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!!!!