I’ve been a metroid fan for a long time,
prime, zero mission, and fusion are still some of my all time favorite games, but even
the most diehard fans will tell you that the series has been in a weird place for a very
long time. We’ve gotten spin-offs, we’ve gotten remakes,
and we’ve gotten crap, but we haven’t had anything to truly advance the story of
samus aran, galactic bounty hunter and half- jellyfish half-bird person, since 2002's metroid
fusion. And wow this is gonna be by far the newest
game I’ve ever reviewed and I’m still 5 months late. But anyway I'm here to give you my thoughts
on Metroid Dread. This game actually starts with a recap of
Fusion and some basic info to get everyone caught up on some of the series lore. Kind of a clunky way to start a game’s story
but it’s a series staple at this point and fusion was almost two decades ago so this
was probably a good idea. We find out that an x parasite has been spotted
on a remote planet called ZDR, that the first research team of deadly robots has been lost
and that samus is sent in to find out what the hell is going on. And we’ve also got the long awaited return
of AI adam in this game! Ah, there’s that old catchphrase. You know, I like this guy when he’s inside
a computer and not inside a bad game. Samus descends into the bowels of the planet
and is immediately confronted by... holy shit a living chozo? That’s new right? This is our first time seeing a live chozo,
the aliens that adopted samus and gave her her power armor, and the first one we ever
meet in the main series of games immediately defeats samus, drains her powers, and… turns
her armor blue for some reason. Guess he was just a big fan of the fusion
suit color scheme. So right off the bat, we’ve got a great
plot setup. Samus is lost and alone on a hostile and mysterious
alien world, no surprise there, but unlike a lot of metroid games we’ve got an interesting
villain firmly established right from the start which I really like. Why didn’t he kill her, what exactly does
he want with samus? We’ve got a clear goal, some mysteries to
hopefully find the answers to, it’s all basic but it really works for me. And yeah maybe the text boxes were a little
retro, a little low budget, but eh I don’t know. I’ll happily take a few text boxes with
some great art and atmospheric music over an annoyingly long, terribly written, terribly
voice acted cutscene to start off a game. Ok yeah I know this video isn't about Other
M so I’ll dial back the hate. And since we’re past the opening set up
of the game, I’m gonna put a general spoiler warning here. I’ll have another spoiler warning later
for major plot stuff but in general, after this point, nothing except the very end of
the game is gonna be off limits. The first thing you’ll probably notice as
you start playing is that this game is… gorgeous. The backgrounds look amazing, samus animates
so fluidly, and there is an astonishing level of detail in everything you can see. It runs at a smooth 60fps which you can’t
see in my footage because my old-ass capture card can only do 30fps. Now there’s a lot going on that makes the
visuals work so well here. One is of course, the switch hardware. This is the first ever metroid game to be
developed for an HD console. The last console game in the series was other
m on the wii and don’t get me wrong, visually that game looked really good for a wii game. But this is just in a whole different universe
visually. MercurySteam and nintendo epd are making amazing
use of the switch hardware to deliver a game that is visually beautiful and completely
easily readable, which I’d argue is even more important. See it’s one thing to have gorgeous graphics
but if I can’t play your game without some kind of detective vision that ruins the aesthetics
in order to make the game actually playable, well then the nice graphics aren’t really
doing anything for you are they? Of course this is simpler with a 2d perspective
but still, it’s impressive how this game manages to look so visually appealing while
never sacrificing any readability. That Z-axis is beautiful to look at and gives
this 2d game an amazing sense of 3d depth but it manages to never interfere with gameplay. They even use the backgrounds to further tell
the story, build atmosphere and do some really effective foreshadowing. Even just in this first area they make great
use of lighting to create some variety in what would otherwise be very drab gray hallways. Later areas make great use of color and there’s
some really awesome environmental storytelling later on that I love. This is the first time we’ve seen chozo
ruins that aren’t really ruins, this is a chozo facility that is still mostly functional
and that includes scientific testing areas of all the typical metroid types, lava zone,
water zone, plant zone, and even some regal, palatial areas that are still being maintained
in their full glory. It’s a far cry from the scattered ruins
of previous metroid games and it creates a different kind of mystery surrounding the
chozo. Why exactly is this place still mostly intact? We only know of one guy who lives here so
