The Anatomy of Games

Beyond the save point, Samus reaches the lab proper. Technically, I suppose the whole space station is a lab, but it’s divided into quarantined simulation zones and work zones for the scientific support. This area is the latter.

And here you find another Super Metroid parallel: Samus arrives too late to this lab to prevent its civilian personnel from suffering a terrible fate. As at Ceres Station, bodies lay strewn across the ground, the collateral of whatever violent horror has taken place here.

In this case, though, not all the bodies simply lie dead. Beyond the human corpse is a bizarre zombie that rises from a degenerate puddle — a human possessed by an X parasite, evidently. The leftmost corpse never stirs, suggesting that this civilian was killed by a parasite-possessed colleague before he or she could be consumed by an X.

The zombie doesn’t pose much of a threat, ranking somewhere below “Castlevania zombie” on the danger meter. It just shuffles along, quivering slightly if Samus comes within striking range.

Unlike the small creatures Samus has already encountered at this point, though, the zombie doesn’t disintegrate when “killed.” It disgorges an X, yes, and you can soak up the parasite per usual. But the zombie itself collapses into a wobbly puddle of goo that you can’t interact with. If you leave the X it emits alone, the parasite will eventually return to the zombie’s mass, regenerating into an upright monster again. All you can do here is prevent the X from reconstituting its host. This is not a common scenario throughout the game, but reformation of enemies is something you’ll have to deal with from time to time and this is a nice, safe introduction to the mechanic.

Above the first zombie lurks another, as well as a more curious obstacle: Some sort of mucus-like growth obstructing a door. Your blaster can’t harm this thing, so it basically represents another obstacle to overcome in the future — one to file mentally alongside red and green doors.

Surprise! You quickly arrive at another Navigation Room. As you can see, the station is lousy with them. This time, Adam passes along information on a superficial change to the game mechanics from previous chapters of the series: How Samus acquires gear. In other games, you almost always collected power-ups from ancient Chozo statues… but since Fusion takes place in a human-built space station rather than the ruins of a Chozo-colonized planet, there are none of those statues on hand. Instead, Samus is forced to rely on the Federation to pass along weapons data for her new suit as they’re able to develop it— the idea that Samus’ powers here are simulations of her previous skills developed for her new bio-technical suit. A little flimsy as premises go, but sure.

There’s a feeling of tension and urgency in the background of Fusion, and it comes in part from the looming sensation that you were rushed into action before Samus was fully ready. The Federation works in the background to come up with programs to allow her gear to mimic the functions of the Power Suit. You don’t have certain abilities because those abilities simply don’t exist yet. Again, it’s a thoughtful way to unite play mechanics and story design, and shows that the Fusion team wasn’t simply content to lazily reprise previous games where it didn’t make sense. Structurally, Fusion works quite a bit like its predecessors, but some careful consideration was given to how its workings reveal themselves.

And here’s an entirely different kind of obstacle than ever before: Some sort of structural damage to a pair of conduits. You’ll have to come back once you acquire wire cutters, it seems. Really big honkin’ wire cutters.

The only other door in the area takes you to, yes, an elevator. As in previous games, the elevator serves as a natural break in the layout of the game world…

…but it also serves as an opportunity for exposition. We get a glimpse of Samus’ rich inner life here, whether we want it or not. Later in the game, elevators serve a different narrative function, too. But due to the “down time” they create, elevators make a smart place to advance the story a step or two.

The observation deck basically works as a command center for the station, consisting of a single large chamber leading to one of every kind of sub-room: Navigation, Save, Recharge, and most importantly (for the moment) Data.

It also features this suspicious panel on the wall, but for the moment that’s simply an incidental detail.

There’s nothing to do here but head to the Data room and upgrade Samus’ suit to fire missiles. Missiles work differently here than in previous games: Rather than activating them with an on/off toggle that brings up missiles in place of standard energy projectiles, you hold down the right shoulder button to work as a modifier. It’s not a bad idea, as mechanics go, allowing you to hot-swap between your weapon selections almost instantly. But it does come with a tradeoff, as the ability to fire at 45 degrees sits solely on the L trigger now. Where in Super Metroid up and down angles were mapped to separate buttons, here you have to hold L then press down to depress Samus’ aim to 45 degrees downward. This is especially cumbersome when you’re firing missiles at a downward angle, as it requires you to hold both shoulder buttons and down and press fire. Blame Nintendo’s goofy decision to make Game Boy Advance functionally a portable Super NES but remove two of the Super NES’s face buttons.

You’re immediately given a new objective here, even as the space station suffers a power loss.

