Originally she was definitely a bounty hunter, if the English translations of the manuals are to be trusted. Sometime later she was retconned to act more like a mercenary, I guess because Nintendo thought it would be more noble to be a former soldier / space cop than just a random gun for hire
Like basically all Japanese NES/SNES games, Metroid's early English translations are definitely *not* to be trusted. Her Japanese title is closer to space adventurer, and according to the devs at Retro, [Nintendo rejected a bounty hunting mechanic in MP3 because hunting targets for money didn't fit her altruistic characterization.](https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/04/random-nintendo-didnt-know-what-a-bounty-hunter-was-before-metroid-prime)
Bruh, she's called a "Space Hunter" in Japanese and the original Metroid manual literally says she hunts pirates for bounties. What are you even talking about?
In the english yeah. IIRC it was a thing that Rare suggested making it a mechanic for the Prime games, but Nintendo of Japan was horrified that that was what a bounty hunter did
Eh, it's something that depends on cultural context. Japan, especially during the Edo period, didn't have much in the way of "freelance bounty hunters" as commonly shown in Western media separate from mercenaries or general blades for hire. It just wasn't as much part of their cultural zeitgeist. Especially as most of their "bounty hunting" historically, was a lord telling his samurai "Whoever brings me this guys head will get a reward!" Something quite common on the battlefield.
EDIT: So I guess to Nintendo, when they heard how western style bounty hunters worked, it sounded much more like a freelance assassin or hitman
https://preview.redd.it/bv9pwoxpxz8d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e87aeef04e40cd19bfe11125b3a57c7fbef809ea
Like, what else could 賞金稼ぎ possibly mean?
The English translations of the early games are 100% accurate when it comes to [calling Samus a bounty hunter.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Metroid/comments/1cr5ml0/random_thought_what_do_you_think_samus_rates_are/l3yri1r/?context=3)
I looked at it and I think it says something more like "Space Warrior" than adventurer. I have the Japanese manual here and it says this about her (and refers to samus as a "him", because the reveal that it's a lady is at the end):
> 彼は最も優秀な宇宙戦士であり、絶対不可能と言われた数多くの事件を解決してきた。
> He is the most superior space warrior (soldier etc), many cases (affairs, incidents, plots, etc) that were said to be absolutely impossible have been solved by him.
Anyway the point is the word they are using is 戦士, which you can look up the meaning for here if you want:
https://jisho.org/search/%E6%88%A6%E5%A3%AB
This is the same word used in Final Fantasy 1 to refer to the "Light Warriors" who are 光の戦士 (Warriors of Light).
Adventurer would probably be more like 冒険者
I might make a post later translating the manual if anyone is actually interested.
The Japanese manuals always called Samus a 賞金稼ぎ, "bounty hunter," since the first game. That "space hunter" terminology stopped appearing as early as the Super Metroid manual: I don't think the Metroid II manual mentioned anything about being a hunter, bounty or space, at all.
[Metroid 1 manual uses it here](https://preview.redd.it/bv9pwoxpxz8d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e87aeef04e40cd19bfe11125b3a57c7fbef809ea)
Yeah, she's more like an independent contract worker for the Galactic Federation. She isn't some random mercenary who will accept payment from anyone. Otherwise, what's stopping some great evil from just hiring Samus to work for them? Obviously, she'd never work for Ridley with the whole killing her parents thing but the Space Pirates aren't the only evil out there.
No, she's a bounty hunter.
The idea that "Nintendo doesn't actually know what that is" is just... dumb? Like, she hunts bounties in the games, we see her do that.
Bounty hunters aren't "Criminal killers for higher." They're people who go after bounties- aka, money put down to go retrieve something or someone, dead or alive.
She does that constantly. When she takes jobs from the Federation, that's a Bounty. When she goes after Space Pirates, that's bounty hunting.
That assumes the Fed needs physical proof though. The Power Suit probably records like a black box which would be evidence enough, and by now Samus is too elite for "low tier" general bounties, instead being tapped for specifically tailored ones and having enough trust put in her to take her word for it.
This is how I'm always going to imagine it going now. "How do I know you actually took out Ridley?" Samus-"if I didn't, then how can I do this?" As she proceeds to morph into a ball and bloop out an explosive......
This idea came from the reveal of Retro's original pitch for metroid prime 3, in which actual bounty hunting was a key mechanic.
To abridge the story, Nintendo rejected the idea cuz they where like
"bro why she doing all that this makes no sense"
& retro was like
"bro she's a BOUNTY HUNTER, this is what they do"
an Nintendo was like
"wait fer realz?? I thought they just went around going on adventures in space."
An Retro was like
" Are you for real bro!?"
Yeah, that’s a misconception lol. However, I don’t think this mindset is reflected in the games that much, beyond her not really doing much bounty hunting in earlier games.
Attempting to kill the pirate leaders (on multiple occasions) and removing a dangerous species sounds like bounty contracts to me. Sure, plenty of what she does is also personal, but it’d be hard to imagine not getting personally involved with work like this, I’m sure real bounty hunters take jobs because of personal reasons on occasion.
Dread’s job was certainly both, Adam even specifically mentions that there’s a bounty on investigating the X parasite footage on ZDR, Samus took the job because she’s realistically the only one who could, and Raven Beak was betting on that. Hunters was definitely bounty hunting, and I’d love to see the systems in that game return in a more fleshed out state. The first Prime game was a bounty, so was the second, the third was more like the start of a war. 4 is looking like a bounty too, likely put on Sylux.
Can you share your source describing this as a misconception? My source ( as well as many others since this was how most people learned about it)
Was through one of the DKYG videos about Retro studios.
I would say more like a military contractor. She is a space adventurer that occasionally does government work. Mercenaries usually work for anyone who has money and so far all of Samus’ commissions have come from the Galactic Federation.
My headcanon says Samus is known for taking jobs that involve saving people and not charging extra when shit gets crazy. Rundas' line in Corruption about being big damned heroes was his way of teasing her for it. She's altruistic, but still a merc.
I mean, she was bounty hunting in Metroid Prime: Hunters. But that's basically the only one, and even then she wasn't hunting a specific person, but an object.
In the manga she saves the head of the federation from an assassination and then tell Adam that she’ll be expecting the payment (she does say this in a semi-joking fashion). She seems to be a bounty hunter in order to do the space cop thing but get better pay and have no rules.
...which... Samus does quite often? lol, do you think she felt sorry for killing Mother Brain?
Also, "hunting" doesn't mean "murder." Hunting someone down is still bounty hunting, even if the goal isn't death. Hunting for an object is also bounty hunting.
It's just a paid job to go do something. In a way that is the job of a mercenary, but mercenaries are usually more for like, war? Samus takes more odd jobs.
Never said hunting meant murder. Thats what hitmen
are for.
And granted, Zero mission and Returns are Bounty Hunting missions, the former being to destroy mother brain and the latter to eradicate the metroids. But aside from that most games are more like "find what happened to these people" or "investigate this planet" or even more personal things like super and fusion
You said she's a merc, and that bounty hunters are more involved with the "hunting" part. I said that mercs are soldiers hired for war, and that bounties involve hunting for more than just people.
In most Metroid games, Samus is actively bounty hunting. Off the top of my head, Prime 2 with being tasked with investigating Aether, Prime 3 with her work alongside the Federation going from planet to planet, her work in Samus Returns where she's tasked with checking out SR388 after Federation troops failed, there's Fusion where she's tasked with going to the BSL Station, and Dread where she's outright stated to be taking a bounty to investigate the X parasite footage.
These are all bounties she's taken. The hunting part often comes in when it comes to narrowing down the source of trouble- How did the troops on Aether die? Can she kill the x parasites on the BSL Station? Can she find who made the X Parasite footage?
These are bounties. (Unless some of these aren't paid in which case she's doing stuff for herself, but the job itself, if paid, is taking a bounty.)
Looking up the definition for bounty:
>1. a sum paid for killing or capturing a person or animal.
>2. a sum paid to encourage trade
So no, I would say Prime 2 and Fusion and Dread and stuff like that arent picking bounties
Still, these kinds of jobs are not used much in the modern world, and i think engaging on debate around their functioning would be little more than fallacy, so, agree to disagree?
I think bounty hunters and mercenaries are more or less the same thing. They get paid to go do tasks that are potentially or probably dangerous and being able to competently use violence might make them less dangerous. The main difference that I perceive is that Bounty Hunters have a connotation of working solo or in small groups, where you would generally expect mercenaries to fight in a company or other military unit.
In any case, most games seem to have at least started as a mission or can plausibly have started as one.
Metroid II is pretty obviously an extermination mission, and fusion started as an escort mission. Super Metroid is an extension of the Metroid II mission since suddenly the last metroid is in the hands of the space pirates and they aren't supposed to be weaponizeable anymore.
Since she seems to be the default hunter to deal with major threats, she might also have a standing bounty to destroy space pirates, given that she's referred to as "the Hunter" in space pirate logs in Prime.
Heck, it would make sense if there was just generally a standing bounty against the space pirates, given the threat they generally pose to the Galaxy at large.
I mean a merc can be a bounty hunter, they basicly do things for money often hired for their prowess in fighting and record of completing jobs. Mercenaries are also more often than not part of a group, while bounty hunters are often more lone wolves or few individuals.
