KingBug
4 reviews liked by KingBug
The Outer Worlds
2019
this game was a blur. everything was forgettable except the different environments, which were pretty cool for the most part. bland writing, bland companions, and why do the guns feel so weak? it wasn’t bad but i felt nothing from this
Hogwarts Legacy
2023
Where to begin with such a contested release? By saying I just found out that this is the same studio that made Dragon Ball Z Sagas. Do with that information what you will.
Exploring Hogwarts and the lands outside are probably the best thing about it. Hogwarts has a large amount of activities and simple puzzles to do with the main story trials having more difficult ones for at least someone as puzzle inept as me, conversations and flavor encounters to experience such as the humming knight, and more secrets than you could shake your wand at. Outside its a lot of nice vistas such as green hills, sparsely forested areas, the rather dreary coast and the forbidden forest with hamlets dotting your way down the roads. You'll find your fair share of enemy encounters outside of the settlements along with various simple Merlin trials and wildlife you can capture for your vivarium for resources. Unfortunately the Merlin trials have about as much variety as the korok puzzles in botw. You have about 7 or 8 versions and things are just placed more spaced out to "change it up". I don't go "wow" often but when I was riding the hippogriff over the water, it was definitely a beautiful site.
The game has a gear and loot system which I grow more tired of seeing in games by the day, but its not gear vomit levels like Nioh were you're getting 30 pieces of gear per encounter with .00000000001% parameter increases on them. Its inventory space does not condone itself to it enough. I don't know the exact number of slots you start with but it can't be much more than 25 and it maxed out at 40. I had to go to Hogsmead regularly to sell my stuff for paltry amounts of money, unless you're on playstation and do its exclusive quest at the time of writing this for an extra 10% selling bonus, like you get 60-200 a piece where things on average are a lot more than that to buy. You can upgrade your gear but it doesn't do much stats wise, the traits are really what matters when it comes to that which you have to find in chests or as rewards from challenges. You can transmog anything into any style of gear you've picked up or unlocked from challenges. I just wore the knights armor for the majority of my time. Not that I liked how my character turned out anyway. You can only choose from presets for the face with no option for actual editing from what I saw and I hated every single one. I'll also never understand not having a raw color picker for customization as its not like they were limiting themselves to "natural" hair colors here. The room of requirement, your personal resource farming center for stuff to craft potions and upgrade gear if you don't want to explore though you can't grow everything such as those damn horklumps, unfortunately doles things out in real time and does not progress while the game is off. Things can take between a few seconds to 30 minutes with the latter seemingly being exclusively for animal breeding. Placing items in the RoR also takes a specific resource called Moonstone that you can either generate yourself at a maximum of 30 a time every 10 minutes, if you place all 3 generators, or find outside while exploring which do refresh but I don't know how long that takes to happen. I spent a lot of time in the vivarium with the magical creatures, and you can find shinies of them in the wild. I haven't found many but I got a couple shiny birds which had shiny kids and a shiny giant toad. My amount of progression per session went down drastically once it unlocked but I knew this would happen and was looking forward to it. Nifflers are precious, must be petted and given all the love.
The story is easily its weakest aspect. Its was just so bland the entire time, and most of the side quests weren't much better. Honestly the only thing worth a damn writing wise was Sebastian's questline. The devs must have been slythrin sorted cuz they have so much more work put into them than the gryffindor or hufflepuff's and ravenlcaw's might as well not exist cuz you blink and miss him. I feel like the game also was intended to have companions follow you while you explore the world. Several times now have I strolled on up to a goblin or bandit camp and my character said something along the lines of "Theres a lot of them, and I'm without my friends" or "This will be tough since I'm alone". It must have been cut deep in development. Your main character is just a bland self insert with choices that lean towards the "good thing" or a little bit rude to get some extra money from quests but outside of that they're nothing. The vocal pitch you can adjust at the time of writing this is terrible as well. Move it anywhere from the middle and you're talking out of a tin can. The whole premise about ancient magic just never lived up to what it could have cuz this "ancient magic" just amounted to 5 to 6 finishers I was able to do outside of seeing what the painting people did with it when they were alive.
