 I want to make a video on Metroid Fusion. Let's do that. Metroid Fusion is the latest Nintendo Game Boy Advance game to be added to Nintendo Switch Online plus expansion pack on the Nintendo Switch. It's a generally well-received game with one perceived major flaw, it's painfully linear. Where Super Metroid lets you explore your own way, discovering new paths and areas, Metroid Fusion explicitly tells you, here. Go here. Here's a little marker on the map. Go to this place for the next little bit of story, and probably a boss fight. Plenty of ink has been spilled about how this compromises the Metroid experience. Take for example Robert Hughes' review for Nintendo Life, which reads, quote, Metroid Fusion's progression, however, is surprisingly linear. There's very little room for deviation from the main path for most of the game. Metroid Fusion has a story, one that it insists on telling and funnels you in one direction. So it's perhaps a little disappointing that Metroid Fusion often just seals off certain routes with locked doors, particularly towards the beginning of the game. It's this lack of ingenuity and originality that keeps Metroid Fusion from surpassing its 2D predecessor, Super Metroid, in quality. There are a lot of reviews like this, reviews that complain about how instead of feeling like a bold space adventurer, the Metroid Fusion formula leaves you feeling a complete lack of player agency. To which I say, yes, Metroid Fusion takes away your freedom. That's a great thing. Because Metroid Fusion is not Super Metroid. This isn't a space power fantasy where you play as a bombastic adventurer. This is a horror game. You're meant to feel a complete lack of control. You're meant to run and hide. And over the course of the story, you're meant to turn the tables to break free from the initially linear path the game sets for you. Sit back and relax, dear viewer, as I explain how the worst thing about Metroid Fusion is actually genius. The game's biggest perceived design flaw is actually exactly what makes its narrative so strong. Because, of course, a channel called Video Game Storytime is always going to love a game that tells its story well. So first things first, monologues. At the start of the game, it doesn't take any time at all for Samus to start monologuing like a cheesy Incredibles villain. The intro to Super Metroid has the player quickly escaping from an exploding pirate ship. The perfect way to sell the player on this idea that they're a bold space hero. In contrast, Metroid Fusion starts with text. Lots and lots of text. Samus explains in exquisite detail how she got a gross infection and she had to go to the doctor. I mean, it's obviously more scary than that. I remember playing this for the first time as a teenager, late at night in a dark room lit only by my GBASP and being absolutely freaked out right from the start. It helps that unlike some Metroid games I could mention, this one is incredibly well written. You get, or I get at least, a real sense of the hopelessness that Samus faces. How she's just barely survived death before the story has even started, and how she's tremendously unhappy with the lack of choices before her. I'm aware that some liberties were taken in localising this game into English, but without knowing exactly how the Japanese version plays out, I'm happy to say that I'm very fond of the story in the English version of the game as it is. Samus is not a decision maker for the first chunk of this game. She's a peon. She's running around following the orders of an emotionless AI commanding officer who in turn is relaying orders from the Galactic Federation. If the player feels frustrated at being boxed in, forced to take orders, unable to forge their own path, then Samus is right there with you. She complains fairly constantly at not having the freedom to do things her own way. But then this is a horror game, perhaps more so than any other Metroid title, including Metroid Dread. Samus isn't supposed to feel in control. The tone of a game is often set by how much freedom and control the player has. Something like Breath of the Wild is sold largely on its sandbox structure. Go anywhere, do things your own way, come up with your own ingenious solutions to puzzles. Five Nights at Freddy's, apologies for using two very obvious examples here, is the polar opposite. You have very little control over the situation. You're stuck in one place, and the few things you can control prove to be somewhat unreliable. That's what builds the tension. That's what makes the whole thing scary. Metroid Fusion is a game about having limited options in an environment that is slowly getting worse. There's a real sense of Dread that comes from being powerless, from having to rely on your absent overlords for support, from not being able to make your own choices about the way you approach the obstacles in your way. Right from the start, the computer AI Adam makes the point of telling you just how fragile you are. Samus has established a pattern of forgetting all of her abilities any time she gets a bonk to the head, but this one feels so much worse than usual. Because of the starting travelogue of hospital trips, it's clearly established that Samus isn't just weak, she's barely alive. She shouldn't be alive. Every foe she faces, even just the weird gooey zombies in the starting area, feel like a serious threat. So Adam gives orders, and both Samus and the player feel increasingly disgruntled at having to blindly do what they're told, especially when Adam's best-laid plans are clearly not working. Apparently systematically opening all