If you loved Metroid Dread, Metroid Fusion is where the story starts

polygon.com:

Back in 2002, Metroid fans learned a lot more about the series’ mysterious heroine Samus Aran. On Nov. 18 that year, the first-person shooter Metroid Prime — developed by Retro Studios and recently remastered for the Nintendo Switch — put players inside Samus’ suit for the first time, allowing them to scan her surroundings, enemies, and objects, and learn more about Metroids, the infamous Space Pirates, and the ancient alien Chozo race that raised Samus. But the day before Prime’s debut, a 2D platformer called Metroid Fusion came out on Game Boy Advance, and it was this game that truly let players inside of Samus’ head.

In Metroid Fusion, which is available today as part of the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscription, Samus may not technically speak, but she does finally get a voice. In diary-like text logs about her enemies and the strange space station AI that she nicknames “Adam” (after a former commanding officer who gave his life to save hers), Samus Aran opens up more than ever before about her emotional state, her past, and her journey forward. The game’s storyline may seem sparse to modern players who are used to chatty protagonists, but compared to previous Metroid games, Fusion signaled a massive change. The laconic heroine had previously been a cypher, an object onto which players could project their own feelings. In Fusion, Samus reveals her own feelings in her brief, haunting missives.

In a journal entry included in the game’s manual, she describes the planet SR388 – the birthplace of the Metroids — as “that forsaken rock,” a phrase charged with refreshing, relatable enmity about the horrors she has repeatedly faced there. In Fusion’s opening text crawl — another first-person monologue from