The combat wasn't asking much of me outside of color recognition and enemy awareness. Its kind of stiff and twitchy with not a lot of enemy variety and can be a bit hectic. Goblins have their several variants, dark wizards have theirs with just varying degrees of aggressiveness with maybe one unique spell to their name, spiders, wolves, big frogs and suits of armor of 3 sizes are what you'll run into outside of students in the dueling room. The enemy tracking is also absurd where the enemies will snap the distance between you, we're talking like 30 feet in a blink. Reminded me of Dark Souls' 2 absurd tracking. In terms of spells you have 5 damage types with one being exploration/puzzle focused (Control, Force, Damage, Utility, Curses) to choose from in the list of 27 and will need to memorize colors for shield breaking. "The game only has 27 spells! Skyrim has 100!" Yes it does and it is less than I expected I will agree but they are spells with vastly different properties and combo potential. Lift them up, slam them down, set them a blaze, freeze in place, stun after countering (with a perfect guard system), curse them for bonus damage and damage all cursed targets at one time to name some. How many of skyrim's spells are just strength progression of the 5 levels from novice to master and offer little else? I understand the mainstream is full on size queens and plenty of you want any reason to tear this game down but actually think about something other than size for once. Instead of having an arbitrary slot on incendio level 2, you just use the talent tree to give it its added ring of fire effect. Having to change spell loadouts mid combat is also kind of cumbersome as you need to hold down the cast button and then hit the corresponding dpad button to change. Better memorize all 4 loadouts of your 4 set spells once you unlock them. Odds are you're gonna find one combo that works and stick with it but you'll be hard pressed to actually be able to land it all unless you're fighting one on one.
I do wish the basic casting was more than a 4 hit where most of your damage from it comes from the final hit. You also have other items like chinese chomping cabbage (which are surprisingly strong), mandrakes, venemous tentacula and various potions to use during combat. Using the unforgivable curses was fun, and the devs almost didn't puss out on Avada Kedavra. That one shots anything and everything even with a shield including every boss enemy that I used it on with the exception of the final boss and a specific beast. There are multiple sectioned life bar enemies but I didn't run into any other than the final boss after getting the spell so I do not know how it interacts with them and if you have the "effects all cursed enemies" talent, it kills everyone afflicted. Sure it has a lengthy cooldown but there's plenty of talents and potions to reduce it. Speaking of the talent tree, you cannot get all talents from it unfortunately so plan accordingly. Leveling speed also drops hard at higher levels, requiring near 100% completion of all story, side quests, challenges and collectables to get to the max level of 40. Theres A LOT of collectables here, 1126 according to many. While its not even half of DK64, that still a lot especially since its required to get to max level, nevermind just as a completion percentage.
The flying controls seem to be a point of contention for a lot of people. Took me a bit to get used to especially since they aren't inverted out of the gate. The left stick controls your left and right turning while the right stick controls your up and down while the triggers are a speed up and a limited boost on top of the gear shift L3 click. This means you only have access to the x axis of the camera and can make things like the time trials more annoying to reorient should you miss a ring or trying to look and see what all the commotion is under you as you fly through the lands. I don't think they are awful by any means, I've gotten very used to them and can effortlessly do what I set out to but I do think either the triggers should have stayed where they are and the verticality be placed on the shoulder buttons or vice versa.
I had heard and seen video claiming the game was buggy and full of performance issues but I didn't run into much 0f anything. Other than the loading in after fast traveling, the frame rate was stable the whole time. In terms of glitches, I didn't get the quest locking or chest one. Other than clothing physics related ones that happened maybe once a session. I got stuck between a ruin wall and a cliffside and wasn't able to open the menus so I had to restart the game, but the game autosaves often so I had plenty of close saves to choose form and only lost like 30 seconds. I played unpatched on PS5 as well so nothing was fixed. So much when I played Scarlet, I either got lucky and rarely saw any issues or people are blowing it out of proportion.
TLDR: While it might not come off that way, I generally a fun time. Getting to run around a fully realized Hogwarts brought back memories of playing Chamber of Secrets on the PS2. This game right now is what I remember Chamber of Secrets being, just with a nondescript bland main character cuz self inserts and whatnot instead of loosely following a movie plot. The combat could have used more enemy variety, the story and other characters needed Sebastian levels of care, but the general act of exploring the world, uncovering secrets, petting your magical creatures and unleashing a killing curse on your foes surpasses that. Its not a 10/10 but certainly not a 1/10, probably a 6 or so maybe 7 if I'm feeling generous. Peeves is lucky he's already a poltergeist or he'd be on the receiving end of a Avada.
