I Have Moved to Wordpress

I love how this post is nearly a year late, but better late than never right?

I have made the move to Wordpress. I kind of took a long break from writing on the blog, but I am back at it and I mean to stay at it this time. Here is a link to the blog:

https://skypirateprimer.wordpress.com/

Please go there for more stuff from me. My blog there looks way nicer too, and that's Wordpress for you. Anyway, farewell, Blogger! You were great for a large part of my life, but now, well, you're not so great anymore. Readers, I hope to see you again on the other side.

... What are you still doing here? Go to my other blog! GO! And without further ado, goodbye!

AM2R Review - Part 2

Please excuse the lack of polish.

Story

The original Metroid II's story appears incredibly simplistic: Samus comes to SR388 to exterminate all the Metroids (for some reason, "all Metroids on SR388" equals around forty of them). Apparently, what I didn't know was that the booklet for the game mentions that the Federation tried to study the planet or kill the Metroids themselves, but failed horribly. Beyond just the simple premise, there are some implications of narrative in the environment alone. As I mentioned under Atmosphere, the game's environment, in both the original and in AM2R, progressively reveals a militaristic side of the Chozo and hints at something that has obviously gone terribly wrong on this planet. Otherwise, the Metroids wouldn't be the dominant creatures here.

AM2R does a little bit to expand the story but not too much. By fleshing out the Federation's role on this planet, the narrative of AM2R ties the original game closer to the sort of overall narrative in the 2D series. I am not sure if this was intentionally written, but because there is no mention of the Federation in the game's introductory sequence, the Federation's sudden appearance on the planet without the player's knowledge could potentially imply that the Federation kept the operation a secret from Samus, marking the beginnings of their corruption that later becomes apparent in Other M and Fusion. On the other hand, the Federation on the surface of SR388 doesn't seem to have done much to really hide their operation from being discoverable by someone else. The Research Team has a large ship perched right on the planet's surface, in a location that must have been visible enough for the Rescue Team to have landed so close to them (who also lands in the not so discrete location of the edge of a cliff).

So if the Federation wasn't written to be corrupt or anything like that in here, my minor gripe with the introductory scene would then be their lack of presence in the briefing.

Actually, I just remembered: if you look in the logbook, it will say that the secondary objective is to find the Federation units stationed on the planet. So that, then, just leads me to say that it seems like something that should've been mentioned in the introduction. It's not a huge deal, this game doesn't really have a tremendous story for it to matter, but it would have been neater as a component in the writing that sets up the events to follow. Particularly as something called an inciting incident, it would have given further reason for the story to be taking place at this moment. Yes, of course Metroids are dangerous so that works as reason enough to go down to SR388 to kill them, but why is it happening now is the question raised by the new introduction. Mentioning the disappearance of two groups sent out to the planet makes the stakes much more immediate to the story. Again, it's ultimately not a big deal in the long run as there is not much else story to this game.

It was pretty much around here where the wording started to irk me, but it's really tough to say what exactly is the issue here.

Another small issue I had with the introduction was just simply the wording at one point in it. It wasn't bad, but I strongly felt it could've been cleaned up a bit to sound more natural. It lacked some sort of mechanical quality that is found in the writing of the localizations of the other 2D Metroid games in the series. This is also I guess not a gamebreaking problem or anything, but at the end of the day it's something that would've helped the game's most immediate presentation.

One new addition to this game that is probably worth mentioning is the logbook, which honestly I have only read once in the ten times I've played this game. Before I read the logbook, I read another article that harshly criticized the logbook for sounding like cringeworthy, Mystery Science Theater 3000-esque, pseudoscientific ramblings about different areas and enemies throughout the game. I came into it a little cautious about the whole thing, but none of the entries were really horrible or anything. They were even written more cleanly than the introduction. They weren't too significant either, but I guess it works just fine as fanservice. The real question is, how well does the game do without it?

Well, as I said, I played through the game ten times without even bothering to read it until the very last time I was about to jump into that ship to end the game. Don't mind my double-dipping into the Atmosphere section, but again, the details and progression in the environment were enough to satisfy a sense of narrative. There is a small arc of consequence indicated as each zone, save for the fifth area, gets more hostile and dangerous. The game progressively shows the SR388 Chozo's gravitation toward engineering weapons, ending with the Genetics Laboratory where they created the very monsters that threatened peace in the galaxy. So because AM2R remains true to the environmental storytelling and makes it that much clearer with visual indicators like the priestly statues in the first area or the statue portraying brute strength in the fourth area, it does a fine job communicating the arc of consequence to the player without relying on the logbook to do so.

If there is any real problem that comes close to worthy of criticism, it's the location of the Power Bomb. Why would the Chozo place it right next to a volatile power generator? This is really the first 2D game that did not depend on a present narrative (basically Samus's monlogues in Fusion or interactions with other characters in Other M) that actually made me stop and question how something makes sense in the world. Of course, this isn't a big deal to me or anything, but it quickly became something I laugh at this game for.

Gameplay
I've gone over the atmosphere in AM2R and found it among the best in the series. Atmosphere alone cannot carry this fan remake, so how does the gameplay hold up? I define the two most critical components for Metroid's gameplay as the combat and the progression. And as such, in AM2R, both aspects of the game feel pretty solid, with the experience only feeling at worst lackluster for about as many times as it happened in, say, Super Metroid.

In order to complete the overall picture of how the progression feels in this game, I think it's important to look at how the movement mechanics work. Like Metroid II, Samus moves faster while in Morph Ball than while she is running, only this time the Varia suit doesn't actually improve your speed. While I understand that this kind of makes sense, at the end of the day it only ends up feeling like a bit of a chore to constantly switch in and out of Morph Ball. I got used to it eventually and it became such second nature that I wound up doing that in other Metroid games as well, so it's no longer a pain to me anymore but initially I thought it was kind of silly that they kept such an antiquated aspect of the original game.