The power outage takes out the doors, so that out-of-place wall hatch comes into play. The room’s illumination dims down, allowing the lighting inside the service tunnels behind the hatch to stand out and draw your attention. As always, Metroid Fusion follows up the acquisition of a new tool or weapon with a situation in which you’re forced to use that tool to get back into the action. But instead of simply sending you through a red door, the game instead makes you find a less-obvious alternate route for advancement. This is a really nice bit of design here, as much of Fusion involves finding hidden routes and passages (including the cathartic “breakout” sequence many hours in). By immediately forcing players to jump through a small and obvious hoop, Fusion sets up player expectations and habits for the future.

Another of those mucus barriers appears here, though this time it completely obstructs your path. With no where to go but forward, you can easily make the mental connection here that you need to blast this thing with missiles to advance.

Further on, a “dead end” allows you to advance with crumbling flooring that regenerates once you pass through it. This pitfalls will come in to play over and over in Fusion, and here you’re getting a crash course.

And finally, you land in a pit which can only be escaped by climbing a ladder embedded in a wall. Oh, the humanity! Samus reduced to climbing a ladder rather than jumping to escape? This gets back to the theme of disempowerment that permeates Fusion: Samus has been weakened, almost crippled, by the X’s attack.

I mentioned her hunched postures in the previous update, but I forgot to point out a major element of her new design that speaks to her newfound weakness. In previous Metroid games, Samus didn’t just stand upright, she held her weapon differently. In the original Metroid, she held it at chest height. Beginning with Metroid II, she began to sling the weapon a bit lower, placing her left (off) hand on top of the gun barrel as if to steady her aim and against the weapon’s kickback. This made even more sense in Super Metroid, where the ability to fire at 45-degree angles made it look even more as though Samus was simply holding her aim steady. But in Fusion, her firing stance changes. Can you spot the difference?

Rather than holding her arm cannon down, now she’s holding it up. Either her body or her suit has been weakened enough that her blaster has become a burden, and she’s forced to support it with her off hand rather than simply steady it. It’s a subtle change, but a significant one. And not incidental, either, because these sprites were deliberately drawn in this fashion — as someone noted in the comments, Samus’ appearance in her Power Suit during the prologue shows her fighting the old way, and the SA-X also walks and shoots with the gait and stance of old Samus. Over and over again, Fusion hammers this theme home: Samus is no longer the invincible loner, and she’s in over her head.

No sooner does Samus land in the space station which comprises the entirety of Fusion‘s world than she comes across the first of many Navigation rooms. And that’s the beginning of the end for many people.

By far the most unpopular element of Fusion, the station’s Navigation rooms are compulsory stops where Samus has to stop and communicate with her mission “commander,” a computer which she nicknames Adam. (There’s a dumb plot twist around this later on, because the Metroid universe is incredibly tiny and basically consists of half a dozen named characters.) You can’t avoid these conversations, and they spell out every portion of your mission in excruciating detail until the point at which they don’t. For the first several hours of the game, Metroid Fusion offers very little sense of discovery as each and every goal is handed to you explicitly, not just through text but also with mini-map highlights as well.

On top of that, Adam is a patronizing, paternalistic, and sometimes condescending robot who talks to battle-hardened huntress Samus as if she couldn’t be trusted to visit a toilet unsupervised.

This marks a radical change in tone and style from previous Metroid games. Even at their most linear, the original Metroid trilogy dropped players into a silent labyrinth of space monsters and left them to their own devices. Not here. You’re marching to the orders of a computer, who sends you scurrying from point to point to do its grunt work: Investigate this, kill that, repair something else.

Mechanically, though, it’s very much Metroid. Samus runs and jumps, shoots, and finds her way through the space station maze. As soon as you receive your first mission objective from Adam, you come across this: The classic red door. Metroid veterans know the score here, of course. You can’t crack this door without a missile, which Samus doesn’t wield at this point. So regardless of how progress is doled out, there’ll still be opportunities to backtrack and navigate through previously inaccessible paths as you acquire new powers.

Speaking of new powers, Samus comes with one by default: The ability to grab on to ledges and pull herself up. This opens up a number of new puzzle design opportunities, but it ultimately comes from a place of practicality, an attempt to solve the Metroid II conundrum: Being on a portable system, Fusion suffers from diminished vertical pixel resolution compared to previous console entries (160 pixels versus 224). Metroid II’s solution to the Game Boy family’s scaled-down size was to make Samus bigger and then double down by giving her an infinite jump skill, often leading players to go leaping into danger without sufficient warning time.

Fusion goes the other route: It makes Samus’ sprite smaller than in Super Metroid, then diminishes the maximum height of her jump. Her reduced hang time makes for a faster-paced game, less floaty than earlier games. But the scale and proportions of the platforming remains similar to that of Super Metroid; Samus’ ability to grip ledges makes this possible. She can’t jump directly onto high platforms as in older games, but she can still reach those areas of the screen by pressing up against them and grabbing them. It’s a smart way to work around the platform’s inherent challenges while switching up the feel of the action and reinforcing the narrative conceit that Samus’ powers have been partially crippled.

