Despite being one of the more recognizable and prestigious flagship titles from Nintendo, Metroid has always struck me as being more of a niche franchise than what its historical legacy would suggest. In a similar fashion to what Link to the Past did for the Zelda series, Super Metroid polished and perfected the open ended design and progression concepts of its predecessors, eliminating much of their more frustrating aspects, and established a success formula that the franchise has religiously followed from then on. In doing so, Metroid has been the same game for more than two decades, and putting aside its 3D detours with the Prime series, it has been trapped in an ever increasingly enclosed bubble of self reference and iteration.

Metroid Dread wastes no time with introductions, and the moment you grab hold of Samus Aran, it feels like coming home again. Take away the new coat of paint, and you are back to the same old Metroid song and dance, rushing past grid like corridors of underground caves and industrial lab rooms filled with alien critters to waste away and locked doors that you will inevitably open once you get the next power up on the checklist. Ever the stimulating power trip that characterizes the series, Dread's biggest achievement is how it seamlessly paces itself and constantly rewards the player in quick succession as it twists and turns the map, demostrating a seasoned understanding of the Super Metroid formula that makes putting down the controller a very hard thing to do. After what felt like a deliberate eternity, getting the Morph Ball power up was a non spoken mutual understanding between game and players in the know.

Unfortunately, that's only what Dread ever is. While the E.M.M.I. cat and mouse chase segments are the most inspired Dread ever gets, they are restricted by a need to appease the fandom's rejection of inconvenience, and so are sectioned off into clearly identifiable areas where a death only amounts to setting the player back to the start of said area. A brief pesky light detour into survival horror before going back to business as usual. For a series so deified for its somber atmosphere and exploration of the unknown, Dread contents itself with regurgitating the same landscapes and biomes we have grown tired of seeing since Super that rarely give an excuse to trade the foreground for the background, and the story, apparently a passion project in the works for many years, hardly justifies its purpose other than continuining on the concepts and themes that previous entries have already expanded upon in a much more meaningful way. Metroid Dread does not earn its title. So I ask this question: how many more times must I expect to get the space jump near the end of the game? How many more instances of blowing up a glass tunnel with a power bomb will I be subjected to? How much longer must the Chozo be the center of the universe?

Thanks to the flourishing of indie development of the last decade, the metroidvania genre has since seen a vast increase in experimentation that has given every kind of Metroid fan something to look forward to. I have made my peace a long time ago with the notion that the Metroid series now occupy a very specific set of qualities and standards meant to appeal to an audience that values the power fantasy of the franchise above everything else, and I can gladly say that Dread fits that bill perfectly with the most fun to control Samus and a plethora of movement and combat options that I'm sure will be exploited for years to come. If I want that old feeling of treading an alien and hostile environment by the skin of my teeth, I'll play Rain World. If I want to revel in indecipherable mystery and obtuse puzzle solving, I'll play La-Mulana. If I want to experience Metroid's atmosphere, I'll play Environmental Station Alpha. I just hoped that Metroid Dread could have once again been all those things for me.

Metroid Dread is good. It's great for most of it, even. But it's never exceptional. And as long as the franchise decides to live under Super Metroid's shadow, it will never be again.