Metroid

Metroid (メトロイド Metoroido) is an action-adventure video game co-developed by Nintendo's Research and Development 1 division and Intelligent Systems, and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was released on Virtual Console for its 20th anniversary.

The original Metroid established most of the concepts that would become the mainstays of the Metroid franchise: Samus explores an open world, finding power ups, battling enemies, and slowly progressing forward. It was one of the first open-world non-linear games ever released on this scale, and was so influential it even has a subgenre named after it and Castlevania: Metroidvania. It was not without growing pains however; its lack of a map system and password only saving give Metroid a notoriously brutal difficulty level. The Virtual Console re-release does not address any of those issues, for better or worse.