 Inori Says: |
| Metroid Fusion is a worthy successor to Super Metroid that helped
define the high-paced action the later 2D-style games carry on, but
ultimately the game falls short of the natural progression that most other games have to offer. Pros:
|
Whatever the case, until Metroid Fusion and Metroid Prime released, it had been nearly eight years since the last Metroid was made, not unlike the current state of the Metroid series today (despite Federation Force being slated for release). So to have not just one, but two pretty great games come out after so long was immensely helpful in kickstarting the series back into the wonderful production it saw for almost ten years. It kind of makes me sad to look back on this and realize the same thing is happening again, but instead of Metroid getting at least one game anywhere half as decent as Fusion, the series is getting a spinoff that is such a wild departure from what Metroid is supposed to be. The future has yet to clear up for the series, and who knows if that time will ever come.
But... that is way too far ahead of ourselves here, as we're not looking at what's to come but rather at the otherwise fantastic history of this series. I debated whether to start with Prime or keep going on the 2D releases with Fusion, since they both came out on the same day in North America, but ultimately after having played Super Metroid and the other 2D games for so much, I figured why not keep the trend going just a little longer.
When I first played Fusion, having played Zero Mission on the GBA beforehand, I went into Fusion with some expectations for what it would be like as it was also a Metroid game on the GBA. And while I did enjoy the experience overall, I couldn't help but feel a little disappointed when I finished playing. I was able to right away identify part of the problem, which was the countless times the game has you stop at a Navigation room and talk to Adam forever, but there's more to it than that underneath the surface. Metroid Fusion is a worthy successor to Super Metroid that helped define the high-paced action the later 2D-style games carry on, but ultimately the game falls short of living up to its predecessor.
Sound/Visuals/Atmosphere
Before I mention anything about this kind of stuff, I have to mention that I am basing this off of having played the game on my computer. As a result, some impressions are going to be skewed since the game feels a lot different when played on the original Game Boy Advance, which did not have a backlight and affected visibility. Nonetheless, I do not believe the hardware limitations should affect my impressions of the game unless there is truly something that has aged poorly, like Metroid Prime Hunters's graphics on the DS. Anyway, let's begin.
Metroid Fusion is somewhat an improvement over Super Metroid, visually speaking. I'm pretty sure the GBA had somewhat better support for better visuals, so that kinda goes without saying, but to be more detailed than that, a lot of the sprites are a lot sharper, more detailed, and of course more colorful but that kind of goes without saying with the generation gap. One thing that is definite about Fusion is that the game is a lot less drab than Super Metroid, although some would argue that the "drab" in Super Metroid worked in favor of that game's atmosphere. However, of all the 2D Metroids, I have to hand it to Fusion for what I consider to be the best atmosphere in the series, next to Echoes but Echoes is on another playing field. I also have yet to replay Other M after so many years, so that may still change. While a lot of the designs and animations are pretty much good, they are but a small part of what makes the atmosphere in Fusion so good. Before that though, I want to talk a little bit about environments.
While I think the setting of being in a space station works well and really captures that Alien feeling, I am not too much of a fan of the environment design in Metroid Fusion. A lot of each sector feels like the previous sector but with a different color scheme. Sometimes the space station hallways change into actual environments, like Sector 4 featuring an undersea locale whereas Sector 6 features really dark cavernous tunnels. I don't really know what else I can say. It just kinda felt bland with a lot of rooms looking a lot like previous rooms but with a different layout. This really sticks out like a sore thumb in Sector 2, the "tropical" sector where the only things that are kind of tropical are the Kihunter forms, some plants in the background, and the tangled vegetation you have to clear out later on. However, I will say I like a lot of the backgrounds for different areas as a whole, like the background for most of the rooms in Sector 6 reveal further caverns with lakes and gives the impression that the area is a lot larger and more complicated than it actually is in the game.
The bosses, though, are about as awesome as they are in Super Metroid. Namely I have to mention, Nightmare, the SA-X, Neo Ridley, and the Omega Metroid. Nightmare stands out for the awesome animation of its face melting through its mask, and as you further damage the boss, the more its face starts to sag and melt away. The SA-X really brings out how the X parasites in Fusion completely twist the beings they replicate, once it reaches its second form and transforms from being identical to Samus into, well, this.
And the sounds it makes once it's shot... Well it is kinda silly, but at the same time it's distinctly alien and really accents this whole The Thing theme going on in the game.
A couple of years ago, I said I despised Neo Ridley's design in this game. But honestly, after playing through the game several times this week, I really find it pretty amazing. I don't really know what I can say; it isn't exactly a "fresh" take on Ridley's design since the only other time he really had a detailed design was in Super Metroid. I think it's mostly due to its animations and sounds (dear god, Neo Ridley's sounds) that make it so memorable. Every time Neo Ridley screams, you can see his body shake and you can actually see his tongue wiggle around. I feel like you can even see the monster breath. It's just a huge step up from Super Metroid where Ridley was pretty much static, in the same pose, with pretty much just its wings and tail moving around, and it's mouth opening up every now and then. Then of course there's Ridley's screams, notorious for being so freaking loud. When I would play Fusion in my car, despite having the GBA set to the lowest volume, my parents would make me wear earphones because they could still hear Ridley screaming. And the fact that his screams are pretty much louder than everything in the game really sets him apart and makes him menacing in his own way. The changes in his design also reflect the kind of theme that comes up towards the end of the game of how the X at the end of the day are just imitators, twisting organisms into nothing but soulless monsters.
The Omega Metroid is also another fantastic monster designed in this game, like I really have a hard time thinking of any criticism for it (then again, as I've stated numerous times, I'm no art major). It feels very much like a Xenomorph from Alien while being its own thing unique to the universe of Metroid. It's jump in size isn't as tremendous as Kraid's, but it is still enough to be imposing. In its animation, it has drool or maybe even acid dripping from its fangs. And it makes such a shrill, unnerving scream it when roars at you. Extending beyond the boss itself, the entire moment it shows up is masterfully done, it's really up there in terms of memorable moments with the Baby Metroid saving Samus in Super Metroid.
