This review—which I will be keeping relatively short (under thirty pages)—is for X-Fusion (2025), a "total conversion" romhack[1] for Super Metroid (1994) and Metroid Fusion (2002) by Metaquarius. It is not a thematic analysis of the game or its textual elements (for that, refer to my series of essays, "X Marks the Spot," 2025). Instead, it covers the base game; i.e., as something to play and watch, and in similar ways to the old interviews I conducted for my initial PhD research (re: "Mazes and Labyrinths," 2021). While I have played the game, myself, much of this review was gleaned by watching a variety of Metroid speedrunners suffer on YouTube and Twitch (the three primarily featured here being CScottyW, Oatsngoats and Shiny Zeni); i.e., because I am not a speedrunner but do research Metroidvania as games to speedrun.
As for the game itself, it lies to players in ways that—while undeniably beautiful—cause unironic suffering. In short, X-Fusion is a bad game, and this review will explain why.
Note: This essay is part of my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus. It's also part of my Sex Positivity book series, which continues after its June 2025 finale in small-form content; e.g., essays on and interviews with other sex workers; i.e., I've worked with muses and models beyond those on my Acknowledgments page (whose examples were my muses/models while writing and illustrating the larger series). To see everyone I've drawn before, during and after said series, refer to my Sex Worker page.
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For the Visually Impaired: I will also be reading this review aloud on my YouTube channel.
Disclaimer Regarding Essay Contents: All opinions are my own; i.e., as part of my research, conducted alongside my book series, Gothic Communism (2023). The material within is written/speaks about public figures and popular media for purposes of education, satire, transformation and critique, hence falls under Fair Use regarding copyright and free speech regarding defamation.
Note: This review was not written based off old footage or reviews of older "alpha" builds of the game, but rather the full finished product. To it, the romhack is officially out—with Metaquarius taking his WordPress site back online to announce the debut (on 8/3/2025); i.e., after having taken it offline for nearly two weeks. There's also a Discord server for X-Fusion—one where players can talk directly with Metaquarius/give feedback on the game—and the hack is also available on MetroidConstruction.com; i.e., where players post their reviews, positive and negative. While not featured on there, mine is meant to contribute to that larger body of discourse.
P.S., Regarding the untested quality of the game, I would consider its release something of a de facto "open beta"; i.e., extended playtesting with members of the larger gaming community. That being said, it's not actually listed as "beta" (the release version being 1.0). So, again, I'm reviewing it as a finished product. In doing so, my review emphasizes first impressions; i.e., for versions 1.0-1.1 (whose differences are primarily damage values and bug fixes), and while covering CScottyW, Oatsngoats and Shiny Zeni's first playthroughs on those versions; re: the game is bad, yes, but specifically merits a bad review for being extremely unforgiving right out the gate: for being "too hard" not just for me, but for top-level players accustomed to hard games, and for whom this game lies to by appearing far easier than is actually the case!
P.P.S., I will not be pulling any punches in this review. To be fair to Metaquarius, his hack is technically impressive, but also needs criticism the game has sorely earned if it is to be "fixed in post"; i.e., I wouldn't write what I'm going to write if I didn't think it possible, but need to be blunt, here: This game is like a serial killer (or giant spider, above); i.e., waiting in the shadows to bushwack you. And not in a fun, "good one, bro!" kinda way but a "sweet Jesus, she's dead; help me hide the body!" kind of way. It takes everything about Gothic, Amazons, Metroidvania and ludo-Gothic BDSM and makes it an exercise in unironic torment; it takes Fusion—one of my all-time favorite Metroidvania, ever—and turns it into a brutal shell of itself. It's not Metroidvania, but Robin Williams' description of golf made frighteningly real: "Right near the end, I'll put a flat piece with a little flag to give ya fuckin' hope!" (source). "Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here!" —Perse
X-Fusion Review: A Beautiful Lie
X-Fusion has been in development for over ten years. So, after much anticipation, the game is finally out...
(source: "Friday the 13th," 2006)
...and I hate it. Why do I hate it?
Simply put, bad games make players suffer and X-Fusion is a bad game; i.e., it lies to players to make them suffer. To quote AVGN (above), "I'd rather piss a cactus outta my dick" than play X-Fusion again. What does that mean? Read on, dear reader, and find out!
First Impressions: Stuck in the Past (feat. Myst and King's Quest III, 1993 and 1986)
First and foremost, X-Fusion feels hopelessly stuck in the past, meaning something to paradoxically explore better than it does; i.e., in ways that need to feel more fun that the actual past (and its brutalities) that Metroidvania hint at; e.g., older games like Myst and King's Quest III (which we'll look at, in just a moment). Except, X-Fusion doesn't hint; it reenacts the past, which is to say "badly and on purpose": bad games = player suffering regardless of intent, with X-Fusion very much a bad game by design (also, it feels like a bad lie, but more on that point during the conclusion). As one player says on Oatsngoats' stream, "2 hours gameplay, 8-10 hours 'where the fuck am i'" (source: outlined, above). This complaint basically sums up X-Fusion, and remains one made by a variety of players both beginner and advanced.
Note: Again, we'll look at CScottyW and Oatsngoats, for the most part. But the same critiques of the hack—that it's too obscure, punishing and limiting in its controls—also applies to other players; e.g., Shiny Zeni spending over thirty minutes on a single bomb jump puzzle ("Super Metroid X-Fusion") that, while you can do it right off the bat, isn't meant to be done that early in the run:
Furthermore, while emergent play is the magic that Metroidvania hinge on, it's ultimately a balancing act; i.e., one where intended play reminds you if you're going to have an easy time straying from the beaten path or not. This varies per game—with X-Fusion technically allowing for emergent play unlike Fusion but making it far harder than Super. So listening to Zeni say in one breath that he loves doing things out of sequence, only for the game to repeatedly punish him into sour bitching for trying (through puzzles designed to punish him), isn't really my idea of a good time. In fact, it's a very old-fashioned design approach—one I'll highlight moving forwards by comparing X-Fusion to Myst and similar old-school titles.
