From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

Metroid Fusion - When Time Alters Perspective
How I came to see the value in a sequel whose embracing of structural change I once viewed as an objectionable act.

So here I was, on an emotional high coming off of my experience with Metroid Prime, which had defiantly pushed back against a tidal wave of pessimism and proved itself to be not only phenomenal Metroid game but also one of the grandest, most sublime video games ever made. This was a significant divergence from the series of events that I assumed would occur prior to my playing the newly released Metroid games, at which point I'd established a narrative for how my overarching experience with the two games would play out.

As I stated in my Metroid Prime piece: "Prime, I was certain, was essentially going to be the Metroid series' Castlevania 64. I'd endure it as best I could, and all the while, I'd lament the fact that Nintendo had passed up the opportunity to blow us away with an expansive, revolutionary Metroid game in favor of tossing out a shallow, imitative assembly-line shooter that was only loosely related to the series.

Then I'd quickly shelve it and move on.

And then, when I needed it most, Metroid Fusion would be there waiting for me with open arms, ready to save me and thus provide me the true Metroid experience for which I was now starved!"

But now my narrative had been shattered, and what remained was a world of amazing possibilities.

Truly, I couldn't have been happier with how things were turning out: One of my gaming desires had been fulfilled--Nintendo had delivered a lovingly crafted, revolutionary next-generation Metroid game--and now so, too, would the other. Soon I'd be immersed in the traditional, Super Metroid-style 2D action game that I'd been waiting to play since the mid-90s!

"Talk about the sweetest of bonuses!" I thought to myself in an overjoyed manner.

Come the next day, I was raring to go. I popped the Metroid Fusion cart into my Game Boy Advance, parked myself under our den's wall-mounted light fixture, and readied myself for some labyrinth-exploring, surface-tunneling action!

Though, as soon as the title screen's purple-colored space motif came into view and its grainy musical accompaniment began to emit from the GBA's speakers, I was suddenly overcome with a sinking feeling.

"Something is off here," I sensed.

I wasn't bothered by the music's muffled quality, no, because I knew that the GBA had crummy audio hardware and I expected the game's music to be compromised in some way. What concerned me, rather, was the title screen's vibe, which, for whatever reason, made me feel as though Fusion was somehow incongruous with previous series entries.

At the time, I couldn't articulate what, exactly, was making me feel that way, and even now I struggle to give solid form to the wordless questions with which my mind was wrestling during those opening moments. Maybe I sensed that Fusion wasn't going to be tonally compatible with the past Metroid games. Or perhaps I started to fear that the game wasn't going to be as ambitious as I expected it to be.

I can't say for sure.

"How ridiculous," you're probably saying, "to get all of that from a title-screen image and single sustained bass note!"

And I'd agree with you had there not been other worrying signs early on.

The first was the backstory-establishing intro scene, which inexplicably dragged on forever. In the previous games, you got an intro that was a minute long, tops, and then you jumped right into action. But Fusion was apparently incapable of telling its story succinctly. Instead it was going way overboard and delivering a setup that was too involved and too unnecessarily elaborate for a series that had always done well to keep things simple and focus on deriving characterization and emotional complexity from its visuals, music and gameplay.

"This is simply too much," I thought to myself every time the prolonged scene shifted to a new perspective.

Also, I wasn't particularly keen on the game's sprite-work. I mean, I understood that it had to be smaller in scale to compensate for the GBA's lower resolution, yeah, but still I was disappointed to see a compressed-looking Samus moving about a noticeably cramped cavern. The game hadn't even started yet, and I was already missing Super Metroid's large, amazingly detailed sprites and spacious environments.

It all felt so regressive.

And I was kinda annoyed by the described nature of the game's antagonistic force, the shape-shifting X Parasites, which were positioned to be such an unfathomable menace that they, like the Phazon in Prime, served to make the Metroid threat seem extremely trivial in comparison.

"Once again: Weren't the Metroids supposed to be the galaxy's most feared species?!" I questioned in an irked manner. "Isn't Samus' dealing with their threat supposed to be the point of the series?!"

I just couldn't help but feel as though Metroid's creators were losing focus of what was most important.

Ultimately, I knew, none of this would matter if it turned out that Fusion was a great Metroid game, which I still expected it to be.

That's how I felt, at least, until about ten minutes later, when I had to stop and wonder, in puzzlement, about what the hell was going on in this game.

