To go with Broco’s AM2R rando adventures, I just finished playing a seed of a Metroid Fusion “Open Randomizer”, which is nearing a public release. The creator showed it off on stream over the weekend, and then plopped a bunch of seeds on discord yesterday. It’s pretty weird and interesting! It works surprisingly well (assuming you already know the locations of all the hidden items), though you can softlock yourself if you’re not careful.
The seed I played was fairly stacked early on (the author says he hasn’t implemented weighted item placement yet). I got the missile launcher first, and then immediately after that got the Varia Suit, Ice Beam (!), and Morph Ball before Arachnus (with Plasma Beam following shortly thereafter). I decided to head to Sector 2 before Sector 1 (to unlock the level 1 hatches), where I found the Wave Beam. I also peeked in Sector 3 early and found normal bombs past a heated room. I then finally decided to go to Sector 1, and I could use the wave beam there to go past the gates in reverse. I found the main power bomb, screw attack, and space jump in that area — by that point I had almost everything I needed to fight Ridley (aside from Charge Beam (note: there is almost no reason to fight Ridley)).
After that I had some difficulty progressing. I needed to unlock the level 2 doors, but that required speed booster. I decided to use the screw attack to take the backdoor into Sector 3, where I found super missiles and decided to fight BOX. I had just barely enough missiles to beat him. After beating him the door to the data room opened up (as doors do after beating bosses), so I went inside and downloaded a measly pack of missiles. Also I was trapped inside because the door was a level 2 door.
(lmao)
The lesson I took from this is (a) this still has some kinks to work out and (b) most bosses probably aren’t in logic until I get the Charge Beam.
Anyhow, the early rush of items was in part a curse, since it opened up a very large explorable space for the remaining upgrades to be doled out. It took me a while, but I did eventually found the rest of the equipment needed to beat the game strewn across multiple sectors. (I also tried fighting Ridley early for like half an hour (because I could), before giving up. Fight’s awful imho.)
Now, to beat the game you need to unlock the level 4 doors, which requires backdooring sector 4 from sector 5 (requires gravity suit and speed), which in turn requires backdooring sector 5 from sector 3 (requires screw attack) due to the insane way the randomizer handles the pristine/ruined roomstates in sector 5. The short answer is that they both exist at the same time, with which one you enter depending on the doors you take. Also, if you don’t have the equipment needed to kill the SA-X that encounter doesn’t trigger.
I ended up beating the game with every major item except for wide beam, and I just want to say that I regret missing that one. The omega metroid fight was much harder working with only a third of the damage output.
It was a bit janky, excising the event system broke most of the musical cues, there were some softlocks to be aware of, and damage scaling was a bit wonky, but overall I had fun.
