Fellas, I have been listening to a shit ton of remixes on the Prime Trilogy and once more I need to let loose my autism unto this hellsite
I fucking love Dark Samus
I really fucking love Dark Samus
I don't know if any of you know this, but I FUCKING LOVE Dark Samus, like she is my top Metroid Antagonists, topping even the SA-X or Raven Beak (Raven Beak is genuinely on top but I'll get to him in another post) or Ridley and others.
Why?
Well that's what this post is about
So who the fuck is Dark Samus? Or really, WHAT IS Dark Samus??
(Source is from the Metroid Wiki channel on Youtube. I use the original version instead of the remastered because the lighting in the remastered version of this cutscene is a bit fucked despite the better-detailed models. You can see the eye on the palm much more clearly as its pupil dilates to adjust to the lighting of the room. look I'm an autist for these details, I want you all to see them in all their glory as much as I have growing up)
DARK SAMUS My beloved
Dark Samus is more or less part of the "dark doppelganger" troupe in nintendo games, with the important caveat that unlike other such doppelgangers like Dark Link or Dark Kirby from the Magical Mirror games, Dark Samus' originated from the destroyed remains of the METROID PRIME, the final boss of the first game in the Prime Trilogy.
After Samus murders the shit out of the Metroid Prime, it manages to steal the Phazon Suit she used to get into the Impact Crater, which by extension also contained the DNA of Samus. With this, this ressurection of the Metroid Prime, reconstructed using this Phazon Suit and the DNA it acquired became what we know today: Dark Samus, a Metroid Hybrid - the first of its kind, long before Samus would eventually have Metroid DNA spliced into her during the opening events of Fusion.
(Dark Samus' final concept art, found in the Metroid Prime 2 concept gallary)
Dark Samus' design in prime 2 is something I adore to the utmost extreme. Its this wholly-organic Varia-adjacent suit with exposed, dark blue musculature. She has a clawed hand, feett, and an arm cannon too and its visor isn't just a visor but is entirely integrated into her body. In essence, She isn't just a living suit, She has used the Varia Suit as a basis to reconstruct her ENTIRE god damn body, right down to the arm cannon and the pauldrons and the visor too. THIS IS HER ZERO SUIT! So if anyone comes up to you and shows you a picture of Emo Zero Suit Samus and calling it Zero Suit Dark Samus, know that that is FAKE and WRONG and ENTIRELY INACCURATE to the ELDRITCH HORROR MADE REALITY.
Its a shame that the Gamecube wasn't really that powerful enough to truly show off just how organic this Dark Samus design was, especially given the pauldrons have these scrolling phazon textures poking out of the holes in her pauldrons that could really do well with an up-ressing of her model. Hopefully the remaster does this justice. Her morphball form, too, deserves an equal amount of justice given the concept art that exists of it
(Source is again from the concept art of MP2. VERY SPOOKY.)
Anyways, Dark Samus comes equipped with her own arsenal too, uniquely her own with a few exceptions, such as a Phazon Scatterbeam, a thin phazon laser thats almost akin to a more focused hyper beam that Raven Beak uses, an energy shield much akin to the phazon suit she used to reconstruct herself, alongside a ramming attack that's kinda akin to her own shinespark or screw attack (prime style of course), and the obvious Super Missiles and Boost Ball that she has in her first and second encounter. Eventually she'll even gain a Cloaking Field that can only be detected via the Dark Visor or the Echo Visor, and eventually super charging herself to even throw out pure phazon at Samus in her third and final fight.
There was a cut bad ending to Dark Samus' fight where she would have stolen the Light Suit from Samus (to reflect the time she had stolen the Phazon Suit in MP1) and gone off to let Aether get destroyed and
Jesus Christ, I love it.
You can see how it takes direct inspiration from the Metroid Prime as well, given her head and pauldrons have those spikes alongside the red and orange highlights on her armor, but it ALSO has a sort of luminoth inspiration to it too. It has a metallic, shelled sheen to it with two-pronged feet, a sort of completed hand and her arm cannon looking less round and more reminiscent of her Prime 3 design. It would EVENTUALLY see the light of day as inspiration for her overall Metroid Prime 3 design, but I still wish I could model it and bring it to life for other Metroid Fans to use.
In Prime 3, her design is switched again to something more akin to a shelled crab. ...now the Wii's graphics aren't... ENTIRELY REPRESENTATIVE of her design...
It's...not BAD, but you can't really tell if its organic or metallic in nature.
Smash Ultimate does this design justice at the very least. You can tell its more chitinous in nature compared to Prime 3's low-res renders
This has her having a more traditional suit design compared to Prime 2, and while the latter's design will always be my all-time favorite, this one is great too.
In Prime 3 her arsenal is expanded too, as she can control the Phazon on Phaaze to create pillars of the stuff for cover, split herself into multiple copies that act semi-independently of her (dubbed Echoes, funnily enough), She is by all means and purposes - a fucking POWERHOUSE of a creature in her own right.
Eventually she is "permanently" killed off in Prime 3, as confirmed by the director Kensuke Tanabe, but I still have hope that maybe one day she could return later on in the metroid timeline, because god dammit. She was THE ONLY other metroid hybrid in the franchise, right there with Samus as of now. Samus is honestly more closely related to Dark Samus now than she ever has been in the franchise, save for the Phazon mutagen Dark Samus had consisted of.
Hell, there's even a bit of a character arc with her where she started off as the Metroid Prime - this solely monstrous, instinctual creature mindlessly consuming Phazon and assimilating weaponry onto itself, before reconstructing itself as Dark Samus proper - still instinctual in a sense, but with a growing intelligence that really shines in the climax of the trilogy with Prime 3 - leading entire raids against the Federation with Space Pirates and showing a sense of companionship with the other metroids/phastroids she interacted with whiles showing how cruel she could be towards the surviving feddies of the Valhalla.
It's so much so that ever since Dread dropped its been a dream of mine to realize a climatic battle between Metroids.
THE LAST METROID VS THE PRIME METROID
If you will.
GOD, I fucking love Dark Samus. She honestly stacks so high up even against the X as my other favorite metroid antagonist that I wish more was done with her before the eventual climatic ending with Prime 3. I hope this was enough to also gain your interest in this fascinating mutant metroid made humanoid.
Next up on the list, the Chozo - including Grey Voice, Old Bird, Raven Beak and Quiet Robe of course.