After you defeat the SA-X, you start a collision course between the space station the game is set in and SR388, where the X parasites reside. You have, I think it was three minutes, to escape the station. In every Metroid game so far, there are pretty much no other obstacles left once you make your escape. Super Metroid, sure, had some space pirates, but Samus is pretty much a force of nature at that point. In Fusion, once again the expectations are thrown off. As you return to where your ship is docked, in the hallway before you'll notice the room is heavily damaged. So okay, no big deal, up until this point the entire station has been falling apart, what else is new? Then you get inside the docking bay and it almost looks as if it was hit by an explosion or something. Your ship is missing and the hangar door has been blasted open. And to make matters worse, there is a huge Metroid shell sitting in the middle of the room. The music has also changed to the game's pretty much goto track for ominous music. Then, just as you try to leave, the Omega Metroid jumps out and immediately lets out that shrill scream. None of your weapons damage it, and one smack from it leaves Samus at one unit of energy. Then the SA-X comes and helps (since the X ultimately see Metroids as their highest priority target for being their predators), and it gets destroyed by the Metroid, so Samus merges with it and restores her Ice Beam to take out the Omega Metroid. Then the boss is pretty laughibly easy but it's just fanservice that's just really well done as a fight against the clock, just when you thought you could catch a breath. Everything from the setup to the monster jumping out to the interaction between prey (you and the X) and predator (the Metroid) to the environment and music and Omega Metroid animations are pretty much a shining example of how this game does its atmosphere so tremendously well. The atmosphere is no longer just a single visual cue or a coordination of a visual with sound, as Fusion incorporates as much interaction as possible between the environment and its inhabitants in addition to audio and visual design in order to create a living, dangerous, and terrifying world on board the B.S.L. Space Station. The Omega Metroid fight pretty much defines how the atmosphere works in Fusion.
The space station works so well in creating this atmosphere as things are constantly falling apart as you progress the environment. One moment you are on an elevator returning to your ship, then suddenly everything shuts down while you are on the elevator and you have to escape through the vents. An ominous sort of harp track plays through this segment, and as you make your way back to the ship, you run into Ridley's corpse in a cryochamber, and then his corpse shambles as the X possessing it floats away. At another point you'll be heading out of a Sector after grabbing an item, as usual, when all of a sudden there are emergency lights flashing and a sort of PA voice announcing an emergency in another sector, which leads into another race against the clock. In Sector 5, there is a very large room where, during your second visit, you'll see the silhouette and hear the Nightmare floating around in the background as if it is watching you. Fusion is just full of moments like these, resulting in the B.S.L. Space Station feeling like a very dynamic and volatile environment, even when the actual art design in the rooms themselves get kind of repetitive. And because the atmosphere is so good, the game does a good job of giving the illusion of being in places where you are "not supposed" to be in despite the game being so incredibly on-the-rails linear.
Then there's the music in Metroid Fusion. Honestly, I didn't find a whole lot of tracks from Fusion all that memorable. A lot of the tracks in the game actually sound really similar to each other for some reason. That being said, when the music does work well, it really goes out there. A lot of the ominous themes in the game highly accent the moments when the space station is falling apart or when you are running into a monster like the SA-X or Omega Metroid. Sector 4's underwater theme is a fantastic, chilling theme in spite of coming off as little much like the typical underwater music you'd hear in a video game. I guess Sector 5's main ice theme is also kinda cool and ominous, but it gets really repetitive the after being there for just a few minutes. A lot of the recurring themes, like the item acquisition theme and the Ridley boss fight theme (the one that plays when you fight Ridley), are really sci-fi-ey, which I guess also plays into the game's emphasis on dealing with alien forces of nature, though it's really hard to explain. Like the themes are familiar but also alien to you at the same time because of how weird they sound, almost like how the X leave something alien about Samus and Ridley's form.
I could go on and on about Metroid Fusion's atmosphere for a long time. While I feel that on a technical level, the sprite designs, animations, the environment designs, and music composition is much better/more memorable in Zero Mission than in Fusion, Fusion achieves the alien atmosphere significantly better by pushing for a dynamic environment that interacts with its inhabitants using the technicalities of the visuals and audio, rather than relying simply on a single image (like the Chozo statue with its head ripped off in Metroid II). As a result, the game achieves feeling pretty much like a sci-fi horror game despite not really being a horror game at all.
Story
Metroid Fusion (and I guess Metroid Prime at the same time if you consider it) is really the first game to drive a real narrative in the series. Super Metroid had bits and moments, but Fusion is the first game to really attempt to expand Samus's character and the Metroid universe. It is also really the first game to establish and develop new characters, of which I'd say are Adam and then to a lesser extent the Galactic Federation and even the X parasites. Metroid Fusion also has a sort of theme going on with regards living as a sentient being opposed to feral monstrosities. Despite the game making a stronger attempt to tell a story than previous games, the story itself is ultimately just only a little more complicated than any of the previous games and nothing tremendously compelling or anything. Too much of the narrative is really driven by the video game objectives of fighting to survive to really matter that much more than beyond that point. To make matters worse, there are moments where things call other things into question, and also there are so many times you have to stop and talk to Adam that it really grinds the pacing to a halt.
If you don't actually skip the intros before title sequences, Fusion begins on a pretty strong note. It starts with the familiar gunship Samus uses, and you see her flying alongside a Federation ship. Then Samus's ship drifts off into an asteroid belt, crashes and explodes, and the game leaves that off by bringing up the title screen. Like Super Metroid, Fusion uses a sort of "gory" or unsettling introduction with conflict inherent in what's happening in order to spark the attention of the player. Then the game starts and sets the scene. The concept of Fusion is that, while on a mission on SR388 with the Federation, Samus gets infected with a new monster known as the X. She leaves assuming nothing really happened, but as she flies back to the Federation, she falls unconscious and crashes the ship in doing so. The Galactic Federation recovers Samus from an escape pod the ship ejected her in, and they immediate begin surgically removing pieces of Samus's suit in order to find a way to treat the X infestation. Somehow, somebody magically finds a sample of Metroid DNA on Samus's suit from when the Baby Metroid saved her in Super Metroid, and they find that it eliminates the presence of X parasites in Samus's body. Because they merged Metroid DNA with Samus's DNA, and because of the massive surgery they did to her, her physical appearance -- which for some reason means the suit she wears and not her actual physical appearance -- changes into what people know as the Fusion Suit. Once Samus got up and walking, she was immediately sent on a mission to the B.S.L. Research Station, where the Federation sent organisms from SR388 to be studied. An explosion occurred at the station and the Federation received a distress signal, sending Samus Aran there to investigate. And so Samus sets out on another mission, complete with a new look, a new ship, and a companion in the form of the ship's computer.
Of course, this situation was caused by the X from SR388, and it's up to Samus to eliminate them before they take her down with the research station, and potentially the rest of the galaxy as well. As Samus progresses through the station, the situation gets further complicated by the presence of the SA-X -- an X parasite with all of Samus's abilities --, the computer, Adam's, interest in the X and single-mindedness on fulfilling orders, a Metroid cloning program kept under wraps by the Galactic Federation, and the Federation's increasing obsession with bioweapons. There's not much more plot to it than that. Most of the plot, again, revolves around Adam telling Samus to go to Point X, kill Monster Y, and grab Item Z. Along the way, things fall apart in the space station, and Samus has to either resolve them or find a way around it.
One thing that's really interesting in Fusion's story is the introduction of the X and how they are actually developed over time as opposed to being just another feral monster in the series. At the beginning of the game, the X are considered dangerous, mindless creatures and not much else, just another monster for Samus to hunt down. But as Samus progresses through the station, the X begin to get increasingly complicated. They sneak into areas opened up by security clearances on Samus's end. They posses monsters to damage the station enough to obstruct Samus's path. They possess the scientists to interface with the computers on the station. One parasite steals an upgrade to Samus's suit from the Data Rooms where Samus downloads upgrades from the Federation, and another triggers a boiler meltdown to try to take Samus down with the entire station to keep the X on SR388 safe. By the end of the game it turns out there are over ten SA-X running around on the ship, and when Samus runs into an Omega Metroid, an SA-X comes by to attempt to destroy it, ignoring Samus as the Metroid is its natural predator. The X further the complications through their actions, and as a result, even if they are a soulless "scourge" only focused on increasing their numbers, they are by the end of the game more complicated than any of the previous monsters of the series have been so far.
However, this is one of the points where the game's universe is called into question. Prior to Fusion, even if the sci-fi could even be considered over-the-top, there was never really anything that demanded an explanation as much as the events that occur in Fusion. Fusion explains that the Metroid DNA saves Samus from the X because the X were prey to Metroids. It is also a known fact, though, that Metroids are weak to the cold, and as a result of merging with Metroid DNA, so becomes Samus as well. Another way the X try to stop Samus is by altering their form in the Arctic sector in order to freeze Samus when she absorbs them. If SR388 is a habitable planet to life, surely there must be some regions where it would be freezing. SR388 is shown to be in orbit around a star, so polar regions are not out of the question. Why didn't the X simply adapt this strategy of freezing Metroids if they had the capacity to do so and if they understood that Metroids were weak to cold?
So that's just a small plothole that I guess is no big deal, but there are still a couple of other problems in the story that really bother me. Samus may be fine with everything but just how the ship started on its own, but I am definitely not okay with everything. For one thing, when Adam reveals to her that the Federation is trying to clone and breed Omega Metroids to use as bioweapons, why does Samus say absolutely nothing about this? Because she assumes there are no Metroids after dropping Sector 0? But then she encounters the Metroid shells as she runs back to another Navigation Room, where she'd surely confront Adam about it? It just seems so stupid that this huge major plot point is revealed, and is almost literally never mentioned again by anybody, only there to serve the otherwise awesome encounter with the Omega Metroid at the end, who is also pretty brushed off as no big deal by Samus afterward. Like I get the X are dangerous and the top priority, but really? The main problem with this situation is really that it holds almost no consequence at all to the characters of the story. You could remove the segment with the Metroid lab entirely and the rest of the game would not be affected other than the appearance of the Omega Metroid at the end.
The other big problem I have with the game's story is Adam's sudden change of heart. Surprise, I've actually been Adam this whole time! It's the classic case of going the entire story without any indicator whatsoever of this being even remotely possible, then suddenly the twist is dropped and then Samus says the classic line, "I had no idea until today..." Just because the story says that "the minds of great leaders had been uploaded into computers" doesn't mean I buy it. All the way until the end, the computer seems closely aligned with the Federation's scheme. At the end, the computer is pretty much knee-deep in siding with the antagonists. At no point at all does the computer even address Samus as somebody its familiar with, and Samus makes it abundantly clear in her monologues. "The real Adam actually cared, and was not some machine obsessed with duty." "The real Adam would've said the same thing, but would've softened the blow." "This computer reminds me of Adam, except he understood me well." How does Adam suddenly become Adam at the point when it's most convenient for him to become Adam?
I think Samus's monologues were attempts to imply that Adam the computer really was Adam the guy the computer reminds her of, but because they are so drawn on how Adam is different from the computer, it only characterizes the computer further apart from who Samus knows as Adam. This whole plot twist has me so aggravated that my sentences are starting to sound ridiculous, but that's really how the plot twist is. It's a real Shyamalan if I've ever seen one. If they wanted to actually earn the twist, we would slowly have seen the computer's characterization conflict with how Adam is portrayed over time. For example, the computer could suddenly recall a classified mission Samus had been on with Adam, and Samus could ask how the computer knew that. Or, over time, the computer would slowly pick up on how Adam talked, like he could randomly say, "Any objections?" and then have that followed with the Samus monologue about "Any objections, Lady?" The best plot twists have the reader initially react, "Holy shit, no way I did not see that coming," and then have them think afterward, "But I totally did, it makes sense!"
In spite of my grievances with Fusion's story though, it's really not something that mars the game by a whole lot because the story itself is pretty straightforward anyway. The main issue I take with it is all the times the game forces you to use a Navigation Room, which is more of a gameplay issue than a story issue. The game ends with Samus giving a little monologue that kinda starts getting on the nose about the game's themes of monsters versus peaceful beings, and ends with a cute shot of the Etecoons and Drachoras, which does a tremendously better job of expressing that theme than Samus does. The whole game is basically showing you the dangers of a scourge that has no soul to them, and the ending shot of the Etecoons and Drachoras is pretty much "this is what a being with a soul is." No need for psychobabble.
So aside from getting a little too on the nose at the end, and aside from the rampage I went on the game's plotholes, I think Fusion handled Samus's character pretty well. I will save that however for the segment on Samus at the end.
Gameplay
After playing these games throughout the summer, my idea of what makes a Metroid game good has become pretty more defined. On the gameplay side of things, a good Metroid really fleshes out the combat as well as opens up the progression through the game. Fusion excellently handles the combat side of things with not just enhanced movement from Super but also through offering a wide variety of fun and challenging boss fights. Unfortunately, the progression through the game doesn't fare as well. It's acceptable, but it is a complete step down from Super Metroid, and Zero Mission's improvements to that side of the game just leave Fusion in the dust.
Just so that I make this a little clearer, I use the term progression as a wide umbrella term for everything from the navigation to platforming, exploring, backtracking, and item acquisition elements that are a part of every Metroid game. Before I go off on how much the progression really bothers me in Fusion, I want to spend a bit praising the combat side of this game.
The number one thing that Fusion has done for the series is really define the speed and pace of the 2D games to come. Sure, one could argue that Zero Mission and Other M are the only 2D style games that follow Fusion, but there's a reason why the acclaimed Metroid 2 fan remake AM2R follows suit with these mechanics. The speed at which everything moves in this game is notably higher than moving around in Super Metroid, and this lends itself pretty well in the platforming and boss fights in the game because a faster pace helps raise the tension in the game. Players have to react more quickly, and as a plus, Samus and the monsters no longer move around all slow and floaty unless they are specifically designed to be that way.