The same shaft includes two other doors of a different color: Green, for Super Missiles. So multiple backtracks, then. The colored doors also mean that, for the moment, the game is strictly linear; there’s only one door you can go through, and it leads immediately to your objective.

Said objective is a small critter in a darkened room. This entire sequence, with Samus exploring a seemingly deserted space station, echoes Super Metroid‘s atmospheric beginning, but it’s far more brief, crashing to an abrupt ending here.

This encounter serves a much different purpose than Samus’ landing on Zebes in Super Metroid anyway; that involved a return to familiar territory and the slow build-up of tension. Here, you’re entering a never-before-seen locale in order to advance the story. The tension comes later.

Destroy the creature here and it spawns an X parasite, just like on SR388. This time, though, it doesn’t hurt Samus; instead, when Samus touches it — and the entrance to the room automatically locks and refuses to open until Samus makes contact with the parasite — she absorbs it harmlessly, taking it out of play.

As it turns out, Samus is now an X-destroying machine. Her metroid infusion allows her to soak up any class five full roaming vapors she may come across, converting them into life-sustaining energy and missile juice.

And here’s the central mechanical hook of Metroid Fusion. No longer do enemies drop standard energy and missile capsules; instead, a destroyed monster transforms into a free-flying parasite that can be absorbed to acquire similar effects to old-school capsules. But parasites have other traits as well, which changes the nature of certain areas of the game.

And here’s another change of pace: At key points in the story, Adam will unlock specific doors. This isn’t entirely without precedent, of course. Metroid II did something similar, with inexplicable earthquakes making new areas accessible as you worked your way through the metroid species. The similarity may not be an accident, as Metroid II informs much of Fusion‘s design.

The opening of Level 0 hatches allows Samus to travel beyond the very small entry areas.

You immediately meet another creature like the one in the darkened room. This one’s even easier to shoot, since it appears on a raised section of floor directly in Samus’ line of sight (you had to target diagonally or drop to the ground to shoot the first one). It’s your proper introduction to combat in Fusion, as the parasite this beast releases on its demise can be sucked up without incident or even ignored. A quick, simple, repeat encounter to denote the fact that you’ll be experiencing live combat from here on out.

And, with the introduction out of the way and combat encounters, you finally get to save. Just in case you screw up once the real monsters make their debut.

Metroid revolutionized action games. Metroid II proved that you could make a satisfying and substantial sequel to a console game within the bounds of a portable system. And Metroid III — Super Metroid — advanced the state of the video game art considerably, relaying both an engaging story and the workings of a complex, non-linear platform shooter with barely a word. The third entry in the series was so good that many people declared it the greatest game of all time, period. And then… Metroid skipped a console generation, foregoing the N64 and Game Boy Color altogether.

Metroid Fusion, the fourth game in the series, wouldn’t arrive until 2002, more than eight years after Super Metroid‘s debut. Needless to say, it arrived with grand expectation in tow; sure, Nintendo was also publishing Metroid Prime on the same day, but that was a first-person shooter made by a bunch of Texans. This was the real Metroid sequel; not only was it directed by one of the key creators of Metroid and Super Metroid, Yoshio Sakamoto, the title screen even said Metroid 4!

Within a few days of Fusion’s release, however, many fans had unilaterally declared Fusion a disgrace to the Metroid name and Prime the true successor to the torch, interquel status and shifted genre designation notwithstanding. Fusion was deeply reviled for its linearity, its lack of atmosphere, and its constant dialogue and restrictions. Also, for Samus’ weird new blue suit.

But was Metroid Fusion really the garbage many disgruntled fans would have you believe? Yes, it’s very different in many ways than Super Metroid, but in hindsight these changes seem neither haphazard nor spurious. Nintendo deliberately set out to create a very different game than Super Metroid here, leaving the slavishly faithful approach to design to Retro with Prime — which is not a criticism of Prime. Retro took Metroid into the third dimension by following the Ocarina of Time template, carefully reproducing a 16-bit masterpiece not from laziness but rather to guarantee a rock-solid basis for a radical shift in play mechanics and possibilities. Prime is a 3D carbon copy of Super Metroid in many ways, and that superior foundation made for a brilliant work that excelled in its own right. It was a smart and effective approach.

But with Super Metroid being copied so meticulously by Prime, the team at Nintendo R&D1 needed to do something other than churn out a second direct reiteration of the Super NES classic. Their solution, not uncontroversially, was to create in Fusion a game that was in many ways the inverse of Super Metroid. It holds true to almost all of the fundamental tenets of Metroid, but it presents them in a different fashion in an unusual context.

