Unwinnable by Mistake/Video Games/Metroid

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Super Metroid could be made unwinnable this way: With a little bit of Sequence Breaking it is possible to acquire the Gravity Suit early, and ultimately reach Tourian without ever collecting the Varia suit. The catch is that each Suit cuts damage by half (both suits = 1/4 damage) ... but this is a moot point if the player is especially adept at avoiding damage. Most Energy Tank upgrades are optional, and Tourian's final Save Point is located beyond the Point of No Return. The problem? Without the Varia Suit[1], Mother Brain's unavoidable Hyper Beam attack inflicts a whopping 600 points damage, and if you don't have enough E-tanks to survive one Hyper Beam, the final plot event (where the baby Metroid rushes in to save Samus) never triggers...since you died before it could take place.
  • Metroid Prime 2 includes a number of rooms that have several switches that must be shot in order to progress. If the player triggers some of the switches and then leaves the room, the game becomes unwinnable (or some items become inaccessible, depending on which room) because the game resets the counter but does not reactivate the switches.
    • You can also trigger a super-jump glitch while fighting the boss Chykka, letting you leave the room (the doors don't lock). If you do this, however, then Chykka is gone for good -- along with the reward for that fight, the Dark Visor, which is required to beat the game. You can play with the super-jump glitch safely, but only if you beat Chykka first.
  • The first Metroid Prime game had a similar Unwinnable bug that was fixed in later releases. When you beat the Phazon Elite, the doors unlock and he leaves behind the Artifact of Warrior. If you're careless enough to leave the room without collecting the artifact, then it will never return.
    • The Wii "Trilogy" re-release uses the original Metroid Prime version as a base. Even though some elements from later versions (such as Fusion Metroids in Omega Pirate's room) were added in, it retains this bug. Oops.
  • In Metroid: Other M, there's a glitch that can occur late in the game once you can use the Beam Grapple and are ordered to hunt down Ridley. There's a certain door that Adam unlocks by this point that you access by using the Beam Grapple. However, should a certain thing be done, this door would be locked and would not open no matter what you do. Now there are two possibilities for this glitch: The one theorized by fans which states taking down the Rhedogian and then going back to a previous Navigation Room and saving there, and the one stated by Word of God that claims the cause is picking up the Ice Beam, going into the next room and killing the enemies there to open the next room, then going back to the Ice Beam room before progressing to the room you unlocked. Regardless of which one it is, the only thing to do at this point is start over. To avoid this, do not backtrack to the Ice Beam room until you enter the second room after it at least once, and do not backtrack once you encounter the Rhedogian (the first and third battles, to be specific).

  1. And, for some reason, this one check only looks for the Varia Suit