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Unrecorded: 0:46 by Biospark

Leaderboards for Metroid Fusion Any% can be found here

Route

A tutorial video series for Metroid Fusion Any% is available in a youtube playlist by kirbymastah

Due to the straightforward nature of Metroid Fusion's progression, there is no significant routing. Simply knowing where to go to beat the game generally follows the ideal route.

Routing differences in Metroid Fusion generally comes down to which energy tanks and missile tanks to collect.

Energy Tanks

The ideal number of energy tanks to collect is exactly one, as the others do not help with speed in any way.

However, it is strongly advisable to collect more energy tanks, especially in races, depending on your skill level. Considering that Biospark gets 2 energy tanks in races, and the next best players (kirbymastah, jaggerg, and dragonfangs) collect 3; new players should opt for several more. Below is a list of cheap extra energy tanks that the player should get, ordered by how much time they cost from less to more. In other words, the player should get the energy tanks near the top of the list until they are comfortable.

1. E-tank in sector 6, the room before the SA-X encounter, before Varia Suit. This costs less than a second to get as long as you plant the bomb before getting the e-tank, so the bomb goes off during the acquisition animation.

2. First e-tank in the game, just before Arachnus, in plain sight.

3. E-tank before Yakuza, in the room with the space pirates, in plain sight.

4. E-tank in sector 1, in the toad room after the first stabilizer, in plain sight inside a morph ball tunnel.

5. E-tank in sector 2, just before Zazabi, in plain sight.

6. E-tank after BOX. Be sure to shinespark left in the hall above BOX so you can get the e-tank from above.

7. E-tank in sector 5, just before fighting Nightmare, in plain sight. Use the morph ball tunnel above to get it. If you can get this with the crumble block strat instead, then get this instead of e-tank #6.

8. Second e-tank before Arachnus. Shoot a missile at the left block of the right part of the ceiling to reveal a tunnel and climb through. This costs a lot of time, but gives you another early e-tank to work with for the rest of the game.

When starting a run, it is recommended to try collecting all 8 above in a run. The player should see how many e-tanks the player can take off, and remove e-tanks from the bottom of the list until the player is comfortable.

Missile Tanks

Standard

For any%, missiles early on save a significant amount of time. The optimal missile tanks to collect in a speedrun are listed below, which are six missile tanks adding up to 40 missiles.

1. Missile tank on Main Deck, in the dark shaft after getting Missiles, in plain sight on the right side.

2. Missile tank on Main Deck, in the room left of Missile Tank #1.

3. Missile tank on Main Deck, above the navigation room Samus stops at after obtaining Morph Ball.

4. Missile tank on Sector 3, notoriously named BOB as it is unskippable on console. You can't miss this.

5. Missile tank on Main Deck, on the bottom floor of the animals room, after saving the animals.

6. Missile tank on the Main Deck, found by speed boosting into the left wall of the Main Elevator that goes down to the sector selection hall.

The first three missile tanks give just enough missiles to reliably complete sector 1 and 2 without heavily relying on missile drops. BOB is unskippable. The only time missiles are really needed before Missile Tank #5 is during the meltdown segment, and having 15-20 missiles is more than enough. Missile Tank #5 and #6 are collected as they save time against Nettori and Nightmare, and both missile tanks cost little time.

Back-Up

The missile tanks below are missile tanks collected if a certain strategy fails; they can also be collected if the player wishes to get more missiles than the ones above.

1. After fighting BOX, and going to sector 6 after, there is a chance that the player will not have enough missiles to take out the super missile barrier. If this is the case, and the player messes up shinesparking through the super missile barrier, then the fastest back-up strat is to bomb the wall to the left of the barrier and collect the missile tank there, rather than collecting drops and refills.

2. An extra missile tank can be collected, depending on the player's luck. On the main deck, in the dark hall with the spitter enemies in the ceiling, before returning to the ship after power bombs, if the player is unable to obtain a speed boost due to enemy placement, then it is faster for the player to simply power bomb the next room and collect the missile tank in the way. This is a good backup strategy as it does not require redoing the speed boost, and the extra missile tank saves time against Nettori and makes Nightmare slightly easier on missile count.

3. If the player wants another missile tank, there is one hidden in a morph ball tunnel in the space pirate room just before fighting Yakuza.