It's weird to think on how few of the Metroid games I'd actually consider to be proper "Metroidvanias". Metroid II and its remake, Samus Returns, chop off the game in fairly linear areas, and Prime 2 similarly has every area be a big dungeon, with little backtracking out of it. Fusion, Prime 3 and Other M are essentially fully linear, and Hunters and Federation Force are just level-based. Prime and Zero Mission qualify, but they hold your hand a bit too much for me. That leaves the OG, Super Metroid and Dread, and I think the latter stands out more as an action game than a Metroidvania.
All of this is to say, it's easy to forget just how purposeful it was for Fusion to be structured in the way it is. A very tight leash is kept on you all the time by an AI that drops terse and very direct instructions on you, while giving you a partial map of the area you're gonna be going through and a general description of what you'll find. And that sounds really lazy, in comparison to Super Metroid's design that wordlessly nudges in the right direction until you're finally ready to the exploration yourself. It probably would be, if it wasn't done so well. At every turn, Metroid Fusion takes care to drop some cool surprise on you, from the stage's enemies beginning to cocoon and blocking you off on the way back, to some emergency countdown you suddenly have to attend to, to a boss just swooping in and jumping you all of a sudden- every time you think you're on top of it, something new pops up.
Chief among all of those set-pieces, obviously, is the SA-X, Samus' clone born of her discarded pieces of outfit, wielding her full Super Metroid (Or I guess Other M... ugh) arsenal, whereas Samus herself is weaker than she's ever been. Much has been said about the SA-X being really effective, but I think the reason she works so well is once again Metroid Fusion's perfect pacing. Your encounters with the SA-X are rare, placed just when you really wouldn't want to die and brief, highlighting how dangerous she is without ever having you interact with her enough to realize how rudimental her AI is. Dread's EMMI, while a lot more mechanically elaborate, miss the memo in every regard. They clearly tell you where you'll be facing them, removing the paranoia of the SA-X possibly showing up at any time, each get removed when you beat them, respawn you at the area's entrance when you die, and are generally just not very scary.
Anyways, the SA-X works. What I think struggles a bit are the boss fights- Metroid Fusion amps up the challenge a lot compared to Super, but the bosses remain simple affairs with just one or two attacks most of the time, which can end up feeling a bit frustrating, because the controls are... sort of weird? They're a streamlined and super action-focused version of Super Metroid's much floatier movement, which I love but do admit has its flaws, and while this is generally a good change there's some slight pauses when you do stuff like landing from a jump and that does harm the game feel a bit (Could be that I wasn't exactly playing on original hardware). I may be way off mark here but I think Zero Mission improves on that. Stuff like the wall jumps and bomb jumps are also way less expressive to remove sequence breaks, which is understandable but a bit of a shame.
Fusion looks really nice, even blown up on a laptop screen. It's saturated as hell, as all GBA games had to be, but it manages to fit that into the aesthetic pretty well. Setting the entire game on a man-made place is a pretty bold decision in a series so far made entirely of barely colonized planets (And another choice that would unfortunately be repeated with less effect by a lot of future games of the series), but it works, thematically. Samus is out of her depth in a way she's never been before, and even her suit, now a lot less cool and a lot more weird and gross, reflects it. I'm not going to lie to you, though, I don't love Fusion's story. The X are very effective and a lot of set-pieces rely on them being a credible threat, and I love how you're led to essentially stumble onto the big reveals at the end, but Samus' arc feels a bit half-baked, and the general ADAM-Samus stuff, while fairly interesting in a vacuum, is sort of tarnished by... y'know. Other M just retroactively ruins the dynamic, with Adam, even in the slightly less worse Japanese script, coming a complete moron and a bit of a sexist asshole.
I think Fusion is among all Metroid games, the one who suffers the most from those that came after it. Its choice to be entirely linear feels less like a bold counterpoint to Super's thesis and more just the new direction the series would take for a while, the SA-X is now neither the only Samus doppelganger nor the only designated invincible horror monster in the series, its focus on an artificial, man-made environment is echoed by a lot of the games after it, ADAM as a character is entirely ruined by Other M, Samus somehow not being a wanted criminal in Dread robs the ending of a lot of weight (though apparently that was just a mistranslation... ech), and so on. And all of that is a shame, because it is a beautiful contrast to Super Metroid, a genuine deconstruction that somehow manages to emphasize both the breadth of this franchise's potential and the incredible quality of both games.
