A very scenic stable at that—check out the incredible picture windows in the background. Dracula’s horses didn’t want for a glimpse of the great outdoors.

You might become so caught up in admiring the scenery here that you overlook the threat that appears immediately after reaching Block 1-3, though: Viper swarms that cling to the ceiling and drop down to the ground as you pass beneath them. We’ll see falling objects that work this way throughout the game, but viper swarms work a little differently from the usual acid drops and stalactites of video games. Once they hit the ground, they don’t explode or cease to become a threat. Instead, the creep slowly toward Simon, still entangled.

Because they’re placed at the very top of the screen in this first encounter, they take long enough to hit the ground that you have time to walk past them safely before turning and whipping them. Of course, Simon can also whip upward, so you could just stand beneath the vipers and smack them out of the air. If you advance at your usual pace, you’ll trigger the trap without putting yourself at risk, making this a decent introduction.

The holy water subweapon comes in handy against the viper nests, since they’re so low to the ground, but this is more of a convenience than a necessity… which basically describes subweapons in Castlevania IV in a nutshell.

The holy water also comes in handy against the horses that live in these stables, which aren’t your typical equines; taking a cue from The Godfather, perhaps, these are decapitated horse head specters which lie in wait for Simon and begin flying toward him as he approaches. The first couple lurk on the ground and fly low, putting them exactly within range of the holy water’s flame. Further, uh, ahead, you’ll find one of these phantasms clinging to the ceiling. It’s also easily dispatched with other means…

…but it respawns once you pass, climb the stairs to the upper level, and double back. The design and placement of the horse specter relative to the stairs seems carefully calculated to take you far enough from the ghost’s resting point that it causes the enemy to reappear as you retrace your footsteps on the upper level. This seems like a fairly innocuous way to introduce the idea that enemies can return if you backtrack, while at the same time forcing you to interact with an enemy you’ve already destroyed in a new way (since this time it approaches you from below rather than above). It also demonstrates the effective range at which this enemy will be activated by Simon’s presence, as the upper path is situated high enough that the horse heads on the ground don’t come to life as you pass overhead.

And now the chunk of game basically lifted straight from Castlevania III: A series of floor sections that flip upside down and drop you off the screen if you jump onto those thin sections. You’re OK to walk over the spinning platforms, as they’ll bear Simon’s weight. They only flip if you land on them.

The trick, of course, is not to jump in this section, but the introduction of a new enemy type can make it difficult to stick to the ground: Medusa heads. As in previous games, Medusa heads fly in an undulating sine wave, similar to bats but much faster and at a much higher “frequency” between their high and low points. With less visible space between Simon and the edge of the screen, you have less time to spot and react to Medusa heads here than in previous games. If one slips through your guard and strikes you, there’s a good chance the knockback effect Simon suffers upon taking damage will cause him to land on an unstable section of floor and fall to his death.

In Castlevania III, the first few flip-floor sections appeared on an upper tier of the screen with safe ground below as a sort of safety net as you learned their mechanics. You’re extended no such courtesy here, though I don’t know whether that’s because the designers figured you’d be a seasoned and experienced player or simply because the overall game is so much easier than the 8-bit chapters and it needs to bare its fangs somewhere.

Beyond the Medusa onslaught, you achieve a hat trick of decapitation as a ghost materializes; unlike their 8-bit counterparts, these ghosts much more clearly depict a severed head with a few dangling vertebrae. Between the horses, the Medusas, and the ghosts, it seems beheading was all the rage in Transylvania.

Also note the viper swarm sneakily tucked in the little nook in the ceiling above the lower path. While the thing is sitting in plain sight, you could potentially overlook it after having recalibrated your expectations to deal with more active hazards. If you walk blithely beneath it once you double back to the lower level, it could potentially knock you off the edge of the stairs.

The sneaky viper swarm does serve to remind you of that hazard’s existence, so you’ll be more alert for the next one to appear, clinging to the bottom of a suspended platform. If you don’t take this one out in advance, it will definitely knock you back onto a spinning platform and into a hole.

