So, lore. And Metroid.
With a lot of more modern/recent games, delving into the story and lore is a huge thing I love to do. There are countless posts on this blog that revolve around my speculation on the story of World of Warcraft, in large part because that is a game that really cares a lot about lore.
Nintendo games, to my mind, are of an earlier era. Mario games never bog you down with anything resembling continuity - even the Mario Galaxy games, if I recall, didn't really make any reference to one another in terms of any kind of ongoing plot.
The Zelda games officially have a canon... well, canon. The Zelda Encyclopedia put forth a convoluted timeline that connects all of the games (or at least all the ones that existed at the time,) but I've always felt that the games tend to be more thematically tied to one another than in a strict sense of continuity. I think Majora's Mask is a direct sequel to Ocarina of Time, where Link's quest begins in an attempt to find Navi, but beyond that I think most of it is a broad-strokes saga, like variations a mythic figure.
Metroid, however, does have a strict continuity.
The first Metroid game I played was Super Metroid, which, despite being like five or six years old at the time, was the newest in the series. (Like many, I checked it out after playing Super Smash Bros. and liking Samus the best as a fighter.) Within the game itself, there's very little in the way of plot - once you arrive on Zebes, the only real "cutscene" you get is during the final boss fight, and then after you get into your ship to escape the exploding planet there's one more animated cutscene.
But unlike Mario or Link, who have never really monologued (Mario says a few short phrases now and then, but generally not a complete sentence that isn't "It's-ah me, Mario!") Samus narrates the opening of her third game, recapping the events of the first two games and then explaining why you're heading to Ceres Station in the game's playable prologue.
The continuity of Metroid games is clear and relatively linear. Metroid, Metroid II: The Return of Samus, Super Metroid, Metroid Fusion, and Metroid Dread are the five games in a 35-year-spanning quintilogy. Metroid Prime is a sort of interquel spin-off series, but again those games take place one after the other, and the events of one game have canonically happened in the next one. Then there's Metroid: Other M, which people hate but which also has a legitimate place within the continuity.
Unlike Link, who is really a reincarnated spirit in different generations with almost every game, Samus is just the one individual who remembers all the things that have happened in each game.
Anyway, despite this being a game series that started in the decidedly story-light 8-bit era, all this is to say that the lore here is real and something one can speculate about.
With that preamble, I think the theories I wanted to talk about seem quaintly low-key in comparison, but here goes:
This first theory is one that I did not come up with, but seems to be making the rounds on the internet.
Metroid Fusion sees Samus infected with something called the X Parasite, an organism that can infect and mimic other organisms. It's more or less a slower-acting version of The Thing from John Carpenter's seminal horror classic (and a reminder that there's a strong cosmic horror element to Metroid games). Samus is saved, however, by a vaccine that is created using the remnants of the baby Metroid she rescued on SR388 and who gave its life to protect her when she fought Mother Brain in Super Metroid. Samus has effectively become part-Metroid. And as it turns out, the X Parasite is the whole reason the Metroids even exist, as they were created by the ancient Chozo to wipe out this deadly threat.
Ironically, at the end of Metroid Fusion, there's a sort of reversal of what happened in the end of Super Metroid. Fighting the Omega Metroid that broke out of the government's shady bioresearch facility, you get your ass handed to you until one of the horrible SA-Xs, aka the X-parasite doppelgangers of Samus that have been hunting you throughout the game, comes to attack the Omega Metroid, using the powerful Ice Beam and such that you used against Metroids in the past. When it's killed, you're able to recover your old powers, which gives you the chance to defeat the Omega Metroid and escape the lab before it plummets into SR388.
With your Metroid vaccine (get vaccinated if you haven't, by the way!) you've been gobbling up X parasites the whole game just like the Metroids were designed to. So let's put a pin in that.
In Metroid Dread, you show up on planet ZDR because someone sighted an X Parasite there, when everyone thought they were extinct after Fusion. You go to investigate, but you're confronted by a Chozo warrior (not thought extinct, but rare) who attacks you and strands you deep beneath the surface of the world with your abilities drained from your suit.
The Federation had sent a group of robots named EMMIs to try to find the X Parasites, but they've gone silent, and when you encounter them, they try to kill you - this will apparently be a major challenge of the game, as these things can one-hit-kill you if they catch up to you, with only a split-second counter giving you a chance to escape.
Given that the EMMIs were sent to try to find the X Parasite, could that explain why they're going after Samus? Either she has some kind of X Parasite residue on her that they are detecting, or...
What if she's actually an SA-X?
The SA-X at the end of Metroid Fusion jumps in to fight the Omega Metroid at the end of the game. Is it possible that, as the SA-X grew to emulate Samus more and more, that it began to think it was her? This is actually something of a trope in sci fi, and particularly sci fi horror - the grand reveal that the protagonist who is worried about some sinister doppelganger actually has been the doppelganger all along. Maybe the EMMIs aren't malfunctioning at all, but are actually trying to extract their target from you.
And maybe that explains how you wind up so deep underground, far from your ship. Maybe you aren't the Samus that arrived on that ship.
Now, there's your real mind-blower of a twist. It actually kind of... works, right? But I can't say I'd be super happy about it.
Setting aside that really big twist, I wanted to talk about another theory, which has less dire implications, but still could be interesting.
We know that there's a center of Chozo civilization on ZDR, as well as live Chozo who you'll have to fight (the final boss very well might be the Chozo guy from the beginning.)
In the trailers, we see a glimpse of a bas-relief depicting Chozo warriors with glaives/halberds, along with a larger, commanding figure who looks like the guy we fight at the beginning of the game (the warriors, interestingly, look like they're wearing Varia suits). What I only realized more recently was that the commanding figure is pointing toward a group of robed Chozo who seem to be falling.
Could he be ordering their downfall?
The Chozo are an odd presence in Metroid - they were a great civilization that has mostly fallen to ruin, but they are not extinct. Samus was raised by the Chozo on Zebes after her parents were killed in an attack by the Space Pirates, which is how she got her suit and strength (she's also got some Chozo genetic meddling in her as well.)
We know the Chozo made the Metroids to deal with the X Parasite, but it also seems the Metroids might have led to their downfall, given that the big fanged jellyfish creatures like to drain the life of other creatures they encounter.
But now, I wonder: was there a schism?
My sense of the Chozo that Samus was raised by was that they were sagely and wise - maybe members of the faction shown falling in the hieroglyphics. There might have then been a more militaristic faction that overthrew the sages. So, it might be that the primary antagonists of Metroid Dread are, in fact, the evil Chozo.
And what else might they be responsible for? I think Mother Brain was a Chozo creation as well, though it went rogue and joined with Ridley and his Space Pirates. In Dread we're going to encounter a number of Central Units, which... weirdly, look a whole lot like blue Mother Brains, consisting of a giant brain with a single eye, and which shoot these weird rings at you.
Could Mother Brain have been some creation by this militaristic faction, maybe even to replace the wise sages they'd cast down?
This is all pretty far-reaching speculation, of course. But I'll admit, I could go for some heightened sci-fi drama (admittedly, Dune is coming out next month too.)
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