On the bright side, everything else about the movement mechanics in this game is great. Samus does not jump slow in the air, the Space Jump still feels as smooth as it did in Zero Mission but they also brought back the ability to wall-jump even after getting Space Jump, the Shinespark has a longer charge time and now you can buffer another Shinespark charge when you aim at a slope. Wall jumping is still as fast as it was in Zero Mission but is now easier to control, and the same goes for bomb jumping. They even improved the Spider Ball in this game! While it still moves incredibly slow, and rightfully so as it makes scaling obstacles really easy, they at least made it fast enough to escape being knocked off a wall by a bomb. In the original Metroid II, sometimes if you were in a bit of a dip in the wall, you wouldn't have enough time to crawl away from the bomb you dropped, knocking you off the wall. I can't remember that happening to me at all anymore in AM2R, even with the faster bomb timer in this game.

There are also the added controls like a button for locking the direction you're aiming as well as a consolidated button for entering Morph Ball, so that's nice. Even better is that the game goes beyond the obvious stuff like wall jumping and brings out some pretty cool movement techniques like mochballing. I always found mochballing weird in Super Metroid for being a pretty obvious glitch, not some thing the developers intended as depth to the game. In here, it seems pretty fair to say it is intentional. First of all, you no longer have to go through a door for it to work. Just do a Speed Boost and, if you morph at about the height of Samus's Morph Ball away from the floor, you'll keep Speed Boosting. This opens up ways to traverse through areas like the series of waterfall tunnels before the last area, which appear at a glance to be impossible to Speed Boost through.

There is also teching in this game, called an "umeki" apparently. If you're not familiar with Smash terminology, a tech is basically a button-input before your character lands on the floor to cancel landing lag. You can use this to cancel the lag from being knocked back by enemies like Zetas. There are probably other hidden tricks in this game that I'm still not aware of, and because they feel as natural as the standard movement options in the game, there was never a point where I felt like I was being prevented by the game from pulling off tricks and progression skips, other than the obvious lava carried over from Metroid II.

At face value, AM2R's progression seems just as linear as it was in Metroid II: Return of Samus. Apparently several have criticized AM2R for being this way and expected the layout to be rebuilt from scratch. To that I then ask, At what point does the game still hold true as a remake? When I first played, I came in expecting to say the game was forever at fault due to being based off of Metroid II, but that is pretty unfair to the developers of this game. Instead, it is more appropriate to judge the game by the lengths the developers took to alleviate the problems with the original game's linearity. Metroid II's problem isn't exactly that it's linear, it's that there are very few ways to replay the game, especially since items had very little impact on the progression whatsoever.

The first immediately apparent feature of AM2R is that there are different difficulty modes, so right off the bat there are already three ways to play the game. Then there are how the items affect the progression, which is where it matters most. What point would there be in a Metroidvania if the items had little effect on the progression? In AM2R, starting off there are already points in the game where you are required to have an item to move forward, something the original lacked with just a few exceptions that made bare minimum use of items. Extending past that, there are several shortcuts in the game that present alternative paths for you to take assuming you skipped an item, as was the case in Zero Mission (although to a much lesser extent in AM2R).

One of the best examples of this is the fourth area of the game. A normal way of going through here would probably be: killing some of the Metroids that outline the area, defeating the Tester to grab the Plasma Beam, then grabbing the Power Bombs after killing the Metroids. At first, it seems like the only way to progress after this area is by grabbing the Power Bombs, but you could also just skip the Plasma Beam and the Power Bombs entirely and use a shortcut with Super Missiles after killing all the Metroids. Or, you can go for one item and not the other, or you can grab the Power Bombs first, after killing the Metroids, and using them to make the Tester a lot easier and to get the Plasma Beam quicker. AM2R might still follow the linear structure of SR388, but it expands on the things that were available for you to explore and navigate through each area, allowing various options for progressing through the game. So because these options are available and the only real thing that halts progression is the lava, the linearity at no point feels unnaturally set up to force you into only one experience of the game.

The item placement is handled pretty well in this game. Most of the main items are located near environments that show you how those upgrades work, as is standard for the 2D games since Super Metroid. Most of the expansions are also placed decently, as none are ever in your way if you are trying to go for a low percent run, and only a few items are in odd places. Like for example, there's a platform in the first area that has a missile tank, but is only accessible by scaling the entire outline of the area with the Spider Ball, or by infinite bomb jumping. Because infinite bomb jumping is a bit of an advanced technique, and because the Spider Ball moves painfully slow, there isn't really much to encourage the player to bother checking out what's up there until later on when they can come back with Space Jump.

Then, looking at the game from a 100% perspective, there's the placement of items relative to the warp points in the game. I am a little disappointed that the only real way the developers figured how to connect the world together was through warp points, as they always tend to make things feel more like a video game. At the very least, it seems like they tried to make the warp points as minimal and unobtrusive as possible. I am still scratching my head, though, as to why the warp point that leads to the second area is placed in the fourth one instead of where the main hub is located. Some items are a bit of a ways off from these warp points, which is a little inconvenient, but at least by that point in the game, you can find pretty much about eighty percent of the items or so, so you don't really spend that much time looking around unless you missed something you could;ve acquired way earlier.

So despite remaining to SR388's linear layout, AM2R alleviates that linearity by amping up the impact that items have on the game, something that seems to be a crucial aspect of any Metroidvania. The game is also fairly open to various ways of replaying it, even if it may not be as much as in Super Metroid or in Zero Mission (but to be fair, it's pretty hard to top Zero Mission's sense of progression). The one caveat is the low percent run, which the game seems poorly balanced toward, especially at the end where the Queen can one-shot you without any Energy Tanks or Varia Suit on Normal.