EDIT: I am dropping the score by half a star. This single player game would not let me even start it without downloading its newest patch at the time of writing this. There is no good reason to force an update in a purely single player title unless it fixes a gamebreaking bug. This update made the game run worse. I had literal slideshows and puzzle room not visually updating so I was just walking through blocks despite having little to no issues whatsoever on the unpatched game. I get stopping multiplayer connectivity without it but I have never seen a single player game just full on stop me without a patch before. Usually I can play while it downloads or just delete the update and play on my current version. I pray this isn't a sign of things to come. Might just never connect my stuff the internet from now on unless I'm buying a digital title and see how far I can get.
Exploring Hogwarts and the lands outside are probably the best thing about it. Hogwarts has a large amount of activities and simple puzzles to do with the main story trials having more difficult ones for at least someone as puzzle inept as me, conversations and flavor encounters to experience such as the humming knight, and more secrets than you could shake your wand at. Outside its a lot of nice vistas such as green hills, sparsely forested areas, the rather dreary coast and the forbidden forest with hamlets dotting your way down the roads. You'll find your fair share of enemy encounters outside of the settlements along with various simple Merlin trials and wildlife you can capture for your vivarium for resources. Unfortunately the Merlin trials have about as much variety as the korok puzzles in botw. You have about 7 or 8 versions and things are just placed more spaced out to "change it up". I don't go "wow" often but when I was riding the hippogriff over the water, it was definitely a beautiful site.
The game has a gear and loot system which I grow more tired of seeing in games by the day, but its not gear vomit levels like Nioh were you're getting 30 pieces of gear per encounter with .00000000001% parameter increases on them. Its inventory space does not condone itself to it enough. I don't know the exact number of slots you start with but it can't be much more than 25 and it maxed out at 40. I had to go to Hogsmead regularly to sell my stuff for paltry amounts of money, unless you're on playstation and do its exclusive quest at the time of writing this for an extra 10% selling bonus, like you get 60-200 a piece where things on average are a lot more than that to buy. You can upgrade your gear but it doesn't do much stats wise, the traits are really what matters when it comes to that which you have to find in chests or as rewards from challenges. You can transmog anything into any style of gear you've picked up or unlocked from challenges. I just wore the knights armor for the majority of my time. Not that I liked how my character turned out anyway. You can only choose from presets for the face with no option for actual editing from what I saw and I hated every single one. I'll also never understand not having a raw color picker for customization as its not like they were limiting themselves to "natural" hair colors here. The room of requirement, your personal resource farming center for stuff to craft potions and upgrade gear if you don't want to explore though you can't grow everything such as those damn horklumps, unfortunately doles things out in real time and does not progress while the game is off. Things can take between a few seconds to 30 minutes with the latter seemingly being exclusively for animal breeding. Placing items in the RoR also takes a specific resource called Moonstone that you can either generate yourself at a maximum of 30 a time every 10 minutes, if you place all 3 generators, or find outside while exploring which do refresh but I don't know how long that takes to happen. I spent a lot of time in the vivarium with the magical creatures, and you can find shinies of them in the wild. I haven't found many but I got a couple shiny birds which had shiny kids and a shiny giant toad. My amount of progression per session went down drastically once it unlocked but I knew this would happen and was looking forward to it. Nifflers are precious, must be petted and given all the love.
The story is easily its weakest aspect. Its was just so bland the entire time, and most of the side quests weren't much better. Honestly the only thing worth a damn writing wise was Sebastian's questline. The devs must have been slythrin sorted cuz they have so much more work put into them than the gryffindor or hufflepuff's and ravenlcaw's might as well not exist cuz you blink and miss him. I feel like the game also was intended to have companions follow you while you explore the world. Several times now have I strolled on up to a goblin or bandit camp and my character said something along the lines of "Theres a lot of them, and I'm without my friends" or "This will be tough since I'm alone". It must have been cut deep in development. Your main character is just a bland self insert with choices that lean towards the "good thing" or a little bit rude to get some extra money from quests but outside of that they're nothing. The vocal pitch you can adjust at the time of writing this is terrible as well. Move it anywhere from the middle and you're talking out of a tin can. The whole premise about ancient magic just never lived up to what it could have cuz this "ancient magic" just amounted to 5 to 6 finishers I was able to do outside of seeing what the painting people did with it when they were alive.
