I spent a lot of my time in high school hating on things. I hated Final Fantasy because it wasn’t what I was used to. I hated Kingdom Hearts without even playing it simply because it lacked any character before Final Fantasy VII and thus was clearly “not meant for me”. I hated Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker because it “looked like Blue’s Clues”.

I also hated Metroid: Fusion because Nintendo threw in a cheap story, lame new monster foe, bad plot and linearity to one of my favorite franchises.

Now I’m an adult that has graduated from College and now has a job with QVC. I’ve seen a bit of what it takes to make games, studied essays and articles on design feverishly, played and reviewed a ton of titles in the span of a decade, and have studied Film Arts and other media. I’m not the same person I was in high school. I’ve grown to actually like the look of Wind Waker, I’ve made my peace with Square Enix, and I’m pretty much apathetic about Kingdom Hearts.

Yet I still harbored anger towards Metroid: Fusion. Nevertheless, it is a Metroid game, and it is hard for me to resist giving any entry in the series a second chance.

I would like to note that, from here on, this article is a completely second draft. Typically I write a single draft of a post, maybe fix a couple of issues that I see throughout, and then post it up. If I do a second draft, it usually means a rewrite.

That’s because I no longer hate Metroid: Fusion. It was a fun game, in fact. I found myself ignoring a lot of the flaws that originally irritated me, most of them related to the story and linearity of it all, and enjoying what the game did right. However, when I tried to write this post, I found it difficult. I was forcing words together and grasping for straws. What did Fusion do right? Well, it introduced some nifty new abilities and weaknesses. Samus being vulnerable to the cold was a nice touch. Unfortunately, it seems that the game didn’t really capitalize on this, which made it hard to discuss the matter. You only enter one or two rooms that deal cold damage before being sent to a region with foes that will freeze and deal damage to Samus. Evade them for a brief time, and you find yourself with a new cold-resistant suit. That’s the end of it.

Yet I insisted on writing with the intent of saying “Fusion does not suck, I was wrong and it was a fun game after all!” Well, Fusion does not suck, and is a well-designed game.

Then I read this in-depth look of Super Metroid, and I started to understand. I began to see the cracks in the system.

To summarize the article, Super Metroid is a game in three Acts, gradually exposing the player to how the game is played and what is to come next. This is done through the game world itself, as that is what Super Metroid is really about (more on that later). The beginning of Super Metroid allows the player to try and explore, but for the most part restricts their movements in one direction. There is still a sense of a greater world, however, with numbers of closed doors and inaccessible passages.

The game continues to force the player into limited situations until they’ve finally managed to defeat Kraid, at which point the world opens up and the player can go back through this world and see what lies hidden behind those once locked doors.

One of my problems with Fusion is that you never really have this moment of exploration. The game locks you out of previous areas constantly, only granting access when the story calls for it. Sure, you can go between the six different sectors at any moment, but by time the player has collected items such as the power bomb and screw attack, two valuable tools for finding any item in any location, the game locks every potential door so that the player can challenge the final enemies and rush to the ending. In order to master the game, you have to know it well ahead of time. You’re never free to do as you please, but must instead follow the rails outlined by the designers.

I could nitpick the many things done wrong in Metroid: Fusion, but it all links back to one change in philosophy.

Metroid, Metroid II and Super Metroid were about the world that Samus was isolated within, exploring, and even invading. Most of all, however, it was about the world. It had to be. At the time, dialog wasn’t much of an option. Not in the first two games, at least, especially considering Samus was only changed to a female at the end of the first game’s development. Even in the second game, the conclusion has little to do with Samus herself and more to do with SR-388 and the final survivor of a species Samus had sought to wipe out.

Metroid: Fusion changed things around. It wasn’t about the world, but about Samus herself. This shift in focus may seem subtle, but it rippled into many changes that would doom Fusion to be less noteworthy than Super Metroid, would tack on a pointless final segment of Zero Mission and utterly ruin Aran’s character in Other M. More on that another time.

As soon as the game begins the player is forced to sit through pages of text much longer than Super Metroid. A narration in 1994 which was beneficial in illustrating how advanced the Super Nintendo was compared to its predecessors, in addition to informing a new, younger generation of the story thus far. Fusion kicks off with the assumption that players already know who Samus is, which itself is a mistake considering the games were eight years apart. Children born the year Super Metroid released were old enough for Fusion to be their first experience with the franchise.

It was this thought, in fact, that caused me to wonder if Fusion had been designed for a younger and more accessible audience. This would certainly explain the game’s linearity, but it would not explain the increase in difficulty. In truth, Fusion is a harder game to play with more difficult bosses and creatures than Super Metroid had been. Everything but the linearity suggests that it is for an older and more experienced audience.

What does explain the linearity is the game’s shift in focus. Now that the story was being told through cut-scenes and text blocks, the designers didn’t have to worry about the narrative elements of the world itself. Samus lands on the space station without even providing the option to go to the right, unlike its predecessors. The one and only option is to move left, which might have informed a studious enough player at the time what they were in for.

From then on, the entire game is disconnected from itself. The Jungle area, the Ice area, the Fire area, they all exist because that’s how you change things up and make the game interesting for the player. These sections rarely interact with each other, and by time they do the player is approaching the end of the game. By that point the world does not feel as if it is one large space, it feels segmented. The names of these sections even suggest their theme, as opposed to names such as Miridia, Norfair, Brinstar, titles that a player is forced to learn if they must identify them.

Yet this is one of the reasons the different sections have an identity in Super Metroid while being “the ice area” and “the fire area” in Fusion. It is also indicative of the priorities of the developers. The original designers of Super Metroid went in to develop a world filled with memorable moments (I bet as soon as I say “Crocomire” you Super Metroid veterans all start thinking of the same thing). Fusion doesn’t have these. At most it has moments that you remember as being a pain in the ass, such as the first time you fought Nightmare or encountered the SA-X.

Even the villain is unimaginative, serving as nothing more than a vehicle for Samus’ journey. It is an amorphous blob without a single memorable feature but its color. It is hardly iconic, and is merely used to replace health and missile pick-ups and provide Samus with a way to regain lost abilities. The very name X is simple and means nothing compared to a name like Metroid itself.

If the Metroid games were designed by various game masters of Dungeons & Dragons, then the first three games were designed by a Simulationist. A GM that wanted to build a highly detailed world for the players to explore and wonder at. Metroid Fusion, on the other hand, was a Narrativist, a game master that simply uses the world as much as it can tell his story.

I understand the Narrativist. That’s the sort of GM I tend to be when running a D&D game, and any ideas I have for stories are always driven by a plot I long to tell.

That is not the sort of person that should have been put in charge of Metroid: Fusion, however. It is a good game, but unlike its predecessors it is not iconic or exceptional. It’s merely a B+. Its only contribution was to pave the way for the complete ruination of Samus Aran in Metroid: Other M.

I will get to that another time.