What really tests combat in a Metroid game are pretty much the boss battles. Fusion already has a good foot in the door by having a wide variety of bosses. To further add to that, one cool theme among all the bosses is that each boss utilizes a piece of Samus's equipment in their own way, from fighting a weird worm hopping around with High Jump to the Nightmare, using Gravity against Samus to keep her missiles pinned to the ground. With this approach to bosses in mind, the result is that almost every boss has their own unique mechanics to them. Unfortunately the beam bosses aren't so special (why is the Plasma Beam the only weapon to have a real boss fight for?) but it is more than made up for through the other bosses in the game.
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| Diffusion Missile explosion. |
As far as weapons go in this game, Fusion introduces a few ideas that are kind of cool but mostly hold very little effect on how the game works. Let's start, though, with one thing that was pretty awesome, and that's the point-blank charge beam trick. In Fusion, when you fire the charge beam, there is also a little arc of the weapon curling out underneath Samus's arm cannon. If the enemy was in contact with this animation, it would take additional damage in addition to the charge beam. Another interesting thing about the charge beam in this game was that it split the beam up into three projectiles. Because of these new mechanics to the charge beam, it often made it the favorable weapon to use against any enemy or boss that was susceptible to the beam. Unfortunately, this kind of made missiles a little bit useless, but not by that much. Some bosses completely require the use of missiles, and a few got the balance between using the beam and using the missiles just right. Nightmare is the perfect example of this, as in Phase 1 it is better to use the charge beam for full damage against its gravity generator (and to be fair, it will destroy your missiles anyway). Then in Phase 2, while you could keep using the charge beam against Nightmare, it is better to use missiles as the boss constantly flies away from you or disorienting your positioning.
For some reason, the point-blank charge beam never comes back in any of the games. Maybe it was just too strong over the missile counterpart, or maybe the developers didn't find it too intuitive to be standing in the face of a boss. But if the latter was the case, that also just leaves me wondering about how the charge beam fired a set of projectiles as well. Maybe consolidating the damage into one made things more convenient, but I personally got a lot of satisfaction out of lining up a charge beam perfectly, as in the fight against the High Jump boss. When that boss jumps over you and tries to "eat" you, you can fire missiles into it OR you can fire a charge shot. If you lined up the charge shot perfectly, all three particles would do enough damage to knock the boss into its next "stage," something that couldn't be done in one round of firing missiles. However, there was still plenty of room for error as the opening to hit the boss was just narrow enough that if you were standing just a little too far left or right, the edge of the charge shot would just miss the boss's weak spot.
As much as I miss the charge beam mechanics, that's really the only new combat element that held any impact on the game. There other major two would be the consolidation of the ice beam effect into the missiles, and the diffusion missiles. The problem with these two new items is that there are very few moments where their use impacts the game. With ice missiles, it seems slightly more understandable given the narrative logic that having the raw Ice Beam could kill or injured Samus due to her Metroid DNA. But the Diffusion missiles are really only used a handful of times in the game, and they never see any use in any boss fight. Which sucks, because the idea of the Diffusion missile, that is, charging up a missile to engulf entire rooms in an explosion, is an awesome idea in itself. It sadly just does not see enough use to really make sense being in this game. Even ice missiles see more use, as some puzzles in this game actually do expand on and demand more out of freezing enemies. But beyond that, not much more is fleshed out with these ideas.
One last thing I want to shed some praise to is the improvement of puzzles in this game. While some are a bit confusing, overall this game improves upon the use of items such as the speedbooster and shinespark by giving them much more to do than in Super Metroid. Several expansions in the game are more complicated to get, and some are fun to solve as puzzles, and others are kind of stupid and fall flat completely. One such puzzle would be the room with the walls that raise from the ground if you bomb the wrong tile. The problem with this room is that it expects you to experiment way too much bombing each tile in the room to see what would happen. I've said this countless times already and I'll say it again, with each new Metroid game in the series, the games should work toward having you bomb every tile in the room far less often. Metroid and Metroid II only forced you to do it because of technical limitations. Super Metroid somewhat improved this with Power Bombs and the X-Ray scope. While Fusion does utilize the environment sometimes to indicate there is an item nearby, there are a lot more times where it simply leaves no clue whatsoever.
I guess this kinda leads me to item placement in this game. First of all, Fusion is unique in that there are far more expansions than there ever were or probably will be in any of the Metroid games in the series. This is because main suit upgrades, like beams and such, didn't count toward completion, so as a result there are more expansions to make up the 100%. However, having that many expansions is just far too much for a player to keep track of. The locations are really easy to forget after a week of not playing, because the items start to blur in the player's memory. Now as for the actual placement itself, the item placement is all over the damn place. Sometimes the game just throws nearly unavoidable (one is virtually impossible to avoid) expansions at you, which is not only pretty random but also really screws over anyone trying to do a low percent run of the game. Then there are the items that are completely hidden away in areas behind walls that have no indications on them whatsoever. One example that comes to mind is the hidden room beneath Ridley's lair in Sector 1. You're supposed to just guess and use a Power Bomb in this room to reveal an opening in the floor, but otherwise there is nothing indicating that there is a hidden area beneath you. Because Super Metroid introduced the Power Bombs, it has some leeway in my judgment on forcing the player to Power Bomb every room, but at this point with Fusion, there shouldn't be any excuses to keep using such dated methods of checking rooms for secrets.
What makes 100% runs even worse is that you cannot sequence break at all in Fusion, so you can't take a certain path to remove unnecessary backtracking. Some people believe 100% runs in Zero Mission are worse since you don't get Power Bombs until the very end of the game, and while it does indeed suck that Power Bombs aren't acquired until the end, you don't really need Power Bombs all that much. There's really not that much actual backtracking compared to Fusion when it comes to the 100% run, which is clearly evident in looking at the speedrun times for 100% in both games. The world records vary by a margin of fifteen minutes on in-game time, which is already a big gap in terms of a speedrun time. Now add to that the Real Time Attack time (pretty much the actual time you'd get with a stopwatch), which has a margin of almost thirty minutes! There is more time spent backtracking in Fusion for 100% runs because of items that could've been acquired ahead of time are made impossible to do so due to the game's incredibly strict, on-the-rails design.