One final surprise as the level reaches the end: Health-restoring meat hidden in a candle. I don’t think the NES games ever tucked healing items into candles, only walls, so this is a bit of a novelty.

A screen ahead, the scrolling locks into place as the boss emerges. In keeping with the stable theme of this section, Rowdain appears as a skeleton riding horseback (on a horse skeleton) and armed with a lance.

He’s a pretty aimless boss; he shuffles back and forth while his horse spits fireballs at Simon, but Rowdain himself surprisingly doesn’t attempt to use his lance. While fittingly easy for a first boss, it does seem a little disappointing that he doesn’t act more like Zelda II’s Rebonack and attempt to run you down.

The lance only comes into play once you whittled half his health down, at which point the horse skeleton explodes and Rowdain takes to his feet. He leaps around the room, attempting to reach the peak of his jump arc directly over Simon’s head, at which point he plunges lance-first toward the hero. This, too, is easily avoided.

In a neat touch, once you knock Rowdain’s health down to a single block, he fakes his death: He explodes into a shower of bones, just like the normal skeleton foes you fought at the beginning of the stage… but this is merely a feint. His component parts hover into the air for a moment, then reassemble into the boss, who takes a big swing at you while appearing to laugh.

The creativity of this gimmick is only slightly undermined by the fact that Rowdain is an embarrassingly easy boss. But that’s kind of Castlevania IV in a nutshell: Not especially difficult, yet nevertheless packed with wonderful details. As usual, a crystal appears at the end of the stage, refilling Simon’s health and giving a bonus for whatever time remains on the clock.

From here we see a full map of the game; the stables are the small building next to the larger ruins in the lower-left of the map.

With each stage, the map zooms in to draw a line through the path ahead—in this case, up a cliff and down a spillway. You may notice that, unlike in earlier games, the icon depicting the boss of the stage doesn’t necessarily appear at the end of the stage. That’s because Castlevania IV doesn’t always put bosses in the expected places, as we’ll see, part of the Castlevania IV experience is soldiering on beyond an encounter without a proper refueling from a boss crystal.

Once you pass through the castle gates, you really get a sense of what Konami was trying to bring to the table with Castlevania on this newer, more powerful hardware. You don’t immediately face a threat upon reaching the castle grounds, but everything seems… livelier. A rousing new musical theme kicks in—you’ll encounter new melodies in every stage, and sometimes multiple times within a stage—and the castle transforms to “greet” the would-be hero. The spiked iron gate rises in the background layer, as if it were some kind of inverted portcullis, slamming into place once it fills the screen and creates a prison-like sense of encagement. Once the spikes lock into place, vines of ivy creep up over them.

A screen into this section, you encounter your first enemy, standing at the top of a short staircase: A skeleton, which occasionally chucks bits of itself your way. It’s slow and almost no threat, and it explodes into a shower of bones when struck.

Shortly beyond the skeleton, Simon drops down onto the grass of the courtyard and encounters something new: An insurmountable chasm. The door in the iron gate suddenly makes the purpose of the massive fence clear. Castlevania IV takes a cue from Super Mario World and uses the Super NES’s graphical layers feature to create a 3D effect within the 2D world, dividing this area into the foreground and the background with the fence as your parrier.

Between the door and pit, there’s no question about you need to do here.

Duck through the door into the background.

This is a neat effect, but like a lot of things in Castlevania IV it doesn’t have much place in the overall game. The entirety of this adventure has a crazy grab-bag feel to it, throwing one new idea at the player after the other and rarely pausing to reprise its most wild concepts. Layering is the first of many gimmicks that fails to play a major role throughout the game.

While this doesn’t exactly fit the rules of sound game design in the traditional “introduce and iterate” sense, it does make for a varied and constantly surprising adventure.

You can fight monsters in the background—besides skeletons, you have bats flying in their usual parabolic arcs as well. The closer you get to the end of this sequence, the thicker the ivy growing on the fence becomes, obscuring the action and making the bats a little harder to spot before they come close… though Simon can simply hold out his whip to defend himself; it dangles in front of him, creating a barrier that projectiles and weak enemies like bats explode against.

