Dependencies
The idea of dependency charts is to show what items, equipment, steps, and event flags will gate progression in a game, or which items become prerequisites for other collectibles from the starting point of the game. These charts primarily deal with the "critical path" between the start of the game and the finale.
Inspired by Gamemaker's Toolkit dependency chart designs via his Boss Keys series. The Youtube playlist for this series can be found here, in which he explains the basic formatting. There are, however, some deviations between GMTK's format and mine.
For example, while the original idea of the item dependency chart is to showcase the openness/linearity of a game's progression design by only focusing on major items and checkpoints .. the format you'll see in these next pages covers not just the major items, but all items. The reasoning behind this is thanks to the trend of "item randomizer" modifications and programs out there, which adjust a game in order to shuffle item locations around. This, in turn, ends up changing what the critical path looks like. So if all of the paths to each item location are showcased, then all that is needed is to place the tokens of each collectable item, wherever they are found.
That last sentence, is the basis for another application I am working on, but is not yet ready to showcase. In the meanwhile, I have created the dependency charts for each of the below-marked games, based on the "vanilla" (i.e. unchanged, base-game, unrandomized) item locations, separated by areas and regions. Included in each game's page is also a "summarized dependency chart" which does show only the major items, bosses, and critical path from start to finish.
For any errors shown therein, please check the Issues page and see if it has already been mentioned (check the Closed tab also!), and if not, feel free to raise a New Issue in order to fix the item.
Trademarked games:
- Metroid (NES)
- Metroid II: Return of Samus (GB)
- Super Metroid (SNES)
- Metroid: Fusion (GBA)
- Metroid Prime (GCN)
- Metroid: Zero Mission (GBA)
- Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (GCN)
- Metroid Prime Pinball (NDS)
- Metroid Prime: Hunters (NDS)
- Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (Wii)
- Metroid: Other M (Wii)
- Metroid Prime: Federation Force (3DS)
- Metroid: Samus Returns (3DS)
- Metroid: Dread (Switch)
- Metroid Prime 4: Beyond (Switch 1 and 2)
Fangames and notable ROMhacks:
- Metroid Confrontation (by DoctorM64)
- AM2R (by DoctorM64)
- Metroid: Rogue Dawn
- Metroid: A New Galaxy (by u/Kelly_Crystal)
- Metroid: The Threat Never Ends (by u/Kelly_Crystal)
- Prime 2D (by Team SCU)