far, there’s no way he’s maintained all of this alone so what happened to everyone
that should be here? And how recently, and why? I like this bit of intrigue that the world
generates just by being different from the game environments we’ve seen before in the
series. It makes you really *want to explore to hopefully
find answers to all these questions you’re going to have about the world. Which is of course, the bread and butter of
any metroid game, having a good world to explore. The core gameplay is the same as it’s always
been with metroid. Explore, find new powers, use those powers
to access new areas, boss fight here and there, repeat. It’s a tried and true formula for a reason,
there’s inherent satisfaction in feeling samus grow stronger. Samus can only jump, slide, and shoot at the
start and to go from that to the whirling dervish of death you become in the endgame
is always a great feeling. But to get there you’re gonna have to find
your way around ZDR Personally, I think the best metroidvanias
are the ones in which you know where to go without feeling like you’ve been told where
to go. At the same time, I also like to feel lost
while actually being guided down the right path without knowing it. These two things seem pretty similar, or maybe
they’re contradictory, I don’t know but I know that Metroid Dread accomplishes both
and it deserves a lot of credit for that. Cause I don’t like when a game constantly
tells me where to go. Waypoints, quest markers, little dumb line
telling you where to turn during every single moment of gameplay, most of the time when
I'm playing a game that has something like that I just find myself wishing that the game
had some other way to guide me. But at the same time, I can see why those
features are usually implemented, no one wants to just be lost in a massive world with zero
guidance where the only way forward is some inscrutable nonsense. Metroid Dread is really clever about how it
deals with this. Sometimes it locks off the way you came from,
forcing you to explore a smaller chunk of the world map to make sure you find the necessary
item from that area. And once you get a new power the game is good
at hinting at where you should go next. They don’t outright tell you hey it's time
to go to the next area now but they hint at it just hard enough that you feel like you
thought of the idea yourself. For example, after you get the bombs in dairon
there’s a bunch of morph ball launchers you can suddenly take that take you down a
path that leads directly to the train to burenia. It doesn’t feel like “ok guess the game
wants me to go over here now, let’s just follow this arrow to the next part of the
game.” It feels like you’re discovering something
for yourself. Yeah, the path is basically linear, but the
simple fact that you’re finding a new area that you weren’t explicitly told about,
using a new power that you just got and which leads to a train to another new area you didn’t
know existed makes this exciting and fun and not a dull trek down a series of hallways. And for the first time I think in a Metroid
game, they give you the tools to investigate and figure out where to go next right there
in the map. Instead of a giant pink blob that tells you
zero helpful information, thanks for nothing super metroid maridia, Dread’s map is super
detailed and user friendly. You can actually highlight almost anything
on the map and it will show you every other instance of that thing that you’ve already
visited. I didn’t realize this on my first playthrough
and I kinda wish the game had told me, but hey, it is right there on the bottom of the
screen every time you hit start so I really don’t have an excuse for not seeing it. This feature is incredibly helpful if you’re
stuck and combined with the log of what items you’ve recently gotten and what hints the
game has given you you can really start to feel like a detective piecing together clues,
examining the map until that great aha moment where you find a door you couldn’t open
or a block type you couldn’t break that you just got the item for and boom you’ve
figured out for yourself how to make progress. This feels great and allows for plenty of
different playstyles and player experiences. If you just want to know where to go, you
generally have the tools and information you need to find that out for yourself. Or if you want to just get lost and explore
for a while, go ahead, there’s nothing forcing you to use the map to find the next step on
the critical path. Now, to be fair, sometimes the game does just
tell you where to go next, like when exposition the bird says ok just go to the next spot,
here it is, sure that’s a bit on the nose. And yeah the big heat pipes early on are a
bit of a cheat but they’re visually weaved into the world in a convincing enough way
that it doesn’t feel like I’m being led by the hand. And sometimes being outright told where to
go is exciting! It guides you invisibly most of the time but
when it’s time to get the screwattack dread makes sure you know there’s something badass