In an interesting choice, you move back and forth between layers before ending this sequence in the background rather than the foreground—

—yet emerge into the next area, an interior space, in the foreground.

Each segment (designated as “blocks”) of this stage introduces new enemies and increases the threat level over the area that precedes it. Here, you encounter Bone Pillars, those classic stacks of dragon skulls that spit flame in alternate directions. In the original Castlevania, these didn’t appear until late in stage two; here, they appear in the second portion of stage one.

This doesn’t mean Castlevania IV is aiming to be a more difficult game than the original, though. (If it does, the game fails miserably.) Rather, it’s creating context for greater creative divergence later in the game. By introducing familiar Castlevania concepts early on, the game establishes its world as belonging to the franchise—which allows it to be decidedly Castlevania while throwing out all kinds of interesting innovations at the same time.

The game allows you to upgrade your special weapon from the dagger to the boomerang in this area. That seems pretty handy, but honestly special weapons turn out to be considerably less useful in Super Castlevania IV than in previous games. Even the miserable dagger had some value in Castlevania; here, however, weapons prove to be extremely situational in nature. Thanks to Simon’s increased versatility as a warrior, his standard attacks largely achieve the feats you formerly needed subweapons for.

He has greater reach relative to the boundaries of the screen thanks to his huge sprite proportions; his fully-powered whip now covers 2/3 of the distance between his body and the edge of the screen, greatly reducing the value of the dagger and boomerang. Simon can whip in eight directions, which means the axe—formerly essential for hitting things at an angle—has far less utility. Even the holy water, which was handy for creating an obstructive barrier, is largely mooted by the fact that Simon can hold out his whip to block projectiles.

But, hey, boomerang.

Once you climb up to the higher tier of this block of the stage, you find a series of uneven platforms that require some mild jumping to get past. There’s also a strange, bat-like object here which stands out from the rest of the background. If you attempt to whip it, treating it as an enemy or hazard, Simon will latch onto it with his whip and swing like he was auditioning for Bionic Commando or something. This action is completely useless in this spot…

…but you need to figure it out a short distance ahead, where the grappling bat-hook is your only means for traversing a large gap. You can’t duck into the background here, so there’s nothing to be done for it but swing.

The second mandatory grapple is more difficult, as you swing only to face a Bone Pillar immediately upon landing. While it gives you time to land before belching flame—the swing mechanic here is extremely limited in nature, so it’s not like you can really do anything besides grapple and release—you need to be quick on your feet to avoid being hit and knocked back into the opening you’ve just cleared.

Friends, meet Samus Aran. She got the band back together.

With Ridley-X defeated, Samus is basically back at full fighting strength — the one absence from her arsenal of goodies being the Ice Beam, which remains somehow impossible for her to use because… metroids? Science? It’s never really explained, since she can use ice-powered missiles that send a freezing ripple through the air, and she gained the ability to absorb ice parasites a while back, so who knows.

In any case, this is the point at which the entire station opens up to you. The last barrier blocks — the ones that comprise massive chunks of wall throughout the station — fall before the Screw Attack, opening up a number of hidden areas and creating helpful links between different zones.

At this point, you might think back to previous games an assume you have a few final objectives or new areas to explore, but….

…instead, Metroid Fusion pulls its biggest dick move ever.

To put it in Ranma 1/2 fanfiction terms: “ADAM NO BAKA!”

Once you have the Screw Attack and enter a Navigation Room, Adam locks you out of everything but the final area. Now that you have the ability to traverse the entire station, you’re no longer allowed to do so. If you, perhaps, find yourself lacking in Energy Tanks and other power-ups and would like to buff up before the final set of encounters, you’re outta luck. Adam performs one last “would you kindly” and strong-arms you to the station’s central control area.

The solution, of course, is simply not to talk to Adam once you have the Screw Attack until you’re satisfied you’ve collected everything there is to find. That’s what the huge swaths of Screw Attack blocks are for: They create links between the various zones so you don’t need to use the main elevators, which require you to pass through Navigation Rooms.

