“Are you ready for your movement shooter lessons?”

Doom Eternal gulps

ULTRAKILL breathes heavily

Quake 3 nods nervously

Titanfall 2 sighs

“Yes, Senran Kagura: Peach Beach Splash" they say in unison

i miss when metroid wasn't so plotty. i know this is something i should realistically be blaming fusion or even corruption for, but man. this game just does not need all this plot. suddenly samus has midichlorians and her metroid dna is overtaking her chozo dna or whatever and that's why giant robots that completely suck all the fun out of gameplay are hunting her. i enjoy this game in spite of itself. it has a myriad of things that do not work for me, but fortunately, it's very hard to fuck the metroid formula up, though it feels like mercurysteam is really trying to sometimes.

i am mildly shocked that this is an unpopular opinion, but the EMMI are by far one of the worst mechanics ever introduced into the series. they are not scary. they punish exploration (you know, the fundamental thing metroid games are built on). they are annoying. they waste time. what is the point of having this giant "unkillable until the game says so" enemy if it's actively ruining the player's experience? it feels so much like mercurysteam saw the popularity of Mr. X in REmake 2 and said "we should have that" (or maybe it was a nintendo directive, who knows). all i can tell you is that far and away my least enjoyable moments with the game were when i was forced to trek through EMMI zones and had fun moments like transitioning into another room just to run into one of the little cunts and have it instantly kill me. even after learning the melee counter timing, that did not deter me from feeling annoyed and like my time was being wasted any time i had to deal with them. i want to stress how incredibly serious i am when i say that they are the worst mechanic ever added into the series when games like Corruption and Other M exist. it runs so antithetical to what makes metroid work, and it's the very first thing i think of when i think of this game.

at the very least, when you're not dealing with the EMMI, dread is fun to play. melee counter is still poisoning the well but, at this point, it at least feels a little bit more natural in its implementation. some of the upgrades feel a little redundant or otherwise unnecessary, i.e. getting the baby space jump like an hour before you find the real space jump, but otherwise the new stuff here is good (i very quickly went from "i am never going to use this" to "this is vital" on storm missiles). as i've implied before, the game really loses me on the whole chozo lore raven beak stuff. not because it's terribly complex or esoteric, but more because it's so uninteresting. they keep trying to make metroid have dialogue and cutscenes, and they fail to realize the most important and memorable moments in metroid happened in spite of a big rendered cutscene or dialogue (i.e. you know the part of super metroid, the ending of metroid fusion with the omega metroid, the ending of metroid prime 1 where samus mourns the loss of the chozo culture/chozo in general, etc.). i've said it before, but we really just need another metroid prime 2-esque game that's wholly self-contained and not trying to be about some greater lore or story for samus.

overall i would say that i'm happy this game exists, because the meme of "metroid dread will never exist" dying is a good thing. from what i can tell, most people seem to be way more enthusiastic about this game than i am, so i'm glad other people are getting more out of it. hell, i'm open-minded and while i give this a light 3.5/5.0 now, i'm hopeful that i could end up revisiting it and having a better time with it. i'm not sure where the metroid series is going to go, but i am glad that people are still getting joy out of it.