So as already mentioned, I loved the game from the very first minute, and this fact held true to the very end. So much so that I immediately went for 100% item collection and then even went on to complete a second playthrough on hard mode.
I loved so many things about Dread. I mean of course it was first and foremost just a darn good game. Fast-paced, polished gameplay with a lot of refinements and a nice flow, nice graphics, awesome cutscenes, a simple (yet very functional) story, and almost everything else you'd expect from a Metroid game, all in one neat package. Aside from that, it was also pure fan service for long-time Metroid fans.
The involvement of the X, Kraid being a boss, Speed Booster making a return, some remixes of beloved themes, really there's a lot to love here for Metroid fans.
I'm glad I didn't watch anything beyond the first trailer and managed to not get spoiled on Twitter. That way, there were loads of surprises for me!
One particular thing I liked about the game was that it had the right amount of challenge for me. It was never frustratingly difficult, yet I certainly struggled on a couple of occasions. So much so that I thought to myself "man, if I'm having this much trouble, I wonder how casual players will fare with this game". Truely, I think some people will find it too hard, but for me, it felt just right. The bosses in particular were quite challenging. The final boss was probably the toughest one in the entire series, at the very least the 2D series, and I enjoyed it all the more for it. It felt so rewarding to overcome. Such a major difference from, let's say, Mother Brain in Super Metroid, who always felt like a pure story boss with no meat to it.
Gameplay-wise, I really love how zippy and fast everything is. I do think it's a bummer that wall-jumps were once again nerved to not work on single walls, but some sequence breaks are still possible with it. My favorite inclusion in the game
is the return of the Speed Booster, which was always one of my favorite items and feels better to use here than it ever did. It's so damn versatile, which reflects in some tough optional puzzles you need to solve to get 100%. It can also be used for quite a number of sequence breaks.
Let me now get into some of my nitpicks and some things I felt a bit mixed about. These will probably make up the major portion of this post, but I'd like to re-iterate that they're all just nitpicks and I just love to go into detail. I still absolutely love the game.
One thing that bothered me a bit was that they made Samus (sort of) silent in this one. My conspiracy theory is that this is all the fault of Other M, that Nintendo are just too afraid of giving Samus too much personality via speech since then. Regardless of whether this is true or not, one of the aspects that made Metroid Fusion in particular one of my favorite Metroids was Samus speaking quite a bit in it. Hearing her perspective and getting to know her pesonality was quite exciting. Dread has, more or less, distanced from this approach.
There is that one exception. When you meet Quiet Robe, Samus does speak two lines. However, it's too little for my personal taste, and it being in the Chozo language feels like an excuse to not have to spend money on international voice actors. Even then, I still would have loved to hear some more lines from her. Like having her talk back to Raven Beak in Chozo language before the final battle or something like that. They tried very hard to avoid that, instead opting to make Samus very much of a "show, don't tell" personality in this game - and sure, that isn't a bad thing per se. It does make Samus feel a lot more bad-ass and less compassionate than I used to perceive her. I guess if nothing else, her silence for most of the game makes the two lines she does deliver all that much more special, since they do actually end up being signs of compassion.
One important aspect for me to talk about is the very thing giving the game its name, the "dread". This comes mainly in the form of the EMMI encounters. These turned out to be a bit of a mixed bag for me. In general, I liked them, and I found that in the beginning, they did instill a sense of fear in me. However, this fear faded quickly once I realized the game always creates checkpoints before entering an EMMI zone. Surely a nice convenience to have, but with almost nothing at stake whatsoever, I just had no reason at all to ever really fear the EMMI. I didn't even bother playing it safe and using my Phantom Cloak ability. I always pretty much just ran right through, trying to dodge EMMI as they appeared. This worked out often enough, and when it didn't, nothing was really lost.
Then there's encounters where you get to actually face off the EMMI and have to destroy them. Thes were somewhat fun, though there was one in particular that I struggled with a ridiculous amount, and I don't get why. I feel like I did something wrong, but even on my second playthrough, I couldn't figure it out what I was supposed to do. That one encounter probably took me longer to beat than all the other encounters combined.
