A Worthy Sequel to Metroid Fusion
I first heard of Metroid Dread in the 2000s, when I was a teenager. I'm 35. Needless to say, when I heard that a game with that title was announced, and that it was coming out in 2021, I had tingles in my fingers. I was brought back to a time before Metroid: Other M or Metroid Prime 3, a world where I still believed that a good Metroid game could come out. I was tentatively excited, as the team behind this game also made the often-applauded Samus Returns, a game full of potential and unfortunate flaws (both due to the platform, the 3DS, and the source material, Metroid 2.) I wasn't thrilled with that game, but I knew that given the right platform and original ideas, that team could potentially make an excellent game. And that's what they did.
Metroid Dread is at it's best when you're just completely lost in the sauce and you're just going with feeling. The level design is smart enough that I almost always ended up going the right way. I was only stuck one time, and it was due to me missing something obvious. At the end of the game, I found myself thinking I had explored pretty much everything, and I only knew I missed 3 items I just couldn't be bothered to go back for on a non 100% playthrough... yet I only collected 43% of the items. I plan on immediately going back and starting a 100% playthrough. Similarly to Axiom Verge 2, I decided to finish the game before really diving deep and trying to get everything. I think this is the way I'll be playing metroidvanias from now on. I think it gives me the maximum amount of playtime-to-enjoyment.
Metroid Dread isn't a perfect game. It has a few major flaws that keeps it from being the best title in the entire franchise. There are a number of really punishing stealth sections. Fortunately, the checkpointing is excellent, putting you right outside the stealth areas whenever you die... which you will. A lot. I'm no stranger to difficult games, I'm a fairly good videogamer by most accounts, and so I didn't find myself overly frustrated with these sections. I could definitely see people being very annoyed with them, as one mistake can kill you. I hope to complete a No Death run someday, and I think that'll be an incredible challenge, probably just as hard as something like Dark Souls 2, which I did twice. Either way, I've seen a number of complaints about these areas. There was one late game stealth section that was maybe a bit much. Some of the tougher late game enemies share something in common with these stealth sections - motherfucking quick time events. They hide it behind the guise of "parrying" but ... I'm no fool. I know what I see. The E.M.M.I. (the things you hide from in the stealth section) will instantly kill you if they catch you... but you have the slimmest of chances of parrying them before you die. It's a window of a few frames that appears in a random amount of time during the murder animation. The game tells you that it's almost impossible to hit, and they aren't joking. I might be old, but my reaction time is still pretty fast. I hit maybe 6 out of 30. Obviously the answer here is "don't get caught," and yeah, that's definitely the way to go. The other enemies that have them... they're after you "kill them." Those are much more forgiving, and failing them just results in you taking 100-200 damage, which by that point, isn't that bad. It did catch me off guard the first time, and I died because of them. I was pretty infuriated, but again, good checkpointing and the enemies themselves are pretty fun.
And that's where the game succeeds the greatest. It's just really fun. The enemies are tricky, the game doesn't pull many punches, and everything is pretty rewarding. The boss fights are really great, with cutscenes that kinda turn Samus into fucking Neo, which is a lot of fun and maybe a little silly. The abilities feel really good to pull off. You can spam the fire button to shoot as fast as you can, and it's effective. There's a missile swarm upgrade that lets you lock onto enemies and fire 20 missiles at them. All of the exploration, combat, and movement abilities feel good and effortlessly integrate into the games pretty good control scheme. The parry system from Samus Returns is back and is appropriately rewarding to use.
Overall, this game is a really big victory for Nintendo. It brings a franchise back from the brink of death and shows that you can do this and still release a fantastic game in this style in 2021. I can't wait to see what this team does in the future... knowing Nintendo, they'll probably go off to work on some crappy side franchise and Metroid will be shelved for another 20 years... but at least we got this one good one. So? What will it be, Nintendo? A last hurrah or a sign of things to come?