there. It teases a new major powerup, puts it just
out of reach and makes you take this long trek to defrost this area, and then gives
you a route back to it through an area filled with enemies you can destroy now and challenges
you couldn’t handle before. The whole time building anticipation for when
you finally get your hands on the new item and when you finally get it. In general though this is one of the least
backtracky metroids I’ve ever played. There's a word that only exists in Metroid
discourse, backtracky. That’s a complaint I know some people have
had, once you know how to play the game and how to interpret the signposting it’s giving
you it is quite linear. The path out of one critical area will generally
lead you right to the next place you’re supposed to be or a teleporter that will take
you right where you need to go. I can see why this would be a weakness of
the game for some people but, I prefer this to almost every other metroidvania I’ve
ever played. As much as I love zero mission I don’t really
get a whole lot of enjoyment out of jumping my way up and down the vertical sections in
brinstar over and over. Up the shaft, down the shaft, into norfair,
back up to kraid, back down to norfair again, back up to tourian, you have to go up and
down these f***in things so many times and what I described is the minimum. Sure it’s a holdover from the original but
I don’t know backtracking over places I’ve been to a dozen times before is not an aspect
of metroid that I think is necessarily sacred. At least, not in isolation. Backtracking can be made fun with new things
to find in areas you’ve already been, zero mission definitely does this. But the backtracking by itself is not what
makes brinstar a good metroid map. The powers ups and exploring new areas is
what appeals to me about metroid games and I get it, zero mission and fusion are pretty
old and were on handheld hardware, they had to squeeze every last bit of interest and
content they could out of what assets they had time to make and could squeeze into those
tiny cartridges. But dread is so expansive and so varied that
I think the design approach they took makes a lot of sense. Trekking back and forth across a map this
huge would be a huge pain so having lots of interconnectivity is the perfect solution. A sort of fast travel does get unlocked towards
the end of game. Once you’ve been pretty much everywhere
all the teleporters become linked to every other one, so you can go from any teleporter
to any other. This is pretty much only for the purposes
of 100% item collecting, or for people who need some extra powerups at the end to help
them beat the final boss, and I probably wouldn’t have bothered to get 100% items if this feature
wasn’t here so this gets a thumbs up from me. What really this comes down to is that I as
a player want metroid world design to accomplish a lot of seemingly contradictory things. I want to know where I’m going but I don’t
want to be told where to go. I want to explore and get lost and wonder
where things are, but I don't want to get too lost. And if I do need help I want to be able to
help myself. This is a lot to ask of a game and yet dread
kinda nails it. And I think gamers who really want to get
lost still have a lot to enjoy with dread. And for gamers who prefer a more guided experience
dread provides the tools for that. So at the risk of sounding like an ign review
of a mediocre triple A game, there really is something for everyone here. Now I struggled a bit with where in the review
to put this section about emmis. At first it’s easy to put them in with the
combat discussion since well, they’re enemies and enemies are the things you fight in the
game. But that’s not really what emmis are, and
I’ll explain what I mean here. There are 7 emmis in the game, though one
is already busted when you find it for tutorial purposes and the last one, well it dies in
a cutscene so in practice there’s only 5. Each emmi will patrol it’s respective zone,
marked clearly by special doors and will chase you if it spots you. The first fully functional EMMI you encounter
is built up super well, the room where it first chases you is designed so that you can
get just enough of a look at it to see how it moves and get the idea that it can move
around using pathways you can't access, and hammer in the fact that it is going to relentlessly
chase you and you cannot stop it on your own.They are completely immune to all of your standard
weapons and if they touch you you are most likely dead in one shot. They can be countered but we'll touch on that
later. The only way to permanently put one down is
to find the zone’s central unit, which all look and behave eerily similar to mother brain,
kill it, absorb its power, and use that temporary power boost to explode the emmis brain. I like how this is done, it really sells the
horror aspect of the emmis. Even when you’re powered up enough to kill
them, you still need to strategize with the environment to get the emmi in a position
where you can wear down its shielding with a beam that locks you in place while you use