Anyways, one thing I do love about EMMI encounters is the countering mechanic. Metroid Dread, as you might know, includes the melee counter from Samus Returns, which plays an even bigger role in this game. This can be used to fend off EMMI, with the caveat being that time frame in which you can actually pull it off is ridiculously short (like a few frames) and seemingly randomized. This means you can't actually react to the EMMI, you have to predict when to counter, which of course won't work a lot of times, since the timing is randomized. This does mean that more often than not, the counter will fail and you will die, so you have no reliably means of defending against an EMMI. That's exactly the point, though. EMMI are intended to instill fear in the player, so having some randomness involved actually feels like the perfect move. The uncertainty really does give them an element of dread. On top of that, whenever you do pull off one of these counters, it feels absolutely amazing, you feel like a badass who just barely got away with their lives. So while I do think the EMMI are flawed in some ways, there are also some things that I definitely like about them. At the very least, they don't actively make the game worse. If anything, they just don't fully live up to their potential. I guess they are a step above the SA-X, but it's worth mentioning that on my very first playthrough of Fusion, I actually feared the SA-X a lot more than the EMMI, precisely because they were scripted and unavoidable, unlike the EMMI, which you might end up not even encountering during many of your visits to an EMMI zone.
The EMMI do unfortunately lose quite a lot of their importance towards the end of the game. The encounters get rarer, and eventually they just fade away entirely, with the final one kind of being the most disappointing, since it was made intentionally anti-climactic for story purposes. Having to fight Metroid larvas, like in all previously games, would have actually made perfect sense here, because that always felt like the most dreadful part of each game. I'm aware that this wouldn't have made much sense from a story perspective, though.
My next issue with the game is related to its level design. The game uses a design philosophy that is very similar to Samus Returns, yet pushed even further, which means issues I had with Samus Returns apply to Dread to an even larger degree.
One particular thing that Samus Returns did that I found notable back then was that it had a very strict main path with very little obvious opportunities to deviate from it. Or in other words, Samus Returns had a main path that was quite linear and not very open. Sure, you could take a detour here and there, but more often than not, there was exactly one way to follow and very little opportunity for sequence breaks. To achieve this, the game used a bunch of different level objects and gates. To explain it simply: for just about every single item you could find in the game, there existed one specific type of gate or level object that would prevent you from moving on without it. The game even went out of its way to disable certain well-established sequence breaking techniques. For example, it introduced slippery walls that you couldn't wall-jump off, or fans that sucked up your bombs so you couldn't bomb-jump off them. This has always bothered me about Samus Returns. I do love it a lot, mind you, but it has always annoyed me how restrictive it could feel. Breaking from the intended path in that game required some really complicated, likely unintended sequence breaks. This was such a long shot from Super Metroid, which was an open game pretty much from the very beginning and even included a bunch of dev-intended sequence breaks. Granted, this open nature can make the game difficult to play for newcomers, but I think a perfect middle ground already exists in Zero Mission.
Now luckily, in some ways, Dread did improve in this regard. For example, it no longer has slippery walls or bomb-eating fans. It does have sloped walls you can't wall-jump off, but those feel more natural, and they also existed in Super Metroid. Anyways, this does make the game a bit more open and even allow for a bunch of sequence breaks people have already found, some of which even seem to be dev-intended
(like a special kill animation for Kraid when you get bombs early)
.
However, in other ways, I have to say that Dread actually got a lot worse than Samus Returns. Mainly in the introduction of even more gates. It feels like just about every single item in this game has a very special type of gate it can open, or a very special type of level object it can get rid off. It's frankly ridiculous. It doesn't feel organic at all, it feels very artifical. It doesn't feel like a place that could exist in real life, but rather just like a place made specifically for a game - which it is, of course, but ideally, you shouldn't feel that as a player. Let's illustrate this problem by comparing some items in Super Metroid and Metroid Dread.
In Super Metroid, you could obtain the Spazer. A beam upgrade which let you shoot three projectiles at once instead of one. The Spazer had no special interaction with anything in the game. In fact, it was an entirely optional item. It was just a beam upgrade for your convenience. In Metroid Dread, a similar item exists, called the Wide Beam. However, it's no longer an optional item at all. In fact, the game includes multiple interactibles specific to the Wide Beam. Gates with three dots on them that only the Wide Beam can open, as well as blocks that only the Wide Beam can push.
Let's look at another example. In Super Metroid, you could find the Ice Beam. There are once again no level objects that interact directly with the beam or require it. However, picking up Ice Beam allows you to freeze enemies, which allows you to reach new places. This very naturally gets the player to collect the Ice Beam at some point, because there's simply no other way to reach those places otherwise without using advanced techs. Now Metroid Dread has a very similar item, Ice Missiles. They have the same property of being able to freeze enemies. So how does the game deal with them? Why, of course. It introduces burning corals everywhere that block the path and can only be destroyed with Ice Missiles, so you won't get around without collecting them first.