The combat wasn't asking much of me outside of color recognition and enemy awareness. Its kind of stiff and twitchy with not a lot of enemy variety and can be a bit hectic. Goblins have their several variants, dark wizards have theirs with just varying degrees of aggressiveness with maybe one unique spell to their name, spiders, wolves, big frogs and suits of armor of 3 sizes are what you'll run into outside of students in the dueling room. The enemy tracking is also absurd where the enemies will snap the distance between you, we're talking like 30 feet in a blink. Reminded me of Dark Souls' 2 absurd tracking. In terms of spells you have 5 damage types with one being exploration/puzzle focused (Control, Force, Damage, Utility, Curses) to choose from in the list of 27 and will need to memorize colors for shield breaking. "The game only has 27 spells! Skyrim has 100!" Yes it does and it is less than I expected I will agree but they are spells with vastly different properties and combo potential. Lift them up, slam them down, set them a blaze, freeze in place, stun after countering (with a perfect guard system), curse them for bonus damage and damage all cursed targets at one time to name some. How many of skyrim's spells are just strength progression of the 5 levels from novice to master and offer little else? I understand the mainstream is full on size queens and plenty of you want any reason to tear this game down but actually think about something other than size for once. Instead of having an arbitrary slot on incendio level 2, you just use the talent tree to give it its added ring of fire effect. Having to change spell loadouts mid combat is also kind of cumbersome as you need to hold down the cast button and then hit the corresponding dpad button to change. Better memorize all 4 loadouts of your 4 set spells once you unlock them. Odds are you're gonna find one combo that works and stick with it but you'll be hard pressed to actually be able to land it all unless you're fighting one on one.
I do wish the basic casting was more than a 4 hit where most of your damage from it comes from the final hit. You also have other items like chinese chomping cabbage (which are surprisingly strong), mandrakes, venemous tentacula and various potions to use during combat. Using the unforgivable curses was fun, and the devs almost didn't puss out on Avada Kedavra. That one shots anything and everything even with a shield including every boss enemy that I used it on with the exception of the final boss and a specific beast. There are multiple sectioned life bar enemies but I didn't run into any other than the final boss after getting the spell so I do not know how it interacts with them and if you have the "effects all cursed enemies" talent, it kills everyone afflicted. Sure it has a lengthy cooldown but there's plenty of talents and potions to reduce it. Speaking of the talent tree, you cannot get all talents from it unfortunately so plan accordingly. Leveling speed also drops hard at higher levels, requiring near 100% completion of all story, side quests, challenges and collectables to get to the max level of 40. Theres A LOT of collectables here, 1126 according to many. While its not even half of DK64, that still a lot especially since its required to get to max level, nevermind just as a completion percentage.
The flying controls seem to be a point of contention for a lot of people. Took me a bit to get used to especially since they aren't inverted out of the gate. The left stick controls your left and right turning while the right stick controls your up and down while the triggers are a speed up and a limited boost on top of the gear shift L3 click. This means you only have access to the x axis of the camera and can make things like the time trials more annoying to reorient should you miss a ring or trying to look and see what all the commotion is under you as you fly through the lands. I don't think they are awful by any means, I've gotten very used to them and can effortlessly do what I set out to but I do think either the triggers should have stayed where they are and the verticality be placed on the shoulder buttons or vice versa.
I had heard and seen video claiming the game was buggy and full of performance issues but I didn't run into much 0f anything. Other than the loading in after fast traveling, the frame rate was stable the whole time. In terms of glitches, I didn't get the quest locking or chest one. Other than clothing physics related ones that happened maybe once a session. I got stuck between a ruin wall and a cliffside and wasn't able to open the menus so I had to restart the game, but the game autosaves often so I had plenty of close saves to choose form and only lost like 30 seconds. I played unpatched on PS5 as well so nothing was fixed. So much when I played Scarlet, I either got lucky and rarely saw any issues or people are blowing it out of proportion.
TLDR: While it might not come off that way, I generally a fun time. Getting to run around a fully realized Hogwarts brought back memories of playing Chamber of Secrets on the PS2. This game right now is what I remember Chamber of Secrets being, just with a nondescript bland main character cuz self inserts and whatnot instead of loosely following a movie plot. The combat could have used more enemy variety, the story and other characters needed Sebastian levels of care, but the general act of exploring the world, uncovering secrets, petting your magical creatures and unleashing a killing curse on your foes surpasses that. Its not a 10/10 but certainly not a 1/10, probably a 6 or so maybe 7 if I'm feeling generous. Peeves is lucky he's already a poltergeist or he'd be on the receiving end of a Avada.