Except, those games' difficulty stemmed at least partly from technological limitations. By comparison, Metaquarius makes X-Fusion harder than either original palimpsest; i.e., by removing player tools and adding obscure map design loaded with deadly traps and unclear routes. Worse, he's chosen to (with "deliberate" a keyword that will repeatedly come up, in this review); i.e., as someone with total control over the game, his mod a "total conversion" consciously changing the code: to make everything less effective, be that level or player. You can still bomb jump, but not well; can still wall jump, but incur limits while jumping off the same wall panel; can still sequence break, but suffer from the game restraining player agency inside architectural restraints/copious gating choices; etc.
Playing X-Fusion and watching others play it, too, there's clearly an enjoyable (non-linear) Metroidvania in there, somewhere. But its curiously restrictive, adumbral open-endedness remains a pale shadow of what it could have been; i.e., forced into the margins by Metaquarius consciously removing "quality of life" to force the player into a dated "hardcore" experience.
Informed by the past, Metaquarius expects players to suffer through the game; i.e., as redesigned with that in mind, retooled as a delivery mechanism for compelled pain—an unironic experience thereof that hinges predominantly on lies the game tells the player through numerous façades. Chief among them is the "normal" gameplay experience, which feels "endgame"; i.e., in how it forces the optional difficulty of those late-stage puzzles from Fusion to the front of the line (re: Zeni vs the bomb-jump puzzle). While deviating from intended, "first-time" routes remains technically possible, X-Fusion purposefully skill gates alternate routes—doing so in ways that aren't always clear and which go against the classic Metroidvania design: to encourage exploration (a good counterexample being Hollow Knight's [2017] relative ease in mid-game non-linearity after acquiring early-game essentials like the mantis claw, left). —Perse
Said complaint includes Oatsngoats, who jokingly says, "It's a Metroidvania; not knowing where you're supposed to go is all part of the fun[2]!" They say this while sarcastically pretending to be an audience member, said "viewer" telling Oats how to play (thus think about) Metroidvania—a genre they've only played for 30+ years! I can relate; i.e., as someone who's only made playing and studying Metroidvania her life's work: as a trans woman who initially played Metroidvania in the closet, growing up, only to write about Metroidvania and speedrunning academically (re: my master's thesis, 2018), combine speedrunning with BDSM (re: my PhD, 2023), explore bigotry in speedrunning across different communities (re: "Those Who Walk Away," 2025), and reassemble everything to reflect on it, time and time again (re: my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus).
As far as Metroidvania go, I'm basically a historian of historians—with speedrunners making their own history in and out of the games they play. To that, Metroidvania are both widely popular and oddly obscure; i.e., insofar as they remain largely understudied despite their widespread popularity (re: Jeremy Parish, highlighting the genre only to cynically discourage it). So where does X-Fusion fit in?
(source: OneShortEye's "Why (almost) No One Runs this Game," 2025)
To sum X-Fusion up, it's a niche title for a niche activity in an already-niche subgenre: speedrunning Metroidvania, specifically romhacks made to "test" (frustrate) hardcore players (which speedrunners are; i.e., non-casuals). From a historical perspective, speedrunning and casual Metroidvania gameplay already go hand-in-hand; re (from my master's thesis):
The game is not timed, has no in-game map system. Its world is a giant map that can be explored, in-game, but also charted out-of-game by the player. In Super Metroid (1994), an "automap" feature would be introduced. However, from a narrative standpoint, this merely illustrated what the player was already doing themselves (source: "Lost in Necropolis," 2018).
Furthermore, some games exist in regular obscurity only to revive as speedruns; re: King's Quest III (above). By making X-Fusion the way he did, Metaquarius appears to have made a game that only certain kinds of speedrunners, streamers or diehard fans will love: a Metroidvania that's incredibly cumbersome to play that doesn't have "Kaizo" in the title. For once, I'll ask for more clarity in the label, not less!
It might not seem like it, then, but X-Fusion is oddly comparable to King's Quest III and its own cryptic shortcomings; i.e., a game with
tons of intermediary steps and puzzles, some of which are extremely obtuse. "It's like a riddle that you don't have the answers to, and you're not sure you're ever really going to be able find them. Without like a walkthrough of something, I can't even imagine how long this game would have taken" (source; timestamp: 0:50).
Yet in this review, I also compare X-Fusion to another puzzle game notorious for its difficulty without a guide; re: Myst[3], below.
Here was a game that emerged alongside the FPS[4] genre in 1993, and one whose dreaded reputation largely relied on a maze filled with obscure puzzles, pretty (for the time) graphics, voice acting (a biggie in the early '90s), unsung technical achievements (Ars Technica's "How Myst Almost Couldn't Run on CD-ROM," 2020), half-completed hints, cruel twists, unreliable side characters, concentric veneers (stories in stories, books in books), and ambiguously false clues. Less played for any immediate sense of accomplishment, and more a slave to the grind, Myst offered the player a "marathon" experience of total containment (to be held prisoner). To call Myst an "acquired taste," then, would be a serious understatement; i.e., one that quickly overstays its welcome, the ensuing frustration (and boredom) all but taking the Action/Adventure umbrella to new heights and depths. Arguably to its highest highs and lowest lows (with little room, in between), Myst is ambitious to a fault—with the developers' signature inability to compromise on a singular vision becoming a defining trait in bad game design.
