Big Baddies Breakdown: Crocomire (Super Metroid)

In Big Baddies Breakdown, Wolfman Jew analyzes all sorts of boss fights across the games industry. The catch: one boss per game. Many of these are brilliant, some of them poor. Several show technical polish, while others tell stories through their fights. But all are worthy of discussion.

When I started this series, I set up a spreadsheet for possible topics, and Super Metroid was one of the first games I jotted down. Admittedly, it was one of fifty-four, but my enthusiasm was strong. It’s Super Metroid! The Super Metroid! It put the “Metroid” in “Metroidvania!” It had the Ridley theme and the Lower Norfair music! It had X-ray visors and grappling laser beams and that gorgeous, mid- to late-era SNES pixel goodness. And its boss fights? Top tier. I’ve been writing about games for this site since Key & Peele was on the air, mostly Nintendo games, and I’ve still never touched Metroid 3.

Image: Source Gaming. The immutable Super Metroid.

Thing is, though, that I could never decide which boss to choose. There’s the early duel with Ridley, where the game reveals its cinematic aspirations. The fight against Draygon, where you can turn yourself into an electrical wire to zap the beast, is held up as a high point of 16-bit boss design. There’s also the tragic final battle against Mother Brain, the creepy Phantoon (who was disqualified by virtue of me wanting to write separately about the Wrecked Ship), and the living Chozo Statue. All great options. But none of them really spoke to me.

So instead, I’m gonna talk about Crocomire, because I like him. But more to the point, he’s something I have covered but not really discussed: a mini-boss. This industry of ours is filled with confusing and vague terminology, something that as a librarian I find equal parts fascinating and frustrating. Perhaps it’s time to start getting into the terminology and analyzing what makes someone like him “mini.”

Image: Source Gaming. Crocomire in the, uh, flesh.

Let’s start by finally just doing it and defining a boss. What is a boss? Well, typically, they’re a tougher bad guy than the rest who ends a level and bestows a reward. That reward may be an item, or an upgrade, or just access to the next challenge. Effectively, they close one act and lead you to the next. By those metrics, we can think of them as punctuations. “Go through these three levels, beat Tinker, Propeller, and Polar Knight, and then you can access the Tower of Fate.” Not all bosses are required, many don’t close a level or give you a present, and several muddle this definition, but that sense of “import” is there. Like in Super Metroid, you kill Kraid and get the Varia Suit, and that opens up Norfair as the next act. He’s a climax. He matters.

In practice, they can be exacting fights only overcome with the skills you spend the game honing. By that definition, they’re tests. This idea is limited, since it can define a boss’s (and a game’s) worth by its difficulty. But bosses are meant to push you no matter how low the skill floor is. Even in the most lackadaisical Kirby games, Kracko and Meta Knight are threats. Phantoon in Super’s Wrecked Ship ratchets up the difficulty by quite a margin, and that’s just as important as the amazing item it guards. So whether the boss is punishing or just a mild uptick of the difficulty curve, we can think of them also as challenges.

Image: Tumblr via WiffleGif. Other Metroid bosses who excel in this category include Raven Beak, the Metroid Queen, Quadraxis, and Nightmare here.

There’s also specialness to consider. A boss is expected to be memorable and unique, certainly compared to generic enemies. Maybe they’re gigantic or physically distinct, like Kingdom Hearts’ awful ship-sized Ansem. Maybe they have special mechanics, like Muffet in UNDERTALE. Maybe they have their own theme song, voice acting, role in the story, or even just an exciting arena. It’s personality. Bad guy mainstay Ridley has tons of personality in most Metroid games, especially this one with his pogo stick tail and two fights, and he’s an icon for it.

We can then think of bosses as foes that are “big” in stature (and often in size). So if a boss is big—important, memorable, challenging—then a mini-boss by definition would have to be that, just… less so. But what does that mean in practice? Are they smaller? Do they give fewer experience points? Do they lack unique moves or music? Maybe, but those are almost “anti-qualifiers;” they define these enemies by what they aren’t. This is what makes “mini-boss” such a telling term. It means everything and nothing, and requires context in every occasion it is deployed.

Image: Source Gaming. What about, for instance, recurring bosses whose individual fights tend to be a bit less important than their one-and-done counterparts?

