How does Samus Aran’s transformation ball work?

With Metroid Afraid Bringing intergalactic bounty hunter Samus Aran back to the hearts and minds of the public, Metroid fans like yours have really been answering a lot of questions about her. I recently summarized Samus Aran’s career before Metroid Dread, but one question has proven particularly difficult to answer, and that is the nature of Samus’s morph ball mode. How can this muscular Amazonian woman contract into such a small sphere?

I am here to tell you that it is entirely possible. Or at least, it used to be.

Way back to the original Metroid, Samus Aran’s transformation ball shape was precisely half his height. Each human body has slightly different proportions, but on average, most people are half their height when curled up in a ball. (This stock image of a businessman doing a cartwheel illustrates my point quite well.)

In these screenshots of the original Metroid (courtesy of a YouTube Playback by naswinger), you can measure the height of Samus according to the building blocks on the walls of the game. A runner for a transform ball is one block tall, while a runner that is tall enough for Samus to walk is two blocks tall. In other words, the transform ball is the correct size.

As for how the Transform Ball would actually work, that’s another story, and it’s not a question that any Metroid game has ever answered: How can Samus see well enough in Transform Ball mode to navigate an underground maze? ? And wouldn’t you get dizzy? My personal theory is that the transform ball works similar to a sliding eyeball toy, which means that Samus is curled up but always upright while in transform ball mode. This would still mean, once again, that the transformation ball would have to be at least half the size of Samus Aran standing at full height in her armor.

The original Metroid meets that requirement. At least some of the other Metroid games, like Metroid Prime, they also seem to fulfill it. Game text in Metroid Prime describes the morph ball hallways as being about a meter high, and Metroid Prime game assets collected by a fan also show that the transformation ball is half as tall as Samus in her armor. Samus is 6 feet 3 inches tall, according to the Super metroid The Nintendo Gamer’s Guide, although there is some dispute among fans as to whether that figure refers to his height in his suit or not. Regardless, a meter is a little over three feet, so Samus’s height and the transformation ball’s height seem to be fine in Metroid Prime.

The situation becomes more and more confusing when we take into account Metroid: Another M. The 2010 Team Ninja game featured Samus standing roughly 5 feet, 2 inches tall outside of her power suit, but still depicted her over 6 feet in the suit, resulting in a strange discrepancy that has been highlighted by fans in diagram form. Other M made Samus’s transformation ball half his size in the zero suit, but not the power suit, which… well, it would make sense if she weren’t so tall in the power suit, but sure.

And then there’s Super Smash Bros., perhaps the biggest source of confusion of all of Samus’s appearances, largely because it’s the one most people are familiar with. It is also the smallest transformation ball it has ever been, to a point that is ridiculous. On Super Smash Bros Ultimate, his transformation ball barely reaches his knee, as you can see in these screenshots I took of Samus Aran fighting the CPU Dark Samus via YouTube user Choctopus:

How Metroid Dread pile on all of this, like the most recent iteration of Samus Aran’s Transform Ball? It is certainly better than Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, but the transformation ball is not big enough yet; is about a third of Samus’s height in Afraid, instead of the half it should be.

At this point, the transform ball has normalized to less than half Samus’s height. That is too small, and for no reason. It wouldn’t make transformation ball mazes and puzzles any less fun if Samus was a little bigger when he made them. The only reason I can imagine why Samus’s transformation ball is so small now is because the difference in size looks fun, especially on something as cartoonish as Super Smash Bros. Or maybe it’s because Samus got a lot more waifish. and diminutive in Metroid: Another M, leading to the height discrepancy between his zero suit and the power suit-wearing selves in Latest. Is the transform ball supposed to represent half its height at 5 feet, 2 inches, since it is at Other M (and Latest, at least in the form of a zero suit)? Or is it supposed to represent half your height in your muscles Super metroid levels?

I can’t talk about any of that. But I have some consolation in all of this – researching this post allowed me to find a massive fan community of artists who have chosen to illustrate higher versions of Zero Suit Samus, in particular artists who have decided to pair this taller one. version of Samus zero suit with the tiny boxer Little Mac. Latest, are about the same height, but in this fan art, she towers over him. It’s great.

Let Samus be great, Nintendo! In his zero suit, his power suit and his transformation ball. It is just correct. And it’s what the fans want.