If you want to be specific that she needs to "hunt targets" to be a bounty hunter, then to be a mercenary she needs to "go to war for someone" as that is usually what mercenaries are for... war. Her jobs are not to be an asset in their war but almost always to retrieve something or hunt a sepcific target, and sometimes she isn't even contracted she just happened to notice a distress signal and came to help (like in prime 1 and fusion)
The games rarely make her a bounty hunter nor a mercenary. but her job when we're not playing her is supposedly a bounty hunter.
The Prime series is a perfect example of your headcanon.
The first game, Samus is contracted to investigate a distress call near Tallon IV. I doubt the Federation paid for anything above that, like hunting down that immortal space dragon, or discovering the existence of Phazon.
I could see Samus selling information about the (now defunct) Space Pirate base on the planet, as well as notes from her experience with Phazon. My headcanon is that those logbooks are valuable to xenobiologists.
Then the bounty in Echoes is to investigate the disappearance of the GFS Tyr in the Dasha region of space. Samus was stuck on Aether when her ship was damaged during landing.
The entire events of Echoes after the “tutorial” area was unrelated to the bounty the Federation placed. Saving the planet and the Luminoth could have been in the interest of self-preservation; losing the planet with no way to leave would ensure her death.
But I believe that Samus would have helped the Liminoth regardless. She knows what it’s like to watch your civilization crumble and collapse.
Of course, I’m sure that Samus received a pretty hefty finder’s fee for recovering those crates of Phazon “misplaced” by the Pirates.
So I wonder if the hero remark is how Samus’s bounties always wind up going out of control and uncovering bigger problems than initially thought
Mercenary, yes, bounty hunter... no, not so much.
Bounty hunters make their livings, tracking down criminals with bounties on their heads to bring them to justice and collect the bounty. At no point have we ever seen Samus actually fulfil that role.
Not to mention she was specifically tasked to slay Mother Brain in Metroid 1. Heck, this may be the reason she’s considered a bounty hunter: in the game that introduced her and her occupation, she was indeed hunting a bounty.
One could also argue she was sent to Planet ZDR to kill any X parasites on the planet, but I think the game made it sound more like an investigation than a hunt.
Or an item. I'm pretty sure in Metroid Prime: Hunters she actually qualifies as a real bounty hunter, since she's hunting down the "Ultimate Power" for a bounty. It's just that a bunch of other bounty hunters are also doing it too.
I have friends who travel to Washington and Idaho state every summer to participate in the annual bounty fishing program to control the pikeminnow population up there.
A key part of a bounty hunter in the Boba Fett sense is that nobody is given the job. Vader says “20k credits to whoever can get me Han Solo” and a bunch of people try to do that. Boba Fett just happens to be the successful one. Far as I can tell, that isn’t what happens to Samus. The Federation hires her in particular to kill the Metroids on SR-388. For her to be a bounty hunter, the Federation would have to say “X space monies for whoever can kill all the Metroids” and presumably you’d see other people trying to do it (beyond the Federation soldiers since obviously those are just government employees)
While not technically being a bounty hunter in the typical sense, I do find it interesting that Metroid gameplay facilitates one to search for bosses, in a way acting as a hunter.
I would also argue that technically Samus was acting as a bounty hunter in Metroid 1 she was hired to take down the Metroids and Mother Brain. The only thing missing is she never captured either.
> The only thing missing is she never captured either.
Remember "Dead or Alive" posters? Bounties don't require the target to be brought back alive every time. Hell about a decade ago, the Philippines was raising eyebrows because their president was endorsing bounties for corpses of drug dealers, no questions asked.
She hunts down bio-terrorists and their leader. Then to complete the job she makes sure that no one else can use bio weapons. But then, whoops, there's now an even worse bio threat that has been confirmed to have spread.
Ah yes, when does she ever fight criminals? If only they, I don't know, pit her against pirates or war criminals or something.
It would be cool if in a recent 2D Metroid game they even outright specified she took a bounty for the job too.
Nahhhh, she's just a mercenary. Let's also just... ignore the fact mercenaries are soldiers for hire, often for war or protection.
Guess that depends on the definition? After Metroid II/Samus Returns, technically she was hunting the Metroids as part of a bounty--just not in the conventional compensation sense and was going to look for the next bounty to exterminate in Super before the space pirates destroyed Zebes.
Mass Effect is another sci-fi franchise that treats "bounty hunter" and "mercenary" as synonyms, especially with Wrex & Zaeed Massani's characters.
Wrex claims he's a bounty hunter but when he talks about all his previous missions, he does close bodyguard duty, assaults on heavily fortified bases, recapturing hijacked ships, assassinations... everything except actual bounty hunting.
Zaeed claims he's a mercenary but the first thing you see him do is roughing up a runaway criminal, shoot him in the leg, then pick him up and turn him in for a cash reward. To be fair to Zaeed, all his stories about his past career are bonafide mercenary work, though.
The skill sets are close enough that I'm not too bothered by the distinction.
They're both essentially freelance work; it's not like you get 9-5 wages with a clear-cut job description. I can see no reason why a mercenary who takes bodyguarding and assassination work regularly would refuse a bounty if the pay were good enough. Working the other way around is a bit more of a stretch, but hardly outside the realm of possibility.
Look, America is the only real world country that even has Bounty Hunters in that strict of a sense, so give other cultures credit for taking a glorified tattle tale gig and making it actually cool
> Look, America is the only real world country that even has Bounty Hunters in that strict of a sense
[The Philippines is not a real country?](https://www.aljazeera.com/program/101-east/2016/1/6/the-bounty-hunters/)
Everyone knows France isn't real. Just look at their language. You dont pronounce half of the letters in most of their words because they're not even real words. It's all just gibberish
Blows my mind that when I was growing up we were all absolutely enthralled by Dog The Bounty Hunter, who was just a white trash class traitor brutalizing poor people who had usually committed relatively harmless offenses.
That “they didn’t know what a bounty hunter was” bit was an embellishment. They know what a bounty hunter is and that Samus is one, they had other reasons for not wanting the proposed mechanic to be in Corruption.
I don't know about that. This is quote from senior director of development at Retro studios Bryan Walker during an interview with [IGN](https://www.ign.com/articles/2009/08/29/a-space-bounty-hunter-in-texas)
"We were looking for something more along the lines of a mission-based game where Samus collected bounties. And for the life of us we couldn't understand why [Nintendo was] being so resistive to that concept. And then over the period of days we came to understand that their definition of a bounty hunter is not a bounty hunter. It is not someone who brings in bad guys for money. That concept was completely outside of their definition," says Walker. Nintendo told Retro that Samus does not actually take bounties for those she hunts. (Someone should tell Nintendo that Aran has officially been labeled a bounty hunter for two decades now, a slight inconsistency.) "So we started joking that Samus was actually a pro-bono hunter. And occasionally we'll run into those nuances of translation and culture that can sometimes derail us for days."
He also said in a [DYK Gaming video](https://youtu.be/oKs_Oyfuyuc?si=U2Wv9rwXmEr7kDqZ)
"Kiyo, who was one of the translators, boiled it down very well in the assumption that our Japanese partners had of Samus — that she was not doing it for the money, she was being very altruistic. And I think he rolled out the term 'motherly'. She was caring for people, what she was doing was literally out of the goodness of her heart, because she deeply cared about humanity. Which was as far away from Boba Fett as you can get. I never would have equated Samus with the definition of an altruistic motherly influence, given that she had the title of 'bounty hunter'... We were just looking at Kiyo as he was describing this, like, are we even on the same planet??"
Which is odd when you consider Samus asks for money in the Metroid Manga, & in Famicom Disk System version of Metroid 1 Samus gets bags of money depending on how well one has done. Even Metroid dread has dialogue suggesting money for her mission.
https://preview.redd.it/k32cec1b5v8d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=efdaa0a5775004266558050112df73426bded9e3
Yeah, but she's not doing it \*for\* the money. That's what Nintendo was saying. Based on her character, you can assume any money she asks for is for supplies and ship maintenance. Just what she needs to keep going and doing what she does.
I mean sure, you can say she's not doing it for the money, and that's true Samus has personal motivation besides pay. Regardless she's still getting payed to do the job.
It does beg to question, how does Samus make her money if not through the missions she completes?
Maybe she set herself up for life by selling Chozo power ups.
Or perhaps the greater society of Metroid is post-scarcity, and money is just less important for survival.
Or maybe she is a courier, or a bodyguard.
I mean she does make money from the missions though. In Metroid Dread the robot AI Adam even says the bounty isn’t super high and in Metroid: Samus Returns She’s being paid by the Galactic Federation to wipe out the Metroid species.
And in the original Japanese Metroid, a completed save has between one and five money bags next to it depending on how fast you were.
I don't speak Japanese and don't know what the manual has to say about it, but clearly the idea that she receives money for completing missions was already around back then.
The thing is, that really doesn't change anything.
If a doctor decides to retire, and stop charging patients for consultations and surgeries, does he stop being a doctor? If a baker decided to give away their goods for free, would they stop being a baker?
Bounty hunting is an activity. It is something one does. The payment is a practicality, not a necessity for the definition to apply.