While Fusion is far from the worst offender of gimping progression in the series with linear design (Other M), the game really drives the linearity home extremely hard. The first notable things about this are inherent in the movement mechanics of the game. While yes, Samus may be running and moving faster than in Super Metroid, there are still some problems. To further ensure the player has no way of sequence breaking at all in this game, the developers removed single walljumping (walljumping against the same wall) and bomb jumping all together with this game. Taking away options to complete the game from a player only limits how many times the player can re-experience the game before the game gets stale. The other annoying problem I have with the mechanics here is that once again, for some stupid reason, Samus still moves slow when she jumps in the air. Like OK, I can understand why this happened in Metroid and Metroid II, and to a lesser extent why in Super Metroid as well. But why is it that in Fusion, the developers establish a faster pace that is picked up on in the rest of the 2D games and still refuse to let go of Samus moving ridiculously slow in the air? Once again, in a game that involves platforming to some extent, the actual platforming is made clunky due to Samus's slow movement speed in the air. At this point, it is extremely frustrating to me that this happens as there is really no excuse for this to be happening anymore. And before you can even use the "technical limitations" excuse for the fourth time in a row, you have to keep in mind that this game was made with the engine for Wario Land 4, where freaking Wario moves faster in the air than Samus does when they jump.
There is only one movement mechanic in the game that is in any way an improvement over the previous games, and that is ledge grabbing. This is pretty self-explanatory, you just jump to a ledge and grab it, allowing you to climb onto platforms you'd might otherwise miss in the previous games. This also actually helps a bit with walljumping, as A) you now automatically hold onto a wall if you grab a ledge, and B) jumping from a ledge is actually faster than walljumping as there is no animation for kicking off the wall. Along the lines of grabbing onto things, another thing that, as far as I can remember, only ever appears in Fusion is the addition of ladders. There were two kinds of ladders in Fusion, ones that scaled up walls and ones that scaled across ceilings. Enemies often were positioned near ladders, and to attack you'd have to stop in place and shoot often at an angle. When you climb up or across a ladder, you also move slightly slower than you would while walking or even jumping through the air (yes even with Samus still jumping slow in the air, it was still faster than climbing those ladders). As you can probably see, it's almost no wonder why the ladders never appear again in any future game, because combat on the ladders, even at their best with the Security BOX boss, was clunky and utilizing them slowed the pace of the game by a lot.
Now that I've got the movement mechanics out of the way, what about the actual navigation through the environment? For one thing, to Fusion's sort of benefit, it is pretty hard to get lost in Fusion now with the Navigation Rooms, which are basically Map Rooms that the player is forced to go to in order to progress the story. Even with hiding "secret" areas, though, the Navigation Rooms really do a lot for the player, which kind of subtracts the value of exploration in this game. My real problem with the Navigation Rooms, though, is how many times the game makes you go to them. You must at least use them twice each time you go through each Sector, and you visit every Sector at least twice in the game. There are six Sectors in the game, so that means you stop at least twenty-four times to talk to Adam for five minutes as it tells you where to go next. That isn't even including the several other times you uplink to Adam in different areas than just the main six sectors. People give Fusion way too much credit for feeling long, especially when compared to Zero Mission, because the majority of that length is spent talking to Adam throughout the game. Uplinking to Adam even in a single isolated run of the game becomes really repetitive by the end of the game, now imagine trying to play the game back-to-back several times throughout the week. That is what I had to deal with.
Even if the game took away walljumping and bomb jumping, and even if the game still had you talk to Adam a thousand times, I might be less hard on it for the on-the-rails experience it seems to go out of its way to force onto you if it actually had a real sequence break or two, or something. Nearly every time you enter a new Sector, the game locks the door behind you so that you cannot backtrack. What if you want to grab some items back in Sector 3 that you saw and figure would help for the next boss? Too bad, you have to keep going where Adam, and as such, the game tells you to go. What if you wanted to try fighting Nightmare before getting the Plasma beam, which rips its generator to shreds? Tough luck, you have to get the Plasma Beam or else the game will not let you open any doors again. Many people say the latter half of the game is really where Fusion starts to pick up, and I'm inclined to agree. It's no coincidence that the latter half of the game then is when you start to deviate away from where Adam tells you to go in order to progress through the game. I.e., to restore power to the station after starting up the Auxiliary Power, you have to work your way through a bunch of tunnels and shafts that circulate around Sector 2 and lead you into a nook where a boss is blocking up the power. Or when you go to Sector 6 to retrieve the wave beam and find yourself having to use it to find a way out of Sector 6 through the secret Restricted Laboratory.
It is during these parts, as well as during the post game when the tubes between each sector become available, where the B.S.L. Research Station starts to assume a sense of interconnectedness as I'd call it. And if it weren't for the Navigation Rooms where Adam is constantly telling you off for going out finding things it didn't expect you to find, it almost feels like you really are finally, at last, exploring the game on your own. But the problems with the linearity are still inherent after you start running it again: there is no other way out than the one way you are presented, and so the illusion of actually exploring the game fades quickly upon replaying the game. To make matters worse, this is the point in the game where Fusion starts to get oddly meta about the progression throughout the series. Every time you "find" another way to get back to Adam, Adam will constantly remind you how it wasn't "intended" for Samus to go off exploring and finding items on her own. Another person I spoke about this with noted how it's kind of like a play on what Samus says earlier about disliking taking orders from a CO. In every other game, she's free to go where she pleases, and in Fusion, she eventually breaks away from that a little to find the Plasma Beam and such on her own.
I personally do not find this poetic at all. In fact, I find it's only more telling of the mindset the developers had going into Fusion, the mindset of, "Let's limit how many ways the player can actually progress through the game." And if none of that was enough to convince anybody, last we have the ultimate offender, the notorious "sequence break" in Sector 4 that isn't even a sequence break or all that much rewarding for the ridiculous trouble it puts you through. You basically have to do a really complicated series of shinesparks across several rooms with slopes that are otherwise completely unassuming and seem like they have nothing to do with each other at all. Then you have to ascend a vertical shaft with another series of slopes that leave you a split second to shinespark after speedboosting onto them, and at one point there is also a tile in the background that is actually a platform in the foreground where Samus is standing. AND you have to avoid getting hit by any of the enemies. It is so ridiculously insane that there is no way any speedrunner would even bother using it if it even worked at all.
At the end, when you return to yet another Navigation Room, you get a secret message with Adam and a creepy mysterious Galactic Federation guy who appears one other point in the story, where they both pretty much essentially laugh at you for figuring that out somehow, and then tell you to get back to the way you were supposed to go. On the surface, this seems like just a harmless joke, but in the context of the rest of the game, which blocks you from backtracking, which runs checks to make sure you have the next item in the sequence, which removes any other way possible for sequence breaking, and which touches slightly on being a little meta about how Samus progresses through the game, it comes off as the developers actually thinking that every sequence break is as ridiculous as that, and it becomes very obvious of the developers intent with this game. They don't want you going where you're not supposed to go, despite the game pretending that's what you do to progress, and they don't want you experimenting to see what other ways you can solve a problem. They want you to play the game their way, and no other way can suffice.