Even so, bad game design takes many forms, and the above explanation (and nostalgic forgetfulness) also applies to Metaquarium's X-Fusion. For being a game that is hard without a guide but also with one—it's arguably less impossible to solve and more a game that feels frustrating to play despite its puzzles not being that hard. It certainly doesn't feel impossible like Myst did, but it's not really any more fun to play than that game was. Instead, it's just a weird mixture of "too much of one, too little of another," and I hate it to a similar degree that I did with Myst, all those years ago.
Much of this hatred has to do with expectations; i.e., I walked into X-Fusion expecting something very different than what I got. But also, I felt disappointed by what could've been; i.e., Metaquarius carries all the knowledge of a '80s game developer having grown into the '90s, '00s and beyond, but one who refuses to learn from the past. Instead, he squanders said potential, doing so to recreate its worst tendencies; i.e., by dressing them up with a fresh coat of paint, offering a de-evolution that plays out in opposite fashion to those genuine innovations seen in Natsume's Shadow of the Ninja Revival (2024; see: The Electric Underground's "What True Innovation Looks Like! Shadow of the Ninja - Reborn | Review," 2024). The design for X-Fusion certainly takes skill, but remains woefully misapplied.
To it, I said I'd review X-Fusion no matter what (and I respect its nerdy devotion to a craft Metaquarius and I approach from completely different angles). Let's get down to brass tacks, shall we?
Review Body: A "Love It, Hate It" Kinda Game (from Speedrunners to Casuals)
In short, X-Fusion is a very pretty game, one that pushes the graphical limits of what these old lines of code can even do. It's also a love it, hate it kind of game—one whose "stuck in a box" approach applies just as much to speedrunners[5] as it does casual players (or scholars who study speedrunners while being casual players; re: me). In deliberately making it the way he did, Metaquarius has alienated a great number of people; i.e., while simultaneously demonstrating a great deal of promise and community goodwill with post-release patches.
To reiterate, this is not me hating on Metaquarius as a creator (and if you like the game, more power to you); I just happen to hate it but respect the craft that went into it. So I want to express why and how as succinctly and accurately as I can. It might not sound like it, but I want to be as fair and measured in my criticism as I can.
Whatever the preferences at work, time is precious both to speedrunners and casual players, alike; i.e., no one likes have their time wasted, "suffering" a feeling that players can equate to "wasting time" felt, among other things, total frustration regardless of intent. In Metroidvania, time is motion through space; re: the "puzzle" to "solve" being the gameworld, itself (which generally is some kind of maze or labyrinth; re: "Mazes and Labyrinths").
The core problem with X-Fusion is, the ways to go are not intuitive and sequence breaks can lead to difficult areas that stay difficult long after they really shouldn't (e.g., the ARC area staying freezing-cold until you turn on the auxiliary power—something that happened with CScottyW's blind run until the game was nearly over). They can also—in the spirit of Environment Station Alpha (above, 2014)—actually break various in-game sequences; i.e., if you perform certain events or access certain areas out of order (on purpose or not), then these and/or other events and areas achieved through earlier access can break when accessed later (with "too late" being unintuitive in its own right). Generally this doesn't "softlock" them, but it still feels clunkier than a game that spent over ten years in the oven really should. So ten points from Gryffindor.
In short, X-Fusion technically allows for sequence breaking—quite a bit, actually—but in practice somewhat falls apart. This isn't just bad game design, but bad Metroidvania design; re (from "Mazes and Labyrinths"):
Metroidvania are a location-based videogame genre that combines 2D, 2.5D, or 3D platforming [e.g., Dark Souls, 2009] and ranged/melee combat—usually in the 3rd person—inside a giant, closed space. This space communicates Gothic themes of various kinds; encourages exploration* depending on how non-linear the space is; includes progressive skill and item collection, mandatory boss keys, backtracking and variable gating mechanics (bosses, items, doors); and requires movement powerups in some shape or form, though these can be supplied through RPG elements as an optional alternative.
*Exploration pertains to the deliberate navigation of space beyond that of obvious, linear routes—to search for objects, objectives or secrets off the beaten path (source: "Mazes and Labyrinths," 2019; refer to the Metroidvania page on my website for everything that I've written on Metroidvania).
i.e., sequence-breaking is spatially fundamental to the Metroidvania experience, one that X-Fusion gets wrong as much by accident as not. As such, Clint Hocking's adage, "seek power and you will progress" (source: "Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock," 2007), becomes something X-Fusion denies players in highly annoying ways; i.e., not "the palliative Numinous" as coined by me (re: "The Quest for Power, part one," 2024), but a complete-and-utter pain in the ass that Metaquarius arguably borrowed from older bad games, mid-evolution (re: Myst). And even if this wasn't deliberate, the de-evolution still feels convergent; i.e., intent doesn't matter, outcomes do, and the primary outcome to X-Fusion is endless frustration, begot from the game repeatedly deceiving the player.
That being said, some deception is to be expected; i.e., it comes from changes happening over time. In turn, Metroidvania is a subgenre endlessly cloning itself, each time resulting in new errors (mutations); re: "This castle is a creature of chaos." And while the X-Fusion Read Me file explains that the game isn't intended "for casuals," it's also a bit of a headscratcher as to why that should even be; i.e., while including difficulty modes, why start the game off so that you gatekeep 90% of players from getting partway through your game? It'd be like having six difficulties for Doom (1993), only to have "Don't Hurt Me!" play like "Nightmare!" and only getting harder from there.