"Why is everything in this game blocked off?!" I angrily questioned as I uselessly fired upon and pushed up against the next in an endless line of securely locked doors. "And why am I standing in front of yet another computer terminal listening to an AI talk for two minutes at a time?! Why am I being forced to stand here while this thing drones on and on about colored hatches and air-pressure systems?!"

"What is this?!" I asked over and over again. "Where's the 'Metroid' action, man?!"

There hardly was any. Rather, I found myself stuck in a constantly repeating cycle in which I'd listen to an AI's instructions, immediately proceed to the next terminal room to confirm the objective, promptly complete the objective, and then return to a navigation room for further instruction. That was it. That was the extent of Fusion's action.

There were no branching paths to discover. There were no series of interconnected caverns to become lost within. And there were no signs that Fusion possessed any exploration element. There was only sickening linearity.

And I was pretty pissed about that.

This wasn't what I wanted. This wasn't the game that I'd waited 7-plus years to play!

"What happened here?" I wondered in perplexment.

Following what was an inexplicably long drought, I expected Nintendo to make up for lost time by hitting me with nothing less than the ultimate 2D Metroid. I was expecting a Metroid game that was cognizant enough of the series' strengths to throw me into a wonderfully labyrinthine world and leave me to my own devices and, if necessary, let the surrounding environment be my guide, like it was in Super Metroid. Instead I wasn't allowed to go anywhere but the place in which the game required me to be at the time!

Fusion's world was neither sprawling nor perceivably deep, and it did nothing to evoke the sense of wonderment that was so critical to the Metroid experience. Rather, Samus found herself confined to a stereotypical space station whose banal, visually generic main hub spilled into six neatly arranged, brightly numbered sectors.

And the way in which the sectors were set up was a microcosm for the game's chief design flaw. They were overly structured to the degree in which every sector's entrance was comprised of the same series of rooms: a navigation room, a save room, and a recharge station. The result was total predictability when traditionally the best thing about playing a Metroid game was not knowing where you might arrive next.

I also had a problem with the game's controls. Though I understood that they had to be condensed to work on the GBA, which had two fewer buttons than an SNES gamepad, I wasn't enamored with the results. I mean, you couldn't run manually. You had to hold down the R trigger to fire missiles. And you had to compensate for the halving of shoulder-button input by holding down plus L to point Samus' arm cannon diagonally downward.

This, too, felt like a regression to me, and I was worried that the compromised control scheme would limit the number of available upgrades and restrict what the designers could do with the existing weapons and items.

And then there was the transgression that made me throw my hands in the air and really start to question the development team's intentions: When I defeated the first boss, Arachnus, I obtained both the High Jump and Spring Ball abilities at the same time!

"Since when do you earn two major abilities via the obtention of a single item?!" I angrily objected. "That's not how it's supposed to work! It's supposed to be that if you want to earn two items, you have to put in the effort to defeat two very different, very distinct bosses!"

"Were they too lazy to design another boss?!" I was forced to wonder.

No other event did as well to illustrate Fusion's condensed-feeling nature.

After considering what I'd seen to this point, I could only come to the conclusion that Fusion's creators simply lacked the will and the desire to craft an incredibly expansive Metroid game whose areas were home to multiple upgrades and intricately designed environments built around said upgrades' procurement and utilization, so instead they sought to use intrusive narrative-based structuring as the means of selling us on the idea that suffocating linearity and compactness were actually the "advancements" that the series needed.

"The truth has to be that they just couldn't think of interesting places to hide all of these weapons and items!" I figured.

And that, right there, encapsulated my entire Metroid Fusion experience. I kept hoping that the game would eventually blossom into the powerfully evocative, wondrously labyrinthine next-level Metroid game that I'd long been waiting for, but it never did. And by the time the game was over, I was completely disengaged. I felt nothing but apathy as I watched Samus board her ship and take off into space.

"Seriously--what the hell happened here?" I once again questioned, this time with a defeated energy. "They had seven years to come up with an idea for a Metroid sequel, and this is the one that they settled on? This is the limit of their imagination?!"

I didn't believe that I was being unfair to the game. I couldn't have been, I thought, if I was willing to admit, upon reflection, that it did have its moments. It had some exciting sequences like the SA-X chases and the emergency situation in which you had to urgently sprint to Sector 3's control room in order to activate the research station's cooling system and prevent a meltdown.

Also, it knew how to create tension in the buildup to major clashes and other events. It did so with its great use of ominous musical cues, stress-inducing changes in lighting, and unsettling foreshadowing. The best example of such was the enormous shadowy silhouette that could be seen menacingly darting across Sector 5's background, whose protective glass barrier provided little sense of comfort. Whenever I'd see or hear the unknown creature, I'd become anxious and filled with the sense that it could break through the barrier at any moment and instantly annihilate me.

