Welcome to this series of videos where
we look not an animation but instead aesthetics in Metroid games, specifically
how they build their atmosphere. So far we've seen how Metroid games can portray
an atmosphere of dread, isolation, horror and fear by establishing certain series
staples, such as constant black backgrounds, unsettling and creepy music
and soundscapes, and vast distances between safe spots and power-ups
combined with backtracking. Series staples now remain present in
future Metroid games such as an unsettling score, creepy sound design,
grotesque creatures, isolated exploration in a dark and dank environment, and
placing you in tense situations. We'll now be taking a look at specific examples in
a Metroid game which manufacture fear particularly well, rather than the game
as a whole. This time we're looking at Metroid Fusion for the Gameboy Advance.
There's a couple of things that are different in this game compared to
Metroid or Super Metroid. Progression is linear and not open-ended. This might
seem to go against what you might like to consider a required aspect of a
Metroid game, but in a positive way this allows the game to manufacture certain
situations and events that perhaps aren't possible or as satisfying when
the game is open-ended. This game lays breadcrumbs to build its tense
atmosphere. We'll come to the other thing in a moment but before we get too ahead
of ourselves, let's quickly discuss the themes of each game so far.
If each game so far were to have an overall theme, you could argue Metroid is
adventure, Metroid II's isolation and Super Metroid's is triumph, though feel
free to suggest your own down below. This brings us to argue that Metroid Fusion's
theme could almost certainly be seen as mystery. This theme drips from almost
every element of fusion from story and stage design to the music design and
visuals. The story has Samus investigate an explosion on a space station after
she's recovered from a near-fatal experience with new enemy The X
Parasite, their re-emergence supposedly thanks to Samus's eradication of the
Metroid's in Metroid 2. There's a particular line after learning of an
explosion on the station that Samus thinks during this opening plot: "this
awakened a nameless fear in my heart" Not only are you experiencing dread and
tension while playing a Metroid game, now you explicitly know that our hardened
hero Samus is scared and she doesn't know why. Straight away, you're on edge.
You now have a nameless fear in your heart. Something the game excels at is
making good use of low strings in its music to create a proper tense
atmosphere. Horror and gore are increased much more in this game as well, from things like
dripping slime and skeletal remains to grotesque
transformations. Okay so bringing us back to the breadcrumbs motif, what I mean
here is that the game will drop various bits of information slowly about an
event character or mission and you'll gradually learn more about these
situations as you experience them firsthand. You'll find the game does it a
lot with the bosses and events in each sector and the use of slowly building
this up to an extremely tense situation does something to you: it convinces you
that this is fear. Okay so this is the other thing that game does and indeed
many other games that are horror or fear-based.
It disguises tension as fear. Tension and fear are very similar; both get your
heart rate up and have you on the edge of your seat, squirming to get away.
Except fear is subjective, and tension is objective. Something that's scary to you
won't be scary to someone else. But creating tension in place of fear? That's
real for everyone. Imagine a scary figure. It might scare someone but probably not.
Imagine a tense situation like trying to defuse a bomb with a time limit;
everyone's bound to be on edge during this. But if you combine these two things
into a new situation, say you're trying to get a door open while the figure
slowly approaches you, the tension from the door transforms into fear towards
the figure. Okay let's look at two or three examples of how Metroid Fusion
does this particularly well. Let's start small and work up, shall we? Okay so first
up it's the Arachnus boss at the beginning. So far we've had a pretty
uninteresting opening in the form of just going through some corridors and
investigating an explosion and speaking to your computer. You're told that you
have to download missile data so that you can defend yourself, you already have
the knowledge that the X parasite can mimic living creatures and so far you're
confident that the station is practically autonomous and everything
should run as normal. You're also told that you have
actual defense percentage and it's very low. When you get your missiles you're
told that something has messed with the electrics and the elevator is out and
you'll need to find a new way out of the room to reach this area, which is where
the threat is. You blast your way through this metal hatch and go into the walls
essentially. You'll fall past some huge wires that appear to be severed. You'll
then go through this communal looking area with resident zombies and
flickering lights and your first door monster thing. When you enter, the pre
bossfight room the music becomes tense and as you drop into the main battle
room, you see some x-parasites forming together to make this monster. The music
and sound design form this kind of reveal of what the monster is and then
you'll fight it and you'll complete everything. This is very basic but it
sets the format for the rest of the game. You're told of a disturbance, you see
evidence of the disturbance, you face the disturbance. All the while being littered
with bits of information that remind you of how powerless you are, how isolated
you are and how dangerous this all is. Okay, so secondly it's probably one of my
favourites, it's that grotesque monster Nightmare. You see nightmare earlier in the game in Sector 5, although you're not aware of
what it is, only hearing it's unusual sound as it roars past in the background.
