Finished the Saturday morning cartoonification of Metroid that is Fusion with affection for what felt like spinoffishly offbrand qualities which at their most smile/eye-brow raising (animal buddies, Bubble Tape™ 'n Capri Sun™ colour palette, deviant art adjacent cutscene/box art, Samus’ characterisation, the stupid Adam stuff) recalled, idk, watching that old Disney’s Aladdin cartoon show or the Ghostbusters or Beetlejuice ones, like, hm, weird, idk that I buy these as the real characters but I’m entertained enough with the licence given to get a little goofy (like encountering a scientist
(isn’t he supposed to be at least like a head shorter than our dear Samazon? (maybe it’s the X)) or even like…seeing a normal human pipe with a normal human handle
felt weird (Neat)) while at its most effective (space station built to emulate SR388, the X infection and its relation to Metroids and how they interact with enemies, being stalked by SA-X, Samus’ near death surgery and rehabilitation) it felt like a top shelf episode of Batman the Animated Series, permission to go high concept with rich source material while keeping things concise, commercial breaks and all (GBA play) but still ultimately nurturing a nagging notion the whole time that this would be actually really good as a feature length film AAA game where these ideas could be fleshed out and full throttled (SA-X in particular felt underutilised, I had as many goofy get-it-stuck-spin-spasming-at-me moments as I did genuinely tense encounters
but hey maybe that’s a demonstration of the “wit” that X lacks (trying to give the game the benefit of the doubt here!))
Samus does feel better to control, snappier (running, pivoting) stickier (wall grabbing) than Super if memory serves and if that’s an intentional stroke of thematically holistic design because she’s in a much slimmer suit this time (and seemingly more fragile if combat was any indication (which is leaned into too much for my tastes without being developed into something more interesting)) that’s cool! None of the music has stuck with me but the sprites are tasty, big funky bosses (I appreciate how the X cells you have to kill after breaking their creature form rubber band with your movement not too unlike the baby Metroid’s in II, which is not an intentional stroke of thematically holistic design I’m sure, I don’t have anything meaningful to pull out of that, just an association!) and if I zoom out enough to see the series as a timeline of little of thumbnails and blurbs, Fusion earns its place writ bold, it’s a fine-by-me Metroid.
Zooming back in however…well, like any of the games where you’re given a map (!) I’m left wondering “How Metroid is this?”/“Is this Metroid?”/“What is Metroid?” and in Fusion, “What am I actually doing most of the time but being told where exactly to go and then locked in a box to tile hunt/pump some laser sponge of a boss?” If my osmosis’d spatial memories of previously traversed places aren’t allowed the room to breathe and re/associate, refreshed via backtracking as they’re complicated with more ossmosis’d soon-to-be known unknowns, when does exploration dull to the point of becoming mere navigation, the classic Metroid verbs quarantined to the point of Hidden Object Game? And verb quarantine may be an artful manifestation of its Theme! But I don’t think it would strike me as Neat with a capital ‘N’ if Metroid wasn’t attached to it. I know some people appreciate the sterility of the science lab. Surgeon Adam barking orders over the map-as-operation table and the concisely-spliced-up-to-be-solved level design/setting/main character can have a little gold star on the zoomed out series timeline for thematic cohesion, I’ll think about this one as time goes on but it didn’t give me enough space to embrace…so idk why I’d ever play it again just like idk why I’d ever watch one of those old cartoons again (and I haven’t, so if that whole analogy is wack, there ya go!)
when I think about this
game gets a B, but if I think about this
game gets a D
call it a solid C