If you look at Star wars’s [bounty hunter code pg3](https://youtu.be/yVfZ_qdeLyo?si=pxtRXpDqIV00KTPb) which is actually pretty accurate historical bounty hunting practices samus is actually a better bounty hunter than boba fett her contracts are always legal and her targets are always criminals as opposed to boba fett who will fight kill or capture anyone for the right price
I haven't watched the book of boba fett and i don't have a lot of knowledge about star wars lore that goes beyond the movies, but if you think about it, luke, leia and han solo were all terrorist, they were criminals because their actions went directly against the empire, and because the government paid him, said contracts were likely legal, so at least on the original trilogy he was a good bounty hunter, even though what he did was morally questionable as he worked for an organisation that was morally wrong almost every single time
Well in empire strikes back while he was hunting down the entire crew of the millennium falcon for the empire he was also hunting down Han Solo for Jabba the Hutt, Jabba the Hutt was a crime lord and the bounty was placed on solo because he owed Jabba money so boba fett was essential working as a debt collector
It's actually Nintendo that has it right. Real life bounty hunters take on people wanted by the government, more often than not. While they usually work for a third party, their interests usually coincide with that of the government, much the same as Samus does.
I add these terms because the events of the original trilogy is a civil war, which means a rival government is forming, & 2 Boba Fett doesn't just work with the Empire, but also the Hutts, which would be like the Mafia having it's own Bounty hunter.
Except the Hutt Council is also a government (in the sense that they rule an area of space, pass laws, collect taxes, and hold a monopoly on the use of force in said space) they just also do crime in republic space which I mean IRL countries do the same thing (that is they sponsor organized crime in other countries)
Not to mention, it doesn't necessarily involve hunting *people. A bounty can be made for non-human things.
Samus takes bounties in the games constantly.
Isn’t bounty hunter just “one who hunts bounties”? It’s up to the franchise/universe lore to define what a bounty can be placed on. She’s 100% someone who hunts bounties.
There’s no Star Wars-style Jedi or Mandalorian in Metroid, just like there’s no Star Wars-style Bounty Hunters in Metroid. There’s only Metroid-style Bounty Hunters in Metroid.
I do know in the canon Zero Mission manga it starts off with her turning in a bounty, and later on she rips off Adam by demanding triple the bounty for Space Pirates attacking the Galactic Federation chairman. So at the very least someone on the Metroid team knew what a bounty hunter was before this fun fact of dubious legitimacy took place.
I think saying they didn't know what a bounty hunter was and have never looked it up since then, like it was a black and white truth, is a bit disingenuous.
My headcanon was always that Samus doesn't care about being a "Bounty Hunter", protecting the universe is her priority, being a bounty hunter probably gives her access to underground sources and informations about the current threats to the galaxy.
She's more of a solitary knight.
Considering Samus takes so much inspiration from Boba as it is, most likely the folks at Nintendo heard the expression "bounty hunter" for the first time while watching Empire Strikes Back. But since the entire world beyond 1800s America would instead just say "mercenary", and since Star Wars bounty hunters don't really act like bounty hunters most of the time (even in the OT, beyond tracking Han down Boba mostly acts like hired muscle for Vader/Jabba), they probably thought it was just a fancy made-up sci-fi term for a merc (like calling psychic powers "the Force") rather than specifically denoting a manhunter job.
(Worth noting that Captain Falcon, another sci-fi flavoured merc, is *also* called a "bounty hunter" despite matching the job description even less than Samus)
I mean plenty of Anime do have the idea of the bounty hunter while properly portraying what the job is, even if it's often exaggerated. So, I wouldn't say Japan as a whole is that ignorant. though it could be a translation thing potentially.
Yeah, Hal Labs has demonstrated a better understanding of it when given the reigns (one event mission in Super Smash Bros Brawl sees both Samus and Captain Falcon (as well as Wolf, who ironically actually is correctly called a mercenary) explicitly hunting Snake for a bounty on his head), so clearly the concept isn't completely lost on Japan, but there's enough going against it for them that I find it believable for Nintendo to have missed a few steps and gotten the wrong idea.
I feel like I'm going insane. Every time someone says "Samus isn't a bounty hunter, she's a mercenary", that's not them flexing their knowledge- that's actually just spreading a misconception.
Mercenaries are for wars and battles, they're for-hire soldiers. Samus not only tends to go solo and often in secret, but her jobs don't always involve combat. Sometimes she's merely meant to investigate something, or attain something.
That's because she's a bounty hunter. She takes bounties. Bounty = pay for a job. The hunting part can refer to both fighting- lethally or not- or hunting for an object or location. She takes jobs to go seek things out.
Saying she's a mercenary doesn't even make sense.
People - including you, to a certain degree - are drawing a strict line where there doesn't need to be one. A mercenary can act as a bounty hunter. A bounty hunter can take mercenary work. Mercenaries aren't exclusively for wars, or even battles, nor are they always hired in a group.
The basic premise is "one who takes potentially dangerous jobs for pay, where the danger is likely in the form of hostile entities". There are different types of contracts, and you can choose to specialize in some and refuse others, but at its core, that's what's being discussed.
All Nintendo spacies are Bounty Hunters for some reason. Star Fox Adventure at least tried to incorporate that lore into it but that's because it was made by Rare.
And in fairness, both Star Fox and Star Wolf are actually referred to as mercenary groups rather than bounty hunters in most of the games, which I imagine comes about from them meeting the "hired to fight for a foreign power" definition of mercenary much more specifically (Adventures is the only time we one of them active outside of an ongoing war), whereas Samus and Captain Falcon doing odd jobs during peacetime (or what passes for peacetime in the Metroidverse) that aren't necessarily about combat for a price could be argued to be a form of "bounty" hunting.
This is a misconception. Bounty hunting doesn't equal criminal assassin. It's someone who takes bounties- aka paid jobs to go get something or someone, dead or alive. Samus does that in like, every single game she's in.
In Dread, she's even outright stated to take a payment fee for her bounties from the Federation, in that case to go after the X Parasite and whoever sent the video of it.
In the opening of Dread Adam says that the Bounty for the job isn't appropriate (too low for the job presumably), so yeah she goes after bounties. It took like 30 years but she finally did in canon, so this meme doesn't make much sense anymore
https://preview.redd.it/5hgi2pyb8v8d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=18eb9195c8460522ba3cc5559b046598a9fb3515
Samus got paid in Metroid 1, at least in the Japanese version.
And hunting down Mother Brain the leader of a criminal organization I would say align with what a Bounty Hunter is tasked with. The only thing Samus failed to do is capture Mother Brain or the Metroid. Though I suppose the giant explosion on Zebes was proof enough of success.
I also think It depends on the framework of bounty hunters. While old Wild West bounty hunters were allowed to kill outlaws, modern bounty hunters apparently have no permission to kill what so ever, and even if they do so in self defense, well they aren't going to get any money.
Not really true:
[https://www.ign.com/articles/2004/01/30/metroid-zero-mission-director-roundtable](https://www.ign.com/articles/2004/01/30/metroid-zero-mission-director-roundtable)
https://preview.redd.it/1imlyxcg3v8d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=41b020167107ed87e847e29ca0bae58ddc62f2af
No no, being a bounty hunter is her day job. At night she's committing genocide.
Hell, she's a borderline war criminal. Just look at her dad. So alike.
It's a fictional universe, what specific jobs means doesn't have to be the same as what it means in the one place it exists IRL. FWIW, the Star Wars bounty hunters are about as far away from real life bounty hunters as Samus is.
You've never heard the term "dead or alive"?
Given the fact that Star Wars takes place in a universe where some significant portion of the population has poorly-defined mind powers that make them extremely dangerous to leave alive, I can 100% believe many bounties wouldn't even *want* them taken alive.
A bounty hunter hunts sapient beings for money. Samus hunts sapient beings for money. She branches out a bit later on and becomes more of a general mercenary ig, but I say bounty hunter is accurate at least at the beginning
Bounty hunting is just the cover story she uses when people ask what she does for a living.
If she told people her actual interests are going around hunting lifeforms to extinction and updating the star charts through forced premature unplaneting she would get weird looks and not invited to the next BBQ.
Samus is very much a bounty hunter. The thing is that the games' stories always revolve around her alone and isolated with no one to give her orders. But we know for a fact that she's a bounty hunter by trade and has taken jobs for money in lore.
It would be funny if in between games she just did normal bounty hunter things like capturing bail jumpers. I can imagine a tied up bail jumper in the back of her gunship saying “Oh wow, you’re _that_ Samus Aran? The one who destroyed a whole space pirate base alone? How much did they pay you for that one.” And Samus just says “not as much as you’re probably imagining.” And then when she goes to drop him off at space jail, the guard says “Hey, you know who never comes by anymore? Gandrayda, have you heard from her lately? She’s so funny, I miss her.”
Dude, so I've been thinking about this. And I think it's safe to say that the missions we join Samus on are, like, the biggest deal missions she goes on. So what if there was a game that shows what Samus gets up to on her slow days. Like...what if you could take on a whole mess load of smaller bounties and requests that involve going to several different planets, seeing actual galactic civilization, with just an overall more relaxed vibe. Obviously there would still be conflict and combat, just nothing world threatening. This would probably be a different genre altogether, unless it involved several smaller maze-like areas. But I was thinking it could focus more on action and story, with a third person camera. Hear me out, gameplay structured kinda like Stellar Blade. I think that would be cool.
Damn fellow Stellar Blade fan is rare here since this subreddit hates that game. But that's exactly what I'd like to see in a future Metroid game, a Xion-like hub city where Samus can take bounty sidequests. Maybe even while she sighs and calmly turns down the woman constantly hitting on her who runs the job bulletin board lol.
