I played this game 20 years ago on the GBA when it first came out and I remember loathing it, but all the little church boys on GameFAQs were INSISTENT that the problem lie with me. So, it’s been twenty years. I beat this fucker back when Saddam was still alive, and now it’s try to do one more lap.

Hey, maybe I’m older and wiser right? Maybe I won’t have such preconceived notions and can try to enjoy the game for what it is, not what I want it to be.

Nope.

This thing is ass. Which is a hard thing to say, because it looks FANTASTIC. It sounds amazing! It’s got great atmosphere, and an interesting premise!

But it also ACTIVELY HATES THE PLAYER and DOES NOT WANT YOU TO HAVE ANY FUN.

Every five fucking minutes I have to go talk to that computer, and god forbid I try to go anywhere other than explicitly where I’m supposed to. Even when I do find some super hidden shit and feel smart, nope - that’s the way you were supposed to go *anyway*. And there are CONSTANT screw attack walls blocking hidden upgrades. No big deal, I’ll come back when I have that. Except you won’t. After all the shitty bosses and suffering, you finally get that screw attack, but if you talk to the computer before you go explore - OH WELL, go fuck yourself. It’s bad enough that you get the final upgrade just five minutes before the end of the game, but WORSE that they lock you out of using that power?

(But anon if you beat the game and reload your save, you can go-) Yeah but it doesn’t fucking tell you that, does it? It just asks you if you want to start over, which I assume means New Game Plus? You never know with this game because it’s a constant battle of “How the fuck was I supposed to know that”. So you restart the game and now your old save is gone and FUCK THIS GAME.

>>11935903 (OP)
I’m so glad I’m done with it, for a second time. This game took everything I loved about Super Metroid and didn’t just *miss* - no, it actively vomited all over it and seemed intentionally designed by a guy going through a messy divorce to make you hate life.

Fuck Metroid Fusion. Not to mention this was the clear canary in the coal mine of how the series would get enshittified going forward.

>>11935903 (OP)
I haven't played the whole game so I can't talk shit, but I agree with you. The visuals are so good, but the game never felt good to play. Whats the word, pixel hunting? Just wasn't fun for me. The atmosphere and tension were amazing, but it never felt good unlocking another zone, the "key" was always just some fuckin thing like running toward a wall. That's the part I gave up at. Moon logic

The other way around for me. I played it without having any preconception of what people online said about it and thought it was an excellent game, then when I stumble upon online discussion I have people telling me I am wrong for enjoying it because of some cutscenes

>>11935961
I've only seen love for the cutscenes. I usually see people complain about the disappointing sense of exploration and gating

Not reading all that, but
>[good game] is ACKshyually bad!
is the gayest kind of topic

>>11935971
It's too linear and not fun to explore like the other Metroids

>>11935903 (OP)
I don't like it too much except for boss fights, although even that is meh due to hitboxes and gimmicks, but the non-linear romhack and randomizer is really enjoyable, especially since it's a big fuck you to the restrictive design of the vanilla experience.

>>11935961
It’s obviously not just the cutscenes, though those are lemon in the wound. All it would take to make this a serviceable game would be to have a handful of cool secrets you can go find in the areas you’ve already been, using the abilities you just got. You could decide to keep plugging away at the main story, or could go do some ‘splorin. But the game seems to actively punish you 99% of the time for doing anything other than simply following the path. Until you HAVE to find a way to break the path because that’s the *intended secret path*. Which again, I could get behind - if there were *any* sense of discovery at all.

And then at the very end, when you finally get all the abilities you need to really do some splorin….. if you accidentally talk to the computer even a single additional time, fuck you, all doors are locked and you don’t get to do shit. Any sane dev would have a dialogue that said “hey, this is the point of no return, if there’s anything you wanted to do in this place - now’s your last chance”. But honestly, who cares - it is like 5 minutes before the end of the game. They have gatekept you and prevented you from having any fun for every grueling step of the journey, why should you even care at this point?

Every time you DO get an upgrade, it barely matters because the very next the thing the devs do is now bully you for even MORE upgrades you don’t have. The only cool and satisfying upgrade was near the end when the monsters were getting so tough your blaster can’t do shit and every monster requires ice missles and then FINALLY you get the plasma beam and can slice through them again. That was pretty satisfying ngl, but the game needed a lot more of those moments instead of endless punishment

>>11935971
It is, but I feel I have valid complaints here. If this were Dead Space on GBA, I’d say - hey that’s a decent game. But this has the balls to call itself METROID 4 right on the title screen, so it sets certain expectations. And then actively stabs us in the taint

That would be like buying Dead Space 2, and then it’s a top down JRPG and idiots like you would say “what’s the big deal, it was a good game!” missing the fucking point that’s not what fans were expecting or wanted.

Metroid Fusion convinced me that Super Metroid was a fluke and that Nintendo has no idea why people liked that game.
While we're at it, I didn't care much for Zero Mission either.

>>11935903 (OP)
Retard filtered by good game, a tale as old as time

>>11935990
Not filtered at all, faggot. I’ve beaten it twice now, once on release and once again just now - both times on original hardware. I disliked it both times, so go fuck yourself. Sorry you have shit taste and English is your second language.

>>11935987
Thanks for the sanity. This is the only conclusion I can come to. What happened to the dream team that fucked our worlds off their axis with shit like Link to the Past and Suoer Metroid? It’s like they all went into a coma for a decade or two afterwards.

This is why I’m even more furious that Link Between Worlds is gated to 3DS, because holy shit it’s like they suddenly remembered how to create SNES magic on modern hardware again for a minute.

>>11935987
Which is curious because the design is really intricate when you take closer look and it's even hard to believe that some of the sequence breaks are accidental.
Zero mission has the right idea, maybe it's even more ambitious than Super, but the way it handles it doesn't feel great.