People go ahead and say, "Well, the Prime games are also linear, and they're pretty good." The thing to keep in mind, though, is that this game came out on the same day as Prime, and it was made pretty independently from Prime's development. It was made as a followup to Super Metroid, which offered far more opportunities for progression and replayability than Fusion. Even Metroid II lets you tackle the progression in more ways, in spite of how limited that may have been. Prime 2 and 3 hadn't even been released yet. Lastly, while the Prime games work very well as Metroid games, they do so for different reasons than the 2D games. The Prime games are pivotal on the immersion and exploration aspects of their progression. As much atmosphere as games like Super Metroid and Fusion had offered, at the end of the day the Prime games simply offer way more environmental detail for immersion and exploration. As a result, the Prime games are far more subtle or at least do a way better job at hiding the linearity, unlike Fusion which goes so far as to comment numerous times on its own linearity.
There's nothing wrong in itself of the idea of a linear Metroid. Not every Metroid game has to perfectly balance the main facets of progression, combat, and atmosphere that the series is loved for. However, the progression has to feel natural to the player, and that was not at all the case for me with Metroid Fusion.
Some final points on the gameplay I want to touch on. I am not sure if I mentioned this earlier, but the encounters with the SA-X also actually serve the progression very well, as with each encounter the player is able to gauge how much stronger they have become since the beginning of the game, something that is also important to have a feel for in each Metroid game. Another good thing about this game is actually the convenient save and recharge station placement, as they are now almost exclusively next to the entrance to each Sector as well as next to each boss. And again, I wanna say that the B.S.L. has a fantastic interconnected layout that could've felt organic if only the game let you experience that before you were on your way to the final encounter with the SA-X.
Overall, as much as I rag on Fusion for its linearity, at the end of the day I don't really care too much about it since the combat and the atmosphere is still very strong, in fact they're both among the best in the series here. But when I am replaying the game, the linearity only becomes more apparent, leaving me to think about it more and more, which ultimately limits how many times I can go back to this game in a span of time.
Depiction of Samus in Fusion
Unfortunately I do not have as much time to spend here as I'd like, even though this part of the article is supposed to be more casual and less thought out (that's right, this is free reign for me to say stupid stuff). I am only going to go over this briefly as I have to focus on writing a review for AM2R as well as getting geared up for Federation Force.
Fusion is really the first game to explore Samus's character at all, and I think it works out all right. Unfortunately it's been so long that most of the things I had to say at this point that are unique to my experience are pretty much forgotten. Unlike Other M, this game handles Samus's relationship with Adam pretty well. None of her monologues really go on long rambling sequences of drama and nonsense, aside from just doing so a tad bit at the end about suddenly talking about the bounds of the human consciousness. Each monologue is fairly straightforward and to the point, while also showing a more empathetic side of Samus in moments like after releasing the etecoons and drachoras. While many could say the straightforwardness of Samus's monologues were due to limitations on the Game Boy Advance, I'd say they work well in her favor especially in the beginning of the game. Even if Samus doesn't like taking orders, she is still obviously focused on tasks at hand and ensuring threats to the galaxy are quelled, there isn't time to stop and talk for hours about Adam and their backstory. Another good point I remember is that, while the computer suddenly saying it's Adam felt completely random to me, Samus's outburst doesn't really feel that way at all. Throughout the whole game, Samus constantly refers back to Adam and compares the computer to him, and each time she does so, she digs up a little bit deeper into that relationship until it reaches the breaking point with the computer confining her to that Navigation Room. And of course, after spending so much time in the game stopping at every single damn Navigation Room, who wouldn't want to get out of that room?
This is also probably the first real game where Samus dons a sort of anime appearance. A lot of people have a strong aversion to this, and while I understand that the anime/manga artwork is pretty limiting in terms of art design in general, I feel like people completely forget Samus is by and large a Japanese-born character. So at that point while I agree there could be more to her character design if she wasn't drawn in manga/anime style, there is really nothing that can be done about that, so the other option is to critique other aspects of her design. And honestly, I think the croptop and shorts combo she comes to be seen in constantly is the best it really gets, aside from maybe the Justin Bailey costume because that was always really cool. The croptop and shorts make sense, they accent her athleticism well, and they aren't as fanservicey as her wearing actual underwear or even as much as her in her Zero Suit.
Another cool thing that goes on with the endings in Fusion is, in the Japanese version of the game, there are endings that depict her growing up and reference the Metroid Manga, which came out around the same time as Fusion did (at least the same year). Just a nice little detail that explores more of Samus's past than previous games hinted at, and I personally like that Fusion acknowledges the manga's existence. While the manga isn't exactly the greatest story out there, I think it handled Samus's character fairly well, even with that PTSD episode.
That's about all I have left to say about Fusion though, and once again this post was too long in waiting. The next game is supposed to be Prime, but there are bigger events happening right now. Expect two full reviews of the latest entries to the Metroid series, where one is a fan game that seems to get everything oh so right, and the other is an official game that seems to get everything oh so very wrong (let's hope my assumptions are wrong).
If you need me to spell it out anymore for you, here it goes: expect an AM2R review by late Friday night the latest. Happy 30th Anniversary, Metroid and Samus!
Edit: Wow I completely forgot to talk about the Fusion suit. It's okay, I like the fins or whatever on the hands, I just feel like it could look more detailed than weird blue goo stretched over Samus's suit. And the in-game sprites of Samus standing sideways aren't that great either. But I really don't have much else to say about it.
 |
| Seriously??? |
I guess this kinda leads me to item placement in this game. First of all, Fusion is unique in that there are far more expansions than there ever were or probably will be in any of the Metroid games in the series. This is because main suit upgrades, like beams and such, didn't count toward completion, so as a result there are more expansions to make up the 100%. However, having that many expansions is just far too much for a player to keep track of. The locations are really easy to forget after a week of not playing, because the items start to blur in the player's memory. Now as for the actual placement itself, the item placement is all over the damn place. Sometimes the game just throws nearly unavoidable (one is virtually impossible to avoid) expansions at you, which is not only pretty random but also really screws over anyone trying to do a low percent run of the game. Then there are the items that are completely hidden away in areas behind walls that have no indications on them whatsoever. One example that comes to mind is the hidden room beneath Ridley's lair in Sector 1. You're supposed to just guess and use a Power Bomb in this room to reveal an opening in the floor, but otherwise there is nothing indicating that there is a hidden area beneath you. Because Super Metroid introduced the Power Bombs, it has some leeway in my judgment on forcing the player to Power Bomb every room, but at this point with Fusion, there shouldn't be any excuses to keep using such dated methods of checking rooms for secrets.