Although before Stellar Blade, the hub city idea I had was closer to either Detroit or Hengsha from Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
Exaaaactly!! It would be so cool! Side note, I have been obsessed with the idea of seeing Samus's living quarters on her ship for the longest time, so I think this hypothetical game would be the perfect place to showcase that. Also, I didn't know people hated that game here! I thought it was fantastic. But I'm glad you totally got what I was going for!
If you want to get technical. In real life there can be bounties placed on animals. Notably in places where certain wild animals cab be dangerous. When Sanus was tasked with eliminating the metroids of SR388 that was absolutely a "bounty". We didn't get much exposition in Super Metroid, but after Ridley destroyed Ceres, the federation likely placed a bounty on both Ridley and the baby metroid.
I mean...they at least talk about the bounty she's getting in Dread so I think we're supposed to assume her missions are all hunts, just ones she's like the only person qualified to take on 😅. That said I do hope we get a prequel game or something where she does legit bounty hunting.
star wars and metroid both have a much looser definition of bounty hunter that seems to be "super effective space guy who sometimes takes bounties and between the bounties they either act as basically a superhero OR a super villain mercenary" and we see all the range of that in hunters
You never really see her get paid for her work, like defeating the space pirates, when she was tasked with wiping out all the Metroids or investigating the Phazon. Other times, it’s personal missions she undertakes, like saving the baby Metroid or investigating a rogue transmission.
Isn't Captain Falcon also a bounty hunter within his franchise? He gambles his life on the racetrack in his personal racecar for prize money while also gambling his life hunting bounties for money on the side. He's a pure entrepreneur!
I always assumed she was a bounty hunter between the missions in the games, and the games themselves were missions she felt *pulled* or *attracted* toward, with each of the game missions usually ending up being bigger and more important than she could ever imagine. I suppose not every game would fall into this category.
She just wants answers and revenge, and with her Chozo suit, she knows she has a means to do that, somehow.
Again, this is just what I always assumed.
Dante from DMC moment, he is a bounty hunter but only for things he find interesting. The sa.e applies to Samus.
Mercenary would be a protagonist from Armored Core, where they clearly have no problem at attacking a random city for money.
It's strange to me that they stuck with Bounty Hunter over space adventurer and mercenary all these years. They could have changed it at any time. People say that it's a distinction without a difference based on Japan's interpretation of that title, but then how do you explain StarFox? They're never labeled that way, and they basically have the same job, taking contracts from good guys to fight bad guys, only we actually see StarFox get paid.
Maybe she just sees the Galactic Federation as a steady supplier and that's why she aligns herself with them?
I know for a fact that's not the case but it's funny to think about.
I think a better question is what does Samus even need money for?
Like sure, she probably needs to buy feul for her ship and maybe maintaince as well as food. But what else? Does she have a house somewhere? An apartment? Does she have any hobbies? To me it seems like she just jumps from one mission to the next with little time in between.
I think I just imagine her getting drunk and going to a gym or something in her spare time until the next crisis is ready.
To be fair, she is one of the hardest Bounty Hunters ever...
Boba Fett didn't remove an entire Species for a Bounty... Alone...
But it would be funny if you compared Samus to Agent 47 / Hitman, as these are basically the same jobs as well.
Samus is referred to as a bounty hunter, but really I think of her as more of a Marvel-level (yes, I know) guardian or protector of her galactic cluster. Bounty hunter is her job description, but she is powerful enough to consistently and reliably take out potentially entire civilizations and species all by herself. She’s kind of a walking nuclear bomb, and the Federation frequently calls on her to more or less fulfill that role.
I think bounty hunter is technically applicable. A bounty hunter, by definition, is one who hunts for a bounty...usually the target is criminals as dictated by some authority figure or another.
I think the confusion is really as a result of the cultural *seediness* that we often associate with bounty hunters. The stereotypical bounty hunter is 'a bad guy who hunts bad guys for money'...Samus clearly isn't that.
But if Samus isn't classified as a bounty hunter...then I think you could argue that neither is Boba Fett...Based on what we see in the original Star Wars movies, Boba is really more of a body guard and sometimes assassin than anything else right?
So IDK....
Samus did get hired in Metroid 2, Prime 1,2,3 and Metroid Dread
She had a specific Job to do and in all but 2 the job just got a lot more complicated, but at the end of the day she was payed for them
Hunters may be the only one where she outright hunt a bounty but then again bounty Hunter is just a soft way of saying Mercenary, end of the day it’s the same thing just sounds better
It becomes particularly weird when you realize it's also the job of this guy
https://preview.redd.it/dbfykkw1ay8d1.jpeg?width=237&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7535adc1f0fe1ee050d5eca978c68bede0bfd594
I believe the implication is that she does smaller actual bounty missions between games.
That being said, the Federation is stated to put bounties on the missions that they outsource as shown in Prime 3 and Hunters.
Adam states there was a Bounty on the ZDR mission in Dread.
Samus’s occupation could be best summed up as Batman in space. Works directly with law enforcement on her own terms. Is sometimes a vigilante who goes against said law enforcement when there is no other choice.
I mean, at thw start of Dread, Adam says the bounty on the X-Parasite is low and he doesn't understand why Samus took the bounty. So I guess the know what a bounty hunter is now and didn't before?
Wait……Is Samus not employed by whoever the government is? I always assumed that’s why she was the only one being sent in to these quarantined planets. I always thought she was like some kind of space green beret
To be clear... samus is (Bounty) Hunting METROIDS , SPACE PIRATES, AND other high Terroristic targets withing the Cult called space Pirates (mother Brain, Ridley) and even a FUCKING Virus!!
Sorry, for f bomb.
Ps: unless you mean, she would kill for just money. Then i get your point BUT even then still... Bounty Hunters can have rules, what NOT 2 hunt.
I like the idea that she was a bounty hunter who has at this point moved past that part of her life due to being the galactic savior. Calling her a bounty hunter isn’t really accurate anymore
Do any of you remember Hawkeye from endgame? Yeah, Samus is kinda like that. (Also, if you call her Metroid I shall tear you apart limb by limb) Have a nice day!
I remember when I first read that she was a bounty hunter in Prime 3 and was like, "😢? She's like Boba Fett? 😥" Then I talked about it with my sister, who basically said, "How else is she supposed to get money for fuel?"
I guess mercenary would be a better description of Samus?
Originally she was definitely a bounty hunter, if the English translations of the manuals are to be trusted. Sometime later she was retconned to act more like a mercenary, I guess because Nintendo thought it would be more noble to be a former soldier / space cop than just a random gun for hire
Like basically all Japanese NES/SNES games, Metroid's early English translations are definitely *not* to be trusted. Her Japanese title is closer to space adventurer, and according to the devs at Retro, [Nintendo rejected a bounty hunting mechanic in MP3 because hunting targets for money didn't fit her altruistic characterization.](https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/04/random-nintendo-didnt-know-what-a-bounty-hunter-was-before-metroid-prime)
Bruh, she's called a "Space Hunter" in Japanese and the original Metroid manual literally says she hunts pirates for bounties. What are you even talking about?
Could she be hunting them to... eat them?
Well, that *would* be a bounty... Of a sort...
... From a certain point of view...
Username checks out...?
...the Jedi are evil!! 
[I too hunt Bounties to eat them](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounty_(chocolate_bar))
In the english yeah. IIRC it was a thing that Rare suggested making it a mechanic for the Prime games, but Nintendo of Japan was horrified that that was what a bounty hunter did
I can't help but facepalm at that, like wtf did they think bounty hunters would do?!
Eh, it's something that depends on cultural context. Japan, especially during the Edo period, didn't have much in the way of "freelance bounty hunters" as commonly shown in Western media separate from mercenaries or general blades for hire. It just wasn't as much part of their cultural zeitgeist. Especially as most of their "bounty hunting" historically, was a lord telling his samurai "Whoever brings me this guys head will get a reward!" Something quite common on the battlefield. EDIT: So I guess to Nintendo, when they heard how western style bounty hunters worked, it sounded much more like a freelance assassin or hitman
https://preview.redd.it/bv9pwoxpxz8d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e87aeef04e40cd19bfe11125b3a57c7fbef809ea Like, what else could 賞金稼ぎ possibly mean?
Also Dread Intro confirms that samus is a bounty hunter because Adam says “The Bounty for this mission does not seem appropriate”
The English translations of the early games are 100% accurate when it comes to [calling Samus a bounty hunter.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Metroid/comments/1cr5ml0/random_thought_what_do_you_think_samus_rates_are/l3yri1r/?context=3)
She’s also called a bounty hunter in super smash bros melee for the GameCube.
Jesus, back on smash 64 i thought samus and cap. Falcon were siblings
A bounty hunter can still be altruistic they just have to be selective if the bounties they hunt
I looked at it and I think it says something more like "Space Warrior" than adventurer. I have the Japanese manual here and it says this about her (and refers to samus as a "him", because the reveal that it's a lady is at the end): > 彼は最も優秀な宇宙戦士であり、絶対不可能と言われた数多くの事件を解決してきた。 > He is the most superior space warrior (soldier etc), many cases (affairs, incidents, plots, etc) that were said to be absolutely impossible have been solved by him. Anyway the point is the word they are using is 戦士, which you can look up the meaning for here if you want: https://jisho.org/search/%E6%88%A6%E5%A3%AB This is the same word used in Final Fantasy 1 to refer to the "Light Warriors" who are 光の戦士 (Warriors of Light). Adventurer would probably be more like 冒険者 I might make a post later translating the manual if anyone is actually interested.
