Fun fact! When I first played Samus Returns, I wasn’t all too familiar with Metroid lore, particularly when it came to the Metroid life cycle. I’d played Fusion beforehand so I knew the Omega was the final stage, but hadn’t paid enough attention to the background when you find the Metroid breeding lab to internalize the amount of stages between; Plus Samus Returns redesigned them, so there was still something pretty new to look forward to. I wondered how the Omega would look in that game, and knew Ridley was the final boss. So after encountering the Omega Metroid, I thought that’s it! That’s all there is to see of the Metroid life cycle, what cool creatures!
Imagine me being surprised when the number goes up at the end of the game, leading to actual larvae being fought; Something I’d waited for the whole game since that form is so much more iconic. But after one increase, I don’t expect another and there’s just one more; I may or may not have suspected this to be the infant that is doomed in Super Metroid.
And then I dropped through a destructible block and was utterly blindsided by the shot of the ginormous Queen in the background. I wasn’t even entirely sure what I was looking at, at first; What the hell is that, and then I realized it had to have been some particularly powerful, actually final stage of Metroid. Way too big to be an Omega, but wasn’t the Omega supposed to be the final form?
And it was only after doing research upon completing the game that I understood what this thing was, and how it was neglected in Fusion because the Queen is an atypical stage (hence why a skimmed online source would call the Omega the final stage), plus Fusion didn’t want to reuse a final boss for what would be a shorter endgame segment. Because of that tasteful restraint, I got one of my favorite shocks ever and I love it.
