I've always liked that the blue on the fusion suit almost looks like the zero suit streatched over the suit. You could make the argument that the old zero suit, which was always implied to help with interfacing with the suit, offered a degree of separation between samus and the armor, but now the armor is bursting out. There is no separation anymore. The amor now is as much a part of her as she is part of it, a fusion as you said.
This is actually untrue. The Zero Suit had not been designed when Fusion came out. It made its first appearance in Zero Mission 2 years later. It's either a total coincidence or that the Zero Suit was actually based off the fusion suit rather than the other way around. Retroactively cresting that connection
@marche800 ... what did i say that was untrue. Yes, the zero suit came out later, so i do agree that it is a retoactive connection at best, but I never said that it was definitively why the fusion suit looks like that. All in all i just think it's an interesting design point, even if retroactively.
Sadly its that very same Baby Metroid's DNA that did save Samus's life Its cool design but also very sad visual presentation Baby sacrificed its life so Mama dont die but it did become part of Samus
They actually have to SURGICALLY REMOVE her suit to save her from the parasyte, at this point samus and her varia suit have become one, and the "Devolution" that plays here in fusion helps bring out the vulnerability of Samus without her suit, and even in the endgame samus is just thinking how deadly the SaX would be if it learned how to use her entire arsenal, my favorite metroid by FAR
I personally think it's one of the worst Metroids, simply because it's extremely linear. You always have some robot telling you where to go and what to do, and you can't stray from it.
That's always been the case. The reason they had to surgically remove it is because it can only be removed by Samus herself since it's connected to her nervous system. The doctors just had to work around it.
@@Oscar97o That sounds more like you just don't personally enjoy it rather than it being objectively "worse" from a videogame standpoint. Not every game in a videogame series needs to play exactly the same as the others, and Fusion is the very rare story-focused Metroid game. The gameplay might not be for everyone, and that's ok! All the other nonlinear Metroids still exist for those that enjoy them.
One detail we noticed is the Fusion suit has some elements of the Metroids themselves. The pink helmet could be a reference to the nuclei/eyes of the Metroid, the arm spikes akin to their mandible, and the arm cannon more green and fleshy detail references the green dome of the Metroids. And give she was injured with Metroid dna to help stop the X from killing her, it make narrative sense, and acts as a bit of foreshadowing to when she will become the alpha and the Omega.
I always liked how samus became part metroid through bonding with this suit. Theres a lot of interesting themes of a hunter *fusing* with a predator. There's some good story telling in gameplay with samus gaining the traits of a metroid, allowing her to absorb the X but making her incredibly vulnerable to her own gear. Gear tuned to hunting metroids.
Bonus: the Sa-X hunts Samus primarily by freezing her with the ice beam then firing a super missile, because that’s the best way to kill Metroids in Super and the X stole that knowledge from her when they copied the suit
The comparison to visible human muscles is even more apparent in Dread, too, where the thinner parts of the suit are just straight up styled after muscle
her power suit has always been a part of her body, quite literally a living biotech armor, and both the Fusion and Dread suits are best examples of it's biomechanical nature, showing it is slowly healing itself
The Fusion Suit is my favorite Samus look. I like the idea of fusion between human and technology, I like how it narratively/aesthetically justifies a tweak to Samus's mechanical place in the world (and losing all of her powerups AGAIN), I like how it confirms that Samus's wide shoulders aren't just her armor having huge pauldrons, she's just Like That.
The Fusion Suit is single-handedly the best narrative cause for Samus getting depowered in the series, like of course getting her entire suit surgically removed and fucked over by the X would break all the equipment, especially if the Fusion Suit is literally just her Zero Suit with spare bits of the armor stuck to it. Presumably the upgrades she get are ‘installed’ into the Power Suit, not the Zero Suit, so when the scientists removed the Power Suit they removed the upgrades too On a side note, Raven Beak forcibly ‘uninstalling’ the upgrades is a close second to my favorite reasons, even if it’s headcanon. Like it totally makes sense to me that he’d take all the weapons and upgrades she’d acquired to either get her killed (he _is_ after her DNA after all, and it’d be a lot easier to collect her corpse from some random weak-ass wildlife that he can dispatch instantly or from the EMMI’s if she can’t fight back; either that or she succeeds despite the odds, which makes her a worthy warrior and gives him a good show after she reaches him. He just wasn’t expecting the Metroid powers, if she didn’t have that she would have died) Metroid’s been getting better about the narrative reasons for her to be depowered (aside from a few Other exceptions) and I’m here for it
the shoulders. yeah. 😂 not saying you're wrong but if that's their intention, then she should be an absolute UNIT in the zero suit. I wish they had actually leaned into that instead of just going with the generic body type. we rarely see female videogame characters like that, even in "realistic games".