So, the Fusion team hath provided… but not in a very obvious fashion. If you don’t know the shutout is coming, it’s entirely possible to blithely chat with Adam and save your locked-out state, erasing your pre-Adam-chat save file and permanently locking Samus into whichever status she might happen to have immediately after conquering Ridley. Good luck beating the final boss with only half the maximum health tanks, newcomer!

You can work your way through the entire station to collect all manner of power-ups, and there are plenty to find. Fusion‘s map designers went the extra mile to create a puzzle-like environment here; it contains a huge number of items to collect, many within esoteric areas that don’t appear on the map. You need to sleuth them out for yourself. (Or you can use a guide, but that seems a bit contrary to the spirit of the thing.)

The final areas contain really vexing puzzles like this one: It’s packed with disintegrating and pass-through blocks, and if you detonate a Power Bomb to figure out which bl0cks can’t be trusted, a rising barrier emerges and walls off the Energy Tank. You can leave the room to reset the barrier, but it’s a real, “Yes, we know your little tricks,” moment from the designers.

You’ll also find some absolutely insane shinespark puzzles that require either meticulous timing or profound good luck.

Samus may come across these odd bubbles along the way, depending on which path you take. They look for all the world like molted metroid shells from Metroid II. But that’s strange! Didn’t you detonate all the metroids in the security zone?

Eventually, though, you need to say “enough’s enough” and trek to the end game. No special Tourian Zone this time, though.

Instead, Adam accedes to Samus’ concerns that the X parasite cannot be harnessed as a bioweapon and that it would destroy all life in the galaxy if the Federation were given the opportunity to collect specimens and attempt to engineer them. So he gives Samus a path to the control room in order to bring the station closer to the planet and evaporate both the station and all life on SR-388. Samus is racking up quite the kill count.

No points, however, for guessing that the control center is locked down once you arrive. A familiar explosion sounds out…

…and the SA-X appears again. Well, an SA-X. There are a bunch of them now.

There’s no running or hiding here, as this is the final showdown. But that’s OK, because the game has clearly been building up to this. Every encounter with and appearance of the SA-X to date has been progressively lengthier and more difficult; meanwhile, Samus as continued to grow in power and skill. At this point, the two versions of Samus are pretty evenly matched.

They’re so evenly matched, in fact, that if they both collide while performing a Screw Attack, they’ll both take damage. This is not a very smart way to win the battle, however, as the SA-X can outlast Samus in a head-butting contest.

The SA-X is fairly easy to lure into a pattern, but it seems almost a necessity to do so. Samus versus her more powerful self is a devastatingly difficult battle otherwise, and despite all the upgrades collected throughout the course of the game, the SA-X nevertheless has the upper hand. The theme of Samus as having been badly weakened by her brush with the X has run throughout the game, and the constant hand-holding and admonitions from Adam — not to mention the numerous hopeless run-ins with SA-X throughout the game — have made the message clear: This is the roughest fight in the game. And if you don’t play smart, it really can be. The SA-X moves quickly, is constantly on the attack, creates a tiny target, and hits hard. If Fusion truly is the ultimate point on the Metroid timeline, this isn’t a bad culmination of the tale: Samus has destroyed pretty much every other powerful force in the galaxy, so she might as well wind things up be destroying the most powerful, i.e. herself.

Once Samus deals enough damage, the weakened SA-X drops to one knee — exactly as Samus did at the end of Super Metroid, further reinforcing the notion that SA-X has duplicated Samus in her prime.

Unlike at the end of Super Metroid, however, the defeated SA-X loses its physical cohesion and metamorphoses into a gruesome chimaera that appears to be both an effigy of Samus — note the visor and abdominal coloration — and a fusion of many of the game’s bosses. This second phase plays out a lot like the second Dracula form in Castlevania, with the chimaera leaping high into the air and crashing to the ground in an attempt to crush Samus. This is a mercifully easy conflict, though it does help further underscore the idea of metroidvania.

Eventually, the SA-X degenerates to a Core-X, which is no more or less difficult than the previous cores you’ve encounters. You have ample space in this chamber with which to evade it, so it amounts to a pleasant denouement to Samus’ ultimate battle.