As a result, a common complaint I heard about X-Fusion was (and is), "This game isn't fun!" It plays like a bad game on purpose, so much so that its in-game dialog seems to know it and chuckle (or dip into "true camp[6]," below). I feel like I'm watching Hitchcock torture the actress, except she's an Amazon torturing us through the player soon-to-be-humiliated by the events that unfold: Samus is a total dork, one who sounds like she belongs on r/iamverybadass.
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So, despite all his technical skill in coding X-Fusion, Metaquarius kinda misses the point of games: to have fun (which torturing players could be, I suppose, albeit from a sadistic developer's point of view). And while some (masochistic) players can still have fun despite the game's high difficulty floor (and sadistic approach), the fact remains said floor is deceptively high; i.e., X-Fusion appears like a normal Metroid game, but whose torturous design makes movement through the base game difficult in ways that don't translate visually well:
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For example, this missile room accessed by Oatsngoats appears normal (above), but requires a deliberately tricky puzzle to solve; re: one that doesn't visually communicate its difficulty to the player. Instead, it's abstruse—an ostensibly "empty room," one bearing no obvious indication of it being a puzzle to begin with (with Oat's "It's just that easy, folks" teasing the audience, a bit; i.e., owing to the fact that Oats isn't a novice). Victory here occurs through dumb luck or pre-preparedness, which isn't a good combination for fresh players. X-Fusion sticks to the past, refusing to evolve and struggling to get off the ground, as a result. There's certainly cool moments scattered throughout (no pun intended, above), but sadly they're largely held back; i.e., by how much the game (therefore of the game) concerns things you can't directly see.
The entire game is like this. Versus moving relatively quickly from point A to point B—with a healthy dose of sequence breaks, boss keys, backtracking and light puzzle work mixing things up—every room in X-Fusion is an utter slog filled with death traps that look "harmless." Enemies kill you in one hit, scripted events have a do-or-die feel to them (on par with Don Bluth's Dragonslayer series), and the aforementioned "abstruse" qualities make the whole experience as frustrating for the audience as it does the player(s) involved (e.g., the gravity SA-X sequence something that—while Oatsngoats plays it for laughs, below—still comments on him having prior knowledge, and also being a pro used to playing Kaizo-style runs; i.e., where knowledge is both scarce and "learn as you go"). It's confusing to play and watch; i.e., because it should be easier than it appears, falling short on every conceivable level because its visuals and gameplay combine to frustrate the player and the audience; re: as a bad game, one favoring artificial difficulty spikes that feel deliberately unfair and unfun to experience: on either side of the controller and/or screen. Regardless of which/where, it looks like a normal game and plays like a Kaizo hack.
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The out-of-joint unheimlich effect is one of constant confusion, frustration and disempowerment; i.e., that goes beyond what is expected of the Metroidvania genre, but also survival horror (re: "Mazes and Labyrinths"). At least with the latter genre, a given game is built around a weak player character that walks you (the avatar) through, "on the tightrope." By comparison, X-Fusion lacks a tightrope, thereby forcing the player to faceplant, trial-by-error, until the novelty wears off (which it very quickly does).
Again, X-Fusion is part-Metroid, part-Myst—an oil-to-water fusion of different schools of thought, one doomed to disappoint all but the most pigheaded of players; i.e., those stubbornly determined enough to actually "enjoy" the intentionally bad combo, even when it hurts to play (so-called "gaming masochism"). And while plenty of visual wizardry and novel gaming mechanics embellish X-Fusion, much of it is spoiled by how you can't intuitively engage with, thus enjoy what you're looking at; re: as a player or audience member. Watching seasoned pros get routinely stuck in, or frustrated at, X-Fusion is about as fun as watching paint dry. And that's really too bad. Considering the game's underlying desire—i.e., to fix Fusion by making it less linear and more engaging through terrifying survival horror elements—the whole thing could have blossomed; indeed, I wanted to enjoy what I was looking at. Instead, it rots on the vine. More's the pity!
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Other complaints I have about X-Fusion include various omissions of classic Metroidvania staples; e.g., the minimap (apparently for technical limitations), and the color-coded doors of yore. While zero minimap is just Metroid 1 reborn, shooting doors of different colors with the same weapon(s) to open them just feels wrong[7]. Likewise, being forced by the game into the menu, mid-fight (to rely on reserve tanks constantly for both health and ammo)—or to check your map (re: because you're aggressively stumped by too many gates and dead ends)—makes the game feel less like Metroid and more like Resident Evil 4 (2002) minus the good combat. Samus feels oddly hobbled, the constant menuing making players feel disoriented while breaking the admittedly solid boss action up with monotonous mechanics.
And perhaps I wouldn't care if the game didn't demand players look at the map every two seconds—re: because the map design is confusing as shit—but demand you, it does. This includes Metaquarius deliberately hard-gating door locks (replacing the original map stations from Fusion, above), which only makes it easier to run into areas that have only one set, unicursal path; e.g., screw attack—with CScottyW[7a] saying to himself, "If it's another screw attack block, I'm gonna scream!" Maybe Scotty had some slack to cut the game early on, but by the end said slack was well-and-truly spent. Furthermore, the anger these players exhibit is not faked, nor is its enjoyable from me. I'm just not sadistic enough to force someone to play a Kaizo game in disguise, and watching Scotty suffer makes me feel more and more like Roddy MacDowell, from A Clockwork Orange (1971): torture disguised as "entertainment," mid-cryptonymy (re: to show and hide at once)!