Like the progression in this game, there are a few mechanics that help the combat as well. So far, that I know of, the standard Charge Attack is kept, the game brings back charged bombs (where you'd launch five bombs at once by morphing with a charged beam), and the game offers a new trick where you can rapid-fire the normal missiles depending on how you time pressing the attack button. I particularly like the return of the charged bombs, which does open up a couple of strategies here and there (apparently the fastest known method of killing the Queen involves the use of charged bombs).  What really defines combat in this series are how the bosses play out, in my opinion at least, so I'll look at a few bosses to discuss how the combat stands.

The two-form Torizo battle was an excellent idea. For one thing, it fits very well with the recurring theme of completely distancing you from the familiar in this game. It's also a boss fight that forces you to learn to use the Space Jump to survive, and rewards skilled use of the Space Jump to bring the boss down quicker. The problem I have with the latter part of that is that shooting while jumping has always been pretty clunky in all of these games. It is actually pretty hard to aim missiles with precision while jumping, otherwise something like the Kraid quick kill in Super Metroid would be really easy. While the Torizo has a decent hurtbox for the missiles to land, it still has good mobility and it is almost constantly attacking you, so most players end up just sticking to the platforms which block line of sight with the boss for a good chunk of the fight. It's a fun boss but could've been a bit better had it compensated the awkwardness of keeping yourself in the air and keeping your aim straight at the same time.

Arachnus is pretty great in the fact alone that it's one of the few bosses in the entire series that actually has you use the Bombs. It's like a blend of Fusion's Arachnus with an expanded take on how you originally killed Arachnus in Metroid II, blending both shooting and bombing to take the boss down. While more challenging than he was in Fusion, his patterns are still reasonable to learn and avoid, as there is enough time to dodge each of them once you know what to expect.

The Metroids are, for the most part, pretty great. From the dodgy AI of the Alpha Metroid to the nimble-yet-powerful theme for the Zeta Metroid, fighting each form gets progressively tense and more complicated. While Omega's are really satisfying to take down through their weakness in the back, the problem with them is that they leave way too little room to jump over them, and the other alternative to getting out of being cornered is to wait out their attacks in the nooks that are in each of their rooms. I don't know if they were going for this idea of fighting something so immense you have to hide from their attacks, but I don't think this would be the right way to do it if that were the case as you are then just basically waiting for the boss to stop attacking. If there was more room to Space Jump and less room to hide, I think it would better encourage the idea of dodging its attacks and striking it in its most vulnerable spot in the back. So while I'm glad Omega Metroids keep their weakness in the back, something was lost from veering away from having to face them head-on to avoid their attacks as was the case in the original game (and in Fusion, you had to put yourself in a vulnerable position to be able to attack it).

I'll skim over some other bosses quickly. Serris and Genesis were pretty cool, but also kind of easy and work as just a little more than fanservice. The Tester was kind of fun but there are so many projectiles the game starts feeling like Touhou, and Metroid is definitely not suited to accommodate that, maybe have at least the ice beam that the boss uses as somewhat destructible because it feels like it covers all the space on your screen. The Queen feels almost perfect, I just think she could've used one more attack. Maybe something to keep you from getting too comfortable on the floor when she lunges her head above you.

Literally Touhou, the boss.

One thing I found actually noteworthy involving the combat in this game is the ammo count for Super Missiles and Power Bombs, which the total limit is twenty (ten in Hard Mode). While I still feel like twenty Power Bombs is still way more than you'll ever need, I really like the leash they put on Super Missiles in this game, as going for all of them in Zero Mission and in Super Metroid came at the cost of mitigating a lot of the tension in later boss fights, as missing a few Super Missiles wouldn't be all that big of a deal. In AM2R, it's already hard enough killing things like the Omega Metroids due to very small windows to hit the hurtboxes, so not only is it harder to land hits with Super Missiles, it is also easier run low on them as a result, making Super Missiles more valuable (especially in speed runs) and satisfying to use. Even on Hard Mode, ten Super Missiles feels like just the right amount to get by.

All in all, the combat in this game is pretty decent. Nothing in this game has anything on Fusion's bosses, but I'd say they are comparable to Super Metroid's bosses in terms of the amount and degree of the problems each game has with them, only with more variety in AM2R's favor from what I can remember.

Running through some final points, I want to say that consolidating the recharge stations to the save stations was a good move since fighting Metroids is still a focus in this game. There is one save station, though, that has some pretty poor placement, and that's the one on the way to the first Omega Metroid. The risk of dying on the way to it is really minimal, and the safety net it provides from such a small chance of dying in that tunnel comes at the cost of a long trek back to fight the boss, where you'll be so much more likely to die.

Interestingly, this game does away with map stations, probably due to the map covering the entire planet in one screen, another sort of first for the series (and a pretty welcome one for newer players and for people trying to keep track of all the items). I kinda wish the map listed the items you collected as it did in Fusion and Zero Mission, but it's not too bad. Adding a map to this game really helped modernize Metroid II and make it friendlier to newer players, although some complain it makes it to easy to know where you are going. Personally, I still had feelings of discovery when I'd come across a shortcut in a place I didn't expect to find one or a hidden switch like the one for the first Energy Tank in the first area, and in the original game it was still pretty easy to navigate through anyway once you played through it to the end.

The last thing I'll cover are the couple of gimmicky new gameplay moments that seem to be in the game because in the remake of Metroid, Nintendo added a whole new gameplay segment. The reason it works in Zero Mission, despite the stealth mechanics not really working very well at all, is because you can still feel like you are playing the game normally while still being impacted by the significant change at the same time. The Sidehopper minigame, while adding to the atmosphere of the area being an industrial facility, really slows down the pace for a game that has extremely simplistic mechanics. Then there are the ball puzzles, which drove me crazy. Slowing the game down quite a bit to place a huge emphasis on positioning, these puzzles get pretty annoying especially on 100% runs, as it is a little hard to tell just where the ball is going to end up aside from which direction you are shooting it toward. Even more annoying is that, if the ball goes through an open door, it disappears and you'll have to wait a few seconds to get a new one. I appreciated the idea of switching up the gameplay with some new puzzles, but the ball puzzles would've been better if they depended on mechanics that the player could more reliably control.

So to sum it up, this game fulfills both the combat and progression aspects of Metroid's game play pretty well, and then some. I never thought I wanted a bipedal Zeta Metroid chasing me down rather than the floaty one I could shoot in the back, and AM2R made me love the idea. The movement mechanics, shortcuts, and different item choices have varied my replays of this game considerably more than I expected, and I still feel like there are more things to try that I just don't know about yet. So despite its missteps, like the ball puzzles and the slightly disappointing Omega Metroids, the gameplay still comes out pretty strong, and no Metroid game has ever been perfect in that department anyway, as I have seen so far in each of my posts in the Metroid Retrospective. I feel like there is so much more I can say about this game, too, but I feel I'm already pushing a reader's tolerance for length as it is. If there's anything you'd like to say or any part of this you don't agree with (as I'm sure a lot of people would), feel free to discuss this wonderful game in the comments or messaging me if there is some way of doing that on this site.

Even if AM2R might not really be the best Metroid game ever so much as really my favorite Metroid ever, I still strongly recommend this game. It is exactly the game I hoped it would be, the game that the Metroid community so desperately needed, and then some. For all intents and purposes, this is pretty much the end of my review, so thank you for sticking with me.

Depiction of Samus in AM2R

Not even this review is safe from my moments of self-indulgence. If you are new to this (as I assume you are, being my imaginary WordPress audience), this is the point where I let loose quite a bit and take less accountability for the things I say. Samus herself is just as critically important to the series as any other component of a Metroid game, so of course I dedicate a section of each post to the Lady herself. So how does AM2R expand the depiction of Samus in Metroid II? Well first I say, take the her cute underwear at the end of Metroid II, and throw it out the window. Er... I mean, the idea of depicting her that way.

It's worth noting that Samus in this game was in fact not designed by a Japanese artist, so her appearance does not too closely follow suit with the anime/manga appearance she had in Zero Mission and Fusion. Rather, she was designed by Azima "Zim" Khan, who (I think) strove for a more grounded, realistic approach without doing away too much with the cartoon side of these 2D games. If you don't know who Zim is, she's the artist who did the super cool Anatomically Correct Samus model and made the top post of the Metroid subreddit for over a year. If you still don't know who that is, well, um, she made the promotional art for this game, so yeah. She also gave me permission to use the stuff she made on this post when I'm very clearly not making any money off this (some people, *cough cough "Nintendo" cough,*  don't appreciate using something they made when it garnishes no royalties whatsoever), so that makes her even cooler than she already is.

Anyway, as this is about Samus and not really about Zim, I don't really know what else I can say. AM2R offers three endings, one with Samus in her suit, and then the other two show what she looks like. The best ending shows her laid back, drinking a can of... soda? I know Zim is already working on some goofy fun endings, but this ending was also pretty fun to me too. I don't know, it's the first time I've seen Samus kicking back with a soda, okay?

To be more serious about this, I really appreciate that Zim and whoever designed the death sprite for Samus (I think it was the guy named Sabre) went with the orange crop-top and shorts combo that Samus donned at the end of Zero Mission. Making this even sweeter is that Samus's face here even bears some resemblance to her face in the first Metroid Prime, which has so far been, in my opinion, the most unique face she's had in the series. This sounds pretty ridiculous, hence why I am probably the least qualified person to talk about art and graphic design and stuff, but it is true that Samus has been pretty much a woman of many similar yet still various faces throughout time, even between Fusion and Zero Mission.

I wouldn't say that the depiction of Samus ends with Zim's endings though, or at least the things that can be said about it. The other point in the game where it's pretty awesome is, again, the part where she holds up the jaws of the Metroid Queen with her hands and feet. Granted, of course, she was in her Power Suit, whereas she most likely would've wound up in the death animation without it. Still, in a game that really drives home the theme of survival of the fittest, that brief little moment conveys a lot of strength in Samus to turn the most vulnerable position into an advantage for her to triumph over a dangerous monster. That is pretty much all the depiction any of these games ever need of her (though before Zim starts writing an angry comment, I have to be clear the game would lose out on a lot without her endings!) Whoever came up with that idea along with the people involved with making it happen are all brilliant. I just wish the Morph Ball didn't clip through the jaw, ha ha.

And that's about it really. Not much more I can say about how Samus is depicted that's different from her portrayal in the original game, as both establish her empathy for peaceful creatures in the same manner. Sometimes these games don't have to make leaps and bounds to adequately portray Samus, so AM2R pulls it off just fine. I kinda wish those goofy endings came out before I wrote this, though, as those would have been fun to talk about. Oh well.

Thank you for sticking with me through this pretty lengthy post that still doesn't even cover all of the thoughts I have on this game. Now it's time to break out some more of the co-op in Federation Force. Hopefully I will have a post for both Metroid Prime and Federation Force next week (on WordPress, I'll be uploading the previous entries in the Metroid Retrospective as well). Until next time.

AM2R promotional art, character art, and SR388 background are all credited to Azima “Zim” Khan, with permission granted for use in this review.

