|
Super Metroid = Best Metroid but the Prime Trilogy was phenomenal when it first came out (first is still the best but I like what they tried to do with the sequels). What I've personally lamented since Super Metroid is turning Samus into a ninja. The actions are so snappy and she's so agile that I miss her being just a drat tank. I mean, once you got a few Energy Tanks under your belt, you tried to avoid damage but you weren't really too scared of getting hit. It was the environmental damage that hurt you more than the enemies. Super Metroid just had more weight behind Samus' actions, beams, etc. You knew a Super Missile hit because it shook the screen. Dread looks good, though. I was worried from the first trailer than the main antagonist would just be those un-killable Hunter robots. I mean, they're interesting but the game felt very "small." With the 2nd Trailer, holy poo poo. It looks like the spiritual successor to Super Metroid, which is the gold standard in my book. Kraid, what looked like Phantoon, Gravity Suit, Speed Boost/Shinespark, and a lot of Chozo stuff. Will we get to kill Ridley? Not a doubt in my mind. Hell, we might even kill Mother Brain.
|
#
¿
Aug 28, 2021 01:32
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 15, 2024 16:39 |
|
|
I replayed Super Metroid this week. Without any help, I managed an 85% clear in about 5 hours. There were a few sequence breaks I remember from back in the day like early Super Missiles (but it took a minute to get Mockball down) but overall, I played it mostly how it was "meant" to be played and it was still very enjoyable. I must have repressed Maridia because that was my least favorite part of the game and I have so little memory of it beyond remembering you had to go down a few of the quicksand traps to get items. I forgot how small New Tourian is. It's hard to even call it a final level because it's only about 4-5 rooms and then Mother Brain. Don't get me wrong, when I first played the game almost 30 years ago, the giant Metroid was terrifying and memorable but it only appears two times. I would have swore it played a larger role but nope. Twice. However, even though I'm nitpicking a bit, it's still the GOAT of Metroid. Prime is also fantastic but Super laid the groundwork for everything in the series and for an entire genre. Dread is looking really good to me. The one thing that sticks out the more I see it is how small Samus is most of the time. In Super, Samus takes up a good chunk of the screen due to the resolution of the game but Samus is nimbly bouncing all over the place in Dread while the environment takes center stage. Only in boss battles and against the Emmis does it seem like you kind of regain center stage. I think that amps the feeling of isolation and is closer to the original Metroid, if anything. Can't wait to play it in a week.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 2, 2021 01:46
|
|
|
Yes, the Pirate Logs in the original Prime added a ton of ambience to the game. Not only are you the bogeyman but your actions cause them to get more and more desperate. I love how they acknowledge that you're hacking their systems at will. They did seem pretty confident that the Omega Pirate could stand up to Samus but then again, the Pirates were never the brightest bunch. And yes, them trying to re-create the Morph Ball was fantastic.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 4, 2021 22:44
|
|
|
Reviews are looking good. Like others have said, I've seen an average length of anywhere between 7-10 hours at 70-85% completion. Considering I took 5.5 hours to beat Super Metroid after not playing it for years, I'm not going to complain. In fact, a common theme I'm hearing is that the game is downright hard, which is encouraging to me. After playing Hyperlight Drifter, Dead Cells, and Hades I welcome a (beatable) challenge, even if I do have to bang my head against it for a minute.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 7, 2021 02:45
|
|
|
I beat the game on Normal and am 3/4ths of the way through a Hard run (~3 hours in). A lot has been said already but here's my 2 cents: Game is great, though not perfect by any stretch. I don't put it up there with BotW or anything like that but it's easily the slickest, most-refined Metroid of them all. It's not as precedent-setting as Super or Prime but the gameplay is just as good, if not better than any in the series. A strong 9/10 and GotY contender. The game does railroad you a bit. I was looking forward to going back to the mental notes I made while traversing the earlier areas ("I need Morph Ball for that." "Oh, obvious Speed Booster room" etc.) but the ability to backtrack is actually limited early on unless you know the sequence-breaks and have the ability to pull them off. Only once did I ever feel completely stuck: just after Spin Boost and all the Fire Plant thingies blocking every conceivable exit. In reality, I just needed to time the double jump back into the EMMI room better. I thought I was missing something but I just didn't stick the landing well enough. The only time I felt like I was fighting the controls were against the bosses but I eventually got over it with enough muscle memory. For my second time going through