Metroid Dredd: What if we took everything people disliked about Fusion, and made it worse?

 I'm ready for a little bit of a break from THE CLASSICS, so here's something else for today. We got a Switch 2 at launch, and in between playing Mario Kart World, I'm taking some time to dig around in the back catalog. I grabbed Metroid Dread, and vacillate between enjoying it and just wanted it to be over.

If you're not a fan