it. And even when their shield is down you again
have to watch them creep slowly towards you while you desperately pray that your beam
finishes charging in time to kill it. It's a very effective setpiece only hampered
by the fact that you have to do it in exactly the same way for every emmi in the game. The emmis adapt and change as the game progresses,
each one gaining new powers supposedly to suit its environment and making them all function
slightly differently. You’ll be able to absorb each emmis signature
ability for yourself once you destroy it, and these are some of the most important powerups
in the whole game. It really makes finding the mini mother brain
and defeating each emmi feel like a genuinely big deal since not only do you get a significant
power up, but you’ll also completely transform a massive chunk of the map since there isn’t
a killer robot patrolling there anymore. Now emmi zones are an interesting sub-category
to talk about with dread’s world design. They’re a super important feature and yet
they kind of function completely differently than the rest of the game. EMMI zones are expansive and labyrinthine
and all more or less look the same. It’s easy to lose track of where you’ve
been already and on top of all that, there’s a killer robot hunting you. That sense of not knowing exactly where you
are makes that titular sense of dread all the more effective. This is what I meant when I said that emmis
aren’t really combat related challenges, they’re world navigation challenges. They’re hazards to be avoided while you
learn to get in and out of the patrol zone as quickly as you can without being spotted,
which makes emmi zones feel like kind of a exploration boss fight. They’re basically sections of the map that
put a time component on your exploration, forcing you to traverse the area and figure
out where you’re going as quickly as you can, which is a really neat concept. However, these areas are deceptively linear,
like a coloring book maze for children. Yeah there’s a lot of dead ends and it looks
really complex at a glance, but in reality all the dead ends are pretty easy to get back
out of and the only way deeper into the maze is also gonna take you forward. That’s how EMMI zones are designed but since
you’re trapped inside with a robot that wants to do unspeakable things to you it doesn’t
feel like a little kiddie maze for babies, it feels like a desperate struggle to find
your way out before emmi sticks a needle in your face. But since the maze isn’t actually all that
complex and you get a free checkpoint before you enter the maze, you can get that feeling
of being lost like a rat in a maze without ever getting too frustrated. Puzzle solving takes a backseat in these areas
too, at least, while the emmi in that zone is still alive. It would be pretty unfair and unfun to require
the player to find hidden unmarked exits and fight a bunch of other enemies with this amount
of pressure on them the whole time, so finding your way around in emmi zones is usually pretty
simple. Once the emmi is dead these zones open up,
spawn new enemies and generally turn into areas just like the rest of the game with
collectibles and hidden paths to find and normal enemies to fight. They’re used well and I like them! Another important feature is the ability to
melee counter emmis and I think this was implemented in a really smart way. When you make any contact with an emmi it’ll
start a short quicktime event where you have to hit X at exactly the right time and samus
will stun the emmi and get a chance to escape. Even though you’ve got two chances and a
very obvious bright light telling you exactly when to hit the button, this quicktime event
is 100% absolutely unfair and you will not hit it with any consistency. The timing is super tight and it changes every
time the qte starts. You’re gonna feel like it almost never works
and honestly that’s fine! It’s supposed to be unfair, you aren’t
supposed to get it every time, the game says that as soon as it introduces the mechanic. This is great, because it provides some variance
to emmi encounters. Functionally it might as well just pop up
a slot machine for how random it is but because it doesn’t do that, and it requires an actual
well-timed input from the player, when you do hit it it feels great, it feels earned. If this was just a cutscene that randomly
allowed the player to live 10% of the time this mechanic would feel like shit. But since it’s a reward you earned yourself
that wasn’t just handed to you out of charity, it feels good. But that melee counter is not just for rolling
the dice against emmis, almost every enemy in the game can be melee countered. This is I think gonna be a polarizing feature. On the one hand I’m not a huge fan of how
the melee counter can tend to dominate normal combat. A new-ish feature is that the L button will
lock you in place and let you precision aim with the left stick, which you might think
means that metroid dread is going to focus more on being accurate with your beam and
missiles, but that doesn’t really end up being the case. This aiming feature is still super handy and
feels great to use. But most enemies after a certain point take
a tremendous amount of shots with missiles and a ludicrous amount of beam shots to kill,
but go down with a single melee counter. On the other hand, it opens up a lot of new
possibilities for combat that previous games never had. The counters in this game against bosses feel
a lot like busters in dmc4 and 5 in the best possible way. At certain points most bosses will do a flash
to queue you to hit the melee counter and hitting it with good timing will net you some
health and missiles and lead to a visual spectacle where samus will just lay into the boss in
a pre-animated sequence. And the best thing about these is that they
don’t feel like sterile quick time events, disconnected from the rest of combat like
reaction command sequences in kh2. Still love that game but, you know, only fair
to point out its flaws. You still have full control over samus’s
arm cannon the whole time which keeps you feeling in control and not like you’re watching
a cutscene play out. Plus the camera never cuts, only moves smoothly
from your typical point of view into the dynamic angles used for the counter sequence, then
smoothly back into its normal position once it’s over. Now, is mashing Y in these parts fundamentally
different from mashing triangle in the vast majority of kingdom hearts 2’s reaction
command sequences? No, not really, but they feel different, and
that’s what matters. You also typically don't have to do them to
beat the boss so they actually feel special to hit. Combat as a whole is a lot less methodical
than in previous entries and feels a lot more frantic and fast-paced, which I think is a
welcome change. Don’t get me wrong, older metroids had a
combat style and pace that worked for them, and dread is just different, not necessarily
better. Zero Mission is the 2d metroid I’ve spent
the most time with and most of its bosses and minibosses are relatively slow paced. Typically the boss is the one dictating the
pace of the fight. They usually only have one weakspot and the
standard boss fight flowchart is that you spend a few seconds dodging attacks, waiting
for the boss to give you an opening, and then that’s when you can tag them with a couple
missile shots. They aren’t all like this but I would say
the majority are. And I like this, it allows for a lot of methodical,
puzzle-like fights where figuring out the weak point and how to expose it is the focus. And it allows for the more fast-paced fights
to feel special. For example I always liked how in zero mission
the ridley fight is just an all out brawl. He swoops in and blindsides you, drops the
floor out from underneath you and just starts relentlessly unloading attacks. Throughout the fight ridley’s entire bosy
is always vulnerable but he also never stops attacking so it feels like a real desperate
fight for survival instead of a more slow paced fight like with the robotic version
of ridley. Now DMC fans this one’s for you cause I
just compared the combat to DMC and I'm about to do it again, and I know you f***in freaks
are all about that shit so here goes. The boss fights in Metroid Dread remind me
of DMC boss fights. There ya go, I did it. I’m comparing every game’s combat to devil
may cry now, I’m a card-carrying DMC fan and part of me just wants to go back to a
time before I knew that boss fights could be this good. My favorite aspect of the best devil may cry
boss fights is that the boss is more or less always vulnerable. You could spend the whole fight dodging attacks
but you won’t get anywhere until you get in some offense of your own while evading
the boss. You're forced to strike a balance between
offense to end the fight and defense to survive the fight, and you have to do both simultaneously
because the boss isn’t gonna just say “oh no looks like you’ve dodged enough of my
attacks so I’ll just sit here and let you hit my weakpoint for a while.” These great bosses are harder to play against
and I’m sure harder to design well, and honestly? Metroid Dread does a pretty fantastic job
making these kinds of bosses. Now something to keep in mind is that both
styles of boss fight can be good and both styles are in most metroid games. But it feels like the standout fights and
the majority of the fights in dread are more in the vergil category and not so much in
the I don’t know, the Sonic Uneashed category. Seriously, what were they thinking with this
block pushing boss? There’s no picking and choosing between
dodging the boss and attacking them, you have to do both and these bosses are relentless. Mostly, not this one but he’s just a big
blob with tentacles, what do you want from him? He doesn’t even have a face. Most of the bosses don’t have many different
attacks either, but the fights are so fast-paced that it hardly matters. Yeah the big bug thing only has 3 attacks
but he cycles through them so fast that you barely notice, and the fight is still really
tense and fun. By far my favorite boss fights are experiment