What makes 100% runs even worse is that you cannot sequence break at all in Fusion, so you can't take a certain path to remove unnecessary backtracking. Some people believe 100% runs in Zero Mission are worse since you don't get Power Bombs until the very end of the game, and while it does indeed suck that Power Bombs aren't acquired until the end, you don't really need Power Bombs all that much. There's really not that much actual backtracking compared to Fusion when it comes to the 100% run, which is clearly evident in looking at the speedrun times for 100% in both games. The world records vary by a margin of fifteen minutes on in-game time, which is already a big gap in terms of a speedrun time. Now add to that the Real Time Attack time (pretty much the actual time you'd get with a stopwatch), which has a margin of almost thirty minutes! There is more time spent backtracking in Fusion for 100% runs because of items that could've been acquired ahead of time are made impossible to do so due to the game's incredibly strict, on-the-rails design.
While Fusion is far from the worst offender of gimping progression in the series with linear design (Other M), the game really drives the linearity home extremely hard. The first notable things about this are inherent in the movement mechanics of the game. While yes, Samus may be running and moving faster than in Super Metroid, there are still some problems. To further ensure the player has no way of sequence breaking at all in this game, the developers removed single walljumping (walljumping against the same wall) and bomb jumping all together with this game. Taking away options to complete the game from a player only limits how many times the player can re-experience the game before the game gets stale. The other annoying problem I have with the mechanics here is that once again, for some stupid reason, Samus still moves slow when she jumps in the air. Like OK, I can understand why this happened in Metroid and Metroid II, and to a lesser extent why in Super Metroid as well. But why is it that in Fusion, the developers establish a faster pace that is picked up on in the rest of the 2D games and still refuse to let go of Samus moving ridiculously slow in the air? Once again, in a game that involves platforming to some extent, the actual platforming is made clunky due to Samus's slow movement speed in the air. At this point, it is extremely frustrating to me that this happens as there is really no excuse for this to be happening anymore. And before you can even use the "technical limitations" excuse for the fourth time in a row, you have to keep in mind that this game was made with the engine for Wario Land 4, where freaking Wario moves faster in the air than Samus does when they jump.
There is only one movement mechanic in the game that is in any way an improvement over the previous games, and that is ledge grabbing. This is pretty self-explanatory, you just jump to a ledge and grab it, allowing you to climb onto platforms you'd might otherwise miss in the previous games. This also actually helps a bit with walljumping, as A) you now automatically hold onto a wall if you grab a ledge, and B) jumping from a ledge is actually faster than walljumping as there is no animation for kicking off the wall. Along the lines of grabbing onto things, another thing that, as far as I can remember, only ever appears in Fusion is the addition of ladders. There were two kinds of ladders in Fusion, ones that scaled up walls and ones that scaled across ceilings. Enemies often were positioned near ladders, and to attack you'd have to stop in place and shoot often at an angle. When you climb up or across a ladder, you also move slightly slower than you would while walking or even jumping through the air (yes even with Samus still jumping slow in the air, it was still faster than climbing those ladders). As you can probably see, it's almost no wonder why the ladders never appear again in any future game, because combat on the ladders, even at their best with the Security BOX boss, was clunky and utilizing them slowed the pace of the game by a lot.
Now that I've got the movement mechanics out of the way, what about the actual navigation through the environment? For one thing, to Fusion's sort of benefit, it is pretty hard to get lost in Fusion now with the Navigation Rooms, which are basically Map Rooms that the player is forced to go to in order to progress the story. Even with hiding "secret" areas, though, the Navigation Rooms really do a lot for the player, which kind of subtracts the value of exploration in this game. My real problem with the Navigation Rooms, though, is how many times the game makes you go to them. You must at least use them twice each time you go through each Sector, and you visit every Sector at least twice in the game. There are six Sectors in the game, so that means you stop at least twenty-four times to talk to Adam for five minutes as it tells you where to go next. That isn't even including the several other times you uplink to Adam in different areas than just the main six sectors. People give Fusion way too much credit for feeling long, especially when compared to Zero Mission, because the majority of that length is spent talking to Adam throughout the game. Uplinking to Adam even in a single isolated run of the game becomes really repetitive by the end of the game, now imagine trying to play the game back-to-back several times throughout the week. That is what I had to deal with.
Even if the game took away walljumping and bomb jumping, and even if the game still had you talk to Adam a thousand times, I might be less hard on it for the on-the-rails experience it seems to go out of its way to force onto you if it actually had a real sequence break or two, or something. Nearly every time you enter a new Sector, the game locks the door behind you so that you cannot backtrack. What if you want to grab some items back in Sector 3 that you saw and figure would help for the next boss? Too bad, you have to keep going where Adam, and as such, the game tells you to go. What if you wanted to try fighting Nightmare before getting the Plasma beam, which rips its generator to shreds? Tough luck, you have to get the Plasma Beam or else the game will not let you open any doors again. Many people say the latter half of the game is really where Fusion starts to pick up, and I'm inclined to agree. It's no coincidence that the latter half of the game then is when you start to deviate away from where Adam tells you to go in order to progress through the game. I.e., to restore power to the station after starting up the Auxiliary Power, you have to work your way through a bunch of tunnels and shafts that circulate around Sector 2 and lead you into a nook where a boss is blocking up the power. Or when you go to Sector 6 to retrieve the wave beam and find yourself having to use it to find a way out of Sector 6 through the secret Restricted Laboratory.
It is during these parts, as well as during the post game when the tubes between each sector become available, where the B.S.L. Research Station starts to assume a sense of interconnectedness as I'd call it. And if it weren't for the Navigation Rooms where Adam is constantly telling you off for going out finding things it didn't expect you to find, it almost feels like you really are finally, at last, exploring the game on your own. But the problems with the linearity are still inherent after you start running it again: there is no other way out than the one way you are presented, and so the illusion of actually exploring the game fades quickly upon replaying the game. To make matters worse, this is the point in the game where Fusion starts to get oddly meta about the progression throughout the series. Every time you "find" another way to get back to Adam, Adam will constantly remind you how it wasn't "intended" for Samus to go off exploring and finding items on her own. Another person I spoke about this with noted how it's kind of like a play on what Samus says earlier about disliking taking orders from a CO. In every other game, she's free to go where she pleases, and in Fusion, she eventually breaks away from that a little to find the Plasma Beam and such on her own.