>>11935903 (OP)
>Even when I do find some super hidden shit and feel smart, nope - that’s the way you were supposed to go *anyway*
So you're saying it used its overall linearity to puzzles much harder to solve? Like, having good game design born from a limitation? What? That was my favorite part of the game. I loved the niche Metroid-isms knowledge checks being baked into the core progression

>>11936025
>to puzzles
I swear to God I'm not Indian, I just backspaced awkward wording and forgot to add a word

>>11935903 (OP)
>Even when I do find some super hidden shit and feel smart, nope - that’s the way you were supposed to go *anyway*
Thank god super metroid wasn't designed for me to find.. everything they.. put in for the player to find...

Oh gods am I not the super smart explorer of virtual worlds I thought I was?? No.. but I.. oh no no no THIS MUST BE SOME SICK JOKE

>>11936025
Op here and yes, I’m going to give it that to be fair - but what was infuriating is there were NO cool secrets to find. Every time you did figure out some clever shit, it was “ahhh, you figured out the way to go”. There were random upgrades hidden behind a stray missile or bomb block here or there, but nothing that made you feel smart for finding some out of the way upgrade. There was no reason they couldn’t have had both.

Near the end you can see them really start to have some fun and break their own linearity and you’re like - oh shit, this thing is about to crack wide open and become a joined breathing world…. And then it immediately ends. I would even accept the entire game as is, if there were 25% more of it where the map opened up afterwards and you were turned loose.

>>11936049
Surely even an 80 IQ retard like you can understand the difference between 1.) here’s an obfusticated path lying embedded in lots of side paths to cool and useful upgrades, all of which are going to require some curiosity and experimentation to find and 2.) there is only one way to go, and sometimes that way to go is hard as fuck to figure out, with no real reward other than - you get to keep going down the one way to go.

>>11936063
>Surely even an 80 IQ retard like you can understand the difference between
Show your IQ by concisely explaining the difference

Do your absolute best

>>11936061
Having Super or ZM openness in a game with main paths as well hidden as secrets in those games would be very frustrating to play. I'm pretty sure Fusion also forces you to properly shinespark a few times, or at the very least heavily incentivizes using its more complicated attributes. It's not even about the difficulty, it would be a matter of the intended path being indistinguishable on the surface from over a hundred secret ones

>>11936076
The fact that you need it explained to you the difference between a linear game with no discovery, and the superior predecessor which thrives on discovery and exploration to succeed shows I was absolutely accurate about the 80 IQ remark. The fact that you don’t intuitively grasp that there’s a serious difference between those two concepts (that doesn’t need explaining) means you have way too much microplastic in your brain.

>>11936089
> addressing the main complaint about the game would make the game worse ackshually.

Fucking zoomers and their zero degrees of frustration tolerance. No, you fucking retard that would have made the game amazing. Super Metroid has a portion of the game where you bust your ASS getting out of Norfair and struggle to climb back to the surface and the very next thing you need to do to progress is go BACK down to Norfair but it doesn’t tell you that - as a result you end up exploring the shit out of the map. That kind of game design was brilliant, not bad.

It would have been fantastic to have some optional paths with hard as nails methods to access, or even some simple gated paths to upgrades through abilities that are slightly out of the way. Figuring out how to beat some of those bosses damn near required a strategy guide / the internet anyway; they might as well have doubled down on the esoteric bullshit and at least made a fun, complex Metroid game.

>>11936109
Super doesn't have any main paths on the level of its most obscure secrets. If I hear one more person say zoomer on this board I'm killing someone

>>11936093
>can't explain it because he doesn't understand it himself
>gets mad and lashes out
Typical.

>>11936116

>>11935903 (OP)
>I am le old! listen to my shitty opinions!
You were always a dumbass, case closed.

>>11936137
NES, RoS, Super, and ZM all use identifiable geometry to funnel you along an intended path. They're basically impossible to beat if you're not looking for patterns or trying to brute force every single tile. Making Fusion nonlinear while maintaining the difficulty of its progression would be like hiding progression paths in the other games behind the functionally random tiles that hide upgrades and the little offshoot rooms leading to them. Having the potential to bang your head on, literally, over a hundred dead ends because they can't be told apart from a more distinct primary path wouldn't be fun. Really, would you have fun if you had to guess which full-tilt shinespark puzzle in ZM took you further into the game?
>deliberately obtuse response

>>11936137
lol

>>11935903 (OP)
/v/ hated it back then, have an old image.
then again its hard to compare to super metroid.

>>11935994
>I hate this game so much I've played it multiple times!

>>11936254
>Doesn't finish the game
Your opinion doesn't matter then!
>Finishes the game
You're retarded!

>>11935903 (OP)
>mobile filename
>inflammatory shitpost
get fucked faggot

>>11935903 (OP)
I like it the most out of the 2D Metroids as there is less tedious backtracking and running in circles checking blocks, it's the only Metroid game where regular enemies actually pose a threat, and the controls are far better than Super.

But it's a double-edge sword, because even for someone who prefers linear games, it is extremely on rails, the constant computer sections bog down the pace, and enemies regenerating right in front of your face constantly is super annoying.

Honestly the Metroid series in general is just really overrated. No wonder it sold like shit, it deserved to stay irrelevant.

>>11936735
Its worth knowing about for the creepy music and atmosphere. And it was probably more fun to play than a lot of other NES and SNES games. But yeah I don't think fusion did anything to save the series other than the visuals being lovely. But people like prime, so i dunno. That first level in prime, the pirate ship, is so memorable, I can't even talk shit about actual gameplay. Anyways the series filled a creepy spacey niche and I guess that means it will never die.