Metroid’s been stuck in so many “look, we’re back!” titles that it hasn’t had any real leaps forward since 2001. The fact that they’re making a game called Prime 4 doesn’t give me much hope.
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Wow I really liked Fusion!!
I mean the story is a bit much but mostly everything else worked for me! I love the pacing of handheld Metroids.
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I think the mechanics of the game blend very well with the theme – you feel very fragile in Fusion. Enemies late game start doing like 1.5 energy tanks a hit and they take quite a few hits to kill. The X are very difficult to stop and you’re always having to run to an enemy after you kill them to prevent them from spreading and undoing your work. Gives the combat a different cadence than most Metroids.
I really love the tension in the boss fights, especially that part after the main phase of a boss where you have to kill the exposed X cell thing. Following something that’s very hard with something less hard but urgent creates a lot of drama. It’s a pattern I’ve personally used in some of my Mario Maker levels; I think it’s great!
Fusion loves the trick where it locks you in when you’re trying to back track and you have to use your new abilities to break out and get back up a different way. For as many Metroid clones are there are, not a lot are doing exactly this. Fusion doesn’t have a lot of literal backtracking – it’s usually remixed and requires something different of the player on the way up and that’s a pretty important difference.
Numbering the sections but then having you break the numeric sequence is a similarly smart trick. And going off-map between sections feels really cool too. These kinds of details are actually really important in a Metroidvania because they set up expectations within the player and then break them. There aren’t enough Metroid clones doing this, and even when they are attempting this they’re not doing it nearly this well!!
Would have liked maybe one more sequence with the Samus clone. I liked the horror aspect of it and feel like they could have played it up a bit more, especially near the beginning of the game.
Didn’t quite know how to make a GBA game look nice on a computer so I just threw a CRT filter on it and got further from the screen. Actually looked great and was night and day vs. the raw pixels so I would recommend that if you want to play it too.
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Zero Mission does this constantly too and I hated it in Zero Mission. It’s a delicate balance that Fusion strikes, employing pretexts from its “collapsing space station” premise, and it can easily feel artificial and handholdy instead.
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Yeah I can see how this might get cloying in a slightly different context. And if you do it too much you absolutely break the effect it’s supposed to have, because then the player IS expecting it.
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Another game that learned the right lessons from Fusion is AM2R which consciously does this a lot. There is one specific moment that everyone remembers that I won’t spoil.
More generally, in AM2R each area has indoor “Chozo ruins/facility” and outdoor “surrounding caves”. And it sets up an expectation that you’ll find major items and non-Metroid bosses indoors, and Metroids outdoors. Then it deliberately violates that sometimes, for example when you morphball through a tiny crack into the Tower expecting to find a missile tank or something, only to face a giant Zeta Metroid in a cramped room, who must’ve entered the crack as a larva and lived its whole lifecycle indoors
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new eSport just dropped: Metroid Fusion Open Randomizer
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I just learned this Important Fact
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this goes against them saying BUT BOUNTY HUNTER IS JUST A NAME SHE DOESNT ACTUALLY KILL FOR MONEY right?
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I hope her genocidal spree in Metroid II was for money
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i do kinda feel like for those who got into the series with Fusion it feels kind of weird playing earlier entries for this reason hey
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been meaning to pick up the FDS Metroid
anyway, in the days since Dread’s announcement, i have come around. i’ll play this game and i think it will maybe be pretty good.
i do sincerely hope it’s not all just in labs, though
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this game is aptly named cuz it fills me with the dread at the thought of mercurysteam being in charge of one of my favorite series again. theyve never made a good game, and samus returns is the worst 2d metroid
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also, the art design is god awful, i thought some of the enemies were just single color with no textures at first
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It almost feels like Sakamoto only got the green light due to the massive delay with Prime 4; tie over the Metroid fans until…maybe, hopefully next year?
There’s like no way Prime 4 is going to be good.
Finding out there are 3 defenders blew my mind
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3 has discrete sections I think are the best of the Primes (GFS Valhalla, Phaaze) and revelatory controls for 2007
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Everyone praises Prime Trilogy on Wii. I’ve also seen the opinion that the only thing holding back Prime on GC was its controls. I normally quite like Wii controls, but aiming in Prime on Wii makes me feel like I’m holding a controller upside down. Hours in and I was still sluggishly trying to jump around in lockon while fiddling to turn off the Phazon mode.
Meanwhile Prime on GC is snappy and precise, the lovechild of Ocarina and Goldeneye. People who don’t like it are people who were expecting trad twin stick controls on a twin stick controller. They can shove it.
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Metroid 2 on 3DS still rules.
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the likelihood of prime 4 having standard twin stick controls is a big sticking point for me, i want to feel like a tank
i will probs play both dread and prime 4 but i have zero expectation of either being very good… like, what can a nintendo authored metroid offer in 2021?
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