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Asterite34 posted:Fusion was a bit more linear than, say, Super Metroid, there's generally a prescribed path for a lot of the game. It's sort of a concession to it being a handheld title, it's deisgned to be played in relatively short stretches such that if you're away from it for a bit and then come back, you won't be hopelessly lost because you forgot where you were going. It's a bit like Metroid 2 for the original Gameboy that way. That said, it does open up a bit in the latter bits as you can start breaking out of the intended path (which is actually something of a plot point) I've heard that Super Metroid's nonlinearity wasn't very well received in Japan, which would maybe indicate why when they finally revisited Metroid they went with a more linear, guided approach. Which maybe the maturation of metroidvanias as a genre in their own right outside of either Metroid or Castlevania might be what promoted the return to more classic form with Dread. I also get the impression that after the videogame industry started getting reliable translation for Japanese games, Japanese devs started to prefer way more text/dialogue-heavy games that closely guide the player entirely unlike the classic NES/SNES era, and these days it's more likely that more silent unguided experiences will be from American devs.
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# ? Mar 3, 2023 22:01 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 05:10 |
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I appreciate Dread for having wall jump in it, for those Metroid veterans coming straight after playing Super. Samus may lose her abilities, but she doesn't forget her sick skillz.
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# ? Mar 3, 2023 22:33 |
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icantfindaname posted:Not to mention mechanics like the charge beam combos and crystal flash not being documented anywhere
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# ? Mar 3, 2023 22:36 |
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I like the missile upgrade early in Fusion that can be easily obtained if you can walljump. It seemed like a very clear wink to Super players.
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# ? Mar 3, 2023 23:01 |
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super metroid and zero mission are basically in a different genre than fusion and dread because they have single-wall walljumping
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 00:28 |
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Super Metroid isn't good because it can be sequence broken. It can be sequence broken because of the ways in which it is good. It has extremely nuanced controls and physics that are expressive and exploitable. The world design is multi-faceted and organic, lacking in constructed barriers beyond some colored doors. In order to prevent players getting overly frustrated with being lost or not making progress, the game definitely opens itself up and offers multiple similar paths towards different kinds of progress.
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 00:29 |
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scary ghost dog posted:super metroid and zero mission are basically in a different genre than fusion and dread because they have single-wall walljumping https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lqkg9TKRyVo You were saying?
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 03:24 |
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Holy fuckin poo poo Does that open up any new sequence breaks? I haven't played since a few months after launch but did some of them like early gravity suit, it was fun as hell drat I should play dread a few more times
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 03:46 |
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Nah. Most of its utility is in making Kraid phase 2 faster since you can just hop up to the spider magnet.
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 03:53 |
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TaurusOxford posted:Nah. Most of its utility is in making Kraid phase 2 faster since you can just hop up to the spider magnet. Still laughing at not 1, but 2 quick-kills for Kraid, depending on your preferred sequence break. early bomb or early phase-shift
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 04:09 |
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icantfindaname posted:Not to mention mechanics like the charge beam combos and crystal flash not being documented anywhere ExcessBLarg! posted:They were documented in Nintendo Power. As for Fusion, I'll be the dissenting viewpoint and say that it was my very least favorite Metroid game until Other M happened, so here's my two cents: Keep in mind, day of release, I didn't give a single poo poo about Metroid Prime and was all the way hyped for Metroid 4. But then right out of the gate, it was the first Metroid game without outstanding music, which would be a drag, but it's not just that it's not great. It's bad. It's irritating. Tinny. It's not atmospheric in the slightest. It was the first Metroid game to railroad you so completely on both a story and gameplay level that you never once feel in control of your own destiny. Metroid up until that point (and at that point, since Prime was released on the same day) was about dropping you off somewhere lonely, scary, and downright beautiful and letting you go on a meandering exploratory journey of adventure where you set the rules. Suddenly, it was about being given permission to do things and a terribly-written computer giving you orders and preventing you from going where you want. It was the first Metroid game to make both Samus and the player subservient. This would be fine if it was trying to do something that could only work under those constraints, or if it found ways to tie that itself to the theme, but it wasn't. It was just lazy. It's the first Metroid to take place in an environment that in no way felt like a world. It was a series of video game levels with a hub world. That's not Metroid. I would step over my own mother to see Zebes or Tallon IV. You couldn't pay me to visit the BSL station. 'Course, they're all blown the gently caress up now anyway. :-P I'd list its good parts, but every single good thing about Metroid Fusion was built upon and done better in Zero Mission. It's a game for completionists more than a destination unto itself. It's the Metroid game you play when you're out of better Metroids and want to keep going. Which places it above the game to be avoided at all costs, but that's just damning with faint praise. Seriously, though. Play Zero Mission. It's incredible. I mean, hell. Play both, 'cause I'm weird and you'll like almost certainly like Fusion. But it's like they listened in to all of my thoughts and fixed literally everything I didn't like.