z57 and the final boss, raven beak. Their attacks are fun to dodge, especially
thanks to the flash shift, that’s actually gotta be the sleeper hit new powerup of this
game, flash shift makes maneuvering during fights feel so snappy and fun it’s just
an awesome addition. They’re open to attack during a majority
of the fight, though they do go invincible or untargetable at certain points in their
fights. But the attacks they do during these segments
are unique and fun enough to avoid that I don’t really mind. Boss fights also serve as great character
moments for samus. And man there is so much that could be said
about samus’s characterization in this game. And most of it is done completely non-verbally. She has like 3 spoken lines in this game and
one of those is a scream. And yet the way she moves communicates so
much of her personality. The way she fights exudes confidence and skill
but also shows that she can be pretty brutal. Anyone who remembers crocomire in super metroid
already knew that. But she’s also never more forceful than
absolutely necessary. The way she absorbs emmi powers after defeating
one is interesting to me, as a big fan of doom I was totally expecting her to just stomp
it’s head in but instead she just gently places her hand on it. There’s just that tiny bit of hesitation
right before she puts her hand down, like even she’s not sure why she’s doing it
or if she even should be doing it. And then she looks at her own hand kind of
curiously as she absorbs the emmi's abilities. Its a subtle touch but that’s what i like
about it, its foreshadowing, but also character building, it’s just great animation on samus
all around. The Kraid boss fight is easily the best and
most talked about example but I just have to talk about it. Samus drops into the boss room, ready for
a fight, before we hear a loud roar. We see from the unseen boss’s POV looking
down at samus who looks tiny by comparison. She drops her arm cannon down and looks up
as if in fear, until we realize that well, she’s basically just disrespecting kraid
at this point. This is like her 3rd time fighting him and
she’s not impressed anymore. It's just a fun moment and there's a lot of
these sprinkled throughout the game. The boss fights in metroid dread are fast,
fun, and unique, that is, except for two. Or should I say 8. Because 8 of these boss fights are just 4
variations of this guy, and 4 separate encounters with chozo robot soldiers. These fights are fine, the first time, hell
they’re even fine the second time, but when I’m fighting a series of identical robots
with the only variation in the fight being either one or two robots and either water
background or jungle background, I start to get a little bored. You could be pedantic and argue that the robots
are just minibosses which, ok that's true, I guess, but it doesn’t really make the
fights much more fun, does it? And then there’s the question of whether
the central units and emmis count as bosses and maybe they are and maybe they’re just
minibosses or not bosses at all but honestly I don’t know. The point is there’s some repeated content
here that isn’t bad by any means but does get a little tiresome when you’re on your
4th fight with this guy and his 3 identical brothers. But something that thankfully doesn’t get
tiresome in metroid dread is movement. To me a game with so much running around is
only as good it’s movement. If I’m not enjoying the simple act of moving
around then I’m definitely not gonna enjoy navigating your massive world. Thankfully the movement in dread is buttery
smooth. Some of that is down to the refined basic
movement. Samus in zero mission felt like she weighed
18 tons, jump height was low and the gravity setting was at least 400g. In Super and Fusion, samus could jump insanely
high from the get go and she was floatier than an osaka team kingdom hearts game. Metroid Dread splits the difference, and ends
up feeling perfect. Her slide move feels great and there’s a
lot of little quality of life improvements with how quickly samus can transition right
into morph ball from a slide or being right next to a low wall with a tunnel in it. Just a lot of little things that make getting
around all that smoother. There’s more movement power-ups than usual
in this one too, flash shift I’ve already talked about but we’ve also got speed booster
which looks and feels better than ever and makes for some excellent shinespark puzzles. Spiderclimb is slow but once you get the grapple
beam a lot of new possibilities for quick movement open up. You get a double jump which I think is a first
for 2d metroids at least, and it’s like a nice little appetizer before getting space
jump towards the end. I won’t go through every power up in the
game but in general not a ton has changed from the basic formula of metroid powerups. The classic missile and e-tanks are back,
not much worth mentioning there except that missiles and health are incredibly abundant
in this game compared to what I’m used to in 2d metroids. But I think to compensate, enemies do more
damage than you’d expect and can tank more missile shots than in previous games. I haven’t done extensive testing on this
