Game EXP: Metroid Dread

Metroid Dread

System: Nintendo Switch

Release Date: October 8, 2021

Publisher: Nintendo

Developer: Mercury Steam

Play Time: 16:44.44

I am not even sure where to start with this article.

Okay, so let us go back just a little bit in the Metroid chronology first.  Metroid Dread is considered "Metroid 5" coming after Metroid/Metroid: Zero Mission, Metroid II: Return of Samus/ Metroid: Samus Returns, Super Metroid, and Metroid Fusion.  While Nintendo has said that you do not need to have played any of the previous games to either understand or enjoy Metroid Dread, that is personally not how I am able to fully enjoy a game that comes this far along in a chronology.  I had previously played all the numbered games in the Metroid franchise (with the exception of Metroid: Samus Returns) before I started Metroid Dread because I need to know, story-wise, what is going on and because this is a direct sequel to Metroid Fusion, I needed to play that game first (which I have already talked about).  

The beginning of the game does start you off with a recap of the Metroid series, giving highlights to the larger points in the story which I found amusing having spent 14h47m in Metroid Fusion and seeing it condensed into a 15-second clip.  But the very reason that Samus is even on this mission has to do with the X-Parasite, being the source of the main antagonist in Metroid Fusion, I was thankful that I came into this game with that knowledge and experience.  

Like a lot of previous Metroid games, Samus starts off her mission to explore the sighting of an X-Parasite on planet ZDR fully armed, and sadly, again, she loses all of her abilities and upgrades through some story element that you only watch.  I really liked that in Metroid Prime, she starts out well equipped only to lose everything due to an explosion, although you only witness that event and it does not happen directly while you are playing; that might be asking too much though.  But I still think that you miss out on a bit of world/game building showing Samus getting knocked around and losing her powers during an elaborate cut scene instead of having the player control her during the opening battle against Ravenbeak (which you learn about 3/4s through the game).

So apart from playing like a traditional Metroid game, gaining power-ups, missile upgrades, bomb upgrades, and such, the inclusion of the new E.M.M.I. enemies are what makes this game mostly fun, but still frustrating at times.  The E.M.M.I. are scientific research robots gone rogue and are now hellbent on killing Samus while she attempts to explore this section of the planet and making her way back to her ship.  Like SA-X in Metroid Fusion, the E.M.M.I. act as the dread part of the title, hunting Samus, but unlike the SA-X, the E.M.M.I. are relegated to specific areas of each area of the map, this is where some of my criticism comes in.

While you are in an E.M.M.I. zone, the E.M.M.I. will often be scouting in the same area that Samus is in, but you can see them on your mini-map, making avoiding them mostly possible, but the levels are designed to evade the E.M.M.I. difficult while taking into account the ability and skill upgrades that Samus has earned up to that point.  I was sad to find out from [article] that how the E.M.M.I. move around their zones is not always plausible, but instead are designed like puzzles.  Each time you pass through a door while in an E.M.M.I. zone, the E.M.M.I. will start in the same location even if where you know they were in the previous room was nowhere near where you now find them.  This type of behind-the-scenes cheating on the part of the computer makes me a little sad because I do not like the idea of the computer essentially being able to cheat their way to make the game difficult for the player just for the sake of being difficult.  My other critique, and one that I have heard elsewhere, is that you are really only scared for the first couple of E.M.M.I. zones, and only while you are in an E.M.M.I. zone.  When you slide through an E.M.M.I. zone door (because I always felt compelled to slide as it felt more dramatic), the E.M.M.I. cannot follow you and you are safe to find an energy refill station or some weaker enemies to spam for health.  

There is a sense of relief when you manage to escape from an E.M.M.I., but that feeling of dread and fear only really lasts for the first couple of E.M.M.I. zones, the rest of the time it is more of an inconvenience because each time you are captured and killed by an E.M.M.I., you respawn at the entrance to the last E.M.M.I. zone door you passed through.  And once you figure out that you gain the power to kill an E.M.M.I. by taking out the Central System, which is typically one of the easier battles in the game, then the E.M.M.I. just become another creature you can kill.  And then on top of that, once you do have the Omega Blaster canon, the E.M.M.I. start acting different, no longer sprinting towards Samus with acrobatic speed, but instead crawling slow enough down long hallways giving you enough time to shoot off its protective face covering, then sprint away from it before finding another close-by hallway to charge up the Omega Blaster to shoot it in the face and disable it.  Granted if the E.M.M.I. acted like the speed-demon-murderous-bastards that they are the entire time, then the mechanics would need to be tweaked because you need time to break their faceplate and to charge the Omega Blaster to kill them.  And then on top of that, you actually manage to kill an already weakened E.M.M.I. so early on in the game that the game is essentially telling you, "Hey, don't worry too much.  You can kill these things, just be patient until you get the Omega Blaster and it will be alright."