on Hard, I was floored at how much better I was at the beginning. I think I beat the first boss within the first 20 minutes and was jumping, shooting, and sliding like a champ. But it's a great feeling mastering Samus' move set and just clowning the same enemies that gave you trouble before. After getting bodied by the final boss after 5 or 6 attempts (getting a little further each time), I went to bed and in the morning beat it on the first try. Speaking of bosses, there's always an initial difficulty curve but the game isn't unfair: you really can avoid everything. I applaud the design and scope of many of the bosses. Some are more memorable than others but I found all of them to be fun, even the repeated ones (because once you figure them out, they're not hard at all). I think the bosses are the highlight of the game, even more so than the EMMI encounters. To say a few words about them, they served their purpose well. I didn't treat them as enemies, I treated them as puzzles. Their zones are very straight-forward if you recognize that each part is just A-to-B. Sometimes you have to find B but the cat-and-mouse game didn't feel too punishing especially since the respawn point is just outside the door you went in. I would love to try a "No Deaths" run but some of the EMMI encounters get you with RNG that is hard to overcome. I thought the Omega mechanic was another part of the puzzle: where do I have LOS enough to pull this off, etc. The only thing I wish was that there came a point where you could go toe-to-toe with one. It's the opposite of Mega Man X's introduction: you never power-up to the point where the unbeatable boss becomes beatable. My few true complaints was the lackluster soundtrack. The only times I perked up is when I heard Super motifs. Nothing was memorable to the point where if you asked me to hum an original tune from the game, I couldn't do it. Super had a great soundtrack, so did Prime, but this fell pretty flat to me. The other complaint is that I did experience the end-of-game crash after my first defeat of the final boss (which was quite the undertaking to begin with). I know that's being addressed but what a hell of a bug to have during an escape sequence. Story thoughts: I, too, thought the ADAM dialogue was drivel until the end. It was *almost* too clever for its own good but now that I'm on my second playthrough, it reads like a book. Having never played Fusion, I didn't get the whole "Lady" thing but having read up on that, ADAM calling Samus "Samus" was a dead-giveaway. Raven Beak's self-wankery is actually quite funny in retrospect and with the twist in mind, it makes Samus' reaction to him at the end even more reasonable. She saw through it early but as the mostly silent protagonist, she doesn't let on she figured it out. My thoughts on the ending is a little different than the consensus I've been reading here. On my second playthrough, when Quiet Robe reactivates the EMMIs, he says something to the effect of "I'm counting on you." At first, I thought he was referring to the EMMI: as in, he was counting on the EMMI to get Samus' DNA because now he's fully under Raven Beak's control. Upon reflection, he's talking about Samus. I think Quiet Robe knew Raven Beak's plan of jump-starting Samus' Metroid metamorphosis and the only way to get her to fully mature is continue to challenge her to the point of breakthrough. The EMMIs still posed a challenge and would help her achieve that end state. Also, even though QR was reanimated by the X, I don't think at any point he was ever controlled. The Thoha genes or whatever granted him immunity to the X, just as they had control over Metroids. Thus, the ending makes sense: QR is still his honorable self and sees that by sacrificing himself, he can save Samus. It has little to do with what the X wants or how the SA-X treated Samus in Fusion: QR never lost control. If anything, he was prescient enough to realize that if Samus achieved Metroid-status, she'd murder Raven Beak and need to come back to the ship (which she'd destroy if she touched it). I think QR was just a few steps ahead the whole time, even going so far as to *expect* to be infected by the X
|
|
#
¿
Oct 16, 2021 03:37
|
|
|
Damage on Normal isn't too awful but Hard is a different matter. I died to regular enemies more than once, as some of the later-game enemies were hitting for 200+ per attack. The only boss I struggled with on Hard was the flying electric beetle-thing. I still don't know how to avoid those homing attacks and on Hard, they hit like a truck. I cheesed it by Shinesparking it at the get-go but only barely beat it even then. Everything else I pretty much breezed through I even managed to land a Shinespark on Z-57, with 19 health left Strangely enough the final boss only took two attempts. I find that his attacks are telegraphed well enough and the actual damage they do is much less than some other bosses. Plus, if you do it right, you're getting health/ammo off of him all the time. Again, hard but fair. My Hard time completion was 5:07 with something like 43% items. Relative to my Normal clear (91%), I still didn't feel like I was lacking missiles or enough Energy Tanks. The game puts enough items on the "main path" that exploration is just gravy on top.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 16, 2021 17:58
