Exploration not as an organic, joyous act, but as one of obligation.

I think this franchise might be cursed. Maybe it's being haunted by the restless spirit of Gunpei Yokoi, his wandering soul pursuing everyone who believes that Nintendo ordered a yakuza hit on him. In this speculation, though, one thing remains unquestionable: Metroid is not allowed to have good games that release without drama. Virtually every game in the franchise since its graduation from the Super Nintendo has been plagued with either being a completely middling (or outright bad) final release, going through a hellish development cycle, or both. Metroid Prime was good, but it took hundred-hour weeks to get out the door. Metroid: Other M had a fairly drama-free production, but was absolute garbage. Federation Force got delayed and it was shit. Now enter Metroid Dread, a game which is overwhelmingly okay at the cost of a nearly two-decade development cycle where employees were forced to work under brutal conditions and found themselves unceremoniously cut from the credits. Oh, well. At least Metroid Prime 4 is coming along smoothly, right?

Metroid Dread is not especially good, but there are parts of it that are enjoyable. Samus is incredible, both in terms of her characterization and the fluidity in her movements. There’s an astounding amount of grace and confidence in the way that she transitions from slides, to flips, to beam charges. Every animation flows smoothly and dynamically into the next, really selling the idea that Samus knows what she’s doing. She’s a calm, cool, brutally efficient professional, and she’s clearly seen enough bullshit through the past four games to not be phased by life-threatening alien fauna. Her normal beam weapon has never felt this strong, aided heavily by the fact that there’s no alt-fire modes; each upgrade overwrites the previous and makes it more powerful than the last to an almost comedic degree, morphing from a little pellet shooter into a triple-wide plasma gun that blasts through walls and armor with the penetrative force of super missiles. It rules. The many, many tools in her kit require your fingers to dance along the controller, with nearly every button having a unique function that gives you a new way to fight through enemies or traverse the environment.

The quality stuff starts to peter out there, however, and Metroid Dread begins to fumble some exceptionally root elements of the search action subgenre in ways that are as baffling as they are frustrating.

Rarely did I ever feel an "aha!" moment while playing Metroid Dread. Contrary to what David Jaffe might think, the biggest problem with the game is that it's so utterly terrified at the thought of letting go of your hand that it refuses to give you any opportunity to think for yourself. An area is blocked off? Shoot it with a missile to find out exactly what powerup you need to destroy that specific type of block, and then come back later. If you can come back later, that is. In order to make sure you don't deviate from the intended path whatsoever, Metroid Dread also likes to regularly, permanently seal paths behind you, making it difficult to backtrack even if you want to. This (perhaps inevitably) becomes less of a problem as you collect more movement abilities and weapon types, but these feel less like ways in which you can interact with a living world and more like Samus is just picking up Doom keycards. The way that you can create a neon tunnel of blocks which explicitly tell you that you're going to need morph bombs or power missiles or the shinespark to progress makes everything feel as artificial as aspartame.

Metroid Dread is, in a word, rote. I'm running down a checklist of things I'll need later, and the game has zero restraint when it comes to adding as many items as possible to that list. There are so many different types of blocks I'll need to blow away scattered so far across this massive map. Why bother keeping track of any of this when it means taking ten minutes to sprint back through the exact same corridors fighting the exact same enemies so that I can open one specific, singular path with my new toy that rewards me with nothing more than two fucking missiles? Ammo and health are so plentiful and so easily farmed even during boss fights that there's virtually no point in going out of your way to collect energy tanks and missile boosts. Just grab whatever's on the critical path and you'll be able to bruteforce your way through every encounter. Even if you die, you'll just be plopped back on the opposite side of the door like nothing even happened. There's no penalty for poor planning, and there's barely any reward for preparing. Why bother?

More to the point, there’s no dread in the game called Dread. I realize that this comes off as — and let’s be honest, probably is — a guy who’s too old to be playing children’s games calling them out for not being gritty and adult enough, but what is there to be scared of, here? The EMMIs? The robots who are secluded to their own, clearly-labelled rooms, and can never come out of them, all of which are easily evaded by just walking out the door? When you get the Omega Stream, it becomes nothing more than a puzzle to find a long enough straightaway where you can just park yourself at the end of the hallway and blast away without any real fear of retribution. They’re so all-or-nothing. An encounter with an EMMI ends either with you leaving uneventfully or dying the instant you get caught; hitting the QTE to get out of their grasp has such a tight timing window as to be unfeasible, practically speaking. And even if you do end up dying to one, you immediately respawn back outside. No muss, no fuss. They’re annoying more than they are fearsome. I “dread” the EMMI encounters the same way that I dread tax season. Comparing them to Metroid Fusion’s SA-X is so unfavorable in every conceivable way that a judge would dismiss it as prejudicial evidence if you dropped it in front of a jury.

Bland. I'll never think about this again unless someone else brings it up first.