Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 5 (Metroid Dread)

(Hi there! Given that this is a whole serendipitous bit of current event writing, it only feels right to give you all a spoiler warning heads-up. This game just came out yesterday and I'm going to talk about a bunch of stuff it does, especially story stuff, so if you're playing through it you'll want to wait until you finish before reading. Hope you've been enjoying the game, if you're playing! On with the show.)

BEEP BOOP IT'S MURDER TIME

There's just a bit of good timing at work here. Not only does Metroid Dread fit a spooky marathon perfectly, but I also spent most of my day yesterday playing the thing non-stop and I really want to talk about it. In the end, you gotta love stuff like this that gives me a good excuse to use a spot on something current. It's not like I can go to a theater and see Halloween Kills in three weeks anyway, so this is the most current events you're going to get. With that out of the way, let's see if I can be concise in talking about Metroid Dread.

It's a pretty good video game. There, that gets my foot in the door talking about it. It's a strange beast, simultaneously Metroid 5 and Metroid: Samus Returns 2. That dual sense permeates the whole thing. It is at once a followup on Fusion and a followup to Samus Returns, both in plot and in mechanics. Saving the plot for now, let's talk about those mechanics. In 2017 I appreciated the uniqueness of Samus Returns, with its free aiming and countering, even if I felt the countering slowed the game down a bit as it made every enemy beeline for you before you could kill it with a beam in early game. Dread feels better about it, and I think part of this is because I played with a controller instead of teeny 3DS buttons, so using the middle of my thumb to hit X in a pinch felt better. More to it, you really can just beam the beeliners early game if need be. Mid-to-late game is when countering becomes more of a needed skill. I appreciate that upgrade.

Overall, the switch to Switch works better for Mercurysteam Metroid. This game just felt a little better than I remember Samus Returns being... to a point. Before I complain, more praise. I got lost in this game. It doesn't have waypoints or a CPU telling you to go here. I had to parse out where I hadn't explored yet, remember shit, and go there with my new powerups. I appreciate that freedom to let me get stuck, lost in these twisty passages. That's peak Metroid to me. Also peak Metroid is being scared out of my fucking mind at spooky bullshit, which brings us to the EMMI. Fusion took an entire game and made it about being chased by an unkillable badass who can murder you in a second before you defeated them cathartically at the end. Dread plays this cycle out seven times for each robot, and it just about works. Stealthily dodge the robots, run from them while screaming, get upgrades, find the Gun That Kills The Robots, and blast their fucking heads off. Rinse and repeat seven times for a wild cycle of fear and catharsis.

Even so, parts of this cycle pissed me off. The robots catching you, for one. The penalty's ways severe, with two counter QTEs that may as well be frame fucking perfect. Yeah, you got me, time to pray to God I hit X exactly right. The checkpointing is forgiving, but it still doesn't feel good to mess this up. I nailed the second QTE exactly twice over the whole run. It's that tight. The whole game is pretty goddamned difficult. Recency bias may be at play here, but I'd call it the hardest Metroid game in terms of combat. Mixing Fusion and Samus Returns results in bosses you really have to learn the timing windows for, because they melt your health if you touch them. To say nothing of the final boss, who's on the middle range of Hard Fucking Video Game Bosses, and also plays into that story a little. Oh God. Let's talk about that.

I do like the move back to mostly silent protagonist for Samus, of course. She has one voiced line in the game and it's in Chozodian. The game takes an action speaks louder than words approach for Samus, and you can tell what she's feeling and thinking by her body langauge. Then we have the whole Chozo warrior angle. This is Mercurysteam following up on the added seeds they dropped in Samus Returns, but it has the unfortunate side effect of making that fannish erasure of the original Game Boy game kind of canon. Metroid 5 is following up on shit they added in the remake. The remake's the canon tale now. That upsets me, even if canon is just made-up bullshit. As for Raven Beak, our main antagonist... he's Samus's dad. He's Samus's shitty bird dad. No word of a lie, his Chozo DNA's in Samus and he calls her his daughter. There's a scene right before the last fight where you think you're talking to computer Adam but it's really Raven Beak, where he says "follow my orders, disobedience will not be tolerated" and Samus replies by shooting the computer in the face. It almost feels like a piss take at Other M, and yet Sakamoto is in the credits. IS this wishful thinking?

ANYWAY THEN YOU TURN INTO A FUCKING METROID, SUCK YOUR SHITTY BIRD DAD'S SOUL OUT OF HIS BODY, AND MELT HIS CRONENBERGIAN X-INFECTED MONSTER BODY WITH A FUCKING LASER. Holy shit. The original game's Metroids were a mysterious nightmare monster that posed a threat to the universe. Now Samus is the last Metroid, a blood-soaked beast in the shape of a woman with a Cronenbergian Metroid suit of her own. Some deus ex machina at the end from your good bird dad fixes this, but wow. Metroid Dread is some interesting shit. Mechanically, it's pretty good. A refinement of Samus Returns, and a return to form. It's not afraid to bare its monstrous teeth, though, both in plot and story. The one horrific thing it does at the end though, at least for a fan of the janky originals like I am? A montage of cards for the mainline series thus far. Instead of Metroid 1 and 2, it's Zero Mission and Samus Returns. The remakes have been canonized, despite Nintendo pushing you to play the original on Switch Online. Metroid Dread has made those original beep-boopy pieces of jank I love so much into historical curiosities, dead and buried.

Happy 35th anniversary.