"I have to hurry up and get the hell out of here!" I'd think to myself anytime I was traversing my way through Sector 5's opening room.

And then there were the instances in which the game would, desirably, leave me alone for a while and withhold direction after an unexpected twist occurred. In those instances, it would allow me to blindly blast and tunnel my way through environments that were now, suddenly, very mysterious- and complex-feeling.

"Those were the moments when Fusion was at its best," I thought.

And that was why I quickly grew disappointed whenever I'd resolve the issue at hand then find myself back in one of those navigation rooms. Because at that point, I knew that it was a certainty that it was time to go back to the normal routine.

For the entirety of the play-through, I kept waiting for Fusion to fully open up and finally evolve into something that resembled a traditional Metroid game, but it just wouldn't. Rather, it continued to reject the idea of freely explorable open world.

"If only they'd done more with this particular idea," I thought as I was reflecting upon my encounters with the SA-X. I very much liked the idea of Samus being hunted by a cold-blooded doppelganger, so I was a little disappointed that encounters with the SA-X were limited to a few scripted sequences.

I felt that the game would have been provided large doses of nervous excitement and persistent anxiety had the SA-X's programming allowed for it to randomly wander around the station. Giving it the ability to roam freely would have created the possibility of the two characters being able to cross paths at any time!

"That certainly would have been a next-level game mechanic!" I thought.

I realized later on, though, that the GBA lacked the memory and processing power necessary to execute such a mechanic and that implementing it would have been a logistical nightmare for the level designers, who would have had to account for every possible encounter point and create hundreds of escape routes and hiding places.

But at the time, it was fun to consider the possibilities!

And for as much as I downplayed Fusion's visual presentation, I couldn't deny that it was a good-looking game. It wasn't in the league of the visually brilliant Super Metroid, whose every texture was purposefully rendered and consequently brimming with character and vivacity, no, but it had attractive sprite-work, a lot of interesting environments, and finely detailed backgrounds.

I gave it high marks in this area.

I liked, in particular, that you could see all types of different creatures hopping around in the background layers. Their activity was thought-provoking, and it worked to create a sense that the Biologic Space Laboratories had real depth to it and that its was a truly functioning ecosystem.

Sometimes the smallest touches go a long way in helping to produce a memorable atmosphere, and that's exactly what Fusion's background-dwelling creatures were able to do.

Though, I wasn't sure how to react the surprise appearance of the Etecoons and Dachoras. My first instinct was to react cheerfully to their presence, but before I could do that, my skeptical mind took over and told me to resist such a temptation. It told me that their inclusion was merely a means of creating a cheap link to the much-superior Super Metroid, from which Fusion was hoping to get a rub.

Ultimately I decided not to react either way and without judgment on their appearance until I fully understood what the designers were trying to accomplish with their inclusion. (In the end, I was fine with how they were used. I liked what they added to the story.)

Fusion's music was a different issue. My feelings on it changed over time.

During my first play-through, honestly, I was too filled with feelings of displeasure to pay much attention to the music. I made only general observations: The tunes were largely muted and compressed-sounding, as I expected them to be, and they couldn't match Super Metroid's in terms of emotional and environmental conveyance, but still a number of them were very good.

That was about all that I felt inspired to say.

Over the years, though, I came to have great appreciation for Fusion's music. I came to value how its distinct tones could arouse feelings of tension and unease and make you feel the weight of whatever situation you were currently in. For that reason, it was, I could happily admit, a very worthy Metroid soundtrack.

My favorite tunes included the inspiriting, goosebumps-inducing The Final Command, which played whenever the mood turned hopeful and used its power to make me feel as though I was a triumphant warrior who was experiencing the bittersweet culmination of a lifelong adventure (though, its replacing all other sector themes during the endgame was a bit much), and Sector 4's aquatic theme, whose depressive vibe so effectively communicated to me the feeling of what it must have been like to be all alone in one of the galaxy's deepest, darkest and most isolated recesses.

These tunes, and all of the others, made me feel emotionally connected to the game and its environments, and I'll always remember them for how amazingly well they did that.

One thing that really surprised me was Fusion's difficulty-level: This game was tough, man--at least early on, when I was short on energy tanks!