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 04:19 |
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zero mission is godlike but fusion does do one thing better than every other 2D metroid: beam upgrades look and feel insanely powerful in it
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 04:58 |
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DoctorWhat posted:Super Metroid isn't good because it can be sequence broken. It can be sequence broken because of the ways in which it is good. It has extremely nuanced controls and physics that are expressive and exploitable. The world design is multi-faceted and organic, lacking in constructed barriers beyond some colored doors. In order to prevent players getting overly frustrated with being lost or not making progress, the game definitely opens itself up and offers multiple similar paths towards different kinds of progress.
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 05:27 |
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Fusions wave beam is the coolest poo poo ever and I'm disappointed Dread doesn't have the cool helix effect.
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 07:46 |
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Fun randomiser fact: Fusion has single wall jumping if you get the screw attack without getting the space jump.
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 08:10 |
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scary ghost dog posted:zero mission is godlike but fusion does do one thing better than every other 2D metroid: beam upgrades look and feel insanely powerful in it ChaseSP posted:Fusions wave beam is the coolest poo poo ever and I'm disappointed Dread doesn't have the cool helix effect.
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 08:15 |
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I think of the more on-rails nature of Fusion as just one more way the story is emphasizing that Samus is weakened and recovering. It's all over the game, from the Fusion Suit missing a lot of the Power Suit's armored appearance, or the different way she holds her arm cannon, or the SA-X continually forcing you to run and hide. Fusion makes you feel limited and constrained, and then it gradually gives you that power back, be it Samus getting back parts of her suit or going further and further off the beaten path or no longer being quite so helpless against the SA-X up until the end when she can finally defeat it. Like, gameplay-wise I can understand not liking it as much, but until Dread Fusion had the best narrative work of the series by a lot, and would even if you cut out all the talking sequences. It's got a good grasp of doing something deliberate with the gamefeel. I can understand liking Dread's work in that department more, though, since it gives Samus more opportunities to do cool things.
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 08:30 |
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LividLiquid posted:Seriously, though. Play Zero Mission. It's incredible. I mean, hell. Play both, 'cause I'm weird and you'll like almost certainly like Fusion. But it's like they listened in to all of my thoughts and fixed literally everything I didn't like. I played zero mission so much I broke the L button on my GBA. Zero Mission owns and still holds up great.
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 09:15 |
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LividLiquid posted:It was the first Metroid game to railroad you so completely on both a story and gameplay level that you never once feel in control of your own destiny. Metroid up until that point (and at that point, since Prime was released on the same day) was about dropping you off somewhere lonely, scary, and downright beautiful and letting you go on a meandering exploratory journey of adventure where you set the rules. Suddenly, it was about being given permission to do things and a terribly-written computer giving you orders and preventing you from going where you want. It was the first Metroid game to make both Samus and the player subservient. This would be fine if it was trying to do something that could only work under those constraints, or if it found ways to tie that itself to the theme, but it wasn't. It was just lazy.
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 10:13 |
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I have funny feelings about Zero Mission. Zero Mission's sequence "breaks" are all so authored. I know there's been some recent clipping developments, but ZM's Unknown Items and heavily scripted epilogue and stealth sequences, and the way Power Bombs are gated off and shape the 100% route, end up feeling very artificial and patronizing. Despite this, the actual game feel is spectacular and the secrets are very well laid-out. It's an incredibly densely designed world. It just feels too designed. Dread and Zero Mission can feel very similar, but Dread being glitchier (psuedowaves, shine sinking, escaping water using corners and bombs, etc.) makes speedrunning and sequence breaking feel extra good.
