Metroid and the Jellyfish

Hm, not sure about the leech/lamprey comparison. They have a lot of small teeth, not four large fangs.

Don't metroids also have little, toothy mouths in between the four fangs?

...

Oh, wait. I think that was just the corrupted Metroids in MP3. Sorry, my bad.

Scratch the annelid part.

[Geemer]

I think the leech/lamprey comparison isn't a bad one for the mouth - regardless of the number of teeth they do have teeth surrounding a mouth rather than distinct jaws like most chordates.

Really in the end though I think they have the most morphological similarities to gastropods. The soft fleshy body, with a protective shell that grows over it? The fangs could even be a modified operculum and/or radula. What they're missing, obviously, is the "foot" on the bottom. But generally speaking they follow a similar body plan. While they superficially resemble a cnidarian, the shell seems to be hard unlike jellies and the fangs aren't really analogous to the tentacles of jellies.

I definitely agree though that the general shape is inspired by sea jellies. I also highly doubt the creators of metroid took anything I just said into account when they designed them.

[metroid_boy]

Yea, they do have a "hard shell", I didn't notice this consciously until now. The radula thing was very creative, and could even be associated with metroid's abilities: they could use these fangs to somehow connect with the prey, and then they start sucking energy...