EDIT: I am dropping the score by half a star. This single player game would not let me even start it without downloading its newest patch at the time of writing this. There is no good reason to force an update in a purely single player title unless it fixes a gamebreaking bug. This update made the game run worse. I had literal slideshows and puzzle room not visually updating so I was just walking through blocks despite having little to no issues whatsoever on the unpatched game. I get stopping multiplayer connectivity without it but I have never seen a single player game just full on stop me without a patch before. Usually I can play while it downloads or just delete the update and play on my current version. I pray this isn't a sign of things to come. Might just never connect my stuff the internet from now on unless I'm buying a digital title and see how far I can get.
amazing game with great music, lore, character, cinematic, etc.
if you want to try league, then this is the best entry!
-shorter length per game,
-less champion to learn(more to come)
-better 3d model
-better tutorial
-better presentation
-easy to control
-etc
if you want to try league, then this is the best entry!
-shorter length per game,
-less champion to learn(more to come)
-better 3d model
-better tutorial
-better presentation
-easy to control
-etc
Metroid Dread
2021
This review contains spoilers
With the new Dune movie debuting this week, bookreaders and brainhavers around the world will no doubt be imminently descending upon your timeline to inform you that well, actually, you see, Paul Atreides isn’t actually the hero of Frank Herbert’s seminal science-fiction fantasy series. No! He’s an a colonial-imperialist, a mass-murderer, a crazed-socio/psychopathic killing machine. Annoyingly, these know-it-alls are totally right. The hero of the book is (as much as he can be within the moral fog of the Dune universe) the bad guy.
Annoyingly, I'm about to make the same argument with regards to the other sci-fi monolith that's been excavated from beneath the sands of time this October. With the new Metroid game debuting this month, gameplayers and Backloggers will now no doubt be imminently descending on your Activity Feed to inform you that well, actually, you see, Samus Aran isn't actually the hero of Nintendo's seminal science-fiction fantasy series. And this know-it-all is convinced that he's totally right!
I mean, for starters, let's check out this list:
https://metroid.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_locations_in_the_Metroid_series
Destroyed locations are denoted by ☠. A quick scroll up and down shows that there's more skull and crossbones here than on a Space Pirate's frigate! That's a lot of ☠! What the hell, Samus? Why do you blow up every planet you go to?! How many times in your life have you flown away from a planet at the last second, only to watch it be reborn as an asteroid shower in your gunship's rear view mirror? That's the kind of ice cold that only a Gravity Suit can withstand, man! Samus Aran, you did a racism. You did an imperialism. You did a colonialism. You did a xenophobia. This makes it clear you don't even understand the intersectional nature of the multiplicity of your offenses!!
Metroid Dread comes tantalisingly close to fully exploring the idea of Samus as a remorseless kill-bot and the reconciliation of this image with our personal legend of Samus, the hero. One thing that's been consistently praised about the game is its depiction of Samus, the character - she idly charges her beam cannon while unflinchingly facing her old nemesis, Kraid; she slowly stalks around a wounded beast after breaking its hind legs with rockets and plasma bolts; she even trains a suspicious reticule between the glowing eyess of the bird-people who raised her; in short, she's a fucking badass in this game - but I think Sakamoto, MercuryStream and their respective teams wanted to explore the implications of that beyond mere fanservice.
It's fair to say that obtaining the Gravity Suit in Dread is probably the game's most stark inflection towards your ultimate goal of supreme badassery (as suggested/commanded by ADAM/Mr. Beak). In the first two thirds of the game, water poses a greater threat to Samus than most of the (admittedly very tough) bosses - water prevents further exploration, seals off escape routes, and makes you easy prey for the EMMI. Whereas most powerups in Dread really only afford you the ability to open new doors or crawl into new spaces, the Gravity Suit is the first step towards truly uninhibited exploration of ZDR's caverns, lakes and techbases. It's also the keys to the Screw Attack - which is, as ever, the Metroid item that makes you essentially untouchable by 80% of the planet's lifeforms. Once you have the Gravity Suit and ADAM begins coaching you for your ultimate showdown with daddy, you begin to sense that Samus Aran is an unstoppable force of anti-nature who will stop for nothing and no one. But does it have reason beyond orders? Probably not. It's just a killing machine - as she's always been.
I don't think it's a coincidence, then, that the game's final (gameplay) EMMI is a giant purple robot too. Running from a robot that can crawl into 1-block high tunnels and fire wall-penetrating ice beams is a nice bit of Video Game Storytelling that gets you thinking about who or what Samus is, and how different she actually is from the EMMI - a thematic continuation of an idea that the SA-X introduced 19 years ago. Samus Aran shows up on the surface of planets at the behest of her galaxy-ruling imperialist overlords, locates the valuables, and then leaves the local ecosystem in sub-atomic ruin. It's kind of her thing. Only by understanding the nature of her perceived natural enemy at the molecular level has Samus begun to understand what she's done and who she is.
