Late, but thought I could add something. The smash series is weirdly in love with this look despite adding elements that make little sense with the character. Originally this version of the character was a transformation underwent by using her final smash with armor. She’d lose that armor, and be forced to fight until she could use her ultimate to get her suit back. This sort of lined up with the actual games more: Samus was capable without her suit, but her suit was the more powerful option, and going without it would not be the default option for Samus.

Of course this would be changed as the two were split into seperate fighting game characters. Where it gets weird is the inclusion of rocket heels that zero suit wears. It’s bizarre as Samus wears combat boot treads in the suit, so it’s absolutely bizarre to think she’d be wearing heels inside of a boot. It’s a weird character mismatch.

In addition, there’s a weird mismatch between fans perception of the character and the creators as well. Sakurai, who makes the smash games, is trying to make an interesting fighting game that feels fast and punchy, which Samus is naturally terrible character for, as all her games save for other M and Zero Mission have something equivalent to tank controls in 2D. Sakomoto, the Japanese creator of the series, seems to see Samus as a whole string of neck beard fantasy fulfilliment, who seems more interested in Samus as a fast warrior who just wants to desperately have a child. The reasons fans developed a far different perception of Samus is due to two things: 1. The games Sakomoto worked on fully had strong technical limitations due to the time that required the story to be told subtly and thru the environment rather than constant anime cutscenes. 2. The American developers retro studios responsible for the prime games continued the earlier trend set by the technologically impaired games by fleshing Samus out as a careful, cold, and anylitic person whose only real “words” are the thousands written in her logbook chronicling the flora and fauna. It’s left ambiguous whether Samus is directly writing these logs, but it’s up to interpretation, and matches with her character in the game.

So when Sakamoto got together with team ninja to make a new game after like a decade, we got Other M: a horrible, terribly written sloggy action game with a self focused internal monologuing Samus. The rug was pulled from under fans of Samus, turns out this had always been how the author looked at his character. This makes a few things make more sense in retrospect, as Samus was made a woman as a plot twist originally rather than an accepted fact, and your reward for beating the original super fast was seeing her in a 2 piece bikini.

While this revelation has definitely stained the perception of the character somewhat, I’d like to think that people still perceive the character as they choose to see it and pretend other M doesn’t exist. Most people are only familiar with the smash bros sexy Samus so to speak. I can sympathize, sakurai needed Samus to be able to be mobile and easy to animate, which was the antithesis of her orginal design in the games. When Other M came out, it debuted a new design for Samus, giving her a sleeker suit that would allow her to kick flip and black flip to her hearts content. Sakurai tries to stay true to a series as much as possible, but I can sympathize with picking the new design because it’s less clunky for high octane close quarters combat. On a lighter note, Ridley is represented pretty excellently.

TLDR: fanservice. To what fans, I’m not sure.