AM2R Review - Part 1

Going to start this off with a warning: there will be spoilers in this post, as I find it really hard to discuss anything without spoiling the experience. The too-long, didn't-read summary I will eventually include should be spoiler-free, so if you're interested and want my opinion for some reason before playing the game, it'll be up shortly, though honestly there's no reason not try it if you're interested, the game is free. Otherwise, you have been warned. If you don't care about spoilers, go on ahead and I hope you enjoy. If you do, thank you for checking out my post, and I'll see you next time.

Also, it turned out that I wrote waaaaaaaay much more about the visuals and atmosphere of the game alone than I had anticipated. Holy shit, my bad. As before, I will update this post as time moves along. The second part of the review will come soon now that I have a foot in the door.

There's not much that people can do to deny it anymore, the Metroid series is in a bad place. Perhaps it's a little better now than it was two years ago, but even with the dawn of a new official game, the trouble is that Nintendo just does not seem to understand or be particularly interested in what the fans want. As such, even with Federation Force pretty much available in North America at the time of writing, most fans' hopes are still shattered as the identity and presence of this series continue to bleed. Despite the grim reality of the situation, though, the fanbase has persevered through the years of no announcements and through the intense frustration with the direction the series has taken in Federation Force, and many fan works ranging from ROM hacks to full-fledged fan games have taken form. And of all these works, one game truly stands out with incredible timing to soothe the pain that the fanbase is going through.

If you didn't know, that game, of course, is AM2R, a fan game with a development period that actually ranges as far back as right smack in the middle of the "Golden Era" of Metroid releases, with development starting between the release of Metroid Prime: Hunters and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, if my memory is correct. At the time, it was called Another Metroid II Remake simply due to the abundance of people starting up their own remakes of Metroid II at the time. Some games vanished into obscurity, and few were released although lacking a lot of polish or sense of completeness. Amazingly, though, AM2R lasted through as the craze to remake Metroid II faded, and has been through the peak, the fall, the drought, and now the uncertainty of the franchise's lifespan. Releasing right on the day of the series's Thirtieth Anniversary, AM2R came at last to fans desperate for something that held true to the things that made these games a Metroid game, Nintendo DMCA's be damned.

So how well does AM2R stand as a game in the series? As you may have come to know through my retrospective posts on previous releases in the series, I really look a lot at three major components that I feel are critical to each game in the series. These include progression, which is how the player interacts with the environment with the tools the game provides to complete it, and involves backtracking, exploration, item placement, movement mechanics, and degrees of linearity; there's combat, which is pretty self-explanatory but mostly defined through bosses and to a lesser extent platforming (platforming kind of falls under both combat and progression I think); and then there is atmosphere, the standard usually set to convey the same mood or tone as something like the first Alien movie did. I don't particularly mind atmosphere too much unless the game somehow wildly deviates from what is typical of the series, or if the game somehow does not convey any sense of atmosphere at all. A good Metroid game doesn't necessarily have to excel in all three components, but a good blend of all three is ideal.

AM2R gets that blend just right, all while remaining fairly true to the original game. It is just the thing that Metroid fans desperately needed at this time, and of course it's enjoyment can extend beyond just the fans themselves. If you had any relative enjoyment in other games like Axiom Verge or perhaps, although maybe to a lesser extent, Shantae, this game is so competently put together and polished that the quality really matches what you'd expect from those games.

Visuals/Sound/Atmosphere

One thing that is immediately clear with AM2R is that the technicalities and polish of the visual and audio quality are the best they have been of all the actual 2D games up to Zero Mission. I guess this may not come as too much of a surprise, as after all, the development has way outgrown the technical limitations of Zero Mission's time on a Game Boy Advance. However, when considering the small development team with no funding (that I know of) for this game, the fact that the technical quality and polish lives up to something you'd expect from a marketed game is commendable. Sprites are in even better detail than any of the previous games, and are pretty much up to standard with spritework in today's games. For example, the sprite for Samus has the armor ridges much more sharply defined, to the point where you can almost clearly see gaps between the plating that reveal the sort of black or gray underarmor beneath (until you get the Varia suit). Or when Samus is in morphball, there is a sprite and animation for her turning while in the morphball, allowing you to see the ridge down the middile of the ball as it appeared in the Prime games. Not even Zero Mission or Super Metroid had this much detail.

I think where the art actually truly excels is in the backgrounds. The backgrounds are by far the largest and most detailed I have ever seen in this series. Some are pretty basic, nothing more than the standard background of a cave. Others are absolutely gorgeous. The background of the first area in the game, outside the building, is a really cool multilayered background with the foremost layer being a rock wall with several holes. The holes look out to another layer of a cliffside, and as you go higher, you start seeing over that layer to the backmost layer of part of a landscape. At the end of the game, there is another huge background depicting a huge cavern, with a pool of glowing water and a series of Chozo temples and statues lining across the walls in the far distance. These backgrounds and more gave a big sense of scale in the environment of SR388, making it really feel like there is far more complexity and scope to the planet than just the tunnels you traverse.

I can't give a thorough, detailed analysis of the specific elements that bring the various environments in AM2R to life, but I will say AM2R significantly does the environments justice in bringing them to life from the aged original on the Game Boy. Without even having to read the logbook, each area is clearly conveyed to grow progressively sinister through the themes and patterns in each environment. It is in this where the developing team really came through with creatively expanding on each area's environment, from adding several different Chozo statues and decor to designate the first area as a temple or holy place, to taking the slightest hint from the original of the fourth area being a weapons complex, and fully expanding on that with a detailed technological theme and a sort of militaristic Chozo statue atop the tower, portraying two Chozo exerting their strength in carrying a large sphere. This isn't just limited to the ruins locales either, as the several breeding grounds beneath the ruins in each area grow more feral and harder to navigate as well.

