Before collecting every character you ever wanted for a dusty shelf, I had a covetous need to own Samus Aran. Before the often incredibly designed and photogenic figma, there was a single figure of the character made by Joyride studios that I’m not even sure could stand up on its own.
I was hunting after a version of the character to play with with my other toys, to throw at bags of old G.I Joes, the big ones that get marketed as Luxury Action Figures now. My fascination with the character was probably not that different than the person who’s youtube channel is dedicated to replicating her in latex. An aesthetic fulfillment: a robot woman to throw into the plastic graveyard.
She kind of is a toy though, right? A backstory that can fit on a cardboard sleeve, parts and colors and armors to snap on and accesorize her with. A paper-doll like dress up screen in Super Metroid that people are still fucking around with in romhacks a full thirty years after the release. Something about her sticks in the imagination and embeds itself there – like an idea not fully realized.
A new Metroid toy hit shelves on the 8th; Samus descends into stark cybernetic caverns on a hostile planet where she’ll be tested at every corner. I imagine that’s the sales blurb, because on the surface that’s what these games do: pit the player against a hostile environment that is trying to excise it like a virus, or a disease. Samus is the foreign object in a bloodstream.
That’s what we know about her though. One of the rare videogame characters contextualized entirely through what they do. We don’t even know if Samus sweats – we just know that part of her is alien but never in a way that reads as strange. Samus gets to be the perfect human woman exposed to every form of hostile alien life imaginable
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Metroid: Dread features our most experienced bounty-hunter yet. If the capital L, lore is to be believed, her and us, we’ve been doing this a long time together. Dread has a Samus that does the superhero landing pose, that responds (but never when we’re in control of her) to the environment around her.
The clunky and cantankerous must be done away with. Machines with belching, creaking, scraping parts need to be retired. Sleekness and form are the name of the game, and that filters down from furniture being sold at ikea into our videogame characters and our comic book heroes.
Samus….has a Neck. She can look around and free-pivot aim. The old ledge grab from earlier metroid games is no longer sticky, or a moment to take a breather. It’s a stopgap in a long list of Jump Slide Aim Maru-Mari and other verbs that includes the word Die.
We, as players, might be the furthest we’ve ever been from being in the shoes of Samus Aran. This is what we’ve all been asking for: we want to know who she is. She’s the goddamned woman who grabs a monster by the tail and beats it into the ground. She’s the goddamned woman who’s tired of all of this shit, not physically but in the way action heroes now all roll their eyes before they commit to the bit.
So far are we from the days of Super Metroid that seven games have bridged the gap, some of the worst too closely examining the character and some of the best maintaining a distance. The only thing anyone needs to really know about Samus Aran is that she will shoot you, destroy your homeworld, and cash the paycheck afterwards.
A single graphical trick in one of the older games roots us in her shoes. Four or five frames of animation that only happen when the player is stopped completely. Out in the far reaches of space, on some god-forsaken planet where the rules of Nature and Nurture don’t apply, Samus stops to take a breath.
Who is she anyway? I don’t know: everyone who’s touched the series has their own impression. At once, for someone out there, she’s both the 6’4” warrior-prince of a dead alien race as much as she’s the cowed and submissive joke of a character archetype from the game that assigns her both the role of mother and child because she’s a girl. I can’t imagine what this person is like, but someone out there thinks she should absolutely be the 5’4” crybaby from Other M.
Samus seems like she’s having an identity crisis. A perfect blank slate meant to be projected on, always ruined, always given a little too much personality and meaning but never in the right way. I still want to see Samus as the god of death that delivers herself to planets under some kind of duty; not to the galaxy, not to settle a score: but because given everything she’s got she’s still just a bounty hunter.
This is one of those ones, like any big series, where I have to constantly list different things in italics. There sure has been a lot of Metroid, huh? Will it ever end? Will we ever wrap everything up with that true and final text when these story beats playing up that Actually the Space Cops Were Behind It All Along finally get tied together by whoever’s workshopping the series that The Last Metroid IS In Captivity, The Galaxy, Is At Peace.
Metroid Prime 4 is looming on the horizon. Can you hear the people like me? Afraid and eager, hungry for whatever little piece of data gets released about it. We want Samus Aran. The Real Samus Aran. Start expecting a Metroid Prime Trilogy remaster. A Classic Metroid Trilogy remaster. One more isntallment and Mercurysteam can release the Samus Returns Trilogy. Whatever variety of power suit you want is going to be hitting store shelves.
If that’s not enough, the robot-girl can be bought in poseable plastic or the fixed kind. Like when she was in Super Smash Brothers as a literal toy-come-to-life, a solid metaphor for the storied history of the franchise. Someone was playing with these one day, and now we can take the woman-in-the-robot to the furthest possible conclusion. It’s the suit, it’s always been the suit.
We want to put her on our desks and pose her to our liking. Finally, the perfect videogame character: as representative of the fantasies we’ve made with piles of G.I. Joes and mountains of fanfiction. Underneath the visor, a hunters eyes.
Navigate the Lava World playset. Tell your parents to buy you the Missile Upgrade accessory pack. She’s a modular videogame heroine, who can brings her action-packed arsenal to any situation.
Samus Aran, in stores now.