This will probably make you jump because this hasn't happened so far going
through Sector 5. Nothing is mentioned of the beast until it breaks free later on
when all the glass is shattered and is no longer there in the background. Your
computer has told you that it's done some pretty hefty damage to Sector 5 and you
know it's a pretty big monster and that it's now out there in the game world for
you to bump into. You've no idea when or even if this will happen but most encounters with creatures in the games so far have ended with them being consumed
by the X, something your computer constantly reminds you of is a very bad
thing. As you progress trying to find it, you'll
see rooms with massive amounts of damage, doors that are broken and unusable and
areas flooded with water. You finally discover a way to your target zone and
descend into the junk room. As it rises out the junk, lit from underneath and
with a purple glow, immediately you know this isn't a normal boss battle. There's
only a few bosses in this game with their own battle music and this one is
certainly unusual. Slowly rising in a ostinato manner, creeping up.
There's nothing exciting or powerful about this music and it's designed to
throw you off balance and trip you up. Visually there's that horrible mask with
dripping eyes, those undulating, dangerous arms and Nightmares overall weird
ability to warp gravity, literally throwing you off balance, sending the
fight into a psychedelic frenzy. Once you've hit it enough times its mask
breaks off, revealing this hideous looking mess underneath, with a gaping
mouth, dripping face and six eyes, and as the fight goes on, the face melts further
and further and further.. Nightmare moves forwards slowly, creeping
towards you, forcing you to quickly find a way to cause it damage before it
crushes you. Remember the door and figure scenario I said at the beginning?
Nightmare is the 'subjective fear' while the thought of being crushed by this
monstrosity is the 'objective tension'. The fight is won, you get the gravity
suit and on you go. Tension broken by relief.
I love Nightmare, it's built up so well. Clumsily handled in Other M but we'll
get that in another video. Okay and finally my favourite atmosphere
arc is how your nightmarish evil doppelganger SA-X is introduced and
handled throughout the game. The breadcrumbs are laid so early and some
don't even fully pay off until the end of the game. It starts right at the
beginning with this mysterious explosion you don't know what caused it but you
never expect to find out. When you go down the elevator to the other sections
the camera doesn't follow you, then there's that huge explosion with those
cold footsteps, and it looks at the camera with cold,
dead eyes and that screeching noise. Then proceeds to destroy the door ahead and it
continues to cause damage off-screen. Your computer doesn't know what it is
and that's all you hear for a short while until it presents the information
it finds with a jump-scare. And it tells you to run if you ever encounter it. It tells you to run! I mean yeah that's already pretty tense
knowing that this could happen at any point from now on and there's nothing
you can do to damage it. Then you get the bomb data and there's
an explosion, those footsteps and the door has been destroyed. Yeah you know
who it is, I mean man you haven't even encountered the SA-X
yet but you already wish it never existed. A little later you'll come back to a door you've been through and it's also
been destroyed. As you work your way through, you'll drop into this darkened
area lit up only by ...the SA X. Those scary footsteps are back, now accompanied by
low strings and a heartbeat kind of sound. Remember that nameless fear in your heart? Breathe a sigh of relief, you won't
encounter the SA-X for a bit. Okay so let's recap so far; we've got an
unexplained explosion, an unknown agent who looks like you destroying doors, and
your first powerless encounter. It next makes this appearance at this little
scene where you're forced to go into a tunnel. It uses the power bomb and then
you're totally exposed. Played right, you can stay put and avoid it but play it
wrong and it will give chase and you'll have to act quickly to avoid death.