All of this is to say, it's easy to forget just how purposeful it was for Fusion to be structured in the way it is. A very tight leash is kept on you all the time by an AI that drops terse and very direct instructions on you, while giving you a partial map of the area you're gonna be going through and a general description of what you'll find. And that sounds really lazy, in comparison to Super Metroid's design that wordlessly nudges in the right direction until you're finally ready to the exploration yourself. It probably would be, if it wasn't done so well. At every turn, Metroid Fusion takes care to drop some cool surprise on you, from the stage's enemies beginning to cocoon and blocking you off on the way back, to some emergency countdown you suddenly have to attend to, to a boss just swooping in and jumping you all of a sudden- every time you think you're on top of it, something new pops up.
Chief among all of those set-pieces, obviously, is the SA-X, Samus' clone born of her discarded pieces of outfit, wielding her full Super Metroid (Or I guess Other M... ugh) arsenal, whereas Samus herself is weaker than she's ever been. Much has been said about the SA-X being really effective, but I think the reason she works so well is once again Metroid Fusion's perfect pacing. Your encounters with the SA-X are rare, placed just when you really wouldn't want to die and brief, highlighting how dangerous she is without ever having you interact with her enough to realize how rudimental her AI is. Dread's EMMI, while a lot more mechanically elaborate, miss the memo in every regard. They clearly tell you where you'll be facing them, removing the paranoia of the SA-X possibly showing up at any time, each get removed when you beat them, respawn you at the area's entrance when you die, and are generally just not very scary.
Anyways, the SA-X works. What I think struggles a bit are the boss fights- Metroid Fusion amps up the challenge a lot compared to Super, but the bosses remain simple affairs with just one or two attacks most of the time, which can end up feeling a bit frustrating, because the controls are... sort of weird? They're a streamlined and super action-focused version of Super Metroid's much floatier movement, which I love but do admit has its flaws, and while this is generally a good change there's some slight pauses when you do stuff like landing from a jump and that does harm the game feel a bit (Could be that I wasn't exactly playing on original hardware). I may be way off mark here but I think Zero Mission improves on that. Stuff like the wall jumps and bomb jumps are also way less expressive to remove sequence breaks, which is understandable but a bit of a shame.
Fusion looks really nice, even blown up on a laptop screen. It's saturated as hell, as all GBA games had to be, but it manages to fit that into the aesthetic pretty well. Setting the entire game on a man-made place is a pretty bold decision in a series so far made entirely of barely colonized planets (And another choice that would unfortunately be repeated with less effect by a lot of future games of the series), but it works, thematically. Samus is out of her depth in a way she's never been before, and even her suit, now a lot less cool and a lot more weird and gross, reflects it. I'm not going to lie to you, though, I don't love Fusion's story. The X are very effective and a lot of set-pieces rely on them being a credible threat, and I love how you're led to essentially stumble onto the big reveals at the end, but Samus' arc feels a bit half-baked, and the general ADAM-Samus stuff, while fairly interesting in a vacuum, is sort of tarnished by... y'know. Other M just retroactively ruins the dynamic, with Adam, even in the slightly less worse Japanese script, coming a complete moron and a bit of a sexist asshole.
I think Fusion is among all Metroid games, the one who suffers the most from those that came after it. Its choice to be entirely linear feels less like a bold counterpoint to Super's thesis and more just the new direction the series would take for a while, the SA-X is now neither the only Samus doppelganger nor the only designated invincible horror monster in the series, its focus on an artificial, man-made environment is echoed by a lot of the games after it, ADAM as a character is entirely ruined by Other M, Samus somehow not being a wanted criminal in Dread robs the ending of a lot of weight (though apparently that was just a mistranslation... ech), and so on. And all of that is a shame, because it is a beautiful contrast to Super Metroid, a genuine deconstruction that somehow manages to emphasize both the breadth of this franchise's potential and the incredible quality of both games.
2 Comments
@Treymoney Apparently in the JP script of Fusion it's just a rogue splinter of the GF doing all the bad stuff which is a shame because I like the localized version way better, "The government is corrupt and untrustworthy" is just thematically a much stronger realization than "Yeah they're ok they just got some bad branches"
Treymoney
5 days ago
When the EMMIs were first announced, I thought cool, the Federation hunting down Samus for blowing up the BSL is such a cool hook for a new Metroid game. Alas...