I couldn't remember dying more than a handful of times during the entirety of any of my past Metroid-game first-play-throughs, but there I was, no more than thirty minutes into Fusion, and I'd already bit the dust about a dozen times. Because the creatures in this game hit hard. Their projectile and physical attacks were taking off thirty points of health each time one of them connected!

And truthfully, I was concerned that Fusion was going to be a grind. I was afraid that it's difficulty would be so high that I'd have to spend the majority of the play-through cautiously inching my way forward and worrying about getting severely punished for making hasty, impulsive movements.

Samus' heightened susceptibility did remain a constant for the greater part of the adventure, yeah, but fortunately it eventually became manageable, and consequently Fusion's difficulty never approached the extreme levels that I feared it would. Rather, its providing a generous amount of energy tanks (a record of 20) and increasingly powerful weaponry slowly evened the playing field and inevitably alleviated the problem of new areas' foes completely outmatching you.

Eventually I caught on to the fact that Fusion's style of play was designed to be tactical: You couldn't rush in, guns blazing, and expect to endure, no. Rather, each segment was designed to where you arrived in a puny and weak state and survived by adopting a strategy of stealthily working your way around threats until you located an upgrade that would help you to neutralize them. (Given the context, it made sense that the genetically altered, defensively compromised Samus would struggle to keep pace with an enemy force that was continuously growing smarter and more proliferate.)

This, too, was another game element that I came to appreciate over time. Because I realized that it wasn't the questionable departure from the norm that I originally perceived it to be. Rather, it was a perfectly natural system for a Metroid game. Because I had always felt, after all, that a strong survivability factor was critical to the Metroid experience.

And Metroid Fusion, I could see, had one of the best of them.

But overall, I was mostly disappointed with Fusion. It had aspects that were worthy of praise, sure, but the hardline reality was that it had fallen short in almost all of the most important categories. And for certain, it failed to meet the standard set by Super Metroid, which I was expecting Fusion to at least match.

Sadly it wasn't able to.

I didn't believe it to be a bad game, no. I just felt that it wasn't what it needed to be. I considered it to be a solid action-adventure game but nothing more than that.

And I absolutely didn't see it as a top-tier Metroid game. To even compare it to Super Metroid at a base level seemed laughable to me.

That's how I felt about Metroid Fusion after I completed my first play-through of it. I saw it as an overly structured, strictly linear action-adventure game that borrowed Super Metroid's mechanics and general visual presentation but otherwise bore little resemblance to past Metroid games.

As I was playing it, I wasn't blissfully exploring a wondrous, perceivably vast world and making progress by freely bombing, blasting and tunneling my way through amazingly labyrinthine, wonderfully interconnected environments. Rather, I was simply moving from points A to B, as instructed, and feeling excitement only in the brief periods when the game would get out of my way for a few minutes.

In the end, Fusion was letdown for me on two levels: It didn't deliver the type of 2D Metroid action that I was looking for, and it failed to sustain Metroid Prime's momentum.

Amazingly, my narrative wound up working in reverse: Prime turned out to be the game that so excellently captured the spirit of the 2D Metroid games while Fusion proved to be the pretender that was falsely carrying the series' name!

From then on, Fusion was largely absent from my radar. I played it two additional times over the next eighteen months, and even though I made an earnest effort to do so, I simply couldn't see the value in its unorthodox approach to Metroid action. And once Metroid: Zero Mission arrived and succeeded wildly in providing me the 2D Metroid experience that I'd long been craving, that was it; I no longer had any use for Fusion. My "true" Metroid game was here, and thus it was an easy decision for me to cast Fusion away to my game cabinet, where, I was sure, it would likely remain forever.

But you know how it goes: Time can alter one's perspective. Perceptions can change. And a game's message can take on a new meaning when it's viewed in contrast to the history that unfolded in the years following the game's release.

In time, Metroid Fusion began to have a certain appeal. It started to exhibit an attractively distinct radiance. And consequently I found myself being drawn to it.

This happened for a variety of reasons, the most relevant of which was my disappointment with the series' move toward homogeneity: I was saddened by the fact that Metroid Prime's sequels had refrained from evolving the first-person formula in a meaningful way and had instead settled for merely iterating on it; and for however much I loved Zero Mission, I couldn't deny that it simply wasn't offering anything new or original (outside of its post-Mother Brain stealth segment, which was treated as something separate) and was basically Metroid wearing Super Metroid's skin, which is to say that it was hardly a creature of its own design.

As we entered the new decade, I started to desire something new and different, though, unfortunately there didn't appear to be any more Metroid games on the horizon. Thus there were no games that could potentially take the series in a new direction.

