Fusion came out and faced a different generation of gamers. So, they created a couple of huge challenges. First, of course, is completing the quest. There are things you must get, there are things you can get that you don’t have to get, and then you go and fight the bad guy. But by making some of the pickups ultra-hard to obtain by placing them in obstacle courses that make no sense in the game’s narrative and are more like arcade-style challenges, players who choose to get 100% of the items but who have already completed the game have an actual learning curve to deal with instead of “oh, it’s over there” and “I can save 5 seconds by going this way.”

Zero Mission *really* played on this by combining Super Metroid’s knack for hiding pickups in odd places (even by Metroid standards) with Fusion’s penchant for creating puzzles that are almost absurdly hard, some of which all but require you to abuse the quirks of the game engine to obtain the item.

I won’t particularly *defend* the decision to lock you out at the end of the game, for all that I found it far more harmless than Mr. Parish. If you’ve defeated such monstrosities as Nightmare, you aren’t realistically going to be weak enough that you can’t also defeat SA-X, so you aren’t actually going to be too underpowered to proceed. I would imagine the game designers did the lock-out to create the feeling of urgency. Once you know the federation is headed here, you don’t have time to waste finding every last item; you need to deal with the problem *now*. And of course, for those who do want to find every item, you can do so after defeating the game in the non-canon epilogue. It works pretty well in practice, I find. (I guess I did end up defending the decision somwhat. Oops.)

I’ll be interested to read about Zero Mission after this. I’ve seen some very high praise for Zero Mission implicit in the analyses, which is interesting because I always dismissed it as not as good as either Super or Fusion at what each game accomplished – those two games are the twin peaks of the Metroid series to me. Maybe this will motivate me to pull out Zero Mission for the first time in a decade (c’mon, Nintendo, virtual console please?) and figure out what I was missing about the game.

Lastly, I should comment on how utterly ridiculous it is that a small space station’s self-destruct sequence would have enough power to destroy a *planet*, and honestly this bothered me much more than any other things about the endgame, but I suppose it’s no goofier than the Zebes explosion at the end of Super Metroid. It would be nice if the Metroid series writers had a bit more respect for just how physically difficult destroying a planet would be, though.