You'll encounter the SA-X like this a few more times with similar results, with you
growing in strength but still unable to cause any damage, requiring you to run
each time, and the encounter is always unexpected. This one right here after
finding the reactor core is particularly notable because you're dropped straight
into its room and it will give chase and you will have to run and you will have
to open doors when it's chasing you down. You'll eventually find it attempting to
destroy a bunch of secret Metroids before being destroyed itself and then
learning that there are in fact a number of SA-Xs aboard the ship, meaning each
one you encountered might likely have been a new one each time. This whole arc
ends with you facing off with one final SA-X right before you set the station on
a fatal course with the nearby planet. In a final twist, the core from an SA-X is
what saves you in a final fight. This breadcrumb design can be found in loads
of places in the game like with Serris and the discovery of its remains, the
choked-up reactor, the mysterious bird statue,
Ridley's remains and the Metroid husks just to name a few. There's many things
this game does well, I mean the sound design alone does a lot of heavy lifting
and the enemy design is just great, but personally these are the things that I
believe give the game is brilliantly rich atmosphere. These sorts of things
in retrospect are present in Metroid 2 and Super Metroid in minor ways, such as
the discovery of the shattered infant Metroid case in Ridley's lair and
finding empty Metroid shells in Metroid 2, but this breadcrumb and tension design
I feel is pretty much the identity of Metroid Fusion. I look forward to
breaking down some of the techniques Metroid Prime uses in completely
drawing you into its atmosphere in the next video, tentative release date of
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My favorite Metroid by far. I never thought 2D sprites on a handheld could make me feel fear, but the part where you are suddenly thrust into a one v one situation with the SA-X and have to run for your life legitimately terrifies me.
This game did so well at making me feel dread of not only new areas, but when back tracking through previous areas. The music was so eerie and I remember walking around with the constant fear I would hear footsteps running after me at any moment.
Also, that Nightmare boss was so unsettling when his face started melting off as you weakened him down...
My first Metroid game, and one of my first GBA games too. I felt so weird being scared from a game with a screen smaller than my hand
There were two parts that dreaded me the first few play through. One is whenever you had to run from sa-x. Does so much damage... Other is when you enter the ice environment and have the ice x chase you.
I'm not able to watch this video so I don't know what it says, but Metroid Fusion had one of my favorite villains of all time.
The villain is simple, but so much more powerful than you for the majority of the game and the sequences they put in where you run from Samus X are really effective in communicating that (and showing you how powerful Samus herself is).
The way they blur the question of how intelligent Samus X and the viruses in general are is also brilliant. I mean, clearly they're capable of planning and complex tasks (like transforming into a scientist to get his memories and expertise) but they do it in such a drone-like pattern, like they're "intelligent" but still slaves to their instincts.
This is what took them a step above Metroids (who were just basic animals being utilized as bio-weapons) and the Space Pirates (who were obviously intelligent being pirates but even Ridley never had a meaningful interaction with Samus). They had just the right amount of spooky mystery to them. They could behave and think like an intelligent species, but did they have a goal beyond reproduction?
It's a shame Nintendo never had the balls to continue where Fusion left off, and instead is committed to making prequels forever.
Fusion is my prime example for an unbalanced difficulty curve. The game generally is very easy, until the spider boss who is incredibly hard and also very far away from any (useable) save point.
And worse: once you finally kill them, unless you are exploring that huge room full of vines you will, without the ability to save yet again, run into the most difficult SA-X sequence of the game which also contains the one single point of the game where you have to use the shoulder buttons in order to proceed.
Worse, once you beat that hellish sequence, the game goes back to easy mode.
And yet, beating these two scenes is one of the most rewarding things I have done in all of my gaming life and I still feel a sense of accomplishment - and dread whenever I decide to replay this pearl of a game.
But for all the railroading the rest of this game does, why the fuck couldn’t they have placed a save point right before and after the spider boss?
I'm a sucker for these type of space horror genre. (System shock 2, Dead Space, Event Horizon) Prey 2017 had this going too especially during its first half of the game and i was so engross in it that i keep thinking about it after i turned it off. But unfortunately you get too OP after that if you take your time to explore every nook and crany (which the game encourages) and suddenly decides to toss big burly monsters every now and then just to annoy you instead of making you work for it. Regardless Prey is still my GOTY for 2017
On the other hand Fusion had this method done methodically right throughout the game.