You can’t absorb the SA-X, however — when you try to snatch the exposed Core-X, it darts off-screen and vanishes.

Still, this leaves Samus free to nuke the station, and also an entire planet. Yes, it’s another countdown, a rush to the docking bay.

Unlike the usual escape sequence, there’s nothing tricky about this one. It’s a brisk run downhill, with no enemies and no complicated platforming to worry about. Although the passage immediately preceding the docking bay seems a bit messed up…

Inside the bay, Samus’ ship is missing — shades, unsurprisingly, of the absent landing craft in Aliens — replaced instead by a badly damaged bay and an absolutely massive metroid husk. One big enough to have belonged to THE BABY THE BABY THE BABY

But actually just a random metroid that escaped the security quarantine and molted to Omega status, no big deal.

It’s also completely impervious to Samus’ attacks.

The Omega slowly advances toward you, shrugging off your attacks and generally being a lot more menacing than the ones you wasted so effortlessly in Metroid II.

Once cornered, Samus can do nothing but absorb a single, massive swipe of the Omega’s claws, which reduce her to a single hit point and leave her gasping for breath on one knee.

When, out of nowhere, the defeated SA-X appears and begins blasting the Omega, legitimately inflicting damage with nothing but its standard blaster.

But, since you previously kicked the SA-X’s butt, it proves to be no match for the Omega, which slashes the parasite and causes it to lose physical cohesion again.

Hmm, this all seems pretty familiar….

At this point, Samus acquires the final Core-X at last, and gains a considerable health upgrade as well as a new physical form. According to Yoshio Sakamoto, merging with the SA-X brought Samus back to her original biological state — which in gameplay terms means you now have an integral Ice Beam, which allows Samus to damage the Omega.

While this entire sequence is more than just a bit reminiscent of Super Metroid‘s climax, it also creates an interesting contrast. Samus’ ultimate power-up in Super Metroid made her an unstoppable destroyer; her ultimate power-up here simply reverts her to the state she was in before gaining the super metroid’s Hyper Beam. This has been a journey not of gaining new powers but rather of simply recovering from a tremendous weakening. Samus at the beginning of Fusion was honestly even weaker than she had been at the beginning of the original Metroid; now she’s in prime fighting form, capable of holding her own against a final boss that was a step below Metroid II‘s endboss.

Eventually, the Omega goes down, and Bishop — I mean, Adam — zooms in and collects Samus with her gunship.

The game ends with a classic colony drop…

…and Samus hits warp drive before the Genesis wave hits.

And that’s the story’s finale. Not just for Fusion, but for Metroid as a saga for the foreseeable future. Zebes is gone; SR-388 is gone; the metroids are gone; the X are gone; and the Federation is not so happy with Samus.

Samus has an annoying new crew member…

…but on the other hand, the story comes full circle as the critters you (optionally) rescued during Super Metroid‘s escape sequence repay the favor.

On the whole, Fusion serves as a pretty decent final chapter of the Metroid saga. No, it’s not perfect, and as a whole it would be far more enjoyable if the designers had had more confidence in their work and their audience and spent less time guiding you through the station. While the back half of the adventure opened up considerably — or at least offered the illusion of freedom, anyway — it didn’t quite go far enough. And the arbitrary, untelegraphed lockout at the end of the game was some real amateur hour stuff.

Nevertheless, Fusion does a great many things well. It’s not as timeless and seemingly effortless a masterpiece as Super Metroid, but I think the team was smart to try a different tack with this game rather than simply trying to outdo the classic Super NES game on its own terms. I don’t agree with all their choices, necessarily, but for the most part they pulled it off and gave Fusion its own identity. And most importantly for the purposes of this particular project, the game’s creators still managed to insert lots of subtle storytelling and design ideas into Fusion despite Adam’s pedantry.

I would still love to know what Metroid Dread was meant to be, how Sakamoto intended to follow up on Fusion’s design and story twists. But that never worked out, and for now, this is well and truly…

THE END

Well, except for one other game that doesn’t really advance the story but brings together the sum total of the Metroid series into one perfect classic sendoff. I suppose we should look at that one, too.