Metroid Fusion Has No Rhythm

The Metroid series is defined by its comprehensive world design, quick pacing, lonely atmosphere, and subtle narrative. This is the reason the latest entry in the series, Other M, is reviled by the majority of the fanbase. While it's still enjoyable to an extent thanks to some good individual level design, Other M is marred with an excessively sentimental, melodramatic storyline that breaks up the game into pieces through long cutscenes coming at the end of many segments, all while destroying the flow, freedom and subtlety the series had previously held close.

However, Other M may not have been the start of darkness for Metroid. Many of that game's problems were birthed from an entry in series that was released eight years prior to it: Metroid Fusion.

Metroid Fusion was released in 2002 on the Game Boy Advance as the fourth entry in the Metroid series. It was released on the same day as Metroid Prime for the Gamecube. Metroid Prime, a fantastic take on the series that took it into first-person 3D, was made by Nintendo's new friends at Retro Studios. However, Nintendo didn't have much faith in the project because of its first-person perspective, which they thought would alienate fans of Metroid and fans of Nintendo in general. Fortunately enough, Nintendo had a new traditionally-styled, sidescrolling Metroid game developed by their good old R&D1 team (of whom had developed all of the previous Metroid games) in the form of Metroid Fusion sitting around for them to fall back on. So fans who were willing to try something new could buy Prime while fans who just wanted more Super Metroid could buy Fusion.

Let me just say this right now: If you want more Super Metroid, play Prime, not Fusion.

Fusion takes place after every other entry in the series so far (Other M is it's direct prequel), with Samus being infected with a parasite called X (or maybe that's just its working title?) while exploring planet SR388 with a few guys from the Biologic Space Laboratories. After being saved from being completely consumed by the parasite by a vaccine created out of DNA from the Baby Metroid that had already saved her once before, Samus is now a hybrid of X, Metroid, and human. With her new abilities, Samus is sent by the Galactic Federation to investigate an explosion at the BSL station only for her to discover that it has become infested with X. With the help of her super computer Adam, Samus must take down the destructive X Parasites.

The X Parasites provide the game with its central gimmick. X are doppelgangers that copy the structure of robots, armor and living beings and use it to cover themselves in a shell of that very thing. Shelled X serve as the enemies of the game. When an X's shell is destroyed, it reverts back to its lowly true form: a spasmodically floating blob. With her altered cell structure, Samus can now absorb X that are in their unshelled forms to recover health and missiles. Now, unshelled X would be exactly the same as the items left behind by enemies that die in any other Metroid game if it weren't for two things. As I said before, they float around the screen at a quick pace, meaning to grab them, you'll often have to make a well-timed jump. But that's not all: if you don't catch the X quickly enough, its shell will regenerate and all of your effort spent on destroying them will have been for naught.

Tag, you're dead.

Fusion really loves the idea of making the actual enemy only half of your worries. If you kill an annoying enemy during a section of the game wherein you have to jump up a series of platforms that are easy to get knocked off of, you often have to end up jumping off from where you were and losing your progress just to make sure you grab the X and the enemy doesn't come back. There is no pattern for you to rely on, so you can't just position yourself where you know the X will fly into you. When an X regenerates its shell after you fail to catch it, its shell is just strong as it was before.

The mechanic serves as little more than an annoyance that slows down the game. Aside from that, it lacks balance. Beating an enemy is a unique challenge. Catching an X is a required ritual. It's the same thing every time. Different X don't have different ways of flying around, they all just go crazy. Yet, the game punishes you for ignoring them, or for failing to catch them because they decided to fly way to the left for no reason at all. The X are also used by the developers to very cheaply create difficulty later in the game. You'll come across very strong enemies that, upon being killed and left in their unshelled forms, are impossible to catch the mere second it takes for them to fly off to the side and regenerate. Upon being killed again, they will take longer to regenerate like normal X. So basically, you are absolutely required to kill these enemies twice. They don't have two forms or phases, it's just the same enemy twice, every single time.