I personally do not find this poetic at all. In fact, I find it's only more telling of the mindset the developers had going into Fusion, the mindset of, "Let's limit how many ways the player can actually progress through the game." And if none of that was enough to convince anybody, last we have the ultimate offender, the notorious "sequence break" in Sector 4 that isn't even a sequence break or all that much rewarding for the ridiculous trouble it puts you through. You basically have to do a really complicated series of shinesparks across several rooms with slopes that are otherwise completely unassuming and seem like they have nothing to do with each other at all. Then you have to ascend a vertical shaft with another series of slopes that leave you a split second to shinespark after speedboosting onto them, and at one point there is also a tile in the background that is actually a platform in the foreground where Samus is standing. AND you have to avoid getting hit by any of the enemies. It is so ridiculously insane that there is no way any speedrunner would even bother using it if it even worked at all.
At the end, when you return to yet another Navigation Room, you get a secret message with Adam and a creepy mysterious Galactic Federation guy who appears one other point in the story, where they both pretty much essentially laugh at you for figuring that out somehow, and then tell you to get back to the way you were supposed to go. On the surface, this seems like just a harmless joke, but in the context of the rest of the game, which blocks you from backtracking, which runs checks to make sure you have the next item in the sequence, which removes any other way possible for sequence breaking, and which touches slightly on being a little meta about how Samus progresses through the game, it comes off as the developers actually thinking that every sequence break is as ridiculous as that, and it becomes very obvious of the developers intent with this game. They don't want you going where you're not supposed to go, despite the game pretending that's what you do to progress, and they don't want you experimenting to see what other ways you can solve a problem. They want you to play the game their way, and no other way can suffice.
People go ahead and say, "Well, the Prime games are also linear, and they're pretty good." The thing to keep in mind, though, is that this game came out on the same day as Prime, and it was made pretty independently from Prime's development. It was made as a followup to Super Metroid, which offered far more opportunities for progression and replayability than Fusion. Even Metroid II lets you tackle the progression in more ways, in spite of how limited that may have been. Prime 2 and 3 hadn't even been released yet. Lastly, while the Prime games work very well as Metroid games, they do so for different reasons than the 2D games. The Prime games are pivotal on the immersion and exploration aspects of their progression. As much atmosphere as games like Super Metroid and Fusion had offered, at the end of the day the Prime games simply offer way more environmental detail for immersion and exploration. As a result, the Prime games are far more subtle or at least do a way better job at hiding the linearity, unlike Fusion which goes so far as to comment numerous times on its own linearity.
There's nothing wrong in itself of the idea of a linear Metroid. Not every Metroid game has to perfectly balance the main facets of progression, combat, and atmosphere that the series is loved for. However, the progression has to feel natural to the player, and that was not at all the case for me with Metroid Fusion.
Some final points on the gameplay I want to touch on. I am not sure if I mentioned this earlier, but the encounters with the SA-X also actually serve the progression very well, as with each encounter the player is able to gauge how much stronger they have become since the beginning of the game, something that is also important to have a feel for in each Metroid game. Another good thing about this game is actually the convenient save and recharge station placement, as they are now almost exclusively next to the entrance to each Sector as well as next to each boss. And again, I wanna say that the B.S.L. has a fantastic interconnected layout that could've felt organic if only the game let you experience that before you were on your way to the final encounter with the SA-X.
Overall, as much as I rag on Fusion for its linearity, at the end of the day I don't really care too much about it since the combat and the atmosphere is still very strong, in fact they're both among the best in the series here. But when I am replaying the game, the linearity only becomes more apparent, leaving me to think about it more and more, which ultimately limits how many times I can go back to this game in a span of time.
Depiction of Samus in Fusion
Unfortunately I do not have as much time to spend here as I'd like, even though this part of the article is supposed to be more casual and less thought out (that's right, this is free reign for me to say stupid stuff). I am only going to go over this briefly as I have to focus on writing a review for AM2R as well as getting geared up for Federation Force.
Fusion is really the first game to explore Samus's character at all, and I think it works out all right. Unfortunately it's been so long that most of the things I had to say at this point that are unique to my experience are pretty much forgotten. Unlike Other M, this game handles Samus's relationship with Adam pretty well. None of her monologues really go on long rambling sequences of drama and nonsense, aside from just doing so a tad bit at the end about suddenly talking about the bounds of the human consciousness. Each monologue is fairly straightforward and to the point, while also showing a more empathetic side of Samus in moments like after releasing the etecoons and drachoras. While many could say the straightforwardness of Samus's monologues were due to limitations on the Game Boy Advance, I'd say they work well in her favor especially in the beginning of the game. Even if Samus doesn't like taking orders, she is still obviously focused on tasks at hand and ensuring threats to the galaxy are quelled, there isn't time to stop and talk for hours about Adam and their backstory. Another good point I remember is that, while the computer suddenly saying it's Adam felt completely random to me, Samus's outburst doesn't really feel that way at all. Throughout the whole game, Samus constantly refers back to Adam and compares the computer to him, and each time she does so, she digs up a little bit deeper into that relationship until it reaches the breaking point with the computer confining her to that Navigation Room. And of course, after spending so much time in the game stopping at every single damn Navigation Room, who wouldn't want to get out of that room?
This is also probably the first real game where Samus dons a sort of anime appearance. A lot of people have a strong aversion to this, and while I understand that the anime/manga artwork is pretty limiting in terms of art design in general, I feel like people completely forget Samus is by and large a Japanese-born character. So at that point while I agree there could be more to her character design if she wasn't drawn in manga/anime style, there is really nothing that can be done about that, so the other option is to critique other aspects of her design. And honestly, I think the croptop and shorts combo she comes to be seen in constantly is the best it really gets, aside from maybe the Justin Bailey costume because that was always really cool. The croptop and shorts make sense, they accent her athleticism well, and they aren't as fanservicey as her wearing actual underwear or even as much as her in her Zero Suit.
Another cool thing that goes on with the endings in Fusion is, in the Japanese version of the game, there are endings that depict her growing up and reference the Metroid Manga, which came out around the same time as Fusion did (at least the same year). Just a nice little detail that explores more of Samus's past than previous games hinted at, and I personally like that Fusion acknowledges the manga's existence. While the manga isn't exactly the greatest story out there, I think it handled Samus's character fairly well, even with that PTSD episode.
That's about all I have left to say about Fusion though, and once again this post was too long in waiting. The next game is supposed to be Prime, but there are bigger events happening right now. Expect two full reviews of the latest entries to the Metroid series, where one is a fan game that seems to get everything oh so right, and the other is an official game that seems to get everything oh so very wrong (let's hope my assumptions are wrong).
If you need me to spell it out anymore for you, here it goes: expect an AM2R review by late Friday night the latest. Happy 30th Anniversary, Metroid and Samus!
Edit: Wow I completely forgot to talk about the Fusion suit. It's okay, I like the fins or whatever on the hands, I just feel like it could look more detailed than weird blue goo stretched over Samus's suit. And the in-game sprites of Samus standing sideways aren't that great either. But I really don't have much else to say about it.
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