Said disguise reminds me, sadly, of the AVGN's original Karate Kid (1987) review, back in 2006—not just "This game is ass!" but also this longer quote:
So what is it about this game that's drawn so many unfortunate kids to turn into bitter adults? [...] I mean, anybody who has beaten this incredibly hard piece of shit will not have any sense of satisfaction, but rather regrets because it's a complete waste of fucking time. I mean, it's like coming out of a brutal fight, being the winner, but achieving nothing for all your trouble but some bloody bruises and broken bones. It's just not worth it. [...] I hate this game but why am I playing it? Well, that's the question everyone has asked themselves, and they all have the same reason: because you're angry and you want to win—you want to beat the Nintendo, but the cold fact is, no one cares but you (source).
I'm not even trying to compare X-Fusion to The Karate Kid, here, but it feels incredibly apt—and that's very bad, from a game design standpoint!
Also, while I obviously don't agree with everything James Rolfe has said and done reviewing games (though he was at his best, in the early days of YouTube), there's a point to be had, concerning X-Fusion. It's not about being "good" at the game, alone, but having the self-defeating stubbornness to see it through because the game's design sucks; i.e., regardless of any injury exacted upon one's health, sanity and/or ego, X-Fusion is simply overdesigned.
The phrase "trial by fire" leaps to mind, something no Read Me (or misguided sense of nostalgia[8]) can really prepare you for. Playing X-Fusion, I felt intensely confused. Where's ledge grab and repeatable wall jump? Why is fire rate nerfed? The hack notably combines Fusion and Super into a single game, but feels even more myopic and linear than Fusion did; i.e., while making Super's trademark progression/freedom of play all but impossible. It's completely infuriating!
(artist: Matt Smith)
And at first I thought it was just me, but then I saw far more skilled players getting noticeably pissed at X-Fusion, too. It was real anger, coming from seasoned vets! Gameplay and game criticism go hand-in-hand, "hate the player, not the game" an adage that reverses easily enough. This felt deliberate—with all player types getting reliably "tilted" by Metaquarius, seemingly by design:
(source: Shiny Zeni's "Super Metroid X-Fusion")
What could irk so many different players, you ask? Personally, I think it's how X-Fusion's every flaw compounds in the worst ways possible; i.e., by throwing the player headfirst into, if not the most difficult, then certainly the most painful experience possible (re: high damage combined with deliberately confusing puzzles and progression). Nothing synergizes, and it plays like Needle in a Stack of Needles. It's certainly the most handsome 2D Metroid I've ever played, but also the most frustrating and unintuitive. While Metroidvania can certainly be hard to differing degrees (and generally make easier speed games harder than they would be otherwise), X-Fusion is simply hard, right out the gate. Professional runners should not be getting schooled this badly! If they are, then what hope do I have?
Again, this doesn't just affect me; nor does it affect Shiny Zeni—a player known for being vocal when playing games (above). Not even Oats—someone a bit more even-keeled (if self-depreciating)—gets out of it, unscathed: "Fuck you! That. Is. So. Bullshit!" he shouts at the screen (next page). "They get stuck in the door and they don't have a hurt box! [...] They can sit in the door, and—'Oh, I'm good!'" At some point, whatever performance they make "for show" gradually gives way to genuine impatience, the ensuing frustrations releasing after constant smaller harassment (microaggressions); i.e., from the game, until the proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back" rears its ugly head:
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In short, even with someone accustomed to bullshit like Oats, he still lost his shit at various points (e.g., towards the end: "This is pissing me off; how do I get out of this hell hole?" source); i.e., in ways he didn't with Kaizo Super Metroid (2022) or Super Metroid Impossible (2020); re: whose makers advertised them as such and who played/appeared as such. The expectation, up front, is frustration, which lets players prepare for the pain before signing the ludic contract[9]. Players should spoil the game, not the other way around (see: footnote)!
X-Fusion, by comparison, plays like an absolute dick: hiding its knife before plunging it into you and repeatedly twisting it. It's stressful because it eliminates, or at least severely undercuts, player consent and agency. And before you mention the Read Me Metaquarius tells people to read, Read Mes don't really prepare you for what's to come—quite the opposite, in fact! Furthermore, even if they did, a game that requires you to read the instruction manual to have a good time is—in my humble opinion—a poorly designed game (and which I'd trade all the "misery content" that results for a game I could actually watch or play to my heart's content). Again, bad game = game that makes player and audience suffer alike; X-Fusion isn't just a bad game, but a Faustian one, too.
And if that sucks to hear, I agree! Then again, some of these things can be fixed with future patches (easy mode + repeatable wall jump and ledge grab, for example). All the same (and to reiterate), the technical skill required to make something like this—while completely astounding as something manmade—falls entirely flat from a delivery standpoint: "It took you ten years to make this?" It's a fair question, and one I ask if only because the sole point (of all that hard work) seems to be unapologetic torture. Yeah, Metaquarius works in assembly code (essentially what TAS coders do); re: X-Fusion magically rewriting several titles before combining them, thus introducing a variety of content into the games involved. But, dude, it flat-out plays like shit. It's not hard, it's punitive!
I'm not saying this purely as someone who wrote her PhD on Metroidvania, but an ordinary trans girl lodging an honest complaint; i.e., someone who grew up with these games (and having played a variety of hacks in her thirties, too); re: I played Super on the SNES, back in 1994, and Fusion on the GBA, back in 2002. I grew up watching Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) on VHS, loving Amazons but also all manner of monstrous-feminine. Ergo, I enjoy games as a culture that goes far beyond the TV or computer screen and into real life as half-real; i.e., with conventions (above) speaking to a space between fiction and non-fiction: as sharing the rules (re: me, vis-à-vis Jesper Juul's Half-Real, 2007) but also a spectrum of fan enterprises doing just that (e.g., videogame remixes[10]).