I don't think it's a coincidence, then, that the game's final (cutscene) EMMI dies by the hand of Samus's fledgling Metroid powers, rather than another beam cannon upgrade or mechanical modification. It feels like a suggestion that Samus is beginning to reject who Raven Beak, ADAM and all the other wily old men in her life have been building her to be; a 35-year tool of the Galactic Federation could finally be writing her own story, the next logical step on a personal journey that Super implied with the death of Baby Metroid and presence of The Animals, and Fusion began in earnest with... everything it did? In Dread, Samus's (quite literal) Guiding Hand of Metroid is a creative bit of mostly-unspoken storytelling that shows MercuryStream probably understand the (thankfully scant) Metroid lore a whole lot better than Team Ninja did. Or perhaps this is all Yoshio Sakamoto? Has he spent his time in captivity reflecting on where Other M all went wrong? Either way, Dread ends on an exciting new note for the franchise - one that's sadly tempered by the foreknowledge that Retro Studios are likely gonna drop us right back into the boring old bounty hunter continuity for Prime 4.
If the runaway success of Metroid Dread gives Sakamoto and MercuryStream a blank cheque to write the future of the Metroid franchise as they see fit, I'd really love to see them explore the idea of Samus as a symbiotic force of technology and nature - a jungle-lawful-good bounty hunter who goes around doing terrorist deeds for good of the galaxy, blowing up Federation space stations and research facilities and mining frigates instead of, y'know, not saving the animals every time she sets foot on the surface of another acronymically-named planet that's teeming with cool little blob guys and armadillos with razor teeth or whatever. C'mon! Make Samus into a futuristic cyber-eco-warrior! Samus Aran knows that fear is the mind-killer. The X must flow!
I've written a whole lot there about what amounts to relatively little in-game content... This game is, rightfully, more concerned with tactile experiences than spooned cinematic storytelling, and the Dread gameplay experience is fittingly all-encompassing for a Metroid game that is presumably placing a capstone on 35 years of 2-dimensional history and also trying to please Metroid fans from 1986, 1994 and 2002.
I'd argue that what makes the game so impressive - it's ability to juggle theme, tone and content from every 2D game in the franchise - is also it's most glaring weakness. It has plenty of creepy, quiet moments - but they sit literally next-door to frantic speedrunning challenges and monster-slaughters that whiplash any feelings of dread from your brain; it allows for ample exploration and puzzling-out - but is constantly guiding and bull-penning you towards your next objective; there's an impressively huge sprawl to explore - but it only truly becomes available when you're literally minutes away from the exciting climax of Samus's pre-determined destiny. This push-and-pull of varying gameplay and presentation modes is balanced right, for the most part, but also robs the game of a unique identity - Metroid was the original template; Return of Samus was the claustrophobic genocide run; Super Metroid is the huge one with the swiss army knife of tools; Fusion is the creepy horror movie - but how would you succinctly summarise Dread's contribution to the canon beyond its ability to perform resurrections of a long-dead series? This is arguably the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate of Metroid games, to slightly damn and highly praise the game in one statement.
"But what about the melee counter shit!!!" can be heardly faintly from the back of the audience at this point in the review, and I'd be inclined to agree that it's probably the most stand-out element Dread has going for it. Sure, it was in Samus Returns (not to be confused with Return of Samus), but in comparison to Dread, Returns kinda feels like an audition tape - does it really count? Especially now that we're living in the era of Metroid Plenty? For all intents and purposes, this is the 3rd Strike parry's debut in the Metroid Mainline. MercuryStream have done an admirable job of reining in the counter on their second attempt - there's nothing as deeply offensive as the Ridley fight here this time - but it still often and ultimately feels like an unwelcome piece in the jigsaw puzzles that each Metroid boss fight represents, and the final boss is a perfect representation of its awkward nature. Having so many runs at Daddy Beak ruined by a need to wait for a specific animation kinda sapped all the tension out of what (14 year old me thinks) is otherwise a totally badass cool awesome boss battle. That animation of Samus sidestepping a laser and flipping over a claw-swipe is no longer cool to me because MercuryStream have burned the images of it onto my cortex like a plasma screen that's been left on the Home screen too long. But that's a relatively minor bummer on a journey that I otherwise thoroughly enjoyed.