front compared to every previous game but having recently replayed super and zero mission
I definitely felt a difference. Like I mentioned earlier, a lot of enemies
can take a huge number of missiles to kill, but missile drops give 5 instead of 2 and
your max missile capacity is gonna get huge if you’re doing any amount of item hunting. Energy drops are buffed in a similar way,
a melee counter can drop enough health to refill a majority of your energy in a matter
of seconds, but enemies can drain it all again with only a couple hits. I think this is part of the scrappy combat
style they’re going for, you lose a lot of resources quickly but you can gain them
back again quickly as well, which definitely contributes to combat’s quick pace. Samus feels like an absolute tank in super
metroid. She can take a lot of hits even from bosses,
enemies will sometimes do as little as 2 damage to you. However, you will eventually get worn down
and when your energy is low, refilling it can take some effort. There aren’t a lot of energy stations but
to compensate there’s a lot of mario pipes with constantly respawning enemies you can
kill over and over for free health. I never really got the point of these, if
you’re gonna give me an easy way to refill my hp and missiles why not just actually give
it to me? I don’t know what it contributes to the
game to make me sit here and kill the same enemy over and over just to heal myself. Regardless, I wouldn’t call dread’s energy
and missile drops an outright better system. Again, just different, and perfectly suited
for the combat style they were going for. Along with missiles and energy, Aeion is a
new resource that actually isn’t new. It's from the metroid 2 remake but I gotta
be honest, I didn’t play that one, and from the sales figures I’m guessing most of you
probably didn’t either. I’m just gonna pretend that the new features
carried over from samus returns are just brand new in dread because they might as well be
for most people, myself included. Aeion is a new resource that recharges itself,
so more or less it’s a stamina bar for certain abilities, namely the phantom cloak, flash
shift and radar. In general, I didn’t feel like aeion really
did all that much for metroid dread. Aeion is theoretically a limited resource
shared by 3 different abilities so you need to choose what to use since using one will
take away your ability to use the others. But in practice, well, invisibility is only
used to hide from emmis, flash shift is basically just used during boss fights or to dodge emmis
when they’ve already spotted you, and the radar is only used when you’re item hunting. There’s almost no situation in which you’d
need to pick which one to use. And since aeion recharges at a different rate
depending on what you used it for, functionally each ability just has a set cooldown and that’s
pretty much it. I never, I repeat, NEVER thought about how
much aeion I had or when it would recharge, since flash shift is the best aeion ability
and your aeion recharges basically instantly after you flash shift. Overall, an addition that’s fine but doesn’t
really feel impactful. Unfortunately, the music feels much the same. It’s not that it’s bad, but it’s very
understated a lot of the time. Which is fine and atmospheric but in pretty
much every other metroid I’ve played there’s at least a few catchy jams. I could hum a song from just about every metroid
game I’ve ever played off the top of my head except for this one. Dread’s music feels a little lacking but
the same cannot be said for the sound effects, which are great, the emmi sounds are instantly
iconic and communicate their threat with just a hint of personality. Their beeps and boops sound curious and kind
of cute which makes for a great contrast with their deadly nature. And I’ll admit a lot of my feelings on the
music might just be my own fault. I spent probably 80% of my time playing dread
with the switch in handheld mode which is definitely not the optimal way to experience
the music. The music is definitely more focused on atmosphere
than on creating catchy melodies. Which is fine and I’m not gonna bash it
for having a score that’s trying to accomplish something different, but for me it just didn’t
end up making that much of an impression. The only part where I really even noticed
the music was during a cutscene midway through the game where they played a version of super
metroid’s brinstar theme. Which brings us to full-on spoiler territory,
skip to this timecode if you don't want to hear about the end of the game. So around the midpoint exposition the bird
shows up and tells you what the hell has been going on for the first half of the game. Turns out that name of the chozo that attacked
samus in the beginning is Raven Beak and his tribe of warrior chozo have been using this
smarty chozo quiet robe to control the metroids and try and conquer the galaxy. Unfortunately that plan was foiled like, you
know, 20 years ago when samus wiped out all the metroids in metroid 2 return of samus.