The Japanese manuals always called Samus a 賞金稼ぎ, "bounty hunter," since the first game. That "space hunter" terminology stopped appearing as early as the Super Metroid manual: I don't think the Metroid II manual mentioned anything about being a hunter, bounty or space, at all. [Metroid 1 manual uses it here](https://preview.redd.it/bv9pwoxpxz8d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e87aeef04e40cd19bfe11125b3a57c7fbef809ea)
ok I see but it did definitely say space warrior in that one part but I didn't know that they stopped using that later on
Yeah, she's more like an independent contract worker for the Galactic Federation. She isn't some random mercenary who will accept payment from anyone. Otherwise, what's stopping some great evil from just hiring Samus to work for them? Obviously, she'd never work for Ridley with the whole killing her parents thing but the Space Pirates aren't the only evil out there.
She’s basically a government contractor.
Samus is Blackwater?!
That’s the way I look at it.
No, she's a bounty hunter. The idea that "Nintendo doesn't actually know what that is" is just... dumb? Like, she hunts bounties in the games, we see her do that. Bounty hunters aren't "Criminal killers for higher." They're people who go after bounties- aka, money put down to go retrieve something or someone, dead or alive. She does that constantly. When she takes jobs from the Federation, that's a Bounty. When she goes after Space Pirates, that's bounty hunting.
Well, she kinda definitely fails the retrieving part as usually the body of the big bosses end up being destroyed by a facility/planet wide explosion.
[Samus during mission briefing](https://youtu.be/aossw4UUjVA?si=vRN1A7jqKGngRwi6&t=82)
That assumes the Fed needs physical proof though. The Power Suit probably records like a black box which would be evidence enough, and by now Samus is too elite for "low tier" general bounties, instead being tapped for specifically tailored ones and having enough trust put in her to take her word for it.
Really, she just has to demonstrate that she's absorbed their unique skill...
This is how I'm always going to imagine it going now. "How do I know you actually took out Ridley?" Samus-"if I didn't, then how can I do this?" As she proceeds to morph into a ball and bloop out an explosive......
It isn't her fault the Federation keeps putting bounties on load bearing bosses.
Its also not her fault the Federation keeps putting bounties on the very folks she happens to have a vendetta agents.
This idea came from the reveal of Retro's original pitch for metroid prime 3, in which actual bounty hunting was a key mechanic. To abridge the story, Nintendo rejected the idea cuz they where like "bro why she doing all that this makes no sense" & retro was like "bro she's a BOUNTY HUNTER, this is what they do" an Nintendo was like "wait fer realz?? I thought they just went around going on adventures in space." An Retro was like " Are you for real bro!?"
Yeah, that’s a misconception lol. However, I don’t think this mindset is reflected in the games that much, beyond her not really doing much bounty hunting in earlier games.
Attempting to kill the pirate leaders (on multiple occasions) and removing a dangerous species sounds like bounty contracts to me. Sure, plenty of what she does is also personal, but it’d be hard to imagine not getting personally involved with work like this, I’m sure real bounty hunters take jobs because of personal reasons on occasion. Dread’s job was certainly both, Adam even specifically mentions that there’s a bounty on investigating the X parasite footage on ZDR, Samus took the job because she’s realistically the only one who could, and Raven Beak was betting on that. Hunters was definitely bounty hunting, and I’d love to see the systems in that game return in a more fleshed out state. The first Prime game was a bounty, so was the second, the third was more like the start of a war. 4 is looking like a bounty too, likely put on Sylux.
Can you share your source describing this as a misconception? My source ( as well as many others since this was how most people learned about it) Was through one of the DKYG videos about Retro studios.
^hire*
There’s an entire game mode that has you competing for octahedron gems and return to a point.
I would say more like a military contractor. She is a space adventurer that occasionally does government work. Mercenaries usually work for anyone who has money and so far all of Samus’ commissions have come from the Galactic Federation.
I mean, she takes jobs involving her weapon for a price. That’s the basics of a mercenary/bounty Hunter job.
My headcanon says Samus is known for taking jobs that involve saving people and not charging extra when shit gets crazy. Rundas' line in Corruption about being big damned heroes was his way of teasing her for it. She's altruistic, but still a merc.
Said it yourself, a merc. Bounty hunters usually are more involved with the "hunting" part
Zero and Returns are both about hunting down specific individuals. Also, who’s to say she doesn’t hunt bounties outside of the games?
I mean, she was bounty hunting in Metroid Prime: Hunters. But that's basically the only one, and even then she wasn't hunting a specific person, but an object.
She was also contracted to find the emmi and confirm X activity on ZDR. Which was confirmed to have been a bounty
In the manga she saves the head of the federation from an assassination and then tell Adam that she’ll be expecting the payment (she does say this in a semi-joking fashion). She seems to be a bounty hunter in order to do the space cop thing but get better pay and have no rules.
...which... Samus does quite often? lol, do you think she felt sorry for killing Mother Brain? Also, "hunting" doesn't mean "murder." Hunting someone down is still bounty hunting, even if the goal isn't death. Hunting for an object is also bounty hunting. It's just a paid job to go do something. In a way that is the job of a mercenary, but mercenaries are usually more for like, war? Samus takes more odd jobs.
Never said hunting meant murder. Thats what hitmen are for. And granted, Zero mission and Returns are Bounty Hunting missions, the former being to destroy mother brain and the latter to eradicate the metroids. But aside from that most games are more like "find what happened to these people" or "investigate this planet" or even more personal things like super and fusion
You said she's a merc, and that bounty hunters are more involved with the "hunting" part. I said that mercs are soldiers hired for war, and that bounties involve hunting for more than just people. In most Metroid games, Samus is actively bounty hunting. Off the top of my head, Prime 2 with being tasked with investigating Aether, Prime 3 with her work alongside the Federation going from planet to planet, her work in Samus Returns where she's tasked with checking out SR388 after Federation troops failed, there's Fusion where she's tasked with going to the BSL Station, and Dread where she's outright stated to be taking a bounty to investigate the X parasite footage. These are all bounties she's taken. The hunting part often comes in when it comes to narrowing down the source of trouble- How did the troops on Aether die? Can she kill the x parasites on the BSL Station? Can she find who made the X Parasite footage? These are bounties. (Unless some of these aren't paid in which case she's doing stuff for herself, but the job itself, if paid, is taking a bounty.)
Looking up the definition for bounty: >1. a sum paid for killing or capturing a person or animal. >2. a sum paid to encourage trade So no, I would say Prime 2 and Fusion and Dread and stuff like that arent picking bounties Still, these kinds of jobs are not used much in the modern world, and i think engaging on debate around their functioning would be little more than fallacy, so, agree to disagree?
I think bounty hunters and mercenaries are more or less the same thing. They get paid to go do tasks that are potentially or probably dangerous and being able to competently use violence might make them less dangerous. The main difference that I perceive is that Bounty Hunters have a connotation of working solo or in small groups, where you would generally expect mercenaries to fight in a company or other military unit. In any case, most games seem to have at least started as a mission or can plausibly have started as one. Metroid II is pretty obviously an extermination mission, and fusion started as an escort mission. Super Metroid is an extension of the Metroid II mission since suddenly the last metroid is in the hands of the space pirates and they aren't supposed to be weaponizeable anymore. Since she seems to be the default hunter to deal with major threats, she might also have a standing bounty to destroy space pirates, given that she's referred to as "the Hunter" in space pirate logs in Prime. Heck, it would make sense if there was just generally a standing bounty against the space pirates, given the threat they generally pose to the Galaxy at large.
I mean a merc can be a bounty hunter, they basicly do things for money often hired for their prowess in fighting and record of completing jobs. Mercenaries are also more often than not part of a group, while bounty hunters are often more lone wolves or few individuals. If you want to be specific that she needs to "hunt targets" to be a bounty hunter, then to be a mercenary she needs to "go to war for someone" as that is usually what mercenaries are for... war. Her jobs are not to be an asset in their war but almost always to retrieve something or hunt a sepcific target, and sometimes she isn't even contracted she just happened to notice a distress signal and came to help (like in prime 1 and fusion) The games rarely make her a bounty hunter nor a mercenary. but her job when we're not playing her is supposedly a bounty hunter.
There is that line in Dread where ADAM says the price for this job isn't nearly enough and Samus just kinda ignores him and goes ahead anyway.
The Prime series is a perfect example of your headcanon. The first game, Samus is contracted to investigate a distress call near Tallon IV. I doubt the Federation paid for anything above that, like hunting down that immortal space dragon, or discovering the existence of Phazon. I could see Samus selling information about the (now defunct) Space Pirate base on the planet, as well as notes from her experience with Phazon. My headcanon is that those logbooks are valuable to xenobiologists. Then the bounty in Echoes is to investigate the disappearance of the GFS Tyr in the Dasha region of space. Samus was stuck on Aether when her ship was damaged during landing. The entire events of Echoes after the “tutorial” area was unrelated to the bounty the Federation placed. Saving the planet and the Luminoth could have been in the interest of self-preservation; losing the planet with no way to leave would ensure her death. But I believe that Samus would have helped the Liminoth regardless. She knows what it’s like to watch your civilization crumble and collapse. Of course, I’m sure that Samus received a pretty hefty finder’s fee for recovering those crates of Phazon “misplaced” by the Pirates. So I wonder if the hero remark is how Samus’s bounties always wind up going out of control and uncovering bigger problems than initially thought
Mercenary, yes, bounty hunter... no, not so much. Bounty hunters make their livings, tracking down criminals with bounties on their heads to bring them to justice and collect the bounty. At no point have we ever seen Samus actually fulfil that role.