Another issue is that while the X serve as the means for recovering ammo and health and such, they are not as solid as the droppings of enemies in previous games. I phrased that very oddly. Let me put it this way: I never encountered an unshelled X that provided me with more Power Bombs after I absorbed it. If I ran out of Power Bombs and came across an area where I needed them, I would have to run all the way back to a Recovery Station. You can't always rely on killing enemies to refill your stock in this game, despite the fact that it would be a fair trade-off.

After a Recovery Station, finding a Power Bomb upgrade is your next best option.

But wait, minor enemies aren't the only foes in this game who have an X at their center. Every boss in the game is a shell surrounding a large round core made out of a giant X. When you kill a boss, you have to destroy one of two types of cores: One basically acts as a regular unshelled X, flying around sporadically without a pattern, except you have to shoot it with a bunch of missiles instead of absorb it and it'll hurt you if it touches you. The other follows you around, making it easier to avoid, but unlike the other type of core, you cannot shoot it anywhere. Instead, you have to shoot it in the eye. Bosses in this game are extremely hard. Most of them lack patterns and do a ton of damage with every attack. This is why the X core mechanic is absolutely infuriating. For some bosses, it takes a miracle to beat them with even a speck of your life left. However, when you do beat them with a speck of your life left, you'll die. What's more, you'll die to a core that you've already fought before. The first type of core flies around at a fast pace without a pattern so you most likely are going to get hit whether you think you're prepared or not. Nothing, I repeat, NOTHING, is worse than winning the battle of your life only to get immediately killed by a flying ball that lacks rhyme or reason that you KNEW was going to show up but just couldn't do anything about. The developers obviously didn't take into account that players would still have to fight this ball after beating every boss. Every boss is a boss in and of itself. Its core is not its final form, it's just a mindless piece of crap slapped onto an already challenging, already complete boss.

As a whole, combat in this game is unrefined, unbalanced and unfair. While the true forms of X and cores made out of X are the biggest offenders of the "lacking rhyme or reason" mindset, the most powerful enemies and bosses think the same way. There aren't really any tricks to beating bosses. Recognizing their moveset will usually do nothing since warnings are scarce, and there's no special way to damage them ala the Grapple Beam trick for Draygon in Super Metroid other than spamming them with Missiles. Some bosses provide disproportionate punishments for the most minor slip-ups. For example, being knocked off of a platform only as wide as one and a half upright Samuses by the nearly unavoidable attacks of Nettori will knock you into a life-sucking flower below with the only way out being to get lucky with your Space Jump and not having a projectile above your head as you exit.

But by far the most poorly-implemented boss in the game and the Metroid series is Yakuza, who comes at the end of a twenty-minute portion of the game without save points. In his first form, his most common attack empties two to three of your energy tanks. You can avoid it if you go into Morph Ball mode and roll into a corner. However, his weak point is only exposed as he is preparing his less common and less powerful attack. This attack doesn't come after a set amount of time or after a set amount of his more common, more powerful attack. It comes whenever it wants to. Add the fact that he's super fast and what you have is a guessing game of trying to figure out when you can come out of Morph Ball mode. His second form (yes, the boss that comes after twenty minutes with no saving is one of the only ones with a second form) moves along a predictable path, but moves and attacks rapidly. Now, Yakuza is obviously meant to be the Phantoon of the game. In Super Metroid, Phantoon comes after a long stretch without save points and is hard to get a hit off of. However, in the battle against Phantoon, getting hit a few times with his most common attack didn't send you spiraling toward certain death. And remember, in Fusion, you still have to kill a core after the battle, even for bosses like Nettori and Yakuza.

How can a battle be so boring and so easy to die in at the same time?

