I spent the last two days playing a romhack of Super Metroid called "Super Metroid X Fusion" by Metaquarius, a hacker who had made Z-Factor and Y-faster, two hacks I liked a lot, one of which has the best Tourian sequence I've seen in any video game period, let alone romhacks. Who knows what W will be.

The main shtick is to remix Super Metroid into a simulacrum of Metroid Fusion, cribbing a lot from the map and visuals, using the X and SA-X, conversations with Adam, a similar map structure with a hub and six contained spokes, sneaking into security terminals to unlock doors, and imitating the general upgrade and boss progression from Fusion.

It accomplishes this, at least. I think the first 60% or so of this is from somewhere between good to extremely good. There are moments where Super Metroid peeks through, for instance when you have to fight Crocomire and then Crocomire's ghost comes back for vengeance; little differences so it isn't just completely copying one thing into the other (which would also have been a fine thing for a romhack to do, but I appreciate this variation also, and not just because that word has varia in it). The first lot of the game felt like playing Fusion again for the first time with almost no knowledge.

There are also some individual ideas that I thought were pretty neat in themselves, like text boxes with dialog choices (although I think the written dialog is the dog's breakfast), or the big cold X being dangerous again specifically in the ice zone because your suit has a limit, with a visible temperature scale onscreen. There are a lot of little touches like this I like in this hack, even if I can't remember all of them at the moment.

I suppose I should also mention that the game makes clear from second 0 that it is not an exact copy of Fusion, since you start in the secret metroid breeding area fighting the technical final boss of the game. It also very quickly demonstrates another gimmick I came around to hate: the map permanently changes as you play. Fusion technically did this to a lesser extent, certain doors being blasted permanently open or fused (heh) closed, but the degree to which this hack does it is almost pathological. See, unlike in Fusion where all six areas have a devoted elevator area between them as this grounding, unifying factor, the ways from the hub into all the different areas are kindof all over the place, and many of them break after your first foray into the zone, giving the game this very linear early game and leaving a lot, and I mean a lot, of points of no return behind you as you go. I appreciate being put in a hole until I figure out, from my now reduced search area, just what I'm supposed to do to spring myself out. Holes are good. What's less good is doing this over and over again, and also doing it in a way where the way out is constantly unintuitive or baffling. Sometimes the block you have to bomb doesn't even look different. This culminated in a different problem once I got space jump.

For starters, the spider boss you get space jump from in Fusion is horrible, and seeing it ported near exactly was frustrating. Like, nope, this is fine, hold that shit. At least whilst fighting it I knew what I was getting and generally what I could do with it. Worse was the next peice of progression: Plasma beam. Not in itself of course, plasma is a good beam, except it sounds like crap in this game for no real reason, and the only reason it is progression is because killing the boss that has it removes roots from the map that then give you somewhere to go. From here, you can more or less go anywhere, and if you don't figure out how to progress in 10 minutes of game time, any of the navigation rooms offer you a conversation with Adam where he accuses you of being lost and offers no help. What could have been a hint system to help you out is instead a shame system? Who needs this?

It was from here that I learned just how unreliable my map knowledge had become. See, because the map had functionally changed through every area I had been, and at that time I had been through all of them, it was more like going from the 8bit to 16bit part of The Messenger: that's just a new map now. And where before, the next place felt pretty natural, with the general dictate of entering an area, activating the aux cable, and leaving through the new exit...I mean eventually we were gonna run out of areas.

Which brings me to my next gripe: the aux rooms and the door-opening rooms are not the same thing. I spent a long time with this misunderstanding, and still I don't know what is supposed to indicate which switch opens which door. This was very explicit in Fusion: where security doors were color-coded exactly, so there was no ambiguity about what you needed. Here, you can just come up to what looks like a door on the map and it can be not actually there, fused closed, or just locked by some security room somewhere that is not labelled on your map.

