Quick thoughts after beating Metroid Dread

Metroid freakin’ Dread!!!!

This will contain spoilers. The TL;DR version is that I loved it, and while it’s always gonna be hard to top Super I’d rank it as my second favorite game in the 2D series, right ahead of Fusion. It’s extremely good.

Okay, so for a while I wasn’t sure whether or not I’d rank it ahead of Fusion. I wished Fusion had let me explore more (which Dread does), but the story in Fusion worked in harmony with the gameplay and structure to really elevate it to something greater. I loved the character work for Samus, I loved the SA-X, I loved all the intrigue. It’s hard to beat for me. But then the back half of Dread’s story hit me with multiple “holy shit, they’re going there????” moments that I won’t outright spoil, and it’s SO GOOD. This game is still pretty light on story (we don’t get all those Samus elevator monologues), but what’s there is wild. This feels like a valuable next chapter for Samus.

For a bit I was a little disappointed that the game didn’t have as much as I’d normally want in the way of exploration off the beaten path. There are diversions and a few things you can get out of order, which I greatly appreciate, and the game never outright tells you where to go. But there is a clear progression of areas that you’ll do one after another, and there aren’t a ton of points where you get an upgrade that unlocks a path you saw several areas ago (with the main exception being a series of optional Shinespark puzzles for health and ammo upgrades). When you do need to return to a previous area for a major upgrade, there’s almost always a convenient teleporter to take you straight there and back. I kind of suspect that they avoided requiring full-blown backtracking in part because the map is Fucking Huge and full of twisty little passages as opposed to Super’s convenient hub hallways, making it take forever to backtrack. But the Symphony of the Night and Hollow Knight lover in me always likes it when whole areas and bosses are technically optional and you can tackle multiple areas at any given time, so for the first half I was a bit disappointed that Dread didn’t do much in the way of that.

But then certain things started happening as the story ramped up and it became clear how much Fusion DNA is in Dread. I think when I stopped judging it in comparison to more open-ended Metroidvanias and started viewing it as a successor to Fusion (which, I mean, it obviously is) I started viewing it in a way more positive light. It’s Fusion if it had a bit more freedom and it nudged you in the right direction through the level design instead of outright telling you where to go. And, again, once the story picked up, I was totally sold. It’s got that intrigue and that sense of a progressively worsening situation that Fusion nailed, and it picks up on story threads from the earlier games (and, in a way, even the manga kind of???) in really, REALLY cool ways. I was so happy that they indulged in the lore and even let Samus have one (1) speaking line.

You could nitpick some of the story stuff as a longtime fan, I guess. In a way the connection to the plot of the preceding games kind of doubles down on the “actually Samus killing all of the Metroids was justified” reading of Metroid 2, because now doing so is revealed to have interfered with the new Chozo villain’s plans to use the Metroids as weapons. But that’s not exactly new for the series. My personal reading is more like… Samus killing the Metroids is supposed to be kind of tragic, as she’s one creation of Chozo science tasked with wiping out the others. Fusion reinforced this for me by making Samus effectively the last Metroid, and the way Dread ran with this made me SO happy.

Also thank FUCKING god they didn’t come up with an excuse to bring Ridley back from the grave again. Instead Kraid got some time in the spotlight by getting his first hard fight ever. I really appreciated that. On the subject of boss fights, I ended up loving that final boss. I died a few times, but it was so much fun to learn the strategies for all his patterns. Yeah, the counters are QTEs, but the game had trained me to expect them from previous fights, and the timing was generous thanks to the obvious tells. (In general I also liked the dashing melee counter a lot more than the stationary counter from Samus Returns. This, the slide, and the airdash made Samus feel better to control than ever before.)

God I just realized I haven’t even mentioned the EMMIs. The EMMIs didn’t end up being as huge a feature of the game as they could’ve been, but I did like their sections a lot as an evolution of the SA-X segments. They probably aren’t going to be as iconic as the SA-X, but I liked the EMMI Zones for the same reason why I liked the dark world in Prime 2: it creates areas of higher and lower tension, and a sense of relief when the high tension area’s threats are neutralized.

I could go on and on. I’m gonna cut myself off here. It’s great. I loved it. Is it a revolutionary entry in the genre like Super, Symphony, or Hollow Knight that will be super influential for decades? No. Is it a great Metroid game? Hell fucking yes it is.