Now let's talk about the world structure. Metroid games don't typically have hubs. Many have an area that people call the overworld, such as Crateria in Super Metroid, but these "overworlds" don't lead to every area in the game. Instead, they simply provide a starting point for players. A place that introduces some of the game's branching paths with a place to save and restore your energy right in the middle. Instead of being mainly connected by a hub or overworld, areas in Super Metroid are connected by each other from the very being. Elevators are sprinkled all over each area, each one leading to a different section of a different area. Thus, instead of doing one level at a time, the whole game is one big level. It's never inconvenient to go to a different area and try the cool new weapon you found and on that suspicious-looking wall you saw two hours ago. In fact, a lot of the fun of Super Metroid is trying to find the quickest path to a certain section in a different area you need to get to. The world is that dynamic.

Metroid Fusion has a hub. No, not even a hub. More like a level-selection screen. See, the game has one minor area and six major areas. The minor one, the Main Deck, contains a few rooms for the tutorial and climax as well as the elevators that lead to each of the six sectors. All of them. Now, that would be bad enough if the elevators were actually spread throughout the Main Deck and blocked with puzzles that can only be solved with items that you got in previously cleared sectors, but it's even worse than that. All six of the elevators are bunched together in tiny rooms that are side-by-side in the bottom-left corner of the Main Deck. The only things that separate them are different colored doors that become unlocked as you progress throughout the game.

Metroid Fusion, ladies and gentlemen.

For the majority of the game, these six side-by-side elevators are the only entrances and exits the sectors have. There are some other exits, but most of them don't become accessible until the game is nearly over. They definitely don't serve to make progression through the game less linear; the game is built so that when entering an area for the first time, you always have to enter from the hub and almost always have to exit straight into the hub again, right where you entered. This means that every time you finish things up in a sector and are ready to move on to the next one, you have to climb all the way back up to that one set exit/entrance. The world of Metroid Fusion is far from seamless. It's chopped-up and painfully linear. Metroid Fusion doesn't have one big world. It's just a bunch of levels. Levels that you have to backtrack through once you're done with them.

However, sometimes it is hard to notice how inconveniently the game's world is structured for exploration because the game itself doesn't really want you to explore. See, Metroid Fusion has an exposition fairy in the form of a computer named Adam. He sits right beyond the entrance of every sector in a Navigation Room, ready to give you a map marked with a specific place he wants you to go. You're objective is not to look around for weapons and upgrades that will open up the world, nor is it to find and kill four bosses. No, your objective is whatever Adam tells you it is. Your destination is wherever Adam tells you it is.

This isn't like the hints in Metroid Prime that appear if you seem to be lost that point out an unreached room alongside vague text basically saying "something's there". In that game, you still have to find a path that leads there and figure out what exactly you need to do in that room once you get there. In Metroid Fusion, Adam doesn't just say "something's over to the right, figure out how to get there and what to do there". He gives you the map of the sector. Yes, that's right, you no longer have to look for a Map Station in each area nor explore the unknown until you find it. Instead, you get the map for each sector literally right when you enter the sector. And of course, that map always comes marked with an extremely specific target that not only tells you what room you need to go to but where in that room. Not only that, but Adam almost always tells you exactly what lies on that mark. And finally, you cannot turn off Adam. You cannot avoid Adam. The doors lock behind and in front of you every time you enter a Navigation Room (which you have to when entering a sector) until you talk to Adam.

Heeeeeerrre's Adam!... Oh crap, I blew that, didn't I?

So this is what Metroid Fusion is: You enter a sector, you are given an extremely specific objective by Adam, you do it, then backtrack to Adam (occasionally there's a closer Navigation Room) and get told where to go next. Over and over. Metroid Fusion's excessively linear progression is what kills it for me. Everything you do is dictated by someone else, a computer. Let's go over the reasons this doesn't work.

Adam kills the atmosphere of Metroid. In previous Metroid games, you were alone. You could only rely on yourself. You were exploring unpredictable areas, never knowing what you were going to fight next, what terrain you were going to traverse next, or what new power you were going to gain next. In Metroid Fusion, the game lets the player know way too much. It gives you someone who you HAVE to fall back on over and over for assistance, even if you don't want or need it. You almost always know what's next in this game. It's just a matter of going from point A to point B… and then back to point A.