Some games are clearer than others. In Dark Souls, only boss fights and hub worlds usually get music, so clearly a mini-boss must be a unique enemy that lacks a theme. In Hades, there are a few one-off creatures slotted randomly into the middle of every layer of the underworld, and they lack the character drama of the standard bosses. And since a Legend of Zelda boss is always the final challenge of a dungeon, a mini-boss is a challenge midway through—or they’re the climax of a “mini-dungeon,” whatever that means. How and where these games place them determines their rung on the ladder.

But these are easier. They have tropes and setups that are clear, unwavering, and easy to define. How does that apply to contiguous open worlds, or game-sized labyrinths like Metroid that are effectively one giant dungeon?

Metroid tends to be conservative with how it deploys the term “boss.” The first Metroid’s manual described only the main villain Mother Brain as a “boss;” Kraid and Ridley, the other unique enemies, were simply “sub-bosses.” In that case, “boss” meant “the boss,” the actual main and final villain, and all other enemies were categorized below it. Of course Metroid 1 came out in 1986, when the boss trope was fairly new, but the franchise is relatively committed to this. All three games of the Metroid Prime trilogy feature unique enemies who guard items or paths, but only a few are ever counted as particularly above the others. And fair enough; the Incinerator Drone (a large flamethrower) isn’t as big a deal as Thardus (an invisible radioactive rock monster that can summon snowstorms).

Image: Source Gaming. Counterclockwise from left, the four main bosses of Super Metroid: Kraid, Phantoon, Draygon, and Ridley.

And then we have Super‘s reptilian, insectile Crocomire. He’s a beast of Norfair, Planet Zebes’ sulphuric lava land, and guards the path to the Grapple Beam. As a mini-boss, he’s treated as lesser than Mother Brain (who retains her final boss role) or the other main bosses: Kraid, Phantoon, Draygon, and Ridley. The four each haunt a section of the game, their rooms marked on your map, and defeating them opens the last area, Tourian. The “door” to get there is a giant golden statue of them that dulls with each one you defeat. With Samus’ archrival Ridley running Norfair as its dedicated master, it could be easy for Crocomire to lack real presence. Fortunately, he got some stuff going for him, and that’s given him fame in the years since the game’s release.

His best quality is having the most unique fight of Super Metroid. Unlike every other enemy, Crocomire has no health bar. You can drop all your Power Bombs and it won’t kill him (though eighty-two can destroy his tongue). Instead, the fight is more akin to a king of the hill-style wrestling match. He’ll steadily crawl towards you, swiping his arm, while you fire a Charge Shot or Missile into his open maw whenever he screams. It’ll push him back to the right… and one inch closer to a deadly pool of lava. Samus has to keep pushing lest he do the same and force her into a spike-covered wall. The ring out structure is, if I recall correctly, exclusive to this fight within the Metroid series. At the very least, it’s certainly quite special and exciting.

Of course, that’s not what people associate with Crocomire. No, they remember the end of the fight. Samus knocks him off the platform and into the lava he falls, grasping and screaming as his skin melts off his body. Exceptionally gnarly; it pushes the nastiness of the 16-bit graphics. But the door’s still unlocked. So Samus walks back the way she came, by the spiked wall at the other end of the room, and Crocomire bursts from it as a skeleton! The jump scare is spooky, sudden, and the game knows it since the corpse stays in the room for the rest of the game.

So really, Crocomire has everything worthy of a traditional boss. It’s not one of the game’s hardest fights, but it is a new kind of challenge. It’s incredibly memorable. It even shares audio with two of the four main bosses; he, Kraid, and Phantoon all share a battle theme and the same stock roar from The Land Unknown. And yet, those failed to get him a nicer status. Why? Well, let’s look at what differentiates him from the bosses that got immortalized in that Space Pirate statue—all things that are incidental to the memorability or quality of his fight.

Perhaps it’s that he doesn’t, strictly speaking, guard the Grapple Beam; beating him just opens some platforming challenges that lead to it. It makes him a bit lesser to be a casual steward, but then again, Phantoon right after him does the same thing with the Gravity Suit, and he’s on that dumb statue. Crocomire also lacks any of the buildup the main bosses get, like hearing shrieks a room away, since all you do is fall through a door and fight him. But, ultimately, it seems to boil down to this: each area is only allowed to have one boss, Ridley is Norfair’s, and therefore ole’ Croc’s only allowed mini-boss status.

