Metroid Fusion

Metroid Fusion is a game that mostly ignores and streamlines the most essential elements of its franchise's design before it. As much as I enjoy the game, that is true, and it is going to piss people off, so it has to be mentioned. Fusion takes the unique approach to ramp up narrative tension to create fear, mostly driven by Samus herself in monologues that reveal here uneasiness about her surroundings. How much this game appeals to you is inversely related to how much you value the open-ended, player-driven discovery of the previous entries in the series, namely Super Metroid.

Basically, Samus has to navigate a space ship to hunt down remnants of the X parasite - intelligent amorphous beings that completely consume organic life and then gain the ability to mimic it. Samus narrowly survives a battle with X, which melded her power suit with her body and removed some of her essential abilities. The X gained the ability to assume the fully-powered Samus form, and launch the being known as "SA-X" to hunt you down in this space ship. Your job is to find out what they want and eradicate them while not dying to your mindless Bizarro clone.

The best parts of previous entries in the series, in my opinion, were not scripted - they were directly tied to your progression of mastering the cryptic world before you, discovering items to help you continue. Falling down the Red Tower in Super Metroid and being forced to navigate the insanely hostile Norfair to find the Ice Beam before you could ascend once again was an extremely powerful moment. Fusion has no moments like these, because the ship's AI will always point you to your next objective, and generally each area has enough doors locked when you first arrive that progression is effectively linear. It feels weird, and if it weren't for the aesthetic qualities the game has, I think this could have been very tedious and maybe trivial to navigate.

But the aesthetic qualities can't be avoided here. In previous entries, quiet save rooms and elevators meant a peaceful reprieve. In Fusion, every time I was alone I felt pretty freaked out, because things are liable to go very wrong very often. The game will lead you in a loop around an area to grab an item and by the time you are back at the start of the area, you'll see huge, blown apart paths that SA-X has been making in the direction that you initially headed. Even if nothing actually happens outside of scripted moments, I did feel that there was a real "sense" of being chased by a force much stronger and crazier than you. Without too much detail, the final point in the story that made me feel like Fusion had something special was that your mindless fetch questing eventually turns kind of insidious as you realize you're not sure where your objectives are coming from.

It might scare off some die-hard Super Metroid enthusiasts, but to its credit, Fusion's curated action-horror romp is really well done. The plot is Metroid meets The Thing meets Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. There might be a world of difference in design between Fusion and the more exploration-leaning entries in the series, but it's such a radical departure and good enough story that I still absolutely think it's worth a playthrough. Definitely the black sheep of the 2D series.