Adam cheapens the gameplay. In previous Metroid games, you had to be sure to thoroughly examine everything. You had to keep the entire world in your head. This is because whenever you gain a new power, you'll have passed by special blocks, walls, pits, and/or structures that can only be destroyed or traversed through with that power. It's a matter of matching the power you just earned with something you've already seen in order to figure out where you're supposed to go. In Metroid Fusion, you always know where you're supposed to go, so new powers are usually just rites of passage. On your way to a specified target, you'll come across things that can only be passed through with a certain weapon. You always have the right weapon, because Adam wouldn't have given you that target if he knew you couldn't reach it, so all you have to do is use the weapon and you're done. There is no fun or challenge in that. Metroid Fusion only uses the concept of weapons and power-ups to make things more linear, blocking off targets that Adam hasn’t told you to go to next.

So what is Metroid without openness, personalization, and the element of surprise? A slow, uneventful run-and-gun with backtracking.

Sometimes jump-off-a-platform-and-gun.

Enough of Adam. Let's talk about Samus and how she does her thing. The controls in Metroid Fusion are perhaps the only area in which the game could arguably surpass Super Metroid in quality. Things aren't as cluttered as they were in Super Metroid. In Fusion, instead of having to press select over and over until the weapon you want to use is equipped, you don't have to worry about scrolling through any inventories at all. Hold L and your Missiles will be equipped for use with the B button. Hold L in Morph Ball form and your Power Bombs will be equipped for use with the B button. Let go of L in either case and you'll instantly go back to your default weapons. Everything else is either automatic or well-implemented on the A button for jumping purposes.

But wait, what about the Grapple Beam? What about the X-Ray Scope? What about the ability to switch between regular Missiles and Super Missiles that made you strategize with the amount of each you had left during battle? With the simplified controls, such things are gone. You gain several new types of Missiles throughout the game, but they always replace the last type of missiles you had. This takes away some of the customization from Super Metroid. Metroid Fusion has considerably less power-ups and weapons than Super Metroid, and the only actually new item in the game is the Diffusion Missile, which hardly alters the gameplay. Going by Samus's full arsenal in this game, Metroid 4 is more like Metroid 2.5.

On to presentation. First, the art and graphics. The designs of enemies and bosses in this game feel less sprite-like than they did in Super Metroid. I mean, they're still sprites, but they look a bit more hand-drawn. For example, the boss Nightmare is turned to the side, but only partially. We don’t just see one side of his face, we see the whole thing. It's an angle that I couldn't imagine seeing in Super Metroid. Everything is much more colorful and less alien than it was in Super Metroid. I'm fine with that. I'm glad Nintendo decided to go all the way with a different tone instead of going only partway with Super Metroid's.

...Well, I guess this is a little alien.

The game sounds just fine. The soundtrack has a bit of range and diversity, with some level tracks that are little more than noises and some boss tracks that almost sound like dance songs. The sound effects are mostly satisfying, but there are two that I just can't get over: the ear-piercing shrieks of Neo-Ridley. Neo-Ridley is an undead pterodactyl-esque creature. Every time you hit him, he screams like an old lady. And the GBA's sound quality isn't very good, so it sounds like something straight out of a talkie film from the 1930's. I probably wouldn't of noticed as much if the whole battle weren't just non-stop screaming. Why's undead Ridley such a wuss?

Now finally, on to the story. As you probably know from everything I said before, this game's story is mostly communicated through dialogue rather than sights. The biggest surprises in the plot are simply told to you by Adam. It doesn't help that many of these "surprises" are there for just that: to surprise you. Some of them end up having no bearing on the gameplay whatsoever. "Oh, there are more than one SA-X? Well, it probably would've been cooler to find this out by suddenly being encountered by an army of me-clones and having a huge battle with them… but hey, that battle will still come eventually, it just won't be a surprise." And then it never comes. You never even see more than one SA-X in the same room.

