>>73317
>>73331
...And all of that, of course, isn't even mentioning her equipment. Which is its own discussion. There's a few different ways of looking at things when it comes to her equipment: a generalized "basic" loadout, a specific game's endgame loadout, and the most incorrect yet powerful option of a "composite" loadout of everything she's ever had all at once.
Let's just look at the basics for now; the Chozo Power Suit. It's got a basic shield system with 99 units of energy. What does that mean? Well, an unupgraded Power Suit takes about 12 to 15 units of damage from a Space Pirate's lasers-which can instantly kill a normal human, and with just a few strikes kill most armored human soldiers. Pirate lasers are also shown to blow apart walls, metal, and the like-so these things aren't comparable to normal bullets. At absolute worst, let's say that a pirate laser is roughly comparable to heavy sniper rounds or maybe a shotgun shell. So Samus is basically immune to small arms and automatic gunfire, and with just her base Power Suit could tank some heavy ordinance before the shields give out. But she also has a Power Beam; this is very roughly equivalent to a Space Pirate laser, perhaps stronger; it can break apart metal crates, kill pirates in a few blasts, kill most things in a few blasts really, and with an upgrade it can be charged for an incredibly powerful shot that breaks through very heavy obstacles or armor. Her Power Suit also has basic life support built in; she can survive indefinitely underwater or in the vacuum of space, so it'll definitely filter poisons and the like as well-though the base form doesn't do well with extreme heats.
Also, fun fact: the suit is bonded to Samus on a biological level, possibly a psychic level as well. It dissolves into light when Samus doesn't need it, and she can don it near-instantly with a simple flex of will if she wants to. Removing the thing is...possible, but incredibly difficult; the Federation had to surgically remove parts of the suit from her when she was unconscious due to the X-Parasite infection, and still couldn't get the damn thing off entirely. So Samus can't really be disarmed, not if she doesn't want to be; she can look like she's completely unsuited and harmless, but with barely a second her suit will materialize around her. As for its energy stores? Those aren't electricity or some fusion power; that's literally lifeforce. The Chozo were on some crazy shit; the Power Suit can condense the lifeforce of Samus's enemies (or just nearby animals that Samus kills) into energy resources that the suit absorbs to power itself, meaning that as long as Samus can kill her enemies her suit will never run out of power. Depending on if you take Other M as canon she can even just concentrate really hard to restore some of her energy; if not, Samus can instead use Missiles and Super Missiles to convert them into energy via a Crystal Flash.
But this baby has more tricks up its sleeve. It upgrades; it can take just about any technology Samus finds and integrate it into itself, making itself stronger and giving it new capabilities. Sometimes this just takes the form of energy tanks or missile expansions, but other times it adds new scanners, new shields, new armor types-hell, even an electro grapple. There is the implicit understanding that extreme upgrades can be taxing on the suit's systems, so Samus doesn't tend to keep her suit upgraded between games...or other excuses like sever damage knocking upgrades out of her suit that she has to go recollect or the like. But the Power Suit's adaptability ensures that Samus can in fact get back in the game damn quickly.
Again-all of this is just the
BASE Power Suit. Samus can upgrade her Suit to ridiculous levels; in any given game she can get anywhere from 12 to 20 more Energy Tanks that make it so you'd basically have to shoot her with railgun rounds continuously for several minutes before she's actually in serious danger, and that's not counting the base armor upgrades that make her massively more resistant to damage and let her do things like move at full speed underwater or jump infinitely in the air. And her weapon systems-oh boy, her weapon systems. They can get ridiculously powerful, letting her shoot beams that go through walls, split, freeze, and more. Or missiles that can casually bust through nearly every material in existence. Or Power Bombs that are basically pocket nukes that she carries around-up to fifty pocket nukes that she can place to utterly
delete every enemy from the screen and cause massive damage to the environment. Hell-the Speed Booster lets her just barrel right through solid stone or the like, so even just running becomes a serious weapon for her.
Ah, but then there's game specific upgrades, like the PED from Metroid Prime 3. That little device (alongside a little Phazon infecting Samus) lets her supercharge her suit to make her literally fucking invincible while it's active, able to tank literally anything without any care, fire off immensely damaging beams, and the like-at the cost of a tank of energy per use. Of course she's in danger of being taken over by Dark Samus if she overuses it, but with a little skilled play and balancing that's never been an issue for most players and the corruption effect is actually quite useful for maximizing the PED's Hyper Mode.
The base Power Suit is fairly fragile, but ridiculously versatile and can be upgraded to become terrifyingly powerful. Any single endgame Power Suit would casually outclass all but the most bullshit Iron Man suits and stand amongst the peaks of capeshit power armor. If you composite the Power Suit, get every single upgrade from every single game and cram it all into one suit and assume Samus never lost any of it...well, she'd basically be an unstoppable force with a Hyper Beam that could core planets.