In breaking down the design of Metroid Fusion, I’m not simply going to look at how the game reveals itself; I’m also going to demonstrate how Fusion is a worthy successor to Super Metroid by knowing when to mimic its predecessor and when to throw out player expectations. This won’t be an uncritical analysis, though. Fusion has flaws, and it has subjective failings that don’t appeal to all players. But on the balance, Fusion is a smartly designed game that plays with the rules of the series in order to prevent coming off as a tired rehash.

Eight years is a long time in video games, and the span between 1994 and 2002 proved to be particularly tumultuous. Games went 3D, gaining a new dimension; and with that new dimension, they developed a new vocabulary and a new way of communicating with players. Characters and narrative grew more important; abstraction began to fall out of fashion; and the find-your-own-way approach of Super Metroid gave way to tutorials and mechanical exposition.

Metroid Fusion came into a world that had little patience for its predecessor’s style. Super Metroid expected observation and patience and mental synthesis of its players; it offered copious clues, and its design nudged players in the proper direction, but it was rarely explicit about directions or even expectations. Masterful as Super Metroid‘s design was, its subtlety was no match for a new generation of gamers who preferred telling to showing, explanation to experimentation. Fusion had to be different — and, as Sakamoto has explained, the team wanted it to be different. Nintendo R&D1 was always about playing around with new ideas, and they’d already made the best possible Super Metroid imaginable with Super Metroid. The sequel needed to be something separate.

So even before the game begins, it throws you off guard by nearly killing Samus Aran.

For three games, the implacable, unstoppable, genocidal bounty hunter Samus Aran had taken the central role in Metroid adventures. Wordlessly, she defeated no end of creatures, always finding a much-needed tool to advance further and destroy new and more dangerous threats in the nick of time. At the end of Super Metroid, she basically functioned as death incarnate, supercharged with a metroid-powered energy beam capable to tearing through any enemy in a single blast.

So Metroid Fusion begins by tearing her down again to the weakest state the games had ever depicted her in. Metroid Prime did something similar, but it half-assed the idea, damaging Samus’ systems at the end of a prologue sequence but by no means stripping her of all her capabilities. Not Fusion, though. It commits cheerfully to the concept of Samus being disempowered and makes it the entire premise of the entire adventure.

At the same time, it also develops the concept of who Samus is. Through prose and pantomime, Fusion‘s prologue depicts Samus’ fall from power, but it also shows hints of the larger world of Metroid. The title screen animation begins with Samus’ distinctive fighter craft flying alongside a frigate before crashing into an asteroid field; shortly after, a cut scene shows her leading a team of soldiers, driving home the idea that she really is the toughest and most capable bounty hunter around: She gets hired to take charge of the dirty work.

But that vanguard position also renders her vulnerable here, as a parasite set loose by her killing of a hostile creature on SR388 latches on to Samus and nearly destroys her.

Fusion‘s introductory cutscene plays out as a sort of twisted parallel to Super Metroid’s introduction: Samus narrates as white-clad technicians perform operations.

But in this instance, it’s not a baby metroid being put under the microscope but instead Samus, who lies at the brink of death after her parasitic encounter. Rather than playing the role of outside observer, Samus has instead become the subject herself.

And here, as in Super Metroid, the baby metroid’s advanced capabilities come into play as the lab workers discover the creature’s curative properties: It alone can push back the infection that threatens to end Samus’ life.

The infusion of metroid DNA into Samus marks the big conceptual change behind Fusion’s story and play mechanics: Samus becomes part-metroid herself. The creatures that have existed as the central threat and motivating device for the duration of the Metroid series may be extinct, but their legacy lives on in the form of the woman who destroyed them.

The metroid-infused Samus is fundamentally the same character, but she plays differently. She shares the same weaknesses as metroids — ice will freeze her solid — and she’s fundamentally weaker. Her attacks don’t hit as hard, she can’t juggle multiple powers, and she suffers far more damage from enemy attacks than  in previous games. Even her profile changes, losing the bulky Power Suit/Varia components that defined her silhouette an adopting a slimmer profile reminiscent of her look in the original Metroid. More than that, Samus’ posture changes, with a ragged hunch to her stance that suggests weariness and fatigue.

The game goes to great lengths to convey Samus’ newfound vulnerability, in both subtle and dramatic ways. Most famously, Samus effectively becomes her own worst enemy; but her weakness is presented in other ways as well, some less obvious than the deadly SA-X.

Some of this is conveyed through game design, but much of it comes across in dialogue and monologues — quite different from Super Metroid‘s laconic approach. Still, they’re from different eras of game design, and Metroid Fusion does a lot with its dialogue to reinforce story and game concepts.