Boss Keys style maps
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Being inspired by Gamemaker's Toolkit's first season of its mini-series Boss Keys, which is a series that looks into the design philosophies of Zelda dungeons in terms of layout, I decided to do something similarly for the Metroid series. This idea was fueled by things like item randomizer algorithms and 100%-speedruns, because I wanted to find a way to chart out the areas of Metroid in an attempt to facilitate pathing and maybe even help Metroid fangame makers to think about design and gating in their games.
Metroid Fusion was actually a very fun one to do.
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Note: Restricted Lab is on separate post. See below.
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Note: some L.0 doors are included to show which rooms are cut off during the Nettori mission (post Reactor Core). Not all of them are necessary to show (and if they were, then the charts would all be much larger), only the ones directly blocking exploration in Sector 2 during that mission. Notice that with one exception, the layout pretty much funnels the player to the boss chamber.
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Note: I've indicated the raised (electrified) and lowered water levels, as the electrified water poses as both a barrier and as a mission objective.
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Note: the red line shows the path that leads to the timed mission objective.
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Note: event flags play heavily in this sector, more than any other. This is factored in based on the current mission's escape route from the Data Room, where the escape route is different pre-Ice Missiles, post-Ice Missiles, and post-Power Bombs.
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Here's a condensed version of the above charts, showing what the whole of the BSL station looks like in terms of item dependencies:
