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Metroid Dread

Ventidius

Arbiter
Joined
Jul 8, 2017
Messages
552
Finished this today. Some impressions with spoilers:

-Intersectoral level design is a massive improvement over pretty much every Metroid except for Super, and in this it even rivals the latter. For the most part you are able and expected to backtrack to previous areas in order to progress, in fact, there are virtually no major areas that you are expected to explored and 'clear' in a single go, you are constantly criss-crossing around the various maps, finding upgrades and opening new routes in previously visited maps. Sometimes, despite this, the way forward is rather obvious, but sometimes it isn't, and starting around the point in which you are tasked with finding the Gravity Suit and Grapple Beam, it tends more towards the latter, which is good. Yes, there is a part in which much of the world gets closed off, but this is temporary and the world becomes freely explorable again once you defeat the boss that causes the problem in the story. Overall, the planet ZDR feels more interconnected and sprawling than the world map of pretty much any other of the 2D Metroids except for Super, and it seems pretty clear they took heavy inspiration from the latter in this regard.

-Intrasectoral level design is not particularly impressive, by the standards of the franchise. The areas themselves are fairly simple, with a relatively limited amount of highlights in terms of interesting encounters, platforming, traversal challenges, environmental puzzles or combination of these. It does get better later in the game, especially when the X show up, but this is one thing that the Gameboy Advance games did better, and obviously so did Super Metroid. In fact, comparing this game to the GBA ones just shows how brilliant Super Metroid was in terms of combining intersectoral and intrasectoral level design, to this day it has the best balance of those two, and this is the main reason why Dread does not really equal it, even in terms of pure gameplay. To be fair, the smoothness of Dread's engine makes it rather fun to use newly-gained abilities to traverse the world (the Screw Attack, in particular, was every bit as fun as it should be, and I was glad to see it didn't get a nerf).

-Combat against non-boss enemies is nothing to write home about, but this is not an aberration for a Metroid game. Like many aspects of the game, this one gets better as the campaign goes on. Once the X are introduced, the player starts coming across some regular enemies that pack some bite, and this was also pretty cool in a ludonarrative sense, since it did justice to the infesting threat that they were back in Fusion.

-Bosses start out fun, but not particularly interesting. Again, this is something that gets better as the game goes on. It gets much better, in fact, and a lot of the bosses of the later half of the game feel rather Fusionesque (for those that don't know, Fusion probably had the hardest and most elaborately designed bosses in the series), something that culminates in the final boss, which is the hardest fight in the game, and a respectably tough battle in its own right. This is one of the few aspects in which Dread arguably beats Super Metroid, as bosses were not a highlight of the latter.

-Yet another thing that gets better as the game goes on is the art direction. Burenia and Ghavoran both look great, have a distinct theme, and ooze personality. Ferenia is a competently designed Chozo area, but it's not among the best in the series when it comes to Chozo ruins. It's still decent enough and mixes up the trope by making it less dilapidated than these kind of areas usually are, and does a solid job of showing a more undiluted picture of Chozo civilization.

-The atmosphere is probably one of the weakest if not the weakest of the major Metroid games, but it's still a Metroid game, which means it's decent at the very least.

-The pacing and length of the game are good, it does not outstay its welcome, but does not feel too short either. There is plenty to explore and find that is out of the way for those who like that too, but the final boss is manageable even without collecting autistically. I liked that the areas got better and changed in their layout and aesthetics the closer you got tot he surface of the planet. This further reinforces the notion that they were consciously taking a very holistic approach to level design, and is also reminiscent of the organic flow of exploration in Super Metroid. In general, the game managed to keep my attention for the duration without resorting to gimmickry, and mixed things up nicely by introducing the X, as the latter change the dynamics and feel of a lot of areas.

-The E.M.M.I.s are not a gimmick, but perhaps it would have been better if they had been. As it stands, they had all the elements to make it a decent mechanic that varied things, but ended up making them too restricted. Perhaps this was done for the sake of challenge, but the result is that they often feel puzzle-like and something of a chore you have to trudge to get on with the game. Could have been worse, I suppose, as they don't really drag the game down too much. Experimenting with this kind of thing is always a risky prospect, and there is always a real chance that it could ruin the game (which I had feared coming in). Thankfully that is not the case here, even if I can't really say they enhance the game either.