Bounty hunters can be for animals too. There's like whole game where she's just given 40 animals she needs to kill.
Not to mention she was specifically tasked to slay Mother Brain in Metroid 1. Heck, this may be the reason she’s considered a bounty hunter: in the game that introduced her and her occupation, she was indeed hunting a bounty. One could also argue she was sent to Planet ZDR to kill any X parasites on the planet, but I think the game made it sound more like an investigation than a hunt.
Or an item. I'm pretty sure in Metroid Prime: Hunters she actually qualifies as a real bounty hunter, since she's hunting down the "Ultimate Power" for a bounty. It's just that a bunch of other bounty hunters are also doing it too.
I have friends who travel to Washington and Idaho state every summer to participate in the annual bounty fishing program to control the pikeminnow population up there.
A key part of a bounty hunter in the Boba Fett sense is that nobody is given the job. Vader says “20k credits to whoever can get me Han Solo” and a bunch of people try to do that. Boba Fett just happens to be the successful one. Far as I can tell, that isn’t what happens to Samus. The Federation hires her in particular to kill the Metroids on SR-388. For her to be a bounty hunter, the Federation would have to say “X space monies for whoever can kill all the Metroids” and presumably you’d see other people trying to do it (beyond the Federation soldiers since obviously those are just government employees)
While not technically being a bounty hunter in the typical sense, I do find it interesting that Metroid gameplay facilitates one to search for bosses, in a way acting as a hunter. I would also argue that technically Samus was acting as a bounty hunter in Metroid 1 she was hired to take down the Metroids and Mother Brain. The only thing missing is she never captured either.
> The only thing missing is she never captured either. Remember "Dead or Alive" posters? Bounties don't require the target to be brought back alive every time. Hell about a decade ago, the Philippines was raising eyebrows because their president was endorsing bounties for corpses of drug dealers, no questions asked.
Would actually be pretty cool if in MP4 you could capture bounties alive for extra completion or alt endings
She hunts down bio-terrorists and their leader. Then to complete the job she makes sure that no one else can use bio weapons. But then, whoops, there's now an even worse bio threat that has been confirmed to have spread.
“The bounty for this mission does not seem appropriate.” -Adam: Metroid Dread.
Ah yes, when does she ever fight criminals? If only they, I don't know, pit her against pirates or war criminals or something. It would be cool if in a recent 2D Metroid game they even outright specified she took a bounty for the job too. Nahhhh, she's just a mercenary. Let's also just... ignore the fact mercenaries are soldiers for hire, often for war or protection.
They usually start out pretty simple to. Nobody’s fault things go to hell real quick. $20 is $20.
That's not her goal. The money is a bonus, not an incentive
Guess that depends on the definition? After Metroid II/Samus Returns, technically she was hunting the Metroids as part of a bounty--just not in the conventional compensation sense and was going to look for the next bounty to exterminate in Super before the space pirates destroyed Zebes.
To be fair, the role of a bounty hunter is usually pretty exaggerated when it comes to science fiction settings.
Mass Effect is another sci-fi franchise that treats "bounty hunter" and "mercenary" as synonyms, especially with Wrex & Zaeed Massani's characters. Wrex claims he's a bounty hunter but when he talks about all his previous missions, he does close bodyguard duty, assaults on heavily fortified bases, recapturing hijacked ships, assassinations... everything except actual bounty hunting. Zaeed claims he's a mercenary but the first thing you see him do is roughing up a runaway criminal, shoot him in the leg, then pick him up and turn him in for a cash reward. To be fair to Zaeed, all his stories about his past career are bonafide mercenary work, though.
The skill sets are close enough that I'm not too bothered by the distinction. They're both essentially freelance work; it's not like you get 9-5 wages with a clear-cut job description. I can see no reason why a mercenary who takes bodyguarding and assassination work regularly would refuse a bounty if the pay were good enough. Working the other way around is a bit more of a stretch, but hardly outside the realm of possibility.
💯💯💯
Look, America is the only real world country that even has Bounty Hunters in that strict of a sense, so give other cultures credit for taking a glorified tattle tale gig and making it actually cool
> Look, America is the only real world country that even has Bounty Hunters in that strict of a sense [The Philippines is not a real country?](https://www.aljazeera.com/program/101-east/2016/1/6/the-bounty-hunters/)
Nope! It's right next to Genovia and France as a fictional location
Everyone knows France isn't real. Just look at their language. You dont pronounce half of the letters in most of their words because they're not even real words. It's all just gibberish
you think this S stands for france
You mean Arabic?
No, it's not real like birds. At least New Zealand has proof it exists thanks to Lord of the Rings
Blows my mind that when I was growing up we were all absolutely enthralled by Dog The Bounty Hunter, who was just a white trash class traitor brutalizing poor people who had usually committed relatively harmless offenses.
That “they didn’t know what a bounty hunter was” bit was an embellishment. They know what a bounty hunter is and that Samus is one, they had other reasons for not wanting the proposed mechanic to be in Corruption.
I don't know about that. This is quote from senior director of development at Retro studios Bryan Walker during an interview with [IGN](https://www.ign.com/articles/2009/08/29/a-space-bounty-hunter-in-texas) "We were looking for something more along the lines of a mission-based game where Samus collected bounties. And for the life of us we couldn't understand why [Nintendo was] being so resistive to that concept. And then over the period of days we came to understand that their definition of a bounty hunter is not a bounty hunter. It is not someone who brings in bad guys for money. That concept was completely outside of their definition," says Walker. Nintendo told Retro that Samus does not actually take bounties for those she hunts. (Someone should tell Nintendo that Aran has officially been labeled a bounty hunter for two decades now, a slight inconsistency.) "So we started joking that Samus was actually a pro-bono hunter. And occasionally we'll run into those nuances of translation and culture that can sometimes derail us for days." He also said in a [DYK Gaming video](https://youtu.be/oKs_Oyfuyuc?si=U2Wv9rwXmEr7kDqZ) "Kiyo, who was one of the translators, boiled it down very well in the assumption that our Japanese partners had of Samus — that she was not doing it for the money, she was being very altruistic. And I think he rolled out the term 'motherly'. She was caring for people, what she was doing was literally out of the goodness of her heart, because she deeply cared about humanity. Which was as far away from Boba Fett as you can get. I never would have equated Samus with the definition of an altruistic motherly influence, given that she had the title of 'bounty hunter'... We were just looking at Kiyo as he was describing this, like, are we even on the same planet??"
Which is odd when you consider Samus asks for money in the Metroid Manga, & in Famicom Disk System version of Metroid 1 Samus gets bags of money depending on how well one has done. Even Metroid dread has dialogue suggesting money for her mission. https://preview.redd.it/k32cec1b5v8d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=efdaa0a5775004266558050112df73426bded9e3
Yeah, but she's not doing it \*for\* the money. That's what Nintendo was saying. Based on her character, you can assume any money she asks for is for supplies and ship maintenance. Just what she needs to keep going and doing what she does.
I mean sure, you can say she's not doing it for the money, and that's true Samus has personal motivation besides pay. Regardless she's still getting payed to do the job.
It does beg to question, how does Samus make her money if not through the missions she completes? Maybe she set herself up for life by selling Chozo power ups. Or perhaps the greater society of Metroid is post-scarcity, and money is just less important for survival. Or maybe she is a courier, or a bodyguard.
I mean she does make money from the missions though. In Metroid Dread the robot AI Adam even says the bounty isn’t super high and in Metroid: Samus Returns She’s being paid by the Galactic Federation to wipe out the Metroid species.
And in the original Japanese Metroid, a completed save has between one and five money bags next to it depending on how fast you were. I don't speak Japanese and don't know what the manual has to say about it, but clearly the idea that she receives money for completing missions was already around back then.
The thing is, that really doesn't change anything. If a doctor decides to retire, and stop charging patients for consultations and surgeries, does he stop being a doctor? If a baker decided to give away their goods for free, would they stop being a baker? Bounty hunting is an activity. It is something one does. The payment is a practicality, not a necessity for the definition to apply.
If you look at Star wars’s [bounty hunter code pg3](https://youtu.be/yVfZ_qdeLyo?si=pxtRXpDqIV00KTPb) which is actually pretty accurate historical bounty hunting practices samus is actually a better bounty hunter than boba fett her contracts are always legal and her targets are always criminals as opposed to boba fett who will fight kill or capture anyone for the right price
I haven't watched the book of boba fett and i don't have a lot of knowledge about star wars lore that goes beyond the movies, but if you think about it, luke, leia and han solo were all terrorist, they were criminals because their actions went directly against the empire, and because the government paid him, said contracts were likely legal, so at least on the original trilogy he was a good bounty hunter, even though what he did was morally questionable as he worked for an organisation that was morally wrong almost every single time
Well in empire strikes back while he was hunting down the entire crew of the millennium falcon for the empire he was also hunting down Han Solo for Jabba the Hutt, Jabba the Hutt was a crime lord and the bounty was placed on solo because he owed Jabba money so boba fett was essential working as a debt collector
It's actually Nintendo that has it right. Real life bounty hunters take on people wanted by the government, more often than not. While they usually work for a third party, their interests usually coincide with that of the government, much the same as Samus does.
