Still very much in the mood for a walk down Metroid memory lane, I played through Metroid Fusion on my 3DS today. Metroid Fusion was a game I got way later than Zero Mission or Super Metroid. I didn't even know it existed until I happened upon used it in a Gamestop in the early 2010's. Out of the three, it's one I definitely remembered the least about despite having beaten it before. Gunstar was talking in Slack about how it's one of his favorites out of the bunch, so I thought it would be a perfect thing to play through today. My completion time was 3 hours and 50 minutes with a 71% item completion rate.
Compared to other Metroid games (at least at the time), Metroid Fusion has a lot of text and story. On a mission to SR388 (home planet of the now extinct Metroids), Samus is infected by a mysterious life form they later call X. X is basically The Thing (from the titular film), and can consume its host and take its form and memories. Their natural predators were the Metroids, but now that those are extinct, they're free to multiply like crazy on SR388. Samus nearly dies, but is saved by a cure made from a culture taken from the last Metroid when it had been in captivity. Now that Metroids are literally a part of her, she can absorb X organisms harmlessly (and these organisms are your new weapon and health pickups). There's an explosion at the center that treated her, and she is sent back to inspect it and try and solve whatever problem may have arisen. And that is JUST the opening cutscene. From there, the story largely takes the form of your little objective briefings from the AI in Samus' new ship (the old one drifted into an asteroid belt and blew up when she got first infected and fell unconscious) as well as little internal monologues Samus will have with herself between large objectives. If Metroid HAD to have a story with some kind of arc, I think the direction they're trying to take this in is probably one of the better ones they could've taken it. The execution falls soooo flat though. The only time any drama or literal dialogue between Samus and her computer really start happening is in the last little bit of the game, and that is when the game decides to make all of its big reveals and character growth moments and such. It's a ton of "tell not show" that ultimately really comes off flat. It's a nice narrative excuse to give you objective markers (to help solve some of Super Metroid's signposting problems), and it probably would've been fine if they hadn't tried for the big dramatic moments and left it as just something to bring a little levity to the story. But as it is, it's somewhere between a net-neutral addition and a bit of an overall drag as the objective briefings (which cannot be skipped) overstay their welcomes and drag down the pacing. This is a 2D Metroid game, so of course it's Samus going around, collecting suit upgrades both optional and necessary, and fighting big boss battles with your arm beam & missiles. There have been a lot of really smart simplifications made to the Super Metroid formula to get Metroid onto a platform with 4 buttons instead of 6, though, and I would say on the whole this game plays a lot better than Super Metroid. Samus moves quickly, turns quickly, and has a real consistency to her movement so you're never second-guessing if the weird terrain you're in or around will interrupt her current movements. Instead of being a separate power up, super missiles are just an upgrade for your normal missiles that just makes them stronger, and you just hold R to use them or your power bombs instead of pressing select to toggle through a bunch of them. A lot of the mechanical fluff and stumbles that didn't quite work in Super Metroid has been stripped out and it's for the better, as all the platforming and action feel way more fluid and fun to play. This game is also a fair bit harder, as while bosses aren't super difficult, normal enemies hit REALLY hard and can run down your HP really quick. It's well worth hunting down energy tank expansions for more health, because otherwise you're probably going to be dying a lot if you aren't careful. However, not all changes are positive, and most of the issues I had with the game come from the new narrative conceits and tightening up of the signposting. X organisms being your new health and item powerups is neat in a narrative standpoint, but that does a lot to add to the game's difficulty. You only get one power up from an enemy at a time, and the most health you can get from one enemy is 10. Most enemies can deal far more than that with just one hit, and there aren't scads and scads of enemies to farm through, so if you're getting hit by even 1 in 5 enemy encounters, you very well might be taking net-negative HP damage. This is compounded by the fact that enemies revert into X organisms when they "die", they don't disappear into a powerup. That little flying blob will fly around and often try and run away from you, and it'll turn into a NEW enemy to fight if you don't snag it fast enough (with some enemy spawns being scripted to turn immediately into a new enemy and being impossible to grab to prevent that). Additionally, there are tons of objective markers as you progress through the story, and the orbital research facility the game takes place in is divided into a hub with 6 sections. The ultimate execution of this is that the game is very linear compared to Super Metroid or Zero Mission, with almost no sequence breaking possible in it. Wall jumping has been made a lot easier, but easier to the point that it's almost expected, and the world is designed so that you won't be progressing any more than a little bit ahead of where you are if you use it. Bomb jumping has also been removed, so you can no longer defy vertical passageways right off the bat. These two things aren't really negative issues as such, but they make the game feel significantly different than the other two post-8-bit Metroid titles. It makes it feel like this has a lot more in common with the Metroid-y Casltevanias on GBA coming out around this time (although I'd say Fusion is far better than either of the two that had come out by this point). Higher difficulty and more linearity aren't inherently bad things, but it's different in a way that's worth mentioning. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Differences from the series and narrative issues aside, this is still a fantastic Metroid game. I'd put it on equal footing with Super Metroid, personally. Overall, I got the feeling from this game that in 2002, Nintendo really had no idea what they were going to do with Metroid. The perfect representation of this comes near the end of the game when you fight Ridley. You see him in his Super Metroid sprite, but then it morphs into a new sprite much more reminiscent of how he looks in Metroid Prime (which came out right alongside this back then). From the far more linear gameplay to the fairly lukewarm narrative, Nintendo was really testing out the waters to see what Metroid could be. Had this game had a little more nonlinearity or a better narrative, I think it could've seen the success that its sister game Metroid Prime found, but that was not the case. That said, It's still a great Metroidvania well worth your time, even if it is a little on the short side.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Categories
All
AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
|