Images: Nintendo via Nintendo Life. Both the Japanese and American box art highlighted Ridley and Kraid as the main threats.

In this case, then, what matters is hierarchy; you aren’t allowed to have two or three equally-respected bosses for one region, so you demote all but one. What makes Crocomire a mini-boss is that he isn’t Ridley, the guy with two boss fights who got into Super Smash Bros. on the back of this game. And that’s what makes this discussion interesting to me, despite it being entirely academic (and despite it treating Crocomire, great opponent that he is, as secondary). What we have is terminology that’s effectively defined by something else and something lacking. Which is simultaneously very useful—every game is going to have its own take on bosses, so we need malleable terms for them—and very confusing.

This isn’t unusual, not really. The games industry is rife with confusing terms, classifications, and definitions. The need to explain gameplay has given rise to muddled genres—just look at Super‘s grossly nebulous “action-adventure”, which has little to do with action or adventure games. We have two important “FPS” acronyms. And the conceit of a boss itself is kinda silly in the grand scheme of fiction, even if many works of art have antagonists who fit the role. These terms and tropes, and the way in which they’re deployed, can be challenging for newer players and for critics like myself. But this has one advantage, which is that these ideas can have many different applications. This gives them power. It also makes them useful for many situations, not just a few, which helps when talk about opponents who don’t easily fit one definition or another.

Mini-bosses exist because games like Super Metroid want to have normal enemies, scary bosses, and things that bridge that gap. Director Yoshio Sakamoto and his staff presumably didn’t start the game making a hierarchy of “Mother Brain, Ridley, Crocomire, spiky bug-thing;” they just knew they would need antagonists who operated at different levels. It’s helpful to remember that while many games are made from the start to fit into a genre or use certain mechanics, genres or features are only a fraction of what any game is. And that’s true of the tropes we use to describe them, too. Even if it’s their primary role, mini-bosses like Crocomire are usually more than just “the bad guy in the middle of the level.” It can be hard when we talk about it, but ideas having complicated meanings isn’t inherently a problem.

Image: Source Gaming. One of Crocomire’s roles: to have an amazingly grisly death scene that toes the line of “good taste.”

It does lead to one problem, though, which is that we as plugged-in consumers are taught to approach these terms with austerity they don’t deserve. While terms can be challenging and definitions helpful, it’s easy to fall into this trap of treating them like a science and not an art. That’s limiting whether we’re forcing bosses to fit one definition, arguing over which story is or isn’t canon, or delineating how many fictional inches it takes to make a “sandbox game” an “open world game.” This pigeonholes tropes that could otherwise help us understand the games we love. And in the case of “mini-boss,” it’s a word we need not because every game has to have one, but because sometimes it’s helpful to note when a creature is special… just not the most special.

Action games need enemies like that. They improve enemy diversity. They allow the potential for one-off ideas. They keep an area exciting while you figure out how to get to the end. Great mini-bosses—your Boom-Booms, your Ooks—keep the world alive, but not so much that you forget about the real threats. That’s a hard job, and an important one in any game with distinct opponents. Crocomire does it wonderfully. He’s never reappeared in a Metroid game (though he’s been homaged in Castlevania and Donkey Kong and was planned for Metroid: Zero Mission), but he also doesn’t really need to. And it’s notable that what he had to do, keeping Norfair threatening, entailed being no less unique or exciting than what we expect from the biggest of baddies.

I suppose my goal to write about Super Metroid was only half-done, as it’s more secondary to the actual subject. In that case, I’ll have to get back to it someday for that Wrecked Ship essay, or something else. But since he wasn’t the main point and deserves more acknowledgement, I think it’s right to end on Crocomire. He’s challenging without being obnoxious, very stylish, and a perfect symbol of how deep Super Metroid’s greatness goes. You’ll never forget about Norfair after seeing him die. He’s a fantastic boss but an even greater mini-boss, and exactly what that kind of enemy needs to be.