|
|
|
You know, there's one thing I wish would have happened toward the end: After Samus starts getting all Metroid-grabby, I really wish you could use that ability outside of cutscenes. Like your melee attack becomes a grab+hold that drains life. I guess I haven't tried but has anyone tried to melee an enemy with Metroid Suit on? I mean Hyper Beam is obviously the go-to but I haven't stopped to try melee'ing anything. Also, I doubt it's in the game because the last item is well, the last item, but has anyone tried to figure out the Crystal Flash? There would be very few use-cases that late but it'd be a cool easter egg.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 16, 2021 22:05
|
|
|
That has to be damage/shot and Wide Beam shoots 3. The damage is near-identical to Super Metroid in function but unlike Super, each shot is its own entity because you can definitely shoot a Wide Beam at an angle and have two shots hit terrain and the 3rd hit the target. I'm curious if the shots from Dispersion are separate/additive to the Charge Shot. Or if they're just shots that partially penetrate terrain. If you mash buttons, I can see how Plasma/Wave can out-DPS Super/Ice Missiles but I don't like dedicating a finger to it. There are some videos of spamming it so hard there's no space between shots. Also, I have to believe the Storm Missiles, which fire in 3 round bursts, do 100/shot for a total of 300. Difference is that you you can usually get 3-4 homing icons on them and they're almost guaranteed to hit. There might also be modifiers on bosses or certain enemies that take extra damage from Storm Missiles because of the "does extra damage to Electrical"
|
|
#
¿
Oct 17, 2021 01:40
|
|
|
Mr. Nice! posted:This is kindof where I'm at. My first run (~11 hours), I remember thinking "God, there's a lot of game here." Second run (Hard, ~5 hours) it felt way smaller. 3rd Run (normal, 3 hours), it feels really lean. To be fair, Super took me something like 5 hours after not playing it for 20 years so I probably shouldn't complain that my first run was twice that of Super's but I do want there to be more now. Plus, my OCD wants there to be another level above Cataris on the map  I don't know if DLC would ever be in the works but we got it for BotW. It's just a shame that I'm basically "done" with the game one week in. It's a great game but I don't really have a reason to keep playing it besides getting faster.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 18, 2021 02:10
|
|
|
Regarding the linearity of the game, I definitely felt it on my first playthrough and noticed the "breadcrumb" strategy right off. The map designers obviously put a ton of missile items just out of reach but with obvious tells on how to get them and once you get an item, if you just follow the items you couldn't get on the first pass, the lead you directly to the next part of the critical path. What I didn't like is that after playing Metroid for years, you start taking mental notes to come back to an area once you get "X" item and when you did get X item, getting back to the area in question wasn't possible. The railroading effect there was pretty strong, not awful, but aggressive. However, I was surprised how quickly the game introduced you to the new environments. In Super, you make a quick trip into Norfair before returning and the Wrecked Ship is on the outskirts of Maridia before you really go into Maridia proper but you kind of stay in the same biome for large chunks of time. In Dread, you're jumping all over the place. The only thing I kept expecting, but never got, was going into an area "above" Cataris. That area seems conspicuously empty. After beating the game 100%, I finally started looking at sequence breaking and that's where the I think the game actually shines. The early Grappling Beam, Bomb, and Shine Spark puzzles (i.e. early Gravity Suit) were obviously pre-planned by the Devs. I'm glad this stuff is in there because you're not "breaking" the game via glitches to do these sequence breaks: just using skill to go off the critical path. It's the Pseudo-Wave and clip glitching that I'm not a big fan of. The only one I think is pretty ok is the Water Bomb Jumping that gets you through a few areas you couldn't before. Boss Keys does point this out but I don't think he gave enough credit to the level design being a lot more open than initially thought. It's surprisingly open if you know what to look for and have the skill to pull it off.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 30, 2021 15:22
|
|
|
My Hard Mode run was actually 4 hours faster than my first normal run and I blew through bosses way easier than on normal. The only thing "hard" about it is that it's less forgiving of mistakes. I mean, what it really boils down to is only being able to take 2-3 hits in a boss fight versus 4-5 and occasionally dying to a regular enemy if you are playing aggressively. Once you get the patterns down, you can routinely take no damage on mini-bosses and maybe 1 hit against some of the longer/more complicated fights (Escue is the worst on Hard, even with the initial Shinespark hit).