And that was sad because I desperately wanted to play a Metroid game that was willing to take some chances and endeavor to break the mold.

That's when I realized that what I was looking for was right there in front of me. The game that I desired to play already existed. Its name was Metroid Fusion.

And now seemed worthy of a second look.

So after shunning Fusion for a number of years, I popped it into my DS (which has GBA compatibility) and began playing it. And suddenly I found myself really enjoying its action.

In examining Fusion without the restraint of bias, I could see that there was much more to it than I realized and that I hadn't given it enough credit. I mean, yeah: It was overly chatty and linear, but it had a lot of soul, a fact to which I was originally blind because (a) I was angry about what I perceived to be its abandonment of the series' core values and (b) I was too busy complaining that it wasn't a carbon copy of Super Metroid.

Over the course of my play-through, it became increasingly clear to me that Fusion was very much a top-tier action-adventure game and that its ideas were all well-conceived. An indeed it had all of the ingredients that made for a great Metroid game: satisfying shooting action; intense boss fights, evocative visuals and music; an abundance of cleverly constructed environments that changed form minute to minute, with each alteration producing new forms of improvisational, tense platforming scenarios; a great many instances in which you could tunnel and carve your way through the BSL station's seemingly bounded environments; and a lot of deviously-designed-but-delightfully-inventive puzzles, most of which required you to make skillful use of the Speed Booster.

"The way in which this game combines classic series elements and its own new ideas is pretty brilliant," I came to recognize. "And it all amounts to a great take on the Metroid formula."

And even though Fusion didn't do so in a conventional way, it did eventually open up its world and allow you to freely explore it. That happened after you defeated the Omega Metroid, the final boss, and then reloaded your save file, at which point all of the door hatches would unlock and the game would provide you a handy checklist.

It was then that you'd realize that there was a ton of stuff hidden within and beyond the station's walls and surfaces (including an excessive number of Power Bombs, which were basically a messy substitute for the X-Ray Visor), and there was a large number of secret rooms to discover and explore.

So Fusion indeed had a significant exploration factor. It was just that you had to wait a while for it to emerge.

And because we were now smack dab in the middle of the Nintendo DS era, years removed from GBA's reign, Fusion had a new type of appeal: It now had a strong nostalgic quality. It now stood as a painful reminder of what we'd lost in the previous half-decade and of the sad fact that we'd probably never again see a sprite-based, 16-bit-style Metroid game.

Because I understood that to be the case, I learned to cherish the time that I was spending with Fusion, which, in contrast to what it represented to me eight years prior, now felt very close in spirit to the older Metroid games. It was now, much like its forebears, the kind of game that I feared to lose.

So in the end, Metroid Fusion set me straight and proved to me that it wasn't the fraudulent Metroid game that I originally made it out to be. It didn't, as I mistakenly believed, work to foolishly abandon the series' core values, no. Rather, it sought to bravely blast its way through the walls of convention and discover new avenues for expansion. And it greatly succeeded in that mission.

And besides: Super Metroid had already perfected the traditional action-adventure formula. We didn't need a string of sequels that simply replicated what it did, no, because, as I grew to understand, endlessly repeating a formula was a recipe for diminishing the value of the original work. I learned this lesson well by witnessing what happened to the Castlevania series following the release of Symphony of the Night, whose multiple iterative sequels functioned to strip it of its individuality and render it merely one from a growing pack of similarly designed games.

Fusion wasn't interested in being iterative. It didn't care to be tied down by the past. Rather, it wanted to be its own animal. It desired to eschew convention and take the series to new places.

And that, it turned out, was a good thing.

When it was given time and some new context, Fusion showed itself to be a fun, challenging action-adventure game, and its unique style of action proved to be a strong complement to the existing Metroid games' and not in any way an affront to them.

And it's for that reason that I've returned to it a whole bunch of times since the late-00s. In fact, I've played through it more times than I've played through Zero Mission!

That information, on its own, should tell you something.

And even though I'll never be a fan of Metroid Fusion's pace-killing chattiness or its overemphasis on story and character-building, I'll continue to regard it as a game that bravely challenged the status quo and through resiliency earned itself an eventual victory.

It really is a fantastic game. I'd even say that it's one of the Metroid series' most outstanding entries.

That's how highly I think of it.

"Do not worry," director Yoshio Sakamoto likely told his staff as they were nervously wrapping up production on their boldly unconventional Metroid game. "Someday they will come to understand. Someday they will see."

Fifteen years later, I finally see the wisdom in that sentiment.