Ultimately, Metroid Dread feels like a crowd-pleaser that really had the potential to be a crowd-shocker. It's unwillingness to carve out its own identity is something of a letdown coming cold on the long-dragged heels of the barn-burning Metroid Fusion, but hey! When you're coming back after almost 20 years, you probably want to introduce yourself to a whole new generation of gamers out there and show them what Metroid's all about. If Returns was the application form, Dread is the first day on the job - and it looks like MercuryStream is gonna get top marks on the performance review for successfully taking Project Dread down from the top shelf. You never know - this could be the Force Awakens to a potential Metroid 6's The Last Jedi! C'mon, Nintendo! MercuryStream's part of the family now!! Let them go apeshit!!! We wanna see something wild!!!!
Annoyingly, I'm about to make the same argument with regards to the other sci-fi monolith that's been excavated from beneath the sands of time this October. With the new Metroid game debuting this month, gameplayers and Backloggers will now no doubt be imminently descending on your Activity Feed to inform you that well, actually, you see, Samus Aran isn't actually the hero of Nintendo's seminal science-fiction fantasy series. And this know-it-all is convinced that he's totally right!
I mean, for starters, let's check out this list:
https://metroid.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_locations_in_the_Metroid_series
Destroyed locations are denoted by ☠. A quick scroll up and down shows that there's more skull and crossbones here than on a Space Pirate's frigate! That's a lot of ☠! What the hell, Samus? Why do you blow up every planet you go to?! How many times in your life have you flown away from a planet at the last second, only to watch it be reborn as an asteroid shower in your gunship's rear view mirror? That's the kind of ice cold that only a Gravity Suit can withstand, man! Samus Aran, you did a racism. You did an imperialism. You did a colonialism. You did a xenophobia. This makes it clear you don't even understand the intersectional nature of the multiplicity of your offenses!!
Metroid Dread comes tantalisingly close to fully exploring the idea of Samus as a remorseless kill-bot and the reconciliation of this image with our personal legend of Samus, the hero. One thing that's been consistently praised about the game is its depiction of Samus, the character - she idly charges her beam cannon while unflinchingly facing her old nemesis, Kraid; she slowly stalks around a wounded beast after breaking its hind legs with rockets and plasma bolts; she even trains a suspicious reticule between the glowing eyess of the bird-people who raised her; in short, she's a fucking badass in this game - but I think Sakamoto, MercuryStream and their respective teams wanted to explore the implications of that beyond mere fanservice.
It's fair to say that obtaining the Gravity Suit in Dread is probably the game's most stark inflection towards your ultimate goal of supreme badassery (as suggested/commanded by ADAM/Mr. Beak). In the first two thirds of the game, water poses a greater threat to Samus than most of the (admittedly very tough) bosses - water prevents further exploration, seals off escape routes, and makes you easy prey for the EMMI. Whereas most powerups in Dread really only afford you the ability to open new doors or crawl into new spaces, the Gravity Suit is the first step towards truly uninhibited exploration of ZDR's caverns, lakes and techbases. It's also the keys to the Screw Attack - which is, as ever, the Metroid item that makes you essentially untouchable by 80% of the planet's lifeforms. Once you have the Gravity Suit and ADAM begins coaching you for your ultimate showdown with daddy, you begin to sense that Samus Aran is an unstoppable force of anti-nature who will stop for nothing and no one. But does it have reason beyond orders? Probably not. It's just a killing machine - as she's always been.
I don't think it's a coincidence, then, that the game's final (gameplay) EMMI is a giant purple robot too. Running from a robot that can crawl into 1-block high tunnels and fire wall-penetrating ice beams is a nice bit of Video Game Storytelling that gets you thinking about who or what Samus is, and how different she actually is from the EMMI - a thematic continuation of an idea that the SA-X introduced 19 years ago. Samus Aran shows up on the surface of planets at the behest of her galaxy-ruling imperialist overlords, locates the valuables, and then leaves the local ecosystem in sub-atomic ruin. It's kind of her thing. Only by understanding the nature of her perceived natural enemy at the molecular level has Samus begun to understand what she's done and who she is.