the doors to every habitat on a floating spacesuit isn't a great plan. Who could have guessed? This is most keenly felt in areas that are clearly perfectly under control right up until Samus turns up doing Adam's bidding, at which point everything collapses as all the weird space monsters A escape and B get infected with deadly parasites that you're trying to contain. I mean, it's almost as if Adam's deliberately trying to ruin things, right? So before long, this exploration-heavy game where your exploration is clearly signed posted gains a new level of paranoia. Is your presumably benevolent AI commanding officer actually part of a wider conspiracy? Can you really trust anyone in this scenario? Is your discomfort with the gameplay actually because you shouldn't be listening to your AI commanding officer after all? All the while you're gaining new powers and abilities, most of which are carefully selected for you by the distant and shadowy powers that be that exist somewhere far away and far more safe. Eventually though, Adam's intel starts to completely fail. Things aren't where he says they should be on the map. After an hour or two of being locked into a rigid, fairly repetitive loop of doing what you're told, making things worse and then getting a small cookie now and then for your trouble, you have to start actually doing some independent exploration. It's at about this point that the game transitions from being straight horror to giving the player a better sense of freedom and heroism. I once heard it said that the difference between a victim and a hero is all in their response to impossible situations. When some lunatic comes along with a sadistic choice, a victim is forced to pick one bad outcome, while a hero rejects the choice entirely and finds a way to save everyone. In the face of increasingly poor odds, Samus and the player alike break the cycle of doing Adam's bidding. You find your own path not on any of his maps. You earn power-ups that he hasn't given you permission to use yet. You grow stronger and for the first time, you start to feel like you're in control of your own destiny. And Adam freaks out. How dare you get a power-up that he didn't sanction? What were you doing in the super-secret part of the facility? By now, it's clear that whoever Adam answers to, they don't have your best interests at heart. It's too late to stop you now, though. The second half of the game is significantly less formulaic. You find yourself crossing back and forth between previously completely separate areas. The whole of the space station seems to be fighting you at every turn and you win and win and win again. I mean, obviously, you are still following a linear path, but it's more like the linear path that we're used to from a Metroid game, one that feels self-directed. You're no longer taking orders. Indeed, before the end of the game, Adam starts taking orders from you in a role reversal that highlights just how completely you've overcome your previous helplessness. The genius of making the first half of this game so rote, so repetitive, so lacking in free thought is that when you finally break free and start tearing things apart, your newfound freedom and power feels earned in a way that it doesn't in perhaps any other Metroidvania that I personally have ever played. The gameplay pairs wonderfully with the narrative, the themes of making your own choices, of not playing by the rules, of doing the right thing even when everyone else is pushing to turn you into a cog in their machine. As I say, I don't know how well this captures the sense of the original Japanese version of the game. As I understand it, some of these themes of fighting against the system are stronger in the English localization, but for me, it works. Metroid Fusion, because of its perceived flawed structure, is a game that in both narrative and gameplay starts with the player feeling powerless and lacking in choices and ends with the player feeling like an incredible hero for refusing to play by anyone else's rules. And because I need to mention them, yes, other rem exists and also has Adam in it. Metroid Dread also exists and AI Adam is in that game too. I'm just saying words to save you the trouble in the comments. Just focusing on Metroid Fusion, though, long before these other titles came out, I can't help but love how this unassuming GBA game manages to create such a dramatic and uncomfortable air of tension and how satisfying it is to puncture that tension as the game progresses. And this is all thanks to an element of the game that a lot of players consider to be a design flaw. For a really great video on how Fusion builds fear, check out my friend Dan's video over at Video Game Animation Study. And also my friend Hotsider is working on a Metroid video too, check his channel out as well. So there we have it. Metroid Fusion's linearity is a feature, not a bug. At least that's my take on this game anyway. Maybe it hits differently for me than for you and if so, well, fair enough, these things are entirely subjective. My point in all this is simply to say, this is a thing that I like. Some people don't like the structure of Metroid Fusion, but I do. I think it's very clever and it doesn't get enough credit for how it makes the player feel the exact paranoia and dread that it's designed to achieve. The moral of the story is that just because other people don't like a thing, in this case, linearity and signposting in games, it doesn't mean that you personally can't enjoy them. After all, isn't the whole point of Metroid Fusion that things are better if you think for yourself?