I should talk about the difficulty of the thing. Expecting what I do from romhacks, I set the difficulty to "easy" the game's second-lowest, which is also the default setting. We'll see if I feel like coming back to some of the harder ones. It, uh, felt plenty hard anyway, and this is not counting the jumpscare deaths, like the eventual spider boss just hanging out in the first area of the game there to pounce on you like a jumpscare, or some of the "extra" items where they set up a gauntlet for you to navigate in order to get your 50th missile pack or whatever, and also not counting the times you can fly into outer space. One of the things I liked about Super Metroid was that it didn't have any pits. Well fuck that, romhack time.

There is some difficulty that I think is unearned for what I consider "lost in translation." In Fusion, Samus could grab ledges and mantle up, generally smoothing your run through high-platform-count areas and giving you slightly more vertical clearance than you would have without that. This would later become an upgrade in Metroid Zero Mission, but she gets it for free in Fusion. While many of the areas are interpretations of Fusion maps, far too many of them are direct copies, with the distances unchanged between platforms, meaning until you get Super Jump, a lot of the basic getting around kind of platforming is painful for no reason. You can exploit your knowledge of Super Metroid to do crouch jumps for that missing block of extra vertical, but needing to do so all the time to make up for a map shortcoming is just annoying. Moreover, this was worked into platformless grip spots and ladders, from which Samus could hang and aim beams or missiles. The first real boss is a near identical copy of the one from Fusion, the little armadillo lizard thing, and the arena is more-or-less an exact copy, including the visible grip spots where Samus could be above some attacks and get damage in...except that mechanic isn't in this hack. A whole arena feature to remind you of a capability you do not have that makes the fight harder...thanks man.

This translates in other places to a ladder from Fusion getting replaced with a grapple block wall from Super, and...I guess you have to be familiar with both of these things, but to my mind, this is like saying "gift" in English and translating it as "gift" in German. I would say this is most egregious in the Nightmare fight but nothing could make that fight non-heinous and they didn't even fucking try in this, so I consider that a lost cause.

Little things like this are kindof all over: the fight against two-way sporespawn, the fight against mecha-draygon, basically any sequence with an SA-X, any of the many times I had to scrape my face against every available surface looking for the different block (at least a little of this is expected with perusing Super Metroid romhacks, but I felt it acutely a problem here). The big negative experiences carry a lot of mental weight.

The "tourian" sequence was also nonsense. They send you into it saying "make sure you're well equipped" and then strip all your equipment and put you into a bunch of fucking mindreading scenarios. And it ends with a cutscene where you blow up Satan? I dunno man.

Special anti-shoutouts to turning Area 2: Aquatic into a sluice. Kids fucking love raising and lowering water levels, right? Unbelieveable.

I have to talk about the writing. Super Metroid has a very, very light hand with this, and is all the more iconic for it. Samus sets the scene, tells you where she's been, and from there it is all direct audio-visuals. Her journey is directly yours. This allows moments like approaching Kraid's door and seeing a dead version of you on the floor in front of it hit harder. Fusion backed off of this style significantly, where Samus would take every elevator ride to vamp at you about her backstory and how much she loved her dead CO Adam and how rude and awful this new AI CO is. It was like having the opening sequence from Super Metroid peppered throughout the entire game and bloated to unreasonable size. I did not like it. It also spawned all the worst backstory facts about Samus and Adam's previous relationship, which, to be clear, was charming in Fusion and infuriating in everything else. So like, there's a lot to improve on, so to speak, if you want to write for Metroid. To be clear, I think Super Metroid is perfect with its writing: but minimalism requires less of perfection than other forms.

The writing here sucks ass. The hack apparently has translations into five languages and I wish it were zero. The writing fails to convey character, set the stage, hint at where to go, introduce intrigue or lore, or form cohesive themes. Anything you ever wanted writing to do, this writing does not do. It would be better replaced by nothing. I appreciated that there were dialog options, letting me put words in Samus's mouth for once, that at least has a value in itself, but holy shit, for all the substantial romhacking skill on display you would think that a basic understanding of human language and interaction would have entered into the scenario at some point. Specialization is for insects, kids.