I don't think it's a coincidence, then, that the game's final (cutscene) EMMI dies by the hand of Samus's fledgling Metroid powers, rather than another beam cannon upgrade or mechanical modification. It feels like a suggestion that Samus is beginning to reject who Raven Beak, ADAM and all the other wily old men in her life have been building her to be; a 35-year tool of the Galactic Federation could finally be writing her own story, the next logical step on a personal journey that Super implied with the death of Baby Metroid and presence of The Animals, and Fusion began in earnest with... everything it did? In Dread, Samus's (quite literal) Guiding Hand of Metroid is a creative bit of mostly-unspoken storytelling that shows MercuryStream probably understand the (thankfully scant) Metroid lore a whole lot better than Team Ninja did. Or perhaps this is all Yoshio Sakamoto? Has he spent his time in captivity reflecting on where Other M all went wrong? Either way, Dread ends on an exciting new note for the franchise - one that's sadly tempered by the foreknowledge that Retro Studios are likely gonna drop us right back into the boring old bounty hunter continuity for Prime 4.
If the runaway success of Metroid Dread gives Sakamoto and MercuryStream a blank cheque to write the future of the Metroid franchise as they see fit, I'd really love to see them explore the idea of Samus as a symbiotic force of technology and nature - a jungle-lawful-good bounty hunter who goes around doing terrorist deeds for good of the galaxy, blowing up Federation space stations and research facilities and mining frigates instead of, y'know, not saving the animals every time she sets foot on the surface of another acronymically-named planet that's teeming with cool little blob guys and armadillos with razor teeth or whatever. C'mon! Make Samus into a futuristic cyber-eco-warrior! Samus Aran knows that fear is the mind-killer. The X must flow!
I've written a whole lot there about what amounts to relatively little in-game content... This game is, rightfully, more concerned with tactile experiences than spooned cinematic storytelling, and the Dread gameplay experience is fittingly all-encompassing for a Metroid game that is presumably placing a capstone on 35 years of 2-dimensional history and also trying to please Metroid fans from 1986, 1994 and 2002.
I'd argue that what makes the game so impressive - it's ability to juggle theme, tone and content from every 2D game in the franchise - is also it's most glaring weakness. It has plenty of creepy, quiet moments - but they sit literally next-door to frantic speedrunning challenges and monster-slaughters that whiplash any feelings of dread from your brain; it allows for ample exploration and puzzling-out - but is constantly guiding and bull-penning you towards your next objective; there's an impressively huge sprawl to explore - but it only truly becomes available when you're literally minutes away from the exciting climax of Samus's pre-determined destiny. This push-and-pull of varying gameplay and presentation modes is balanced right, for the most part, but also robs the game of a unique identity - Metroid was the original template; Return of Samus was the claustrophobic genocide run; Super Metroid is the huge one with the swiss army knife of tools; Fusion is the creepy horror movie - but how would you succinctly summarise Dread's contribution to the canon beyond its ability to perform resurrections of a long-dead series? This is arguably the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate of Metroid games, to slightly damn and highly praise the game in one statement.
"But what about the melee counter shit!!!" can be heardly faintly from the back of the audience at this point in the review, and I'd be inclined to agree that it's probably the most stand-out element Dread has going for it. Sure, it was in Samus Returns (not to be confused with Return of Samus), but in comparison to Dread, Returns kinda feels like an audition tape - does it really count? Especially now that we're living in the era of Metroid Plenty? For all intents and purposes, this is the 3rd Strike parry's debut in the Metroid Mainline. MercuryStream have done an admirable job of reining in the counter on their second attempt - there's nothing as deeply offensive as the Ridley fight here this time - but it still often and ultimately feels like an unwelcome piece in the jigsaw puzzles that each Metroid boss fight represents, and the final boss is a perfect representation of its awkward nature. Having so many runs at Daddy Beak ruined by a need to wait for a specific animation kinda sapped all the tension out of what (14 year old me thinks) is otherwise a totally badass cool awesome boss battle. That animation of Samus sidestepping a laser and flipping over a claw-swipe is no longer cool to me because MercuryStream have burned the images of it onto my cortex like a plasma screen that's been left on the Home screen too long. But that's a relatively minor bummer on a journey that I otherwise thoroughly enjoyed.
Ultimately, Metroid Dread feels like a crowd-pleaser that really had the potential to be a crowd-shocker. It's unwillingness to carve out its own identity is something of a letdown coming cold on the long-dragged heels of the barn-burning Metroid Fusion, but hey! When you're coming back after almost 20 years, you probably want to introduce yourself to a whole new generation of gamers out there and show them what Metroid's all about. If Returns was the application form, Dread is the first day on the job - and it looks like MercuryStream is gonna get top marks on the performance review for successfully taking Project Dread down from the top shelf. You never know - this could be the Force Awakens to a potential Metroid 6's The Last Jedi! C'mon, Nintendo! MercuryStream's part of the family now!! Let them go apeshit!!! We wanna see something wild!!!!