@@lukefortune8314 she had that body type in the super Metroid manual, all muscle and badass, definitely like that look a lot more than ‘generic pretty blonde’ I have to admit tho I do also find the dissonance between ‘badass bounty hunter’ and ‘generic pretty blonde’ kinda funny
Serris can be terrifying. He breaks half the platforms, moves faster than you can possibly dodge, moves unpredictably, and screams at you. Not anywhere near as loudly as Ridley, but still.
They should have given her this type of design, she does not look like someone who has been twisted and fusioned with the void, she looks like an e-girl in provocative cosplay
Honestly even making her helmeted form the default, rather than something you have to manually activate, would improve it. Having people to have to make the choice to open Kaisa up to be vulnerable, rather than it being her default choice for combat? It would actually communicate the cautious attitude she allegedly has but never displays... But yes, Void Samus would be way better than any Kaisa skin. I can actually enjoy Samus as a character.
Metroid fusion was the first Metroid game I ever played as a kid he was my first introduction to anything horror and even though it's a platform shooter, the first shooter I ever played. I played that game like 7 times. And the fusion suit is peak to me. I don't know if it's the nostalgia glasses or the fact that I'm really into biopunk but I love that it looks like a fleshy mucusy growth covering Sci-Fi armor (Yes, I'm fully aware that's that's what's going on)
Kinda the same for me but I did play the first og from nes but was aware of what the game was until I played fusion and the first metroid game I finished.
I think this is the furthest the series has ever gone with exploring the biomechanical aspects of the Chozo Power Suit. I used to not care much for the design, but it's grown on me over time.
Also, I love the fact in Fusion, Samus carries her Arm Cannon in a shotgun carry (hand under the barrel), while is literally every other game she carries her Arm Cannon with her hand over the barrel, stabiling the weapon. In Fusion, Samus is too weak to stabilize her arm cannon like this, so she has to hold it up with her off hand. This is never stated, it's just a nice little detail in her sprite. Man, I love little details like this.
Her being unable to take it off is a mistranslation/misunderstanding. The suit always had organic parts and could not be removed while she is unconscious. Several of the ending cards have her out of her suit. Even in the gameplay, when she dies, her animation shows her still having her human body.
This is unironically the short that sent me on a 7 hour binge of metroid fusion and metroid dread. Really well written, and thanks for sending me on that journey TBSkeyen!
A great element of game design that reinforces the horror elements, is that the X you absorb for HP, NEVER give you back more HP than a single attack from any enemy in the game. If you get hit even once, you have to defeat multiple enemies to get back to max health. Especially when I was younger and worse at the game, each time I got damaged felt like a major setback, turning some expeditions into the stations incredibly tense, as i tried to make to a recharge room with only a few bars of health left, and it made me get really good at killing specific enemies so I could reliably farm them for HP.
Syken specifically compared the color of the fusion suit to the zero suits color, and while in older games the outfits were similar, they were different in form and, more importantly, color. The color comparison he made simply didn't exist at the time when the fusion suit was first introduced.
@@kyogrecrown5869to be fair the difference in color could be explained, lore wise, by all the genetic fuckery/the X screwing things up From what I remember tho the colors are now meant to match, for example in Smash Bros Samus’s alt that’s based on the Fusion Suit is very similar to Zero Suit’s default color, but I very well could be misremembering
Its a fusion of Galactic Federation and Chozo tech, human and Metroid DNA, and of Samus and her suit itself. Fusion really is the perfect name for the suit and the game.
To me the suit always took me out with the bright light yellow and blue with the more spherical muscle like exposes It is so alien, that it just works.
This was actually designed before the Zero suit made its first appearance in Zero Mission (hence the name). Before this she wore a black two piece and in this game underneath she has a blue top and shorts. I
I'm really looking forward to the design for the Metroid Dread suit, because not only is it an evolution on the design of the Fusion suit it's also my favorite suit of Samus's.
The Fusion Suit was the first real introduction I had to Samus, as Metroid Fusion was my starting point with the franchise. I was always under the impression that the blue material was not dissimilar from a hospital gown on a patient, with the blotches of yellow at the bulk of her muscles being fragments of the Varia suit that were either inoperable or unscathed by the X infection. It felt more to me like a gelatinous protective layer over the damaged and lost components to her suit, like dressing on a wound - only truly "healed" in the end when Samus has reabsorbed the SA-X that robbed her of her power in the first place. It clashed against the underlying color scheme of the Varia suit it concealed until Samus was finally returned to her full strength, and that says a lot already.