Like most Metroid games, exploration is part of the gameplay.  You explore an area and discover that there is a door that you cannot open, or that there is a wall with a new symbol barring access to another area.  Your exploration takes you to a new area where you unlock a new upgrade or an ability like the bombs or Wave Beam.  Now, where was that wall that you needed to bomb to get through?  This has always been my personal frustration with Metroidvania games in general, is being able to remember where certain locations were, assuming that you were able to find that small single block-sized bombable wall down in the bottom corner of the room.  Metroid Dread does help a little bit in this aspect as it gives you the ability to leave different colored markers on maps, and I did do this early on as there seemed to be several types of doors that I could not open.  And on the map, you can have the cursor hover over a type of door or object on the map (like recharge stations) and have them isolate those specific locations by lighting them up on the map.  But only on the map of the area that you are in.  I was again frustrated by the inability to not look at maps of other areas, for instance, while in Cataris, I could only look at Cataris and not at the map of Darion.  If I wanted to know what percentage of items I had found in Hanubia, I would have to make my way to a transport or elevator, get to Hanubia to see if there was anything that I had not picked up yet instead of being able to look at a map and see that I only had 45% item completion.  I don't think other Metroid games have this functionality so I do not know why I would have expected Metroid Dread to start this trend, but it is more of a quality of life feature that I would have liked to have been implemented.

I briefly want to talk about boss fights, because I have mixed feelings about how they were designed.  First off, the boss fights here were all difficult to varying degrees.  I know that each boss took multiple attempts as you learn their patterns, which attacks work against them, which attacks do not work, how many forms they have (or how many sections of the battle there are), which attacks can be countered, and how to time those counters, and how to use your existing arsenal of skills in the room provided.  I am not saying that I think that each boss should be able to be killed the first time around and thankfully the game respawns you right outside the room/area where the fight is as opposed to the last save room, but knowing that you will just respawn close by does take away a bit of the fear of the boss, but again, I feel like that mechanic is worked into the design of the boss fights.  You are supposed to die multiple times as you learn how to fight the boss, and when you die, you take what you learned from the previous attempts to fight the boss almost immediately after respawning.  

But here is the strange thing about how Mercury Steam designed their boss fights.  While at times I would often get frustrated at only being able to make it just a little bit further and survive a little bit longer during the fights, I did survive longer and gained a little bit more knowledge about my plan of attack.  And when I died, I wanted to try again, because I felt that I had gotten just a little bit closer to getting a new ability so that I could explore more.  There were a couple of times though that I felt like I had hit a wall and watched a YouTube video or read an article about tactics, and I would usually find out that I was either reading the enemy wrong or that I was actually doing just fine and needed to progress just a little bit further.  The final boss fight though felt different because it was the final boss fight.  There would be no more exploring to do, only the fight then the end of the game.  And the final fight took a while to both learn, recover from, and have the gusto to restart the fight because it took so long.

The fight against Ravenbeak was different from all of the previous boss fights.  Not only were his abilities different, but so were his tells, and also how the battle progressed.  I realized pretty early on that Ravenbeak's attacks never felt as powerful and damaging but he was one hell of a bullet sponge; or missile sponge as it were.  Oftentimes I felt that I was just unloading missiles into him without any effect and just trying to survive long enough for the next counter to be available.  And then after that, the glowing aura surrounding him would turn from purple to gold, which made it nearly impossible to tell if the missiles and/or Plasma Beam were having any effect.  Even trying to focus on the sound effects, I could not tell if there was a hard metallic *tink* sound indicating that what I was doing was working or not.  And then there was the flaming/shadowy globe attack that chased you around the room and god forbid if it hit you because that seemed to do the most damage.  It was not until I watched a video that I learned you have to use the Power Bomb against these spheres, the giant flaming one actually giving you health upon destroying it; I know for sure that I would not have thought to use the Super Bomb during this fight.  Eventually, on/around my 10th attempt, I was able to take down Ravenbeak and progressed to finish the game.

I am going to leave the end-end of the game a mystery because it was something that I did not anticipate and will possibly have implications for the rest of this storyline, but I definitely "woah'd" a few times.  I also died once while trying to escape the inevitable planet collapsing timer.

Lastly, I wanted to briefly touch on the amiibos designed for the game, which I did buy.  The Samus amiibo gave you an additional energy tank and once per day, would recharge your missiles to full.  The E.M.M.I. amiibo gave you an additional 10+ missile tank and again, once per day would recharge your health completely.  At first, I thought that I would be using these somewhat frequently, at least once a day, but I never did.  Because countering would often reward you with additional health and missiles and there were some enemies that could very nearly get you back up to full, along with the energy and missile recharge stations feeling somewhat plentiful, I never felt the need to use the amiibo again.  I had also thought that they would come in handy during boss fights, but I was usually wrapped up in the battle that I never thought to pause the game, go to the system settings, go to the amiibo menu, tap the amiibo and then return to the battle.

You know, I think we are good here.  There are still several aspects of the game that I could touch on such as the speed of Samus' running, the Shine Sparking ability, the E.M.M.I.'s attacks, the focus on countering during boss fights, the progression of gaining new power-ups and upgrades, subverting the normal power-ups by using Ice-Missiles instead of the standard Ice-Beam, the pacing, finer aspects of the story, and what the hell Kraid was even doing on ZDR in the first place, but that would have just dragged this article out to longer and more unreasonable lengths.  Overall, I am very happy with Metroid Dread and while I may not jump right back in and play the game immediately or try to beat the game under a certain time limit with a certain percentage of the items collected, I did have a lot of fun and would like to reiterate how much I love Metroid games, especially 2D side-scrolling Metroid games.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
He'll Be So Kind In Consenting To Blow Your Mind