20 years ago in our world, not the metroid world. And his plans have been further ruined by
an x parasite outbreak that killed his entire tribe. Oof. This explains why ZDR is still a mostly functional
chozo base and why the grandiose, ceremonial halls haven’t fallen to ruin like every
other chozo thing we’ve seen in the series up to this point, this entire planet was an
active chozo facility until not that long ago. In this scene samus also speaks for what is
I think the first time, well first time in a good metroid game anyway. Ehehe, got em. And she speaks the chozo language to him which
is really cool! Samus in the games has never really felt connected
to her adoptive race except via her suit but this is a great way to show that she really
is a part of this culture. Not long after this samus stumbles upon a
vault that clearly should not be opened and surprise, the X parasites are back. Now, can I just say while I love the idea
of the x parasites, they’re very fun and are basically just john carpenters the thing,
I just can't really get past their design. They’re just too adorable. Like they’re squishy and brightly colored
and they make fun little noises, listen to them! They’re making little baby cooing noises. I guess all this could be similar to the noises
emmis make but I feel like the emmi visuals do a better job at selling the threat they
pose and well, x parasites just kinda look like sentient gummies and come on you know
they must taste good, right? You got your green apple flavor you got orange
flavor and of course the best one, red flavor. Then again once, they've taken on the form
on something else in this game they're all black and goopy so maybe I’ll pass on eating
them. So of course the x parasites get loose and
the whole planet gets infected. Samus keeps exploring the planet, collects
some power ups and fights through a few X parasite bosses until Adam says "alright samus
your metroid DNA powers are looking ripe and juicy why don’t you head on up to Raven
Beak’s dining room I think he’s hungry. Time to fulfill your destiny!" Fulfill your destiny, huh? That doesn’t really sound like something
Adam would say. And hey wait a minute, he hasn’t said his
little catchphrase since the beginning of the game where he said remote communication
would pose a problem. And why does he keep talking about how powerful
and handsome raven beak is? Something’s up here oh my god it was raven
beak all along. So yeah it turns out Raven Beak was impersonating
Adam all along, using the emmis to try and steal samus’s DNA, and guiding samus to
unlock her metroid powers. She is now a Metroid, and Raven Beak plans
to clone samus and use an army of samus metroids to conquer the galaxy! And after what is maybe the toughest final
boss in metroid history, Samus rages out and unlocks her full metroid powers, and holy
shit this is one of the coolest power trip victory lap moments I’ve ever seen in a
game. Samus has now awakened her metroid powers
even further to the point they change her suit and increase her power to insane levels,
enough to completely annihilate an x parasite infused raven beak. What follows is probably the coolest end game
escape sequence in metroid history, and with a little help from the x parasite version
of exposition bird Samus manages to escape the planet. What a great ending to an honestly fantastic
game. The final battle with Raven Beak is a visciously
hard boss and the genuine triumph I felt at the end made this escape sequence feel even
better as a sort of endgame victory lap. This is a metroid staple and it’s clear
why. Action setpieces are used sparingly throughout
but that means when they do happen they’re all the more effective. And the story, though kind of barebones in
terms of plot developments is rich in lore and fanservice and is really just a nice return
to form for the metroid main series. As for what to expect content wise if you’re
on the fence about whether you should buy metroid dread. My first playthrough took me about 6 and a
half hours of in game time, but the in game timer doesn’t count restarts or deaths so
the actual time I spent playing is probably closer to 8 or 9 hours, and getting 100% item
completion could easily take twice that or more. Beating the game once will unlock hard mode
and you’re gonna need to beat both difficulties in under 4 hours to unlock all of the secret
ending rewards in the art gallery. 100% items on any difficulty will also be
needed to unlock all of the art in the chozo archives, which tell the backstory of the
chozo tribe on ZDR. Just these little rewards provide a lot of
incentive so the replay value is surprisingly high. My total playtime at this point is close to
50 hours and even though I’ve done literally everything there is to do, I still might go
play some more after this review is done. A word of warning though, this game is pretty
damn hard, like seriously some of these bosses are brutal. I didn’t personally have too much trouble
and I’m the kind of player who likes bashing my head against a hard challenge over and
over anyway, but if you aren’t super confident in your reflexes and aiming skills then dread
might prove too difficult for you. Aiming becomes less of an issue when you get
the lock-on storm missiles but those are pretty late in the game. You can explore to find more missile and energy
tanks to help tank your way through some tough parts but even collecting items can require
some pretty precise maneuvers. It wasn't an issue for me personally but I
think it might be for a lot of people. Despite that, I think it’s pretty obvious
here that this game is gonna get a solid recommendation from me. In fact it’s pretty solidly my game of the
year. I know this doesn’t mean a whole lot since
this is only my second video in a year and you guys probably have no idea what I’ve
been playing but I have played a lot of games this past year and none of them have come
close to Metroid Dread for me. This might even be my new favorite metroid
game though I’d have to replay Prime to really make sure. This is honestly a new high bar for modern
metroidvanias and hey fingers crossed for Prime 4 right? I am honestly just so happy that Metroid is
back, and I really hope it’s here to stay. Anyway that is gonna be all for this video,
I hope you guys liked it. I'm sorry for the long wait I know it was
nearly a year since my last video but things have been busy and I'm gonna try to do a lot
better this year. If you have any suggestions for games you'd
like to see me cover leave em in the comments. I read every comment that I get. So thanks so much for watching, support me
on patreon if you’d like, thanks to my current patrons whose names you should be seeing on
screen right now and yeah, I'll see you next time, thanks!