- The Chozo warrior fights are very cool, but I hate that they brought back QTEs. Yes, that is a QTE, the fact that cinematic looks like Samus using the riposte mechanic does not change that. The worst offender was the double QTE at the end of the final boss fight. There is no reason why this egregious and discredited convention should still plague gaming in this day and age.

-This is very much a 'full-blooded' Metroid game and Metroidvania, not an eccentric experiment like Fusion was.

Spoiler-free TL;DR: it's a good game, probably not a great of the subgenre like Super Metroid was, but it's alright. It's debatable whether it's better than the GBA games as well, but that's not necessarily a bad thing to me, at least, since I liked those. If you are a fan of the franchise, can't get enough of it, and want some new content, it should be worth checking out.
 
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J1M

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2008
Messages
14,745
Maybe I'm operating on another level of game design than these other posters, but I don't understand how anyone could view the level design and exploration as anything other than a strictly-linear railroaded experience. For most of the game you can't even backtrack to pick up powerups, previously open doors are made one-way or locked arbitrarily throughout the game to funnel you in a certain direction, and random teleporters are placed where the level designers couldn't figure out how to get the player near the next story point.

I consider the exploration elements an abject failure because the designers refused to entertain this important pillar of the genre.
 

Tigranes

Arcane
Joined
Jan 8, 2009
Messages
10,350
Yeah, I agree. Regarding exploration/backtracking - my experience has been almost entirely linear though I've gotten quite far? Maybe that changes after the Gravity Suit, though I feel like I've seen most areas & upgrades already before that.

The maps seem to be almost always designed so that you go somewhere, there's 3 doors but you can only go in 1, so there's effectively a linear path you follow until you pick up the upgrade, and then that opens up a new semi-backtracky path that you do to use the newly opened doors. There's nearly always a single path you follow that just happens to wind back and forth through the same areas. That linearity only broke up for me on a couple of occasions, when you were meant to get your upgrade and then go somewhere far away for the locked door.

The upshot/downshot is that unlike in HK, etc., I spent very little time "truly" backtracking or getting lost.
 

Hobo Elf

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The maps are always funneling you to the place you're supposed to go to. I'd go after unlocks only once you have all the upgrades, but even then it felt a bit redundant. You get most Energy tanks just by playing and you don't need more than 100 missiles. I finished the game. Thought it was pretty good, but it's not quite on the same level as Fusion was for me. Still, I was glad to play it. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but isn't this supposed to be the end of Metroid? I recall reading somewhere that this was the final chapter for Samus.
 

randir14

Augur
Joined
Mar 15, 2012
Messages
762
The maps are always funneling you to the place you're supposed to go to. I'd go after unlocks only once you have all the upgrades, but even then it felt a bit redundant. You get most Energy tanks just by playing and you don't need more than 100 missiles. I finished the game. Thought it was pretty good, but it's not quite on the same level as Fusion was for me. Still, I was glad to play it. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but isn't this supposed to be the end of Metroid? I recall reading somewhere that this was the final chapter for Samus.

It's just the end of the Fusion / X-Parasite story arc. Sakamoto said he has ideas for future games, plus Metroid Prime 4 is still coming.
 

Hobo Elf

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The maps are always funneling you to the place you're supposed to go to. I'd go after unlocks only once you have all the upgrades, but even then it felt a bit redundant. You get most Energy tanks just by playing and you don't need more than 100 missiles. I finished the game. Thought it was pretty good, but it's not quite on the same level as Fusion was for me. Still, I was glad to play it. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but isn't this supposed to be the end of Metroid? I recall reading somewhere that this was the final chapter for Samus.

It's just the end of the Fusion / X-Parasite story arc. Sakamoto said he has ideas for future games, plus Metroid Prime 4 is still coming.
The way I understood it was that Dread was going to be the last chapter in the timeline and other games would be prequels. I might still be wrong, but that's what I remember. The Prime games are prequels that take place before Super Metroid.