I mean Boba Fett is also technically working for the government because in the Original Trilogy the Empire essentially is the government.
You can remove technically and essentially. Boba fett is explicitly working for the government
I add these terms because the events of the original trilogy is a civil war, which means a rival government is forming, & 2 Boba Fett doesn't just work with the Empire, but also the Hutts, which would be like the Mafia having it's own Bounty hunter.
Except the Hutt Council is also a government (in the sense that they rule an area of space, pass laws, collect taxes, and hold a monopoly on the use of force in said space) they just also do crime in republic space which I mean IRL countries do the same thing (that is they sponsor organized crime in other countries)
Facts
Not to mention, it doesn't necessarily involve hunting *people. A bounty can be made for non-human things. Samus takes bounties in the games constantly.
Samus probably just uses bounty hunting as an excuse to do vigilante work
Isn’t bounty hunter just “one who hunts bounties”? It’s up to the franchise/universe lore to define what a bounty can be placed on. She’s 100% someone who hunts bounties. There’s no Star Wars-style Jedi or Mandalorian in Metroid, just like there’s no Star Wars-style Bounty Hunters in Metroid. There’s only Metroid-style Bounty Hunters in Metroid.
I do know in the canon Zero Mission manga it starts off with her turning in a bounty, and later on she rips off Adam by demanding triple the bounty for Space Pirates attacking the Galactic Federation chairman. So at the very least someone on the Metroid team knew what a bounty hunter was before this fun fact of dubious legitimacy took place. I think saying they didn't know what a bounty hunter was and have never looked it up since then, like it was a black and white truth, is a bit disingenuous.
I like this. It gives Samus an actual flaw without being character assassination.
Neither did Lucas. I have never seen any of them look for a Paper Towel
If this doesn't become the highest upvoted comment, I am gonna be upset.
What do you mean? Surely Bounty Hunter just means "Cool space explorer" right?
My headcanon was always that Samus doesn't care about being a "Bounty Hunter", protecting the universe is her priority, being a bounty hunter probably gives her access to underground sources and informations about the current threats to the galaxy. She's more of a solitary knight.
Considering Samus takes so much inspiration from Boba as it is, most likely the folks at Nintendo heard the expression "bounty hunter" for the first time while watching Empire Strikes Back. But since the entire world beyond 1800s America would instead just say "mercenary", and since Star Wars bounty hunters don't really act like bounty hunters most of the time (even in the OT, beyond tracking Han down Boba mostly acts like hired muscle for Vader/Jabba), they probably thought it was just a fancy made-up sci-fi term for a merc (like calling psychic powers "the Force") rather than specifically denoting a manhunter job. (Worth noting that Captain Falcon, another sci-fi flavoured merc, is *also* called a "bounty hunter" despite matching the job description even less than Samus)
I mean plenty of Anime do have the idea of the bounty hunter while properly portraying what the job is, even if it's often exaggerated. So, I wouldn't say Japan as a whole is that ignorant. though it could be a translation thing potentially.
Yeah, Hal Labs has demonstrated a better understanding of it when given the reigns (one event mission in Super Smash Bros Brawl sees both Samus and Captain Falcon (as well as Wolf, who ironically actually is correctly called a mercenary) explicitly hunting Snake for a bounty on his head), so clearly the concept isn't completely lost on Japan, but there's enough going against it for them that I find it believable for Nintendo to have missed a few steps and gotten the wrong idea.
I feel like I'm going insane. Every time someone says "Samus isn't a bounty hunter, she's a mercenary", that's not them flexing their knowledge- that's actually just spreading a misconception. Mercenaries are for wars and battles, they're for-hire soldiers. Samus not only tends to go solo and often in secret, but her jobs don't always involve combat. Sometimes she's merely meant to investigate something, or attain something. That's because she's a bounty hunter. She takes bounties. Bounty = pay for a job. The hunting part can refer to both fighting- lethally or not- or hunting for an object or location. She takes jobs to go seek things out. Saying she's a mercenary doesn't even make sense.
People - including you, to a certain degree - are drawing a strict line where there doesn't need to be one. A mercenary can act as a bounty hunter. A bounty hunter can take mercenary work. Mercenaries aren't exclusively for wars, or even battles, nor are they always hired in a group. The basic premise is "one who takes potentially dangerous jobs for pay, where the danger is likely in the form of hostile entities". There are different types of contracts, and you can choose to specialize in some and refuse others, but at its core, that's what's being discussed.
THANK YOU. bounties arent exclusively hunting marks/criminals
All Nintendo spacies are Bounty Hunters for some reason. Star Fox Adventure at least tried to incorporate that lore into it but that's because it was made by Rare.
And in fairness, both Star Fox and Star Wolf are actually referred to as mercenary groups rather than bounty hunters in most of the games, which I imagine comes about from them meeting the "hired to fight for a foreign power" definition of mercenary much more specifically (Adventures is the only time we one of them active outside of an ongoing war), whereas Samus and Captain Falcon doing odd jobs during peacetime (or what passes for peacetime in the Metroidverse) that aren't necessarily about combat for a price could be argued to be a form of "bounty" hunting.
This is a misconception. Bounty hunting doesn't equal criminal assassin. It's someone who takes bounties- aka paid jobs to go get something or someone, dead or alive. Samus does that in like, every single game she's in. In Dread, she's even outright stated to take a payment fee for her bounties from the Federation, in that case to go after the X Parasite and whoever sent the video of it.
In the opening of Dread Adam says that the Bounty for the job isn't appropriate (too low for the job presumably), so yeah she goes after bounties. It took like 30 years but she finally did in canon, so this meme doesn't make much sense anymore
https://preview.redd.it/5hgi2pyb8v8d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=18eb9195c8460522ba3cc5559b046598a9fb3515 Samus got paid in Metroid 1, at least in the Japanese version. And hunting down Mother Brain the leader of a criminal organization I would say align with what a Bounty Hunter is tasked with. The only thing Samus failed to do is capture Mother Brain or the Metroid. Though I suppose the giant explosion on Zebes was proof enough of success. I also think It depends on the framework of bounty hunters. While old Wild West bounty hunters were allowed to kill outlaws, modern bounty hunters apparently have no permission to kill what so ever, and even if they do so in self defense, well they aren't going to get any money.
Not really true: [https://www.ign.com/articles/2004/01/30/metroid-zero-mission-director-roundtable](https://www.ign.com/articles/2004/01/30/metroid-zero-mission-director-roundtable) https://preview.redd.it/1imlyxcg3v8d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=41b020167107ed87e847e29ca0bae58ddc62f2af
No no, being a bounty hunter is her day job. At night she's committing genocide. Hell, she's a borderline war criminal. Just look at her dad. So alike.
It's a fictional universe, what specific jobs means doesn't have to be the same as what it means in the one place it exists IRL. FWIW, the Star Wars bounty hunters are about as far away from real life bounty hunters as Samus is.
Mario as a plumber lmao
There is no universe you can ever convince me that freaking murderbot IG-88 is a bounty hunter lol.
You've never heard the term "dead or alive"? Given the fact that Star Wars takes place in a universe where some significant portion of the population has poorly-defined mind powers that make them extremely dangerous to leave alive, I can 100% believe many bounties wouldn't even *want* them taken alive.
In all fairness, there are a great many things Nintendo has no idea about.
Samus did what Boba Fett couldn't, killing a deadly giant alien plant
Yeah, but Disney owns the other one, so it’s not all smiles and sunshine.
Not this debate again….
A bounty hunter hunts sapient beings for money. Samus hunts sapient beings for money. She branches out a bit later on and becomes more of a general mercenary ig, but I say bounty hunter is accurate at least at the beginning
Her job is murder specific targets (metroids). That's what a bounty hunters goes assuming she gets paid.
Bounty hunting is just the cover story she uses when people ask what she does for a living. If she told people her actual interests are going around hunting lifeforms to extinction and updating the star charts through forced premature unplaneting she would get weird looks and not invited to the next BBQ.
Was she found by birds or the gf find her with the birds?
I think this is more relevant to Captain Falcon.
Samus is very much a bounty hunter. The thing is that the games' stories always revolve around her alone and isolated with no one to give her orders. But we know for a fact that she's a bounty hunter by trade and has taken jobs for money in lore.
They just play on a different level. Samus seems to have bounties on planets.
It would be funny if in between games she just did normal bounty hunter things like capturing bail jumpers. I can imagine a tied up bail jumper in the back of her gunship saying “Oh wow, you’re _that_ Samus Aran? The one who destroyed a whole space pirate base alone? How much did they pay you for that one.” And Samus just says “not as much as you’re probably imagining.” And then when she goes to drop him off at space jail, the guard says “Hey, you know who never comes by anymore? Gandrayda, have you heard from her lately? She’s so funny, I miss her.”
I mean even in Dread Adam said she’s not getting paid a lot for that mission so that seems to be true.