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 15:58 |
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LividLiquid posted:This would be fine if it was trying to do something that could only work under those constraints, or if it found ways to tie that itself to the theme, but it wasn't. It was just lazy. you just described the themes of Metroid Fusion and then said that they aren’t tied into any theme
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 16:11 |
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I think fusions is easily the best 2D Metroid but I don’t particularly care for the free range backtracking that it doesn’t really have
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 16:15 |
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DoctorWhat posted:I have funny feelings about Zero Mission. I agree with you. Zero Mission is cool until the final bit where you have to run back through the entire world to pick up a bunch of power ups gated behind the screw attack and power bombs just for the sake of collection. It feels very forced and inorganic and is my least favorite thing about the game.
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 16:25 |
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DoctorWhat posted:I have funny feelings about Zero Mission. I mean, if it wasn't for Dread having those glitches then it would have been designed just like Zero Mission in regards to sequence breaks; ie everything carefully planned out for players to figure out. The open ended stuff of Super was great, but not something to ever really expect again, especially from Nintendo. If you get really nuts in Super it's possible to completely gently caress up your save file and get stuck, and I guarantee Nintendo devs aren't fans of leaving stuff like that in on purpose.
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 16:34 |
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Yeah, Dread wasn't supposed to be quite as broken as it is. But it is broken in fun, interesting ways and most of those glitches were passed over during patches so there's a degree of intentionality too. But more important than intent is result, and the result of Dread is I think better than ZM.
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 16:39 |
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"I hate going back to old areas with new items to get stuff I couldn't get before!" ~ Metroid Fans
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 16:48 |
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Orange Crush Rush posted:If you get really nuts in Super it's possible to completely gently caress up your save file and get stuck, and I guarantee Nintendo devs aren't fans of leaving stuff like that in on purpose. You don't have to get that nuts if you're a dummy who saved at the bottom of the wall jump shaft and can't figure out how to get out.
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 16:50 |
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Poopy Palpy posted:You don't have to get that nuts if you're a dummy who saved at the bottom of the wall jump shaft and can't figure out how to get out. It’s almost all recoverable somehow. Super does have a hilariously high skill ceiling for SNES, though. Hell, there’s even a speed run category for reverse boss-order, where you’re doing Lower Norfair without a Varia Suit and somehow coming out on top somehow. I had the game as a kid and went too far exploring into Tourian, only to find out after I’d saved at that final station that there was no going back to the surface to collect anything you missed That’s the only truly unrecoverable point in the game that I can remember.
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 16:54 |
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DoctorWhat posted:Yeah, Dread wasn't supposed to be quite as broken as it is. But it is broken in fun, interesting ways and most of those glitches were passed over during patches so there's a degree of intentionality too. I wouldn't say there was intentionality so much as the devs know that this is a Metroid game and as long as the glitches weren't game breaking then there was no need to remove them. HINT HINT RETRO.
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 17:00 |
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I for one am glad we have both Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion, which offer two unique variations of the Metroid experience. Fusion works for me because it bakes the limitations into the narrative and then subverts it. Other M did the same thing later but the reasoning made no sense, the gameplay itself was awkward and mediocre, and the broader narrative just sucked. That said, I was very happy when Dread went back to the classic formula. I loved my second playthrough where I looked up sequence breaking techniques and got to experience the game very differently.
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 17:00 |
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I think the planned “sequence breaks” are an important part of the experience. Being able to get items in different orders and skip past the obvious objective is cool, but it’s good for it to be possible while playing the game normally, rather than the game being purely linear unless you clip out of bounds or wrong warp or whatever. Sometimes you can get lucky and have your game’s glitches allow for sequence breaking without breaking the logic of the setting (I still prefer the 1.0 gamecube release of Metroid Prime because of it), but the most likely outcome is that it’ll only happen if you deliberately allow for it.