|
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2021 02:43
|
|
|
Re: Kraid If the whole "Raven Beak staged this whole thing to unlock Samus' Metroid metamorphosis" then capturing [a] Kraid makes sense as a challenge to further push Samus to her limits. I'd still say that's a weak reason but out-of-universe, Kraid is a crowd-pleaser and wink back at previous titles. By that logic, Ridley should probably be in it, too, but maybe he's finally dead? (Who am I kidding, he'll be in the next one!)
|
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2021 22:54
|
|
|
I think the one thing that is standing out for me right now is that even though I've beaten the game 5 times, I keep thinking about playing the game. I know all the tricks, I can sequence break, beat bosses without taking a hit and 100% if I want to but I'm still drawn back because the game is just fun. I know there was a lot of controversy over the AAA price tag but I've already spent about 30 hours on the game and enjoyed every single minute. I really hope they make a sequel or at least push out some DLC. It's not a "small" game (it's by far the largest Metroid in map size) but I wish there was about twice as much of it. It's a lot like Breath of the Wild in that you don't want it to end. I feel like this Samus/gameplay style would lend itself to 2 to 3 more games really easily.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2021 03:30
|
|
|
Here's a controversial opinion: the thing that has me disappointed me the most in Dread is that they kept the Wide Beam for all subsequent powerups. I really liked that Plasma in Super went with twin long beams that oscillated. Triple Beam gets stale and has been the staple since Fusion and Returns. Bring back the glory of Plasma.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 2, 2021 02:45
|
|
|
Going through those categories, Dread is only in two: Game of the Year and Best Action/Adventure. Not Art Design, Music, Direction, etc. which some of the other GOTY games are up for. It's like Dread is there due to "intangibles." If Dread wins, it really does say more about the lack of competition than the game itself. It's a good game, no doubt, but 9.0/10 is all it gets out of me. If that's enough to win this year, it was king of a weak field.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 17, 2021 03:06
|
|
|
Renegret posted:God gently caress Samus is so loving badass Does it have to be a flash shift or can you just jump? Kraid keeps getting closer and closer...you might be able to just hop in there! Makes me think there's some other cutscenes we don't know about because people are too straightforward in killing bosses?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 23, 2021 00:59
|
|
|
Well, to be fair, any kind of large area where Speed Booster would speed up travel times would probably be condemned for being un-interesting. We had teleporters in Dread. The only issue is that load times were too long. If Fast Travel was actually, you know, fast, no one would complain.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 24, 2021 20:52
|
|
|
As far as I know, Hard Mode's only departure from Normal is that you take 2x damage. Enemy health is unaffected.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 18, 2021 20:08
|
|
|
I still haven't picked up Prime Remastered yet but it was a magical experience 20+ years ago. It would feel familiar, I'm sure to replay it but I have forgotten so much it might as well be a fresh playthrough. As a "Super will always be the best Metroid no matter what. Shup up, I'm not even considering anything else," I still rank Prime as 2a (with Dread as 2b) and the gap between 1 and 2 isn't that big. I think reading the pirate entries of in Prime was probably one of the most enjoyable experiences in the series because they portray Samus as the Terminator: hacking their systems at will, blowing through their defenses, being utterly unstoppable and of course, their experiments with morph ball tech. It made you, as the player, feel like a badass. It was also quite obvious toward the end that even the bosses would have hard time just slugging it out with you because you were goddamned tank. Dread really dialed back the power fantasy, and that's ok, but I do enjoy Samus being the badass she is.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2023 21:13