However, the game does have some more genuine, important surprises for you to find "on your own". Sometimes, the game will spell out with giant neon letters that you have to go beyond Adam's orders to see something important. When you do, surprise, you'll see something important.

While the execution of the story is quite lazy for a Metroid game, the story and characters themselves aren't bad at all. In fact, Samus's dynamic with Adam is actually very interesting. The ways both of them think about each other gradually change throughout the game. It seems like they become more antagonistic to each other as the story goes on and their differing motivations are exposed. Samus's loyalty to the animals that helped her learn how to pull off special jumps in Super Metroid is also extremely adorable, although the whole arc involving them probably makes no sense to the millions of Super Metroid players that didn't know you could save the animals from the exploding planet before the credits.

Sponsored by PETA.

The story provides Samus with a consistent threat in the form of SA-X, a clone(s) of her made up of X using the scrapped pieces of Samus's suit that had to be surgically removed from her after the infection. SA-X has all of Samus's abilities from the very start, including her Ice Beam, which is bad news for Samus as her partially-Metroid cell structure makes her extremely vulnerable to cold temperature. SA-X strolls around at her own will, and Samus comes across her several times. Because SA-X has the Ice Beam, there are only two things you can do if you walk into a room that SA-X is in: hide until she leaves, or if she doesn't leave, make a run for it while avoiding her Ice Beam shots.

You are never warned when you are about to come across the extremely dangerous SA-X. Ever. It's always a "HOLY CRAP" moment. It's always challenging, but fairly so. When you notice that the only way you can get to where you need to go is to get near SA-X, you still have time to plan your escape while hiding. It's so cool how the player's entire mindset has to shift right the second they see SA-X. Nothing else matters other than not dying when trying to get past this overpowered you.

Oh yeah, another good thing about this game: Light doesn't go through roofs.

It helps that it all makes so much sense considering everything that happens in the opening. Every single little thing that happened to Samus in the opening of the game matters in these encounters. The X getting their hands on her, the Metroid injection she received, the surgical removal of her suit parts, everything. While the far-apart encounters with SA-X don't make up for the game's general lack of surprise, suspense and subtlety, they are by far the best moments in the game and some of the best moments in the Metroid series. Dark Samus certainly thinks so.

Surely, we are cursed.

But for the awesomeness of the SA-X encounters, we had to pay a price. The rest of this review is going to be dedicated to the Metroid Fusion's final moments, so if you haven't beaten the game yet and don't like spoilers, skip to the last paragraph, in which I don't go into any specifics.

First, let me tell you what happens during the final section of the game. Samus's last mission is to send the BSL towards its destruction. As she goes up to the control room, she encounters SA-X one last time. This time, there's no choice but to fight. The fight is amazing. Aside from the fact that SA-X does more damage with her beam of choice than you can with yours and the fact that you have a human mind and she doesn't, you're evenly matched. After so much build-up with having to run away from SA-X time and time again because she had more stuff than you, you get a really fair, really fun fight. Well, for the first phase, anyway. The second phase is an insultingly easy to kill, completely unnecessary monster form, and after you beat that, you've still got to kill another core. But no matter, the first phase made it a satisfying final boss.

…It's not the final boss. After being reduced to an unshelled X, SA-X flies away before Samus can nab her. So Samus just goes and changes the BSL's course, and the player takes her through another timed escape sequence. Included inside that sequence once you get to where your ship should be is the final boss. So we already fought our biggest enemy… what could be left? An Omega Metroid. Just… an Omega Metroid. One that's really big for some odd reason. It takes all of Samus's health away except a speck with one swipe of its claws. Then it sits there until suddenly, SA-X flies in, regenerates her Samus shell, walks right past the almost dead, completely immobile Samus, starts shooting the Omega Metroid (which damages it, since ice hurts Metroids), and gets killed again in one hit. But this time, she doesn't fly away when reduced to an unshelled X, so Samus absorbs her and regains all of her abilities… as well as the ability to withstand damage a million times better, which she obviously never had before but just gets anyway. So she kills the Omega Metroid, flies off with the animals, the end.

