this screenshot is probably also useful https://imgur.com/SZDi87t

[RT-55J]

99% sure there is another exit to the screen you are currently on in that screenshot that will lead you where you need to go

[Zincoshine]

99% sure there is another exit to the screen you are currently on in that screenshot that will lead you where you need to go

no, check the second screenshot I edited into my previous reply: I don't have super bombs.

edit: just to be clear, the room I current am in is this one: https://imgur.com/8FtHIiu

[RT-55J]

I know you don't have power bombs at this point. I am asking you to inspect that screen more closely.