In my notes for this post, I originally mistook this game as the first 2D Metroid game to make use of lighting effects, when in fact it was Super Metroid that did so through the firefleas. AM2R, however, takes the lighting and amps it up to a hundred in its use of it. Perhaps the most notable area to play with lighting would be the breeding grounds underneath the third area of the game. As I mentioned, the breeding grounds grow progressively more feral; the breeding grounds underneath the third area are a sort of complex of thick roots, vines, and plants attracting small fireflies to them (I'll use this moment to mention a cool move of how one room juxtaposes the interlocking roots next to the metallic base of the ruins you can explore further above). As you go deeper into this area, the lighting gets darker, to the point where you even encounter a Gamma Metroid in an almost pitch-black room! Your beam and missiles also have light-sources, so they can create a flash of light across a room to help you see, or you can hold your charge beam to attract the fireflies to light the area around you.

Most of the bosses in this game are designed neatly. One cool thing is that over half the bosses (along with many enemies of this game) are aggressive robots designed by the Chozo, further expanding on the militaristic implications of their SR388 civilization. One of my favorite bosses is actually the first boss at the end of the first area, where as the fight draws close to the end, so too do the spiked walls draw closer to you. It's placement right after the seemingly peaceful temple serves as a grave warning to both trespassers of this environment and to the player of just how dangerous the Chozo's creations could truly be, should they dare progress further into their ruins.

While the new bosses are a certain welcome addition, we can't forget that the Metroids are the true stars of this game. The original game succeded in making each form more terrifying than the last. This remake kind of follows that line as well, as I find it pretty hard to really say the Omega Metroids aren't terrifying at all. Before I get into that, I want to mention the new design of the Zeta Metroids. Making them a bipedal form that chases you on foot may be a departure from the original, but it was the right choice for a modernized take on the game. Not only does this shift the expectations of a veteran player, the Zeta still comes off as more terrifying because it is still nimble despite it's heavier weight, its attacks appear much deadlier (it even regurgitates acid all over you if you're cornered), and simply due to being another step further away from the familiar larval stage of the Metroid in both form (bipedal semi-Eldritch monster) and function (it now chases Samus on foot).  The creative liberty taken with the Zeta Metroids in the end succeeds in keeping the terror of another dangerous evolution despite deviating a little from how they originally appeared in Metroid II.

I wish I could say that I was just as struck with awe at the Omega Metroids. I truly did like the Omega Metroids in this game, and the way they were introduced by having a Zeta evolve into an Omega and literally slaughter the Federation Force from the new Metroid Prime game was brilliant. Past that, they are towering, hulking beasts with loud roars, that breathe fire, and have such immense strength that just touching them sends Samus flying across the room. At the point where you have to fight the entire nest of them, you do so in dark rooms that are dimly lit with lava.

There is definitely at least some good atmosphere in these encounters, but unfortunately it doesn't extend too much beyond what you'd expect. Chipping further away at this form are also the pretty generic viscious monster roar, their tiny arms relative to Fusion, and, to me at least, their faces kinda look like gerbils. I definitely understand you can't just simply take the Fusion sprite of the Omega Metroid and call it a day, especially since the design does not match at all with the Zeta Metroids here, but the Omega Metroid in Fusion has 1) acid dripping from its mouth, 2) the most unnervingly lanky arms I've ever seen on an otherwise hulking beast, and 3) the most bizarre scream I have ever heard from a monster in a video game. Even Zeta Metroids still kind of held true to the sound effects and the acid and whatnot. The Omega Metroids were still terrifying in their design, don't get me wrong, but they were still left wanting. Maybe if they at least still had the unnatural screams, I'd have no issue with their design aesthetically.

Now that I've spoken quite a bit about the visuals for the game, I'll talk briefly about the music, mainly because most of these songs are remixes. First off, I think it is important to note even just the choice of music from the previous games. Assuming Doc made the executive decisions on the song choices here, he didn't just simply pick some of the most popular songs in the series (the fact that the third Area uses the overworld theme for Aether is already implicative of this, as that song isn't as well rated or spoken about), the "Green Brinstar" and the Temple Grounds theme both have somewhat ominous undertones to them. Then of course is the theme for Lower Norfair, which again is not just a fan-favorite, but also holds a significant sense of hostility in the music. Sadly I really suck at explaining it any further than that so I have to leave it at that. There is one new song, for the new area specifically, that is also kind of nice and fits the robotic theme for that area pretty well. It's just not quite as memorable as the other tracks in the game. Overall the remixes are of excellent quality. Each song kind of goes for the motiffs used in the Prime soundtracks, of sort of eerie electronic music mixed with ominous orchestrated and choral music. Every underground section has a slower, darker version of the corresponding area music as well.

With all these pieces in play, how well do they come together to create that Metroid atmosphere? I could spend hours echoing the things I basically said about the original game and how watching the Metroids evolve is kinda gross and awesome, or going on and on about how each zone gets progressively darker and more sinister. Instead, I am going to delve straight into spoiler territory (which should be okay with you, as you decided to continue past my spoiler warning) and talk about the one part of the game that almost perfectly culminates all the audio-visual aspects and then some to create some of the most amazing atmosphere I have ever experienced in this game. That place would be the Genetics Laboratory, the final area of the game where the Queen awaits.

First off, the buildup to the Queen exists even prior to the final area, with her distant cries echoing as you progress further past the Omega Metroids. Then you have the waterfall tunnels completely devoid of enemies, offering a brief sort of calm before the storm. The music is kind of hard to talk about since they are pretty much spot-on recreations of the original tracks, and that's all they really needed to be as the original tracks up to the Queen are spooky and alarming. One of the best things about this zone is that Doc included the Chozo statue with its head ripped off (even this time with what looks like a rib cage sticking out of the statue), something that is easily overlooked in the original game. So right away, the area remains true to the original, but even here things are greatly expanded upon.

