That being said, you can make the experience easier or harder on yourself as you like The randomizer comes with a ton of options, not the least of which is the ability to set the game to one of five different levels of difficulty logic Want to be expected to know all the hardest tricks in the game and then have the randomizer put key majors behind those locations? Crank the difficulty up to five and give yourself a punishing experience. Memorizing the layout of Metroid Fusion is all but required if you want to clock a fast time in the randomizer. It's not that the randomizer is unforgiving more that there are a lot of nooks and crannies in the game (because it is a Metroid game) and you'll have to explore them all if you want to find all the key items you need to get to the end game. Of course, that also comes with the caveat that you better know the game well if you're going to get through in in a couple of hours. It takes what was a very linear game and makes it into one of the most open world Metroid experiences you could get. No, here you really could be sent on any one of a number of directions each time, with a variety of places the game may expect you to explore, never knowing where that next major could be.

It's not just that you have a few minor split paths to explore before the linear game takes back over. I've seen a ton of seeds in this randomizer and it really does feel like each adventure is unique. You won't know your path through the game, or even what the logic is dictating, until you go exploring just to see what's available. Each area could have hidden major items (aka, 'majors'), the special key abilities Samus needs to continue exploring her world. Get the right starting items and you could be able to venture into Sector 2 from the start, or maybe take a dip into Sectors 3 or 4. The randomizer, though, changes that completely.ĭue to the way Fusion is built, with six zones available right from the hub world of the space station, it's possible for the randomizer to grant you a ton of different paths through the world. They changed that up in Fusion, thus making the vanilla experience much more controlled. The third game in the series, Super Metroid, was pretty open to interpretation with the programmers adding in a lot you could do with the heroine to find you own path through the game. When it was released one of the great complaints about Metroid Fusion was that it was too linear, a very 'on rails' experience due to the construction of the world and the story bound around it. It's interesting, then, when what seems like a linear game is opened up wide by a randomizer. You can only randomize so much when a linear game has a set path. You can't get anywhere in Samus's first ever visit to Zebes if you don't get the Morph Ball you can't do anything in Metroid II until you kill a few metroids, and you need the requisite items to do so. When you venture through a randomizer version of the original Metroid or Metroid II: Return of Samus you still have to follow the bounds of the game.

Thing is, though, that randomizers have to work with the existing code of the game, and despite how much they can change up often they're limited buy the vary construction of the world being explored. That is the power, and beauty, of the form. When you've played the vanilla game enough times that you have it all down in your memory, a randomizer can reveal things you never even realized about the game in new and intriguing ways. They help to create a new experience even as you trudge through familiar hallways and areas. They take what's already in the game and move it around, be it items or enemies or what have you. By definition randomizers randomize games.

Metroid fusion rom nicoblog