Metroid Fusion essentially answers a question about her Power Suit: It's not just a suit of armor, it's part of her. First the suit generate the organic part, which is why the suit fits her nicely. It's also why the SA-X can copy her WITH the varia suit: The x can only copy organic matter. It can replicate plating, clothes, etc, but it needs to be organic. Essentially Fusion shows how the Power Suit is without the plating, and it looks weird because again, it was stripped out by force. The suit would then generate the plating, but since the plating was forcefully removed, it will do it slowly. Another interesting thing about the suit is that the Metroid Vaccine was only applied to her after the parts were removed, meaning they could not get to her body before removing the plating but the organic part is one with her skin so it works easier to penetrate. Finally, Dread shows that the suit can regenerate but it will never be the same anymore, the plating will probably not regenerate completely, and I think Samus will prefer that way, this way she's more mobile. I wish they have done a Fusion remake though, with huge maps and all of that.
It always gave the vibe that the suit went under her zero suit and melded to/became her skin, that gives you (or me) the vibe that it sucks to move, like having a shirt above a jacket
They don't show the back of the armor that often, but there's a triangle of circles that mirror the 3 red things in a Metroid, to hammer home that the vaccine made from the Baby Metroid saved her from her initial X Parasite infection.
Yeah I love the fusion suit on her. Especially when you see it in the sprites and pixel art, the colours fit so well. It also works where even when you get power ups that give the armour the same colours and features of her base armour, you can still visually realize that it’s not the same thing. The power suit is gone, taken by the SA-X and twisted into an abomination, she has fully lost that part of herself and has to start from square one with this weaker Metroid-fused armour.
I've always loved how Samus supports her arm cannon from below like a shotgun rather than from above like a western movie revolver. Makes her seem more on edge
I love the fusion suit.. especially because thematically it WAS a rush job. That being why samus is so vulnerable compared to the upgraded version of it come dread. Where she CAN remove parts of it given she has assistance
I really like that Fusion fucked her up so bad (not narratively, but physically and maybe mentally since both games are the closest she came to death besides maybe Super Metroid), she still didn't recover by the time Dread released. Parts of her suit still show some of the blue muscle tissue, although some parts of it could regenerate again. We knew for a while that her suit isn't any standard technology but actually bonded to her on a psionic level to the point that people other than herself actually cannot take it off, which is why she looks so mangled in Fusion and Dread despite being at the top of her game and bloodlust in both titles
I actually never understood it to be that the Fusion Suit is permanently bonded to her body, just that the suit is partially organic and cannot be removed when she’s unconscious because she materializes and dematerializes the suit at will to take it on and off, and that’s why it had to be surgically removed. Otherwise I’d assume the death animation wouldn’t include the classic scene of Samus losing the suit, and there’d be no 100% gallery images of her outside of the suit. Other than that misunderstanding, this was a great video though
My second favorite Metroid game. I love how broken the suit is. Especially when you see it in dread and it looks so organic. Quick correction though. When she says she can’t take the suit off it’s actually a bit of a translation error. She says her body is forever changed because she treats the suit as part of her. That’s why she can take it off at the end of Fusion.
i also find it interesting that Samus in Fusion holds the arm cannon from below, as opposed to holding it from the top as usual, signifying that she is much weaker than usual.
As someone who's played (and beaten) Fusion, this suit has by far got some of the best design that isn't the Metroid Prime power suit (or any other prime suit) especially at the end of the game when you just get SA-X's Core-X, essentially having what I'd like to call the SA-X Fusion Suit before obliterating the Omega Metroid with a barrage of Spazer Ice Beams
A lot of rements of the Fusion suit carry over to the Dread suit as it's been said that if the suit goes into critical damage, it will slowly repair itself.
Samus has always been bonded to her suit, it's literally a part of her. The lines in the intro saying that the suit cannot be removed is the fact that she's unconscious and the suit locked up to protect her. Its a failsafe in the event that Samus becomes unconscious in a dangerous situation. She CAN take it off, she removes it at the end of the game, much like all previous games.
The thing I love most about this game is that it gives a first hand experience for what it’s like to fight Samus. She is the deadliest, most versatile thing in the galaxy. If she sees you, you either run and pray you’re fast and sneaky enough or die.
that really is a problem. It’s a lot of media is trying to show that your scale of power certain characters for example, a lot of people dig on Power Rangers saying oh they’re Captain America level because you don’t really get sense of scale what level they’re fighting at when there are rare this one you can get a level of scale it really kind of punches you in the out of oh yeah yeah these monsters we are doomed if there aren’t any rangers. really good example that you can kind of say look up kamen rider wizard here, the first episode is subbed by toei and we get to see the police take on Mook and a monster of the week and then the title car to do the same thing so we can get a one to one reference of just how devastating and dangerous even the Mook are that our hero takes out by the dozens.
What I think is really cool (and likely the main intent behind the design) is how it incorporates Metroid imagery to reflect Samus’ now partly-Metroid DNA: The “fangs” on her helmet and arm spikes resemble a Metroid’s mandibles, and the three lights on the back resemble a Metroid’s nuclei when viewed from the front. It’s a BRILLIANT design that’s meant to be off-putting.
