Full scans of the Nintendo Official Guide Book for Super Metroid

 

 

Last year I acquired a copy of the Nintendo Official Guide Book for Super Metroid, released in 1994, and did some kind of shitty scans for it at my local library. They're not the highest quality ever, but they're readable and provide access to an obscure but very interesting part of Metroid's history. The link can be found below:

https://mega.nz/folder/HXQylbDC#CkJrf6VwFvxFegxWZ2cwYA

 

Or alternatively, as I only found out after making this post initially, use these scans uploaded by OZKai on the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/sm_ogb_2h-59m/

These scans were uploaded in-between me first scanning the guide and uploading it here, they're way higher quality than mine and also a lot more accessible, so I'd definitely recommend using them instead.
 

This guide, beyond the obvious of serving as a guide for Super Metroid, is some of the earliest material to establish Samus's backstory and some of the general world-building of Metroid which would become prominent in later material, and notably features narration by Samus across the walkthrough giving her internal thoughts for specific sections of the game. Reading through them, you really get an idea for why Samus was characterised the way she was in the Japanese script of Other M and how it's always sort of been her characterisation in Japanese material. It also gives some commentary on the weapons she acquires, such as the Ice Beam apparently disconnecting enemies from space-time and reversing entropy to justify why it can freeze enemies in mid-air. In general the guide takes a very literal approach to game mechanics for its narrative sections and interprets basically all game mechanics as actual elements of Metroid's world, providing explanation for why Zebes is laid out the way it is.

 

Relatedly, I think it's worth linking this blog post by prominent Japanese Metroid fan wata-ridley:

 

https://www.wata-ridley.com/entry/review-super-metroid-comic

 

This blog is a review of the Nintendo Power Super Metroid comic, but also talks about the details of this guidebook and some related Super Metroid articles published in the June, July, and August 1994 issues of the Game On! magazine in Japan, including a few images. This material ties into what the guidebook talks about and gives details on elements such as Zebes's ecology and geography in more depth than the rest of the franchise. It's also worth noting how the guidebook uses some artwork pulled directly from the Nintendo Power Super Metroid comic, which makes sense since said comic was written and illustrated by Benimaru Itoh, who worked at Ape Inc. alongside Shigesato Itoi on Earthbound, and so would be someone who would have access to this kind of background material to inform the comic. 

 

All together you can sort of get the impression of how internally a lot of Metroid's lore was actually laid out fairly early on in the franchise's history, like a sort of series-bible, and would be developed for later material which Western fans are more aware of. Many elements of the lore established by this Super Metroid-era material would go on to be further developed in the early 2000s for games like Zero Mission and Fusion, and would then be subsequently adapted into the Metroid manga. Due to the Western fandom's lack of translated material for many years, I think the common belief was that the Metroid manga itself invented things like Samus's backstory, as opposed to it in-truth having already been established in earlier material the fandom didn't have access to, which the manga was simply drawing from for its own story. It makes you wonder how much other material for franchises like this which is surprisingly foundational is simply out of the purview of Western fans.