@“2501”#p45762 They put a lot of stuff into that fight that I love. It feels like the old Kraid but smoother, and there‘s a sequence break easter egg that’s really clever.
The bosses generally I feel like are the biggest strength of this game
at last i emerge from my hole: the last Metroid is ||Samus,|| the galaxy is at peace
first thoughts
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"I explicitly direct ye, composers Abe and Doi, not to put any tunes in the game!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49dyYAuRDy4
:'(
[size=20][b][i]HOWEVER
Dread is ||pretty good!||
||There's an incredible amount of character in Samus's animations! Especially during boss fights. I can understand mixed feelings about Samus fighting like [a Monty Oum character](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL-mR79GErU&t=2m49s) but I love that stuff.||
||I love that enemies put up a decent fight. Combat moves quickly, even when you have to stop to aim Contra-style—love this—and melee counters feel good. That the game runs smoothly is a very nice thing indeed. I am thankful for my hands being able to put up with pushing all those shoulder buttons at the same time. Holding L to aim, R to load a missile barrage, and flash-shifting with A during one of the last boss's attacks felt awesome.||
||The boss fights really did it for me in this one. I don't care if it does or doesn't make sense Kraid is here—they made the fight _feel new_, which is what matters, and anyway there have been 200 Ridley fights in this series and they didn't do another one of those! The fights with the robot Chozo soldiers were not very fun—I could never get the counter timing down—but dying and reloading is painless enough that it didn't leave too bad a taste in my mouth. The last boss takes too much damage in his second phase.||
||EMMIs are cool. That it is so difficult to counter them was obnoxious at first but I grew to appreciate it—as a previous poster said, when an EMMI catches you it's really supposed to be Game Over.||
||I'll be interested to replay it someday (I borrowed my friend's Switch to play it). The level design seemed pretty cool—I enjoyed the huge map even though it was visually annoying to parse on occasion. I feel like there are a lot of fun items to hunt down which I missed (cleared with below 50%).||
||Aesthetically it is not to my taste. It turned out looking nicer than I thought it would, but I am not really down with the 3D sidescroller look of deep, detailed backgrounds and foreground platforms which all look black in cross section. In fact the dark platforms actually caused problems a few times for me as I was playing in a room during `gasp` _the daytime with open blinds_ and was having a hard time gauging where I could stand in order to counter some enemy. Disappointed in the space jump animation.||
||The music is... interesting? I am glad it is almost entirely new tunes and I appreciate that they went for different textures and instruments compared to series history, but it's kind of a get-Kuniaki-Haishima-to-score-Other M situation—it doesn't really work, or at least it doesn't leave any kind of impression on me. I finished the game three days ago and can barely remember what it sounds like. My friend was playing through Prime in the same room and half the time I had one earphone out so I could listen to his music instead.||
||@"captain"#p37969 [I love this tune.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjNa7TS-heM) [Bring me every version of it.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuWS67EXlRg)||
||the one in Dread is [kinda blah](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxIW_duj_zM&t=4959s) but I was surprised it was one of the few old tracks to make an appearance||
||Didn't care for the story. There are way too many cutscenes at the beginning, and the extremely huge exposition dump from Uncle Chozo at the halfway point felt like too much. At one point Adam is like, "There must be some reason Raven Beak spared you..." and I said, joking, "Ah, so he's my dad." :\ That Samus becomes a Metroid, however, and that Adam says, "Samus, you are now a Metroid," is hilarious and awesome. Computer Adam shouldn't have a voice. I prefer my head voice saying his lines as I read them.||
That's it for now. Is it the Metroid renaissance? I dunno. I had a fun time.
THE END
@“captain”#p46024 I appreciated that Adam sounds like a cartoon robot from the 80s. BEEP BEEP I'M A ROBOT
@“GigaSlime”#p46043 It is of course ||not such a problem considering|| ||it is not actually Adam at all (right? was it all Papa Chozo all along?),|| but if it had to be given a voice I would have at least preferred something more similar to the Aurora units in Prime 3. BEEP BEEP TO EACH THEIR OWN
@“the-concrete-captain”#p46201 ||There is that scene at the very beginning where Adam is briefing Samus in her ship on the way to ZDR, which by the end of the game i realized is the only time he ever says “any objections, lady?”||
@“GigaSlime”#p46212 It is, and I think that is where my issue with the voice is coming from: ||when he says it in the BLEEP BLOOP ‘80s robot way I don’t get the sense of “dignified sarcasm” Samus describes the computer having in Fusion (or whatever she says).||
So I got to the part where the game suddenly springs some heavy-duty Plot on you (been progressing through this quite slowly as most of my Gaming Time is still going to wrapping up Nocturne) and for better, worse or both it’s mostly got me thinking about how exciting I would have found this had the game actually released for the Nintendo DS while I was still in high school… Metroid lore being a somewhat less significant part of my life at the age where I am teaching high school.
@“the-concrete-captain”#p45780 Yeah Samus Returns and Other M both had conspicuously tuneless “cinematic” OSTs as well which leads me to suspect this is another direction from Sakamoto as part of his “vision” for the series, which, idk
@“2501”#p46358 Watching my friend play Prime recently I did wonder, what exactly is the goal in having the player listen to these extremely cool jams while they‘re walking around? When we talk about the saw, did, felt of Metroid it’s usually all about exploration/unraveling of an unknown world—does feeling whatever feeling the kind of music in the series pre-Other M inspired fit into that? Can it be extracted from the experience without altering the, uh, gestalt of what Metroid even is???