|
|
|
I think Fusion was the end of “tank Samus” because they played up her vulnerability relative to the unstoppable SA-X. Even at the end of the game when you finally throw down, you never feel like you can go toe-to-toe. Dread felt like an extension of this. Even at your most powerful (barring Metroid Samus), the literally invincible robots and most of the bosses could completely overpower you. I like tank Samus, though. Dread’s smooth controls make me miss that less but sometimes you just want to crush some skulls. I grew up with Samus being a 6’2” linebacker in a power suit so I kind of expect some physicality.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 12, 2024 02:32
|
|
|
Super Metroid had the option of turning off upgrades that I don’t believe was ever fully exploited. You never really needed to unless you were handicapping yourself. Having a low-grav biome where High Jump was a liability or another biome where speed booster and plasma ignited the environment could be fun. I mean there are certain upgrades that never make sense to turn off but I wish Super leaned into that more and other games expanded on.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 12, 2024 15:38
|
|
|
Right. If the EMMIs did one thing wrong is that late game Samus was still no match for them. They were still utterly invincible. There should have been a final fight where you can go toe-to-toe with one without resorting to tricks or hyper beams. Just a straight-up, "You got me good at the beginning but I'm not that person anymore" throwdown. The fact that you could hurt/defeat Raven Beak (who literally manhandled the first EMMI per the wall art) but not any of the EMMIs themselves isn't quite a plot hole but is hard to reconcile.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 13, 2024 03:30
|
|
|
TaurusOxford posted:They mean the unlockable art, one of which shows Raven Beak after he just curbstomped the now-broken EMMI that you run into in the game. Yes, that’s the one. I presume it means Raven Beak actually fought it (his arm cannon is still smoking) and didn’t rely on subterfuge. Again, it would have been nice for Samus to beat one fair-and-square toward the end.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 13, 2024 22:49
|
|
|
I wonder if Samus is getting tired of having all her upgrades stripped away. Like, her demeanor in Dread is easily “I’m getting too old for this poo poo” as evidenced above. She’s already merc’d two whole planets by this point and even giant beasties like Kraig are old news. With the first boss, she’s all “If I had my OG abilities, I would have killed you in 3 seconds.”
|
|
#
¿
Feb 8, 2024 21:41
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 15, 2024 16:39 |
|
|
W.T. Fits posted:Older Metroids games I've played always felt like they were based around exploring, gradually powering up, and eventually tackling the bosses, and then having a race against the clock at the very end. Once you've cleared the game, the replay value was in going back and seeing if you could do it faster, or with fewer upgrades. Speed running the game was an optional challenge available after completing it. I thought the EMMI sections were puzzles: no more, no less. There is a "right" way to do them and you just have to figure them out. Some of the early complaints were "EMMI sections have no weight to them because if you die, you just respawn outside the EMMI zone with no repercussions." I think it was obvious that you wouldn't figure it out on the first try and if you had to go six rooms back to give it another shot, people would have bounced really hard off it. If I had to improve on those sections, I would have made the ways of dealing with the later EMMIs more about trapping them in environmental hazards then constantly finding a Mother Brain to kill and go through the same song and dance. Like, doing the hyperbeam thing is fine a few times but after that, it's all about outsmarting them. Drop them in acid or lava, crush them under a rock, cause a bigger enemy to engage them, etc.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 30, 2024 02:59
|
|