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 17:00 |
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Bleck posted:"I hate going back to old areas with new items to get stuff I couldn't get before!" ~ Metroid Fans That's all well and good for a first playthrough but the fun part of a speedrun is optimization and Zero Mission cuts off a lot of opportunities for optimization and routing by so strictly dividing the collection into halves.
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 17:01 |
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Bleck posted:"I hate going back to old areas with new items to get stuff I couldn't get before!" ~ Metroid Fans It absolutely sucks rear end in Zero Mission that you get power bombs pretty much right in front of the end boss’s door and the only way to get 100% if running back through the entire game to collect items that didn’t become available until that moment. Also, power bomb expansions feel like they only exist to give you another thing to collect. Other games allow you to get to the final boss door and already have 100%. Idk man I really don’t like that design choice!
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 17:26 |
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Tbh power bomb expansions always feel way more disappointing than missiles or etanks just from barely using them in the first place.
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 17:32 |
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Poopy Palpy posted:You don't have to get that nuts if you're a dummy who saved at the bottom of the wall jump shaft and can't figure out how to get out. I absolutely love sequence breaking and super Metroid is awesome for it. Shine spark, hell runs and wall jumping let you do all sorts of crazy stuff. The biggest unrecoverable situation, I believe, is if you get to the Maridia boss without gravity suit, you can’t get out without weird glitches or preplanned glitching. But I think even that save room can be escaped without anything glitchy back to the rest of the game. It’s funny, dread has something very similar if you get to the gravity suit via the speed running corridor without diffusion beam, you’re similarly unable to escape.
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 17:37 |
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ChaseSP posted:Tbh power bomb expansions always feel way more disappointing than missiles or etanks just from barely using them in the first place. Dread is the only time I’ve ever used them outside of opening doors, and even then it was just like 3-4 in the last phase of Raven Beak. Do they even do good damage against bosses in Super? I’d have a semi-rough chuckle if a better way of killing Ridley fast was always right there.
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 17:39 |
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Yeah as much as I loving love Zero Mission, the fact that the last e-tank is literally right before the final boss door does feel a bit silly.
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 17:39 |
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ChaseSP posted:Tbh power bomb expansions always feel way more disappointing than missiles or etanks just from barely using them in the first place. not so much in the 2D ones beyond "oh I'll jst check the whole room for destructable blocks, hyuck" But yeah a big issue in every Metroid is that the missile upgrade to get you from 240/255 to 245/255 is not the most exciting reward and some games hide that better (e.g. by having less stuff in total to collect) or make it feel more worthwhile (Prime with the buster combos and Dread with the actually good storm missiles for sure), while others struggle hard to make them relevant. Sadly enough, Zero Mission both fails at making upgrades relevant late and makes them impossible to collect earlier, so the final collection loop just feels really bad!! This is btw something where the Castlevania side of things is usually better: collecting stuff with late-game upgrades in early-game areas feels perfectly fine in e.g. Dawn of Sorrow because - you could always get another soul drop that you don't have yet or makes one you use better, same for other drops - the upgrades are more varied due to the flexible equipment system - you level up as you kill your way through the enemies - there's often a secret final boss or a superboss that makes leveling up relevant - money drops from candles if you have full MP, you don't need to spend MP to kill early-game enemies, so you get a bunch of cash on the way for free Not to say that Metroid necessarily is worse, it's just easier for CV games to avoid that problem! EDIT: vvvvvv
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 17:40 |
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Power Bombs are vitally important in Metroid Prime because Fusion Metroids are little pieces of poo poo and MP can summon them in its final form and I’d much rather nuke them than try to fight them. Getting the expansions matters a lot, especially on hard.
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 17:41 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 05:10 |
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LividLiquid posted:Shine sparking, infinite bomb jump, alternate charge beams, and the crystal flash are all shown in the game itself if you let it run through its attract mode. Some of these are fair, but there's no way you could just watch the attract mode perform the crystal flash and intuit how it's done. There isn't a popup on the screen to tell you to hold L+R+Y+↓ after the power bomb.
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# ? Mar 4, 2023 17:44 |