See what I mean with Metroid Dread feeling very artifical in its level design? It never quite trusts the player to figure stuff out on their own, like Super Metroid did. It always nudges them into the right direction, giving them very little choice to go anywhere elze, often feeling quite patronizing as a result. Granted, this design structure does have its advantages. New players won't get lost so easily. They will always gravitate towards the right way to go after a short time. However, for me, who likes more open Metroidvanias, it feels quite restrictive. I basically have to go out of my way if I want to leave the intended main path. It also definitely hurts the immersion with all these different gates and objects. At some point, you just have to ask yourself: "Who would build a place like this?".
It unfortunately results in one very specific gameplay problem as well. As I mentioned, while you're following the main path, it always nudges you in the right direction and it's difficult to get lost. This will definitely be a good thing for some players. In fact, even on my very first playthrough, I never got lost once, which definitely isn't true for other Metroid games. However, once you do leave this main path - to go for 100% item collection at the end of the game, for example - you immediately notice how problematic this design really is. What were previously cleverly designed levels with a clear main route to follow have suddenly become a maze-like hell that is super cumbersome to traverse. I'm not kidding, when you go to explore at the end, you'll really notice how gigantic everything is and how many twisting, bending paths there are, often utilizing one-way gates, meaning you're forced to go the long way around. There isn't even a convenient fast travel method until the very end of the game, which you aren't even made aware exists. You just have to realize it by accident. It feels like the game's level design takes a sudden nose dive in quality as soon as you leave the intended path. I'll be honest here, I'm probably greatly exaggerating and it's not actually thaaat bad, but there definitely is a very noticable difference between when you follow the main path and when you don't, and I'm not the only player to have noticed this. I've heard from other players who loved every minute of the game until they went to collect missing items at the very end. It's definitely a problem that exists.
You know, Metroid Fusion often gets criticized for being quite linear and for the game always telling you where to go next. Conversely, I have seen people praise Metroid Dread for its structure, how it lets you find the right way around without outright telling you. However, I actually find that Metroid Fusion did things a lot better. Sure, Fusion usually outright told you where to go, but you still had to figure out how to actually get there, which wasn't always obvious. More importantly, Metroid Fusion never felt so incredibly artificial in its design. That's because Fusion's gating was actually entirely story-based, which made it make perfect sense.
Where Metroid Dread has dozens of different gates, Metroid Fusion had just one type of gate in different colors, all of them unlocked via story progress. It made perfect sense from a narrative standpoint, because there were actual logical story reasons to not have all gates unlocked at all times in Fusion. It achieved the same goal as Metroid Dread, yet all while fitting perfectly into the narrative and game world, and without being artificial in any way. The same goes for the different sectors in Metroid Fusion. Some may say they make the game feel restrictive and less open, because they're all so clearly connected to one another, but they just make perfect sense from a story pespective, because you ARE on a space station, after all. It makes sense to give it a very clear architectural structure. On the other hand, Metroid Dread has very large, seemingly open and interconnected areas, but when you actually play it, they will rarely feel open at all, because as I said, there's always that one obvious main path, and deviating from it will immediately make the game feel less open. On the hand, when you reach the end game in Metroid Fusion, you will find that the entire thing is actually pretty nice and easy to traverse. All areas are very simple in structure, and there's even secret shortcuts connecting the different areas. People may complain about it, but I think the structure of Metroid Fusion is a lot better in practice than that of Dread - and that's despite Dread actually having fast travel teleporters, which Fusion doesn't have.
So overall, I definitely had a blast with Metroid Dread, but there were a few things I didn't fully like and a few things that didn't quite live up to their potential. As a result, Metroid Dread isn't quite my favorite 2D Metroid, but it's still definitely up there. I'd say my current ranking is as follows:
Super Metroid
Metroid Fusion
Metroid Zero Mission
Metroid Dread
Metroid: Samus Returns
Metroid II
Metroid
I consider everything above Metroid II to be amazing games. Metroid II I consider to be an okay, but kinda boring game, and Metroid I consider to be the only bad 2D Metroid game. I should also probably fit AM2R in there somewhere, but it's been a while since I played that and I forgot many things about it. I know that I considered Samus Returns to be the more interesting remake back then, but disregarding this, I might still rank AM2R somewhere above it.