Morph Ball Bomb

Morph Ball Bombs are an upgrade to Samus' Morph Ball in the Metroid series. In the Prime games, they serve several roles: mainly to activate bomb slots and to gain vertical height. If you stay close to a bomb while in Morph Ball form when it detonates, you will do a Bomb Jump. In the original release of Metroid Prime, it is possible to chain multiple bomb jumps. It is also possible to unmorph from a Bomb Jump to gain even more height with the Space Jump Boots, in what is known as a Bomb Space Jump (BSJ for short). In Prime 1, it is acquired by defeating the Incinerator Drone in Burn Dome. In Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, it is acquired from defeating Bomb Guardian in Agon Temple.

General

Bomb Slots

Bomb slots are composed of multiple elements that, when packaged together, will behave like a type of switch which is activated whenever Samus uses a bomb. There are several triggers: one to detect if Samus is near the bomb slot so that it can lock Samus in place, and an additional damage trigger that detects when Samus has laid a bomb, which will activate other triggers that are connected to it. The damage trigger works such that it can only be activated once Samus is locked inside the bomb slot. If Samus gets into a bomb slot without having any bombs to interact with, the game will become softlocked.

In Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, it is possible to activate most bomb slots without actually using bombs. This is achieved using either the Darkburst or Sonic Boom beam combos. This is because the damage triggers actually react to these beam combos, as the developers forgot to make these triggers invulnerable to them during development. This makes it possible to beat the game without ever using the morph ball bombs, and has lead to the creation of speedrun categories, in particular Max% No Bombs. Only a few bomb slots in Echoes cannot be interacted with in this way, mostly due to imposed restrictions that prevent Samus from morphing (such as in the Spider Guardian boss fight, which is impossible without bombs).

Metroid Prime

The original release of Metroid Prime offered the greatest amount of freedom with regards to bomb jumping. It is possible to have up to 5 active bombs on screen at once. This freedom allows for entire different categories of bomb jumps to exist, in particular the Uber Bomb Jump (UBJ) and the Half Pipe Bomb Jump (HPBJ) which are most often used in low% categories.

The maximum amount of height that can be gained with the morph ball bombs alone is currently known to be 9.697 units.

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Metroid Prime 2: Echoes

With Echoes, there are additional restrictions that were made as a result of changes to the bomb timer, meaning that there can only be 3 active bombs at one point now. As a result, 3BJs are now the way in which the maximum amount of height with bombs alone can be achieved.

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

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See Also

• Power Bomb
• Bomb Jump
• Bomb Space Jump