‘Metroid: Dread’ Evolves and Some Fans Aren’t Happy. Here’s Why They’re Wrong.
What true fans want is for things to never change, so they can complain how game devs just rehash old titles.
Well, Metroid: Dread is out and some fans aren’t happy. It’s the first 2D Metroid game in almost 20 years, so the hype was at an all-time high for Metroid fans, myself included. So what exactly is making people so upset? Turns out Dread is not the sequel we were expecting. But is that good or bad?
Very Minor and Obscure Spoilers Warning.
Also, so we’re all understanding each other: I have beaten Metroid: Dread. I’ve also played and beaten every other mainline Metroid game. So, I consider myself a long-time Metroid fan who has some grounds to speak on the direction of Metroid: Dread. Okay? Good. Let’s get into it.
The cinematography in this game is stellar, by the way.
So What Changed?
Metroid: Dread is hard! Like, brutally no holds barred difficult.
You’re constantly getting barraged by enemies who deal tons of damage and you don’t really get that many Energy Tanks. And the bosses are insane! Bosses in Dread have a “dodge first, shoot when you can” style of combat. Think more like Cuphead levels of engagement and less like Spore Spawn’s “Go into ball. Shoot when the mouth opens. Repeat.” levels of strategy.
Pictured: Engaging Gameplay
And the game knows this. They instill in you from the very beginning Samus is not a threat to the beings of this new planet.
What a mood.
When you ask about Metroidvania games now everyone points to Hollow Knight, and I think the inspiration is clear. Metroid: Dread draws a lot from Hollow Knight. Dread has a much larger focus on swift movement abilities, enemies you can’t just barrel through, and tough engaging boss battles that require a lot of patience and planning. I mean, is it any surprise that the progenitor of the genre would take after what has come after it?
This shift towards engaging combat has side effects. Metroid: Dread is much more focused on combat than it is on exploration. Not to say it doesn’t have the Metroidvanian tropes of item collecting and backtracking, but it is not as much in the foreground of gameplay. The amount of railroading sways between a slight nudge to literally blocking off other routes with fallen rubble. Any exploration done is for the sake of extra missile packs. Granted, there are a lot of goodies to find. Even so much that the game lets you find things you can’t even use yet!
Metroid: Dread Isn’t Really a Metroid Game, But That’s A Good Thing
Dread is not the sequel we were expecting. In fact, it’s barely a Metroid game as we know it, outside of the characters and plot. But, when I look back on Super Metroid and Metroid: Fusion, I wonder if I would really want more of the same. I love those games, don’t get me wrong. And I always will but….. they are kinda boring to play.
They have their moments though…
For all the praise Super Metroid gets, it’s a very rote playthrough. We’ve all gone through those motions time and time again. They are like clockwork now. But, it’s like reading your favorite book from when you were a kid. Sure, the characters are kinda bland and the plot is super predictable. Despite all that, the feelings that it instilled in you and the inspiration it sparks within you even today are absolutely worth treasuring. That’s the previous Metroid games. They are bland and stale, but only because the genre has progressed so much from that point and precisely because they laid that foundation. They are only bland because Hollow Knight, Ori, and the Belmonts have advanced what the genre could be.
Ori doesn’t get enough praise, and it gets a lot.
Metroid: Dread has evolved along with the genre and brought new ideas to what the game should be. I died a lot when I first jumped into the game. Because I was playing it wrong. I was expecting to be able to run through and tank damage like I’d always done. But that’s not how Metroid: Dread does things.
Expect to see this screen a lot.
Think back to Breath of the Wild. Everyone said that game was super difficult at first, but only because we were all going in with certain expectations of what a Zelda game was supposed to be. Once we all understood you can’t run up to a guardian with just a rusty sword and your underpants and expect to survive.
Metroid: Dread isn’t too difficult. We just expected it to be easy.
Plus, there’s even a Hard Mode!
What do you think about how Dread has changed the Metroid formula? Also, my clear time was 8 hours. I was really hoping for a death count!