The tiles with Metroids marked on them just before you actually head into the area forebodingly indicate the danger you are about to face. The odd jars in the walls in the original game are expanded on to be stasis tanks with greenish-yellow liquid, which are a pretty standard and effective way to bring out that disgusting alien feel. The best part of this sequence is probably, not surprisingly, the background. Not only is the veiny, purple organic mass in the background unsettling, the background even has this neat effect of a flickering light that A) indicates how disheveled and torn apart the lab is, and B) gives the amazing effect of keeping the background hidden at first then surprising you with it after a few seconds.  Even better, since the Metroids hide in the background as in Zero Mission, they are veiled behind the darkness until the screen lights up and you can see their shadows in the distance. This was one of the coolest effects I have ever seen in a 2D game.

Then there's the Queen, oh how amazingly well do the pieces come together. The ambient track on the way to the Queen remains, working as a hostile sounding alarm, in coordination with the spikes, as the final warning for you to turn away. The Queen fight, aesthetically, is probably perfect minus one small clipping error where Samus's morphball clips through the Queen's mouth at the end. The Queen is amazingly detailed with a shrill scream, scaly body (along with a sort of transclucent red underbelly), its face getting progressively bloodier as the fight progresses, and the spit globules still looking really ambiguous even in a full-fledged remake (are they really spit? Organisms? Seriously what the fuck are those things?).

The best part of the Queen, though, is how she's expanded in AM2R: instead of being easily killed with bombs straight away and sitting in one spot, she blasts down walls and chases you down through the halls of the laboratory. One review complained that the Queen should be backed into the corner cowering over its egg as Samus is truly the aggressor in the situation, but seriously? The entire point of each evolution in this game is to be more terrifying than the last. All the creatures onj SR388 are feral and even described in the logbook as undergoing, "An evolutionary arms race." Survival of the fittest is truly a driving theme in the design of these monsters. Plus, Samus can't simply get away with not having to overcome a towering monster just cause she's a badass exterminator, that is not climactic at all. Instead, it works much better that the Queen chases Samus down into a tight corner, something of a common theme with all of the Metroid evolutions here, and Samus just manages to come out triumphant by the skin of her teeth. Samus literally stays alive (well, that's if you don't manage to kill the Queen before this happens) by holding open the Queen's jaw with her hands and feet when the Queen tries to land the final blow.

Even without any context, that moment makes it immensely more satisfying to actually fuck up in the game than to kill the Queen before she can even attack. Plus the death animation if you drop a Power Bomb is so satisfying due to the literally flashy animation and grotesque gore that follows. Not really supporting points for that paragraph above, but it's still awesome nonetheless as it took the Queen's most unique feature and amped it to a thousand. The entire fight with the Queen in AM2R tries to top the original and probably even Other M's fight as much as possible, and it succeeds in at least almost every possible way thanks to the imaginative vision Doc and the AM2R crew had for this moment. Through accurate representations of the original music, new tilesets and backgrounds befitting the final area, and amazing presentation of the final encounter with the Queen, the final area fantastically creates the sinister, alien, and hostile atmosphere that has been a triumph of previous games like Fusion and Metroid Prime 2: Echoes.

This is, of course, just one area, but it was the perfect example. Several other areas bring out the atmosphere pretty well also, from the bizarre tunnels with what appear to be piles of corpses(?) leading to the first Zeta Metroids to the new area, the GFS Thoth, utilizing dark lighting and dead space marines that recreates the feel of at least the first couple of Alien movies. While they don't come quite near as amazing as it was presented in the Genetics Laboratory, each area takes its their own spin on the atmosphere and even advances the circumstances with it, creating one of the most dynamic atmospheric experiences in the entire series.

Seriously, WTF is all that?

While my praise for the game's atmosphere seems like it knows no bounds, there were some points in the game, like with the Omega Metroid, that just didn't hold up as well as the rest of the game. Honestly these are much more simpler for me to discuss, so there won't be as much elaboration as there was in discussing the Genetics Laboratory. First off, while a lot of the backgrounds in the game are pretty good, there were a couple that kinda threw me off a bit. The background on the way to the first Omega Metroid kind of looked an awful lot like the background of Sector 6 in Metroid Fusion, just recolored to fit the lava theme. It still looked nice and maybe it's not actually that same background but I don't really know how to explain it other than it felt odd and it was something I could not really divert my attention from in those tunnels. The other background that gets under my skin is the background behind the Power Bomb, though. It honestly looks very basic, like it doesn't necessarily look horrible but it seems like it still lacks a lot of polish, as if it was made as a rough draft for the demo and then just sort of left that way.

I said earlier that most of the bosses in this game were neat. While the only other boss that comes to mind is Genesis, whose sprite seems to lack a lot of detail compared to others, the worst offender by far is the Chozo "Tank" boss during the game's escape sequence.

It's just way too over-the-top, it ends up looking pretty goofy and almost like something out of Federation Force to be honest. The design of the boss also reminded me of Mimiron's boss battle in WoW, which is a game with a silly, cartoony, comic-booky aesthetic to it. Not to mention the boss felt a little out of place, maybe if it wasn't a huge tank that conveniently blocked the wall but maybe a smaller drone of sort that just locked the door? To be honest, I can't really think of something else to fight, but at the very least, the boss could probably be more streamlined, sleeker, and less colorful, and then it could work. As it is, it looks a little too much like a windup toy to me.

Really that's all I can think of as far as criticism for the game's graphics and such are concerned. I know it really sounds like I am fanboying really hard, but I've let this game sit with me for about three weeks now. I've never had this much to say about a Metroid game's visuals and such so far, so much in fact that I am going to have to dedicate a separate post just to avoid winding up with one long post that lasts for ages. Plus, the fanboy in me actually really tried to like Zero Mission better than this game, but ultimately was forced to concede. Zero Mission had good atmosphere, just not the kind that was close to other games like Echoes, Super, and Fusion. I've always felt that the potential for atmosphere in the original Metroid II was really strong, and this remake just about takes full advantage of that potential. I really have to hand it off to Doc and everyone else involved with this department of the game, they really took what the original game had to offer and ran marathons with it, with technical quality that surpasses today's standards for 2D games.