So while I understand that you can't please everyone, X-Fusion feels like Metaquarius trying to please the most niche of niche players imaginable: speedrunners who play bad games on purpose. And if the ads (not the fucking Read Me) were more clear about that, I wouldn't have cared. But in lying to players like he does (a lie of omission is still a lie)—or by making players feel lied to; i.e., by torturing them following an astoundingly misleading advertising campaign (re: "Dust Off Your SNES..." and play a game far more abstruse than Super Metroid ever was)—Metaquarius has broken the unwritten rule of ludic contracts: lying to players up front, and intending to drive them nuts!
Conclusion: A Bad Lie
To conclude, Metaquarius seems bent on fucking the player over—effectively lying to ease them into the empty promise of something the game isn't (re: fun). Instead, X-Fusion plays less like Metroid and more like The Witch's House (left, 2012); i.e., every room is a death trap, making the sheer number of energy tanks, power-ups and weapons (missiles, beams and bombs) oddly deceptive (re: false power). Except, The Witch's House lacks the same expectations; furthermore, it subverts them to deliver a satisfying ending to what is, more or less, a ghost story meant to fool the player—meaning in ways that feel satisfying when all's said and done. In short, it's the point, the format "made for it"; re (from "Our Ludic Masters"):
The real horror is retrospective: One, the hero was already dead, trapped inside a blind, disintegrating body while attacking Viola to warn the player (the player reacts towards the hostile home like Viola's father did towards his transformed daughter—with fear and aggression). Two, every action made by the player to preserve "Viola" was actually keeping the witch, the hero's destroyer, alive. Three, the hero ultimately fails, and the villain wins. The player is hoodwinked into self-destruction. Ignominious death? Check (source).
Yes, The Witch's House is very hard but it's also coming from the Action/Adventure genre as not hiding that aspect about itself. For all the deception the narrative pulls, what you see is what you get. The player wants to be fooled, if only to say "touché!"
By comparison, X-Fusion lies to the player in how it looks and plays, doing to them what most arguably don't want. It's a trap and a lie, one told to the player to make them forget the kind of game they're actually playing—not a fresh new Metroidvania, but a wholly ambivalent love letter to the annoying past resurrected, trapping the player in its box. I feel lied to by Metaquarius, which isn't skill; it's someone manipulating their audience for years, and all to deliver a sub-par product; re: a bad game whose lie ostensibly tortures players, and for no good reason—pleasing the hacker at the player's expense!
And while that is something to be expected within reason, this degree of discomfort goes a bridge too far! You can't solve that with spiffy cutscenes; i.e., gameplay = whatever lies beyond the cinematic elements (re: the Black Veil, below), and this is where X-Fusion's biggest deception occurs: the promise of something beyond the veil-in-question as worth experiencing. Instead, I just feel lied to—so wowed by Metaquarium's big-battle set pieces that I never stopped to ask why he avoided gameplay demos. It's an information blackout!
(source)
Partly I can blame the secrecy of the project and lack of playtesting on that front, but therein lies the rub: having been in development for over ten years, X-Fusion suffers from a lack of feedback (a bit like Doctor Frankenstein, to be fair). In other words, the flow of information goes both ways.
And if a hard-as-nails game, catering to a small number of "hardcore" players, was Metaquarium's starting aim, then I get it—Super Metroid and Fusion are way too easy, "out of the box"; but also, there's a big difference between difficulty for its own sake and posing a challenge in ways that feel rewarding despite the adversity offered up (mendacious or not). X-Fusion is just adversity to piss players off. Yes, it "solves" the puzzle of making Samus' powerups "ineffective," end-game; but it only does this by turning the bosses into pretty distractions from basic game flaws. Less is more, I think, but Metaquarius—just as I predicted—goes a tad overboard. Indeed, he far exceeded my predictions; i.e., with "X Marks the Spot" largely critiquing the game for its thematic content, my work failing to anticipate just how badly designed it feels when played!
By making the game so specialized—and by relying on a lopsided development process—X-Fusion feels very much like a missed opportunity. It's a technical marvel all on its own, but a colossal wreck from a design standpoint. Instead of enjoying myself, I felt sucked into a trap—one I wanted to escape by not playing it; i.e., versus immersing myself among the terrible wreckage:
(source: Don Hertzfeldt's "Rejected Cartoons," 2001)
Bad games = games someone doesn't want to play (usually entire groups of people who normally do want to play what they hope is a good game), and X-Fusion is a bad game. Metroidvania or not, the Gothic past should be something to adore and worship inside, not compel people to actually run away from, screaming as they do! And yes, calculated risk requires balance, but per ludo-Gothic BDSM denotes play and power to invoke a balancing act. Said act should respect consent to regain control, and all as the game invokes feelings of danger and harm; i.e., without frustrating or harming anyone, including by lying to them! To that, lies are fine if they don't cause harm, and the Gothic is built on lies that Metroidvania perpetuate; i.e., in ways that lessen harm through themselves, given the proper balance is struck; e.g., The NESkimoes' "Norfair Tenement Blues" (2004) going for the very vibes that X-Fusion tries to capture, but doesn't "stick the landing."
By comparison, the song highlights these paradoxical feelings as "captured"; i.e., without subjecting oneself to unironic torment (chasing the Numinous, minus the harm a given chant [and "violent" ritual] speaks to):
"Infestations can be dealt with"
I think to myself as I grit my teeth
Determined to take back this land
Where the lava glows and warms the worthy
/
One and two and through and through
I chant to myself
As my missiles track in and I'm already reloading
And now I've taken hundreds of them
But I hear the slithering of thousands more (source).