I don't really care, I just want my tunes back
Aaah… If only I had access to power bombs in this game…
https://youtu.be/5RVKc-isjd4
Been continuing my way through the game at a reasonable pace (for me (and my non-Metroid responsibilities)) and still generally enjoy it quite a bit. There are two things that I'm finding worth discussing.
The upgrades come so fast that they sometimes obsolete each other immediately. I love getting new powers, but you get the ||flash dash|| and then minutes later you get the ||speed boost||. I think they should have dropped one or another and I think they should have been courageous and dropped the ||speed boost||. The can easily serve the same purpose in the design.
I'm also curious about how some of the discourse about the game has gotten so combative. There's almost been a backlash to it - even in this thread if you scroll up. Being fully aware that this next anecdote sounds petty and insigificnt, I un-followed someone in the games space on Twitter over a post. It was a straw on a camel situation obviously, but it got to the point where I didn't want the toxicity and swearing about a game that I think is flawed but perfectly enjoyable.
I'm intentionally not calling individuals out because that's genuinely not what I'm trying to do. I'm questioning what our collective expectations were of a "_Metroid_" game as "_Metroid_ Fans" or at least "People who were in the market for a _Metroid_ game in 2021". Is this a side-effect of the fact that it's called "_Metroid_" or a side-effect of the explosion of Metroidvania-alikes in gaming?
The game has sins, but none of them are cardinal.
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@“antillese”#p46499 The upgrades come so fast that they sometimes obsolete each other immediately. I love getting new powers, but you get the ||flash dash|| and then minutes later you get the ||speed boost||. I think they should have dropped one or another and I think they should have been courageous and dropped the ||speed boost||.
I totally agree with this. I got to the point of the underwater boss which required use of the ||grab beam||. Since my joycon is sort of busted I ended up remapping it to the left stick click. I havent unmapped it yet, effectively getting rid of the speed boost. I dont think speed boost should even be on a button, just turn it on after a certain length of running. Isn't that how it used to be?
Also I did the ||Chozo Soldier|| boss fight, it was kinda simple but quick paceed and a lot of fun.
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@“beets”#p46520 I dont think speed boost should even be on a button, just turn it on after a certain length of running. Isn’t that how it used to be?
It was mapped **B** in _Metroid 3_. It activates after a period of running in _Metroid 4_.
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@“beets”#p46520 Also I did the Chozo Soldier boss fight, it was kinda simple but quick paced and a lot of fun.
Yeah. I also enjoy how missiles continue to be useful throughout the game. And the animation of them flying off inert if you shoot one into a fan is incredible.
I assume it will be followed worldwide but Nintendo released a demo of Metroid Dread in Japan for this Halloween weekend, and there is a cute seasonal illustration that goes with it.
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I beat the game it only took me 15 hours and 21 minutes, lmao. There was a good chunk of time getting lost, dying to EMMIs and doing speed booster puzzles. I also got 100% items which may explain the length.
I really enjoyed that game and that final boss fight was a really good level of difficulty. I like that they had been teaching the parry during the chozo soldier fights so I was ready when Mr Raven Beak got angry. The boss fights are good but I only beat the first one with one try, all the rest I had to learn the patterns while dying. I don't think there's any solution to that which wouldn't make them a lot easier.
Upgrades, huh. There sure were a lot of them. I think the only excessive one was the cross bomb, it didn't need its own button it should have just upgraded the bomb. Grapple beam didn't need its own buttonSpeed boost will always frustrate me with how [technical](https://youtu.be/YA1ql6ZgqMQ) it is (there's an easier way to do that puzzle). The flash shift is so good for exploring and boss fights, it also helped with escaping from EMMIs. I thought that delaying the morph ball so long was interesting.
From the small amount of Metroid games I've played, this one felt new, fresh, modern. Samus was agile, she wasn't helpless when a random bug divebombed her. The animation was smooth and flowing. Most bosses felt like they had a motive, from wild animal, to I HATE SAMUS ARAN, to hostile parasite, to I want to rule the galaxy. I don't get why ||they chose Ravenbeak to be Samus's Father/Creator, is she a clone? It could have been something like "I rule the Chozo so you will obey me".|| At one point I thought Samus was cloned and that's why she lost her powers.
I thought the game was good, the only things missing was some control help and a short epilogue.
I started this this evening and have >!just got the Varia suit.!< Generally liking it so far but will echo the frustrations of the navigating the EMMI sections, I'm not that fussed on the QTE element of it as such, more the “not being able to get to where you want to go because you have to run away or change your route to avoid capture” aspect of the sections, and they really need an “I Get It” button.
Otherwise I'm broadly enjoying the controls, movement and action, as well as the general progression guidance. I've not really found myself stuck aside from one deeply embarrassing and very obvious moment early in the game.
I'm by no means a connoisseur of Metroid or Metroidvania games but as much as a good time I'm having, I can't see this threatening to become one of my favourite games any time soon.