Good job. Your reward is hair.

…Let me tell you all of the plot holes contained within this ten minute ending, point by point:

-When reduced to her unshelled form, how come SA-X was able to fly away and regenerate when every other giant X like her was rendered completely immobile after their core forms were destroyed?

-Why is the Omega Metroid so huge and powerful? Omega Metroids previously showed up in Metroid II: Return of Samus. Four of them, to be exact. In that game, they were hardly taller than Samus, could be taken down with 40 missiles, and of course, could not nearly kill Samus in one swipe. This one isn't infected by X or anything (Metroids are immune to them, which is why the Baby Metroid's DNA saved Samus in the beginning), so why is it so different? Its ability to nearly kill Samus in one swipe and actually kill SA-X in one swipe could be attributed to the Metroids' advantage over the X, but then how does absorbing more X suddenly make Samus more immune to the Omega Metroid's attacks? Sure, she was absorbing her own suit's abilities and all that, but those things certainly didn't help SA-X.

-Why does the Omega Metroid attack Samus? Earlier in the game, Samus encounters Metroids being kept in a Restricted Area by the Galactic Federation. However, these Metroids don't attack Samus because of her Metroid DNA. Why doesn't the Omega Metroid sense Samus as its sister? Is it just a bigger jerk than all the other Metroids? Well, what a final boss, then.

-Why is SA-X so dumb? She could've killed Samus in one hit, but instead she just walks past and goes after something that has full health. Maybe she was trying to help Samus, somehow knowing that despite being extremely weak to the Omega Metroid, Samus could SOMEHOW become more resistant to the Omega Metroid's attacks by absorbing her. But doesn't that render Samus's self-justification for blowing up the BSL and destroying all of the X (she says they're heartless, mindless, inhuman and destructive) moot?

-If SA-X actually isn't weak to the Omega Metroid's attacks (which would halfway justify Samus's absorbing of her upping her defenses by 1000%), then why was she killed by the Omega Metroid in one hit? People will probably say that she hadn't regenerated fully. However, assuming she regenerated just like regular enemies do after they're reduced to unshelled X and not absorbed, why didn't she come back with full health? All of the other enemies can. Except bosses, which can't move or regenerate at all when unshelled. What the heck IS SA-X?

Just reading all of these things, one would wonder why this ending sequence was even included at all if it didn't make any sense whatsoever. However, if you've seen the ending for yourself, you know why it was included: Super Metroid. SA-X's "sacrifice" (aka completely stupid and impossible act) in Metroid Fusion plays out just like the Baby Metroid's sacrifice in Super Metroid. It's a painfully obvious call-back. But instead of playing off as a clever parallel to an emotional ending, it instead comes off as a cheap, forced rip-off of an emotional ending. Instead of having Samus be bested by one of her mortal enemies, she's bested by a motiveless mook that shouldn't even be attacking her. Instead of having Samus be saved through the sacrifice of a corrupted entity that still recognizes her as its mother just like it did when it was born, she's saved by a random, supposedly mindless entity who's parents have been trying to kill her upon sight throughout the entire game that was already dead but came back for no reason. It's a sad imitation.

Samus Aran's archenemies: Mother Brain, Ridley, Metroid Prime, and turtle.

This game is a mess. While it strikes some high notes through SA-X, the presentation and some okay upgrade placement, it doesn't do enough to make up for the choppy world structure and linear, tedious progression. With a talkative computer that forces you across a set path, a weapon system that serves as nothing but a set of keys, a lack of atmosphere and subtlety, a lazily implemented gimmick in the form of the X, and one of the worst endings in video game history, Metroid Fusion is insulting as a sequel to Super Metroid and frustrating as its own thing.