In 2002 Nintendo released a tie-in prequel manga for Metroid Fusion. To promote both the game and the manga, in collaboration with Kodansha, the first two chapters from Volume 1 were released as "E-Manga", slightly animated and with sound effects from the game, in Flash or Shockwave format on the official Japanese Metroid website through Kodansha's website.
While the Metroid website is still accessible and stills from the animation are available in the form of fan translations, the links to Kodansha are no longer working, meaning that the proper E-Manga chapters are lost.
Also, after translating the page about the E-Manga, it looks like the Metroid website hints that chapters from 3 onwards would have been released with the same treatment. However, all English sources only mentions the first two chapters already listed on the Metroid website, and given that the Kodansha E-Manga index is unavailable and I'm not a Japanese speaker, I cannot fully confirm this.
Post by ShowsniPending on Apr 24, 2021 21:59:26 GMT
Looks like you're in luck - the Wayback Machine captured the original e-mangas of both chapter 1 and chapter 2. Downloaded them, and they're both working fine still, just as I remember them. (Of course, they're in Japanese...) If you go here: web.archive.org/web/*/http://kodansha.cplaza.ne.jp/e-manga/club/manga/metroid/* the ones you want are the Flash objects; 01.swf is chapter 1, and story.swf is chapter 2. (00.swf and interface.swf are the respective intro/interface screens and music). I'm fairly certain chapter 3 onward never got the e-manga treatment (there's no mention of them on Kodansha's archived site), so after the two e-manga chapters there's just the regular manga for the remaining chapters.
Thank you very much!!! I tried to fiddle a bit with the Wayback Machine and found some .swf, but couldn't find any that were working. About the other chapters, I also thought that despite being advertised they never got transposed to e-manga format in the end. Thanks again!