I hopefully won't have another ridiculous amount of things to say in the latter part of this review. If you've followed my Metroid Retrospective so far, you can fully expect (if I don't make this a three-part review) the next part to cover story (not that much to say), gameplay (quite a bit to say), and the depiction of Samus (that's right, that's coming in this review as well). Please stay tuned.

AM2R promotional art, character art, and SR388 background are all credited to Azima “Zim” Khan, with permission granted for use in this review.

Possible Migration to Wordpress

I am starting to consider switching over to Wordpress lately. I like Blogger, it has been my platform for over ten years, but as times change, so do demands and standards. Wordpress is pretty much the blogging platform many people use, from professionals to enthusiasts alike. Even my job is going to have me start using Wordpress pretty soon to write a blog for their company. Blogger has been a nice and fun place, and a couple of my favorite people on the Internet still continue to use it, but it has never felt the same ever since Google started to run it. Adsense doesn't really make all that much sense to me. The interface feels really sterile at best, and is buggy at worst. Blogger keeps tracking my own pageviews after setting that option off several hundred times already. For some reason there are options to delete a comment and remove a comment, and even weirder there are no options to undo removing comments (found out the hard way when I accidentally removed one of my comments explaining something in Final Fantasy Type-0). It's starting to get pretty dated for me, and I think it's only indicative that it's time to switch as most other bloggers have done by now.

This is not something I consider doing overnight. First I am going to go to Wordpress and start my continuation of this blog there without changing or removing this one. This blog is currently in the middle of my biggest project so far, The Metroid Retrospective and 30th Anniversary Game Reviews (AM2R and Federation Force). To shut it down in the middle of that just seems a little disorganized to me. So what I plan to do is this: keep this blog, finish my AM2R post here (sorry that is, once again, running late by the way), launch my Wordpress blog, attempt to copy every post from here to Wordpress, and then continue rolling out my Metroid Anniversary posts on both blogs, which will give me time to adjust and figure out how much I'll remain committed to Wordpress. Assuming that will be the case, once the Anniversary posts are complete, that will be the time to bid this platform adieu.

Blogger has been a wonderful site for me, for ten years, ever since I first heard about it through my father's best friend, who used to be huge into blogging and who recently passed away. He is the one who really kickstarted my interest in this thing, so I really dedicate my two blogs here (I also have a personal blog) to him for showing me a part of the Internet that I've fallen in love with and had the pleasure of growing up with as the Internet took form over the years.

See you folks on the other side when the time comes. Oh yeah, and I am trying really hard to find the time for the AM2R post. Federation Force came out this weekend, and as such, I found myself really caught up getting impressions of it. If you want to know now, I beat the game, and I can't say I'm disappointed, but I am truly sad that that is the best Nintendo had to offer for the series. You'll hear more from me about that later on, hopefully within two weeks.

Metroid Fusion

Before you continue, I want to say, even though this game is well over ten years old, there are going to be some heavy spoilers ahead. Fusion and Prime are pretty much the points where spoilers kinda begin to matter with the series, and I'm not just saying in terms of story. These posts I'm writing really aren't meant to be read by a newcomer or somebody wondering if they should try these games out anyway, but nonetheless you are still welcome to read if you don't care about spoilers or if you've only just played the game for the first time.

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: Best atmosphere in the series. Bosses are well designed and animated. Fantastic escape sequence that shows this game's atmosphere at its best. Atmosphere is achieved through a dynamic environment. The X advance the circumstances as antagonists. Samus is handled well for the first game she really speaks in. Defines the fast pace of the later 2D games. Variety of bosses with themes of using Samus's weapons against her and putting you in the most vulnerable position to defeat them. New combat tricks with the Charge Beam. Further improvement on how items are used in puzzles. Introduced ledge grabbing. Neutral OK soundtrack. The few memorable songs work very well at least. Fusion's attempts at a more complicated plot don't really push it that much deeper than the previous games. Consolidates all missiles to one ammo source. So you can't have the choice of using normal missiles or Super Missiles. Navigation rooms make exploring pretty easy. B.S.L. has a fantastic interconnected layout, but the game prevents you from taking advantage of it until the end. Cons Navigation rooms take up way too much time in the game. Single wall jumping and bomb jumping are completely gutted. The game locks you in the sectors to prevent backtracking. Way too many expansions to keep track of. No sequence breaking is allowed. Linearity is made obvious and unnatural through 1) one single way of progressing through each area, and 2) Adam getting oddly meta about the game's linearity. Personally, I found the Shinesparking easter egg pretty offensive and indicative of the developer's mindset for the game. Replay value: The game is fun enough to play every now and then, but not good enough to play constantly back-to-back because of the limited progression. For further elaboration, please read the full post. Thank you.

Ah, Metroid Fusion. Released alongside Metroid Prime in the same day, (well for North America at least), both of these games marked the beginning of the Golden Age of the Metroid series, with Retro Studios consistently releasing Prime games and Nintendo consistently working on Metroid games. If two games releasing on the same day starting nearly a decade of almost nonstop releases wasn't enough, this marked the beginning of a huge comeback for the series after vanishing into obscurity for a while after the success of Super Metroid. Unfortunately, Nintendo just didn't see Metroid working very well on the N64. There are rumors that Jet Force Gemini was originally a "Metroid 64," but there has been no actual word from Rare themselves despite having gone back on their old games and releasing behind-the-scenes videos.

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.

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.

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.