Because the word “mercenary” has a negative connotation, whereas “bounty hunter” sounds cool. That’s it.
Dude, so I've been thinking about this. And I think it's safe to say that the missions we join Samus on are, like, the biggest deal missions she goes on. So what if there was a game that shows what Samus gets up to on her slow days. Like...what if you could take on a whole mess load of smaller bounties and requests that involve going to several different planets, seeing actual galactic civilization, with just an overall more relaxed vibe. Obviously there would still be conflict and combat, just nothing world threatening. This would probably be a different genre altogether, unless it involved several smaller maze-like areas. But I was thinking it could focus more on action and story, with a third person camera. Hear me out, gameplay structured kinda like Stellar Blade. I think that would be cool.
Damn fellow Stellar Blade fan is rare here since this subreddit hates that game. But that's exactly what I'd like to see in a future Metroid game, a Xion-like hub city where Samus can take bounty sidequests. Maybe even while she sighs and calmly turns down the woman constantly hitting on her who runs the job bulletin board lol. Although before Stellar Blade, the hub city idea I had was closer to either Detroit or Hengsha from Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
Exaaaactly!! It would be so cool! Side note, I have been obsessed with the idea of seeing Samus's living quarters on her ship for the longest time, so I think this hypothetical game would be the perfect place to showcase that. Also, I didn't know people hated that game here! I thought it was fantastic. But I'm glad you totally got what I was going for!
If you want to get technical. In real life there can be bounties placed on animals. Notably in places where certain wild animals cab be dangerous. When Sanus was tasked with eliminating the metroids of SR388 that was absolutely a "bounty". We didn't get much exposition in Super Metroid, but after Ridley destroyed Ceres, the federation likely placed a bounty on both Ridley and the baby metroid.
I mean...they at least talk about the bounty she's getting in Dread so I think we're supposed to assume her missions are all hunts, just ones she's like the only person qualified to take on 😅. That said I do hope we get a prequel game or something where she does legit bounty hunting.
Neither did they with book of bobafett so it's okay
All I am getting from this is that Samus isn't a bounty hunter because she never fell in to a sarlacc pit... twice.
Well two completely different universes so two different types of characters imo
star wars and metroid both have a much looser definition of bounty hunter that seems to be "super effective space guy who sometimes takes bounties and between the bounties they either act as basically a superhero OR a super villain mercenary" and we see all the range of that in hunters
You never really see her get paid for her work, like defeating the space pirates, when she was tasked with wiping out all the Metroids or investigating the Phazon. Other times, it’s personal missions she undertakes, like saving the baby Metroid or investigating a rogue transmission.
I mean she gotta eat time by time she gotta have that BH money
Isn't Captain Falcon also a bounty hunter within his franchise? He gambles his life on the racetrack in his personal racecar for prize money while also gambling his life hunting bounties for money on the side. He's a pure entrepreneur!
I always assumed she was a bounty hunter between the missions in the games, and the games themselves were missions she felt *pulled* or *attracted* toward, with each of the game missions usually ending up being bigger and more important than she could ever imagine. I suppose not every game would fall into this category. She just wants answers and revenge, and with her Chozo suit, she knows she has a means to do that, somehow. Again, this is just what I always assumed.
I prefer the term “fetch quester”
Fun fact: Captain Falcon is a bounty hunter, too.
Dante from DMC moment, he is a bounty hunter but only for things he find interesting. The sa.e applies to Samus. Mercenary would be a protagonist from Armored Core, where they clearly have no problem at attacking a random city for money.
Well I mean it’s probably not everyday that’s she’s committing space genocide. I bet she’s a bounty hunter at her day job
It's strange to me that they stuck with Bounty Hunter over space adventurer and mercenary all these years. They could have changed it at any time. People say that it's a distinction without a difference based on Japan's interpretation of that title, but then how do you explain StarFox? They're never labeled that way, and they basically have the same job, taking contracts from good guys to fight bad guys, only we actually see StarFox get paid.
Maybe she just sees the Galactic Federation as a steady supplier and that's why she aligns herself with them? I know for a fact that's not the case but it's funny to think about.
I think a better question is what does Samus even need money for? Like sure, she probably needs to buy feul for her ship and maybe maintaince as well as food. But what else? Does she have a house somewhere? An apartment? Does she have any hobbies? To me it seems like she just jumps from one mission to the next with little time in between. I think I just imagine her getting drunk and going to a gym or something in her spare time until the next crisis is ready.
"I'm crazy enough to fight Sylux, but the IRS? no thank your sir."
In fairness, Star Wars doesn't know what to do with bounty hunters either.
https://youtu.be/ZWRYLZTRn1g?si=8XFSI8KaUPFo4-dZ watch this if you speak spanish
Western devs: please please please let us make a game where you actually get to hunt bounties as Samus Nintendo: what the hell are you talking about?
*Had* no idea. They know what a Bounty Hunter is now.
I mean she does get a real bounty in Dread
Huh. I forgot that Samus was a bounty hunter. I thought she was just some agent going on missions. 😂
To be fair, she is one of the hardest Bounty Hunters ever... Boba Fett didn't remove an entire Species for a Bounty... Alone... But it would be funny if you compared Samus to Agent 47 / Hitman, as these are basically the same jobs as well.
she has a job off screen. and the empire also seems to hire Boba as merc instead of bounty hunter.
Apparently Prime 3 was actually planned to have bounties you could find and hunt, but Nintendo said No.
Fett is more of an assassin/ bounty hunter. Samus is more one person army/ reverse damsel
Samus is referred to as a bounty hunter, but really I think of her as more of a Marvel-level (yes, I know) guardian or protector of her galactic cluster. Bounty hunter is her job description, but she is powerful enough to consistently and reliably take out potentially entire civilizations and species all by herself. She’s kind of a walking nuclear bomb, and the Federation frequently calls on her to more or less fulfill that role.
I think bounty hunter is technically applicable. A bounty hunter, by definition, is one who hunts for a bounty...usually the target is criminals as dictated by some authority figure or another. I think the confusion is really as a result of the cultural *seediness* that we often associate with bounty hunters. The stereotypical bounty hunter is 'a bad guy who hunts bad guys for money'...Samus clearly isn't that. But if Samus isn't classified as a bounty hunter...then I think you could argue that neither is Boba Fett...Based on what we see in the original Star Wars movies, Boba is really more of a body guard and sometimes assassin than anything else right? So IDK....
Samus did get hired in Metroid 2, Prime 1,2,3 and Metroid Dread She had a specific Job to do and in all but 2 the job just got a lot more complicated, but at the end of the day she was payed for them Hunters may be the only one where she outright hunt a bounty but then again bounty Hunter is just a soft way of saying Mercenary, end of the day it’s the same thing just sounds better
It becomes particularly weird when you realize it's also the job of this guy https://preview.redd.it/dbfykkw1ay8d1.jpeg?width=237&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7535adc1f0fe1ee050d5eca978c68bede0bfd594
I believe the implication is that she does smaller actual bounty missions between games. That being said, the Federation is stated to put bounties on the missions that they outsource as shown in Prime 3 and Hunters. Adam states there was a Bounty on the ZDR mission in Dread.
Neither does Disney lol
She's still a bounty hunter, just the kind that has government contracts and pays taxes.
Samus’s occupation could be best summed up as Batman in space. Works directly with law enforcement on her own terms. Is sometimes a vigilante who goes against said law enforcement when there is no other choice.
I mean, at thw start of Dread, Adam says the bounty on the X-Parasite is low and he doesn't understand why Samus took the bounty. So I guess the know what a bounty hunter is now and didn't before?
They know what a Bounty Hunter is. They just don't want Samus to missions for the money.
So quick to forget Captain Falcon
I always thought they meant it as adventure seeker.
It sounds cool. Like how zorro was a pirate hunter but we never saw it
She very much does still collect bounties.It's just the games aren't focused on that.
They go by Japanese Space soap opera standards, not by the space fantasy western that star wars follows.
 This guy too, but he pretty much just races for bounty
Wait……Is Samus not employed by whoever the government is? I always assumed that’s why she was the only one being sent in to these quarantined planets. I always thought she was like some kind of space green beret
neither does Disney
To be clear... samus is (Bounty) Hunting METROIDS , SPACE PIRATES, AND other high Terroristic targets withing the Cult called space Pirates (mother Brain, Ridley) and even a FUCKING Virus!! Sorry, for f bomb. Ps: unless you mean, she would kill for just money. Then i get your point BUT even then still... Bounty Hunters can have rules, what NOT 2 hunt.
I like the idea that she was a bounty hunter who has at this point moved past that part of her life due to being the galactic savior. Calling her a bounty hunter isn’t really accurate anymore
Do any of you remember Hawkeye from endgame? Yeah, Samus is kinda like that. (Also, if you call her Metroid I shall tear you apart limb by limb) Have a nice day!
I mean... It's in her DNA...
I always assumed she did space pirate bounties off screen and the only bounties we see involved Metroid in some way
I remember when I first read that she was a bounty hunter in Prime 3 and was like, "😢? She's like Boba Fett? 😥" Then I talked about it with my sister, who basically said, "How else is she supposed to get money for fuel?"
she's a bounty hunter, we just dont focus on her bounties in the games🤷🏿♂️🤷🏿♂️🤷🏿♂️ same with captain falcon.