The feeling of "zero control" is there, but actual control is maintained. In short, it's "the perfect domme"; i.e., that Metroidvania, during ludo-Gothic BDSM, should ideally represent (re: "The Quest for Power, part two" [2023] based on "Why I Submit" [2021] and "Our Ludic Masters").
Sadly X-Fusion is like a bad BDSM partner—zero instruction while melting your face off, Metaquarius returning the player to a flawed childhood (the nightmare home; re: the "Solving Riddles" postscript, 2024); i.e., one that, while Numinous, isn't palliative. I'll play Fusion till the cows come home; X-Fusion is a haunted house I refuse to go inside more than I already have! It reminds me of things I want to forget (re: Myst, which I played back in the mid-'90s)—not the joy of calculated risk, but a lack of control followed by genuine confusion, mid-lie; re: bad games make players unironically suffer. To it, X-Fusion feels more than a little like that uncanny scene from The Invitation (2015); i.e., where the hero and his wife are running away from the table, chased by the killer inside a house that no longer resembles the hero's memory of it (source, timestamp: 1:20:20)!
And yes, not everyone plays these games to overcome trauma (though I would argue that most actually do). Fair enough; that's my problem, I guess. But the fact remains, people from all over had the same hostile response to X-Fusion that I did. Keeping The Invitation in mind, I wanted to ask the hero's question to Metaquarius, "Why's everyone bein' so fucking polite?" Not everyone is, to be sure, but any desire to be polite by me has since been swept aside by how mean-spirited this game feels. "Are you a sadist?" I want to ask Metaquarius. "Because this game feels like nails on a chalkboard to me."
To it, I've never hated a Metroid game, before, but then X-Fusion happened; re: torturing scores of players after a ten-plus-years waiting period, and all in the middle of a global crisis! It's one where a brief distraction—from the agony of multiple genocides—would have been nice. So while I certainly don't want to distract myself permanently from what's happening in Palestine (Bad Empanada's "Israel's Gaza Genocide, Legally Proven," 2025), I also felt like I needed a small break; i.e., from the abject suffering taking place there and elsewhere; e.g., all the Nazis in the White House saying my ass is illegal and you pull this bullshit? Sorry but I gotta yuck that yum! C'est merde!
(source)
"I want a hero." Here's to hoping that future patches make X-Fusion more fun to play (or watch) than it currently is!
Footnotes
[1] A "rom" file being the game's original code—the practice popularized by Nintendo after the 1983 Atari Crash; i.e., ROM, or "read-only" memory on which data is stored, being silicon-based computer chips, including those inside the old, "blow on it," plastic cartridges used by Nintendo's console titles (~677 unique releases in total, not including unlicensed games; source: Quora). Versus modifying hardware, a romhack changes the rom's code by hacking the software involved. Likewise, whereas older romhacks from the early '00s and 2010s were less drastic and more additive—changing bits and pieces of a game's appearance while largely preserving its core gameplay experience—a "total conversion" takes the underlying code and alters it (and the visuals) to a more sophisticated degree; i.e., to modify the core gameplay experience to a fundamental point, making it less and less recognizable when compared to the original. To that, X-Fusion looks and plays radically different than Super Metroid or Metroid Fusion, while still obviously borrowing from both titles: similarity amid difference—the author's intent, here, seemingly being to generate uncharacteristic feelings of disempowerment, which it ties to combat, Gothic atmosphere and "hardcore" gameplay difficulty.
[2] "Fun" being relative; i.e., as a certain amount of frustration is to be expected, in Metroidvania. For example, my brothers and I played Super Metroid back in the '90s, trying for weeks to find the power bombs. We searched everywhere, only to discover a breakable floor (after the horizontal tunnel past Red Tower):
Having done so completely by accident, imagine our eight-year-old relief and chagrin, then multiply that by a hundred, in X-Fusion. Except, if the frustration is too high and frequent, the relief tends to peter out. Such is the case with X-Fusion. In any event, this relic from Metroid 1 (1986) was barely a design issue in Super. By comparison, Metaquarius in X-Fusion has made it a core design feature.
X-Fusion's design is notably regressive, deliberately falling back on that early "Action/Adventure" style the Metroid franchise eventually grew out of (one example I give being the King's Quest franchise); e.g., invisible doors, "pick a pipe(dream)" gimmicks, dead-ends, offscreen tunnels, one-hit kills, and far too many variations of destructible-block "soft gates" and switch-activated, indestructible-wall "hard gates," alike (and gradients of these qualities).
(source: Shiny Zeni's "Super Metroid X-Fusion")
[3] Newer versions of that game come with developer-provided hints and clues (my brothers and I only beating Myst on the Mac in the '90s, using a strategy guide provided by a computer gaming magazine).
[4] Versus the TPS genre—while popularized by Nintendo's copaganda-in-disguise—actually appearing in more overt forms, in the mid-'70s (Renegade Cut's "Kill Cops! (in video games)," 2025).
[5] Speedrunners tend to love/hate games they don't want to speedrun versus those they do; e.g., Zoasty doesn't like the RNG (random number generation) known to JRPGs like FF7 (1997), whereas other runners very much love to speedrun FF7 (and similar games; e.g., Caleb Hart). Some, like Arcus, do a bit of either (or play a "marathon" of many different NES games, which tend to have similar designs; e.g., run 'n gun or platformers). Speedrunning is one, a meta activity whose emergent gameplay remains informed by intended gameplay precursors; e.g., Nintendo, with the Metroid and Zelda franchises, having developed some of the first games made to be speedrun; i.e., in a closed-space format with hidden rewards built in (re: "Always More: A History of Gothic Motion from the Metroidvania Speedrunner," 2019):
Beyond communities that reward speed, fast players are rewarded by Metroidvania when using the same items. Samus, in Metroid, will remove her armor at the end, but only if the game is beaten fast enough. Triggered, this ending produces a hidden image in a hidden system with hidden details—its trigger, label and ending number [a monomyth striptease canonized by the game and carried forward into future metaworks; i.e., critiquing present structures in "past," pre-capitalist, virgin/whore language, below] (source).
