Metroid Fusion (Game Boy Advance) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
353A playthrough of Nintendo's 2002 action-adventure game for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance, Metroid Fusion.
Metroid Fusion, the fourth game in the main-line Metroid series, arrived a full eight years after Super Metroid's debut (https://youtu.be/Y9tufNHthJE ). It came out the same day as Metroid Prime did on the GameCube, offering fans a choice between a somewhat traditionally styled 2D experience and an innovative 3D one.
Taking place after the events of a ghastly misstep that doesn't deserve to bear the franchise's name, Samus Aran finds herself once again on the planet SR388, last visited in Metroid II: Return of Samus (https://youtu.be/yjifl27zTPw ). She has been assigned to the security detail of a group of researchers on the planet's surface. An alien attacks the team, and when Samus dispatches it, a flying creature bursts from its body and attaches itself to Samus's suit, infecting her.
Before she can reach the nearby research station she passes out. Her escape pod is eventually found and she wakes up at a Federation facility where she is told that she was infected by the X parasite. The organism has ravaged Samus's system, but since the X parasite and the metroids are natural enemies, the doctors created a vaccine derived from the cells of the metroid hatchling to save her.
The research station is then compromised by X and Samus is ordered to investigate. Everyone on board has been killed, the parasite is spreading quickly among the live specimens housed at the facility, and things go from bad to worse when it begins showing signs of intelligence.
Metroid Fusion starts off with quite an enthusiastic bang, and from the outset much of it feels familiar. Samus's aim once again is to amass strength so that she may ultimately take on an alien threat of cataclysmic proportions.
The biggest difference is that she is no longer alone. She is now in regular contact with an AI-driven mission commander that feeds her orders and intelligence. Instead of being left to her own devices, each leg of this journey is predetermined by a computer that dispenses station maps marked by objective markers. If you've played the earlier Metroid games, you'll immediately understand the gameplay implications of this new structure.
While the station is massive, the spirit of exploration and the sense of isolation - both critical elements of the first three Metroids - have been sharply curtailed to make room for the narrative. Though each of the ship's main areas do provide smaller opportunities for discovery, overall, Metroid Fusion is a disappointingly linear experience.
That's not at all to say it's a bad experience, though. The narrative gives us more insight into Samus's character than we'd seen previously, and it allows for some brilliantly tense moments in the way it handles encounters with Samus's doppelganger. The SA-X is a terrifying antagonist, and she's my favorite "villain" of the entire series.
The controls are also a huge improvement. Samus can now grab on to ledges and hoist herself up, and there's no longer any need to cycle through weapon menus: everything you need is easily accessed with the R button, now a shift trigger for missiles and bombs. Laying waste to alien lifeforms has never felt more fluid which is a good thing when the enemies hit this hard. The combat is much more demanding here than it was in Super Metroid.
The graphics are loaded with detail and the animations are smooth, but in spite all of the improvements they represent over Super Metroid's graphics, I didn't like them as much. The bosses are too absurd and cartoony to be scary, and like the full-screen cutscene images, they're at odds with the tone of the setting.
The station itself looks phenomenal, but the first GBA model's screen suffered from poor color reproduction and the lack of a backlight. Fusion compensated for this by cranking up the saturation and contrast, and it looks great on the original GBA (and the effect is mimicked nicely by the shader I recorded this video with). When played on a GBA-SP, Game Boy Player, DS, or an emulator without any filtering, however, it looks awful. Everything becomes eye-searingly bright and garish, and the shift ruins the game's visual character.
The sound design isn't as strong here as it was in the earlier games, but it does have its moments, like the echoes of the SA-X's footsteps that are permanently ingrained in my memory. The music is appropriately adventurous but a little bland, and it's hobbled by the snarly quality of the GBA's audio.
Metroid Fusion does what it does very well, but I really wish it hadn't sidelined exploration to tell its story. (What a slippery slope that compromise turned out to be. *glares at Other M*) I probably would've liked it more if it hadn't been saddled with the expectations that come with a numbered Metroid game, but I still had a lot of fun with it.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.