Edit: And I want to be wrong because I really want to see more
Biosuit Samus
 

Ventidius

Arbiter
Joined
Jul 8, 2017
Messages
552
The events of Metroid Dread are indeed the most recent chapter in the story of Samus that we've seen so far, in terms of the setting's established chronology: https://metroid.fandom.com/wiki/Metroid_timeline

I don't think anyone has said that it will be the last chapter, though. It's just that Prime 4 is the big thing on the franchise's horizon right now, and that one is probably going to be a prequel or of ambiguous canonicity, much like the previous Prime games were.
 

randir14

Augur
Joined
Mar 15, 2012
Messages
762
I thought this was cool - the developers knew players would find a sequence break to get bombs early, so they added a secret way to kill a boss with them:

 
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J1M

Arcane
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May 14, 2008
Messages
14,745
Is that really a sequence break? I thought I had the bomb there too...
 
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It'll be interesting if the success of this game brings back the whole side scrolling action platformer as something more than just a discount genre. It'd be nice to get more stuff like this with some money behind it again.
 

The Decline

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Aug 24, 2009
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Everywhere
Certainly worth playing, especially since Switch emulation is so almost trivial now - I'm playing on an actual Switch, but while the handheld mode is cool (and runs better), docked mode has a lot of slowdowns and looks pretty terrible on my display. The Switch is a nice little machine, but it's definitely getting long in the tooth for new releases.

It's actually stronger than it seems, Nintendo is just too conservative with the clock speeds. That's one of the nice things about hacking one, you can overclock it a lot.
 

TheHeroOfTime

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Level design doesn't mean exploration. You can have a complex map with a linear progression (Zero mission). You can have a map that's quite linear and simplistic but offers options and exploration (Dark souls 2). As far I played Dread, it reminds me to Zero mission and Fusion, which were straightfoward games too except for the upgrades. So far, it's very good. Bosses, combat and overall movement is the best of the 2D series. The map, atmosphere and music is inferior to Super metroid, which is no surprise.

If you want metroidvanias with a big map, freedom on the exploration, sequence breaks and a lot of depth then go play La-Mulana 1&2.
 

TheHeroOfTime

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Imagine getting flushed by the most user-friendly Metroid game because you didn't read the line at the beginning of the game that says something like "shooting can reveal hidden paths behind fake cubes".
 
Joined
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Messages
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David Jaffee is a fucking idiot who for some reason and a lot of talented people behind him struck gold with the original GoW. He's the definition of a sourpuss has-been, and to top it all off, he's also an insufferable SJW (who would've thought?)

This little clip of him fumbling miserably in Metroid Dread is akin to that mongoloid who couldn't get past the tutorial level in Cuphead. Fuck these people.
 

DJOGamer PT

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Lusitânia
Imagine being middle-aged, having the face of a soyjak and streamming games for a living (despite being shit at them)... :M
 
Joined
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Messages
5,904
Well, he used to make games for a living (the first God of War and Twisted Metal being the most well-known), until the industry shat him out after a string of terrible flops. Now he's just a SJW has-been in an even more crowded field. He's a joke.

ANYWAY,

I didn't play Metroid the past couple of days, but today I decided to continue (had stopped just after Burenia, was stumped looking in other areas for something that was pretty silly in Burenia itself,
one of those growths that you have to shoot through the wall to break it, the game obviously wants you to see it when you're backtracking to the tram but I missed it, so I wasted like 2 hours wandering around aimlessly
). After getting a couple more upgrades, the game decided to do a 5 minute lore dump that was very unlike Metroid and honestly pretty fucking lame. After killing a cool boss
the underwater tentacle thing
I'm up to the forest area. My opinion of the game hasn't changed - it's good but nowhere near perfect, it really doesn't come close to the best stuff in the genre. Hollow Knight shits on it from a great height.
 
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Ventidius

Arbiter
Joined
Jul 8, 2017
Messages
552
Almost as soon as I finished my first run I decided to start a Hard Mode run. There is something is oddly addicting about the game, I think it's probably related to the mechanics (combat, movement, etc.) and moment-to-moment gameplay as a whole. It's all just silky smooth and very fluid.
 

Decado

Old time handsome face wrecker
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Codex 2014
David Jaffee is a fucking idiot who for some reason and a lot of talented people behind him struck gold with the original GoW. He's the definition of a sourpuss has-been, and to top it all off, he's also an insufferable SJW (who would've thought?)

This little clip of him fumbling miserably in Metroid Dread is akin to that mongoloid who couldn't get past the tutorial level in Cuphead. Fuck these people.

Always relevant in these conversations:

 

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