Things I don't understand about the universe of Metroid

It was explicit. Urtragia is specified as the homeworld of the Urtragian Space Pirates and they're referred to as such. The only place this entire detail gets translated into the English version at all is with "Urtragian Shriekbat". The Zebesians weren't conducting an excavation, the Urtragians were. Remember that Orpheon, Vol Paragon, and Siracius (all frigates of the 3D space pirates) were in orbit above Zebes "at Zero Hour" and managed to retreat; plus, its highly likely there were Urtragians on the mother ship as well since there was Mecha Ridley, who with the context of MSR is pretty clearly supposed to be a precursor to Meta Ridley's cybernetic implants.

Also, the manga doesn't mesh with the games at all past chapter 3. Fusion, Zero Mission, Prime 3, and Other M all canonize chunks of the K2-L incident (which originated in a super metroid Nintendo power comic), and Other M and Federation Force canonize a few other things like the CO uniform, but the manga literally cannot be canon because it's just an alternate version of Zero Mission that contradicts the canon a few chapters in. I'd take even the K2-L incident and the stuff we don't see in the games and aren't present in manual stuff with a grain of salt too, since things like Ridley being able to talk (unless he had a cybernetic implant at that point) are kind of sketchy. Especially after some of the stuff in MSR that have been leaked so far; I don't think the canon version of the Metroid origin matches the manga version at all, unless there's a mistranslation either with the manga or the game (or both?).

As far as we know in canon, Zebesians are more or less robot-like drones, distinct from the Pirates we see in the 3D games, that simply carry out orders, and the part about them being bioweapons made by the Urtragians is a theory, but a very likely one.

We also see multiple species of pirates even in the 2D games, I should mention. Kihunters are explicitly another species that are part of the space pirates, even in the Japanese manual.

/r/Metroid Thread Parent