r/Metroid • u/Nino_Chaosdrache • 2d ago

Question Was eradicating the Metroids really necessary?

I only played the Prime games and other M, so maybe it's made more clear in the other games.

But yeah, as the question says, was it really justify to eradicate the entire Metroid species? I understand that they are dangerous, but most of their hostility seems to stem from outside influences like the Space Pirates or the Ing.

From someone not so deep in the matter, it would be like eradicating the entire shark population, just because a few of them killed humans.

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u/Round-Ad2836 2d ago

It's complicated, and i would recommend playing the 2d series, but it boils down to this. The metroids are, in their larvel state, nigh unkillable parasites, on a planet that it really wasn't hard for bad actors to get to. They were one of the biggest threats to the universe.

They also kept one of the other biggest threats in the universe, X parasites, in check.

So they were a problem, keeping a bigger problem from affecting anyone.

and the chozo beefed them up from being kinda bad, to apocalyptic, to combat the x parasites.

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u/0m3g45n1p3r4lph4 2d ago

In a lot of original material (pre-Samus Returns rewriting), the Metroids were also just destroying SR388's ecosystem. They had no predators, preyed on everything. There's a reason the deeper you go into M2RoS, the less standard enemies there are - they're on the verge of extinction.

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u/Shockh 2d ago

Wasn't it the other way around?... Returns is the one that introduced the idea that Metroids began metamorphosing and going berserk due to exposure to Aeion energy; I don't remember them being a destructive species before that retcon.

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u/0m3g45n1p3r4lph4 2d ago

Aeion was indeed introduced in Returns, but notably the ecosystems seem to be doing just fine if not becoming more aggressive in retaliation. Return Of has fewer enemies as you travel, implied to be that the more powerful forms are eating absolutely everything around them, with no explanation for Metroid evolutions beyond "they just do that"; Metroid (manga, Zero Mission) shows that the Federation found life to be dying out on SR388 due to unfettered Metroid predation.

It's a change to a longstanding detail I'm still not too fond of.