(artist: Tavuntu)
Said movement was recursive, around which a business buoyed by Gothic themes could boom (e.g., Paul Martin's 2011 "Ambivalence and Recursion in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night [1997]" informing my idea of recursive motion, "Lost in Necropolis" purposefully combining Esper Aarseth's "ergodic" from Cybertext [1997] with Bakhtin's "castle-narrative/Gothic chronotope" from The Dialogic Imagination [1981] when I wrote it). Followed by early organized speedrunning happening in 1990 (re: Koziel regarding Mario 3's [1989] Nintendo World Championships), the practice grew—from the late '90s and entire '00s to the early 2010s—into an underground circuit largely populated by white straight men (re: me, "Modularity and Class," 2024).
From there, subsequent documentation happened in the late 2010s; i.e., after Metroidvania (and similar speed games) became popularized. Said popularity (and monetization) sprang not from YouTube alone, I would argue, but from Twitch that YouTube reported on, hand-in-hand (with Summoning Salt kicking off the speedrunner documentarian craze, in 2018; re: "4-2"). Regardless, speedrunning is highly preferential, therefor arbitrary—a fact that extends to franchises. For example, CScottyW loves Zero Mission (2004) and Fusion but isn't as big a fan of Super's "floaty" movement, whereas Oatsngoats hates the original Metroid but plays Super and Dread (2021), etc. Different strokes for different folks! One man's trash is another man's treasure.
[6] From Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp" (1964): "True camp is seriousness that fails" (source).
[7] With color-coded doors being a quick easy way to emblematize gates; i.e., ones that present as relatively conspicuous (thus easy to remember), while also being fairly limited in number. With blocks, they can be far more numerous, as well as requiring players to shoot them every time they want through: small, harder-to-hit "mini-doors" that can easily crowd and camouflage an obstacle course, overstuffing it; i.e., with cryptic minutiae the player must memorize but can't directly see. So later when I say the game is overdesigned, this is largely what I mean!
[7a] With Scotty—despite being a WR Zero Mission and Fusion speedrunner I've interviewed before (re: "Mazes and Labyrinths: Speedrunning Metroidvania - CScottyW," 2021)—saying roughly eight-and-a-half hours in, "I don't know if for this section, here, I'm just softlocked for no reason. Like, there's no indication and it's so obtuse [...] Yeah, I've got complaints, here; I've got a lotta complaints!" (source):
These really aren't the words you want to hear from players deep into a game. Yes, fatigue can be a part of it, but the fatigue a bad game causes only leads to players hating something after a certain point, versus the satisfaction of having made it thus far and wanting to continue. X-Fusion only has you feel like you're fumbling around in the dark—randomly bumping into shit the developer has put there precisely so you can and will bump into it. It's humiliating and, furthermore, not any fun to watch after a certain point; i.e., I feel as bad for the people playing and watching as I do while performing either of these things, myself.
[8] Longing for the past is all fine and good; torturing oneself to make the experience as unpleasant as possible—re: like the "past [where] shitty games suck ass" that Rolfe critiques (and Kyle Justin famously sings about)—can only play out like a bad joke; i.e., Marx' "first in tragedy, then in farce" refrain. Metaquarius feels like a glutton for punishment—one determined to glut himself on player suffering (a bad DM, in D&D parlance). So get your jollies by playing X-Fusion if you like/dare, but remember who you're feeding as you do!
[9] A ludic contract being something the player agrees to, in advance, based on pre-existing information. There are often "holy" considerations, too (re: the Protestant ethic); or, as Pratt writes, "Whatever tactics and stratagems that players may develop the unspoken agreement is that none of their moves should threaten the spirit of the game. And the spirit of the game is nothing more than the set of mutual expectations and understandings between the players, the highest and most basic of which is that the game is worth playing at all" (source: "No Exit," 2021).
Yet, while such dogmatic expectation historically leads to a canonical sense of damnation—i.e., that one is damned to play the game because it was given to them—players can ultimately subvert these through play as actually being rather flexible; re (from my series glossary):
An agreement between the player and the game to be played; or as Chris Pratt writes in "In Praise of Spoil Sports" (2010): "the more traditional definition of the ludic contract [is] an agreement on the part of players that they will forgo some of their agency in order to experience an activity that they enjoy." Yet, inventive players like speedrunners (which Pratt calls "spoilsports") converge upon intended gameplay with unintended, emergent forms. In other words, the ludic contract is less a formal, rigid contract and more a negotiated compromise occurring between the two; i.e., where players have some sense of agency in deciding how they want to play the game even while adhering to its rules and, in effect, being mastered by it (see: Seth Giddings and Helen Kennedy's "Little Jesuses and *@#?-off Robots," 2008, exhibit 0a2c).
Even so, such forces clearly "buckle"; i.e., whenever games like X-Fusion test the devotion (and patience) of players, mid-interpretation (a fan game effectively taking corporate canon and breaking it on purpose, but also the brains of players)!
[10] Remixing videogame music happening all the way back in 2000, with The Minibosses and NESkimoes, but also Grant Henry's Metroid Metal from the early 2000s, onwards.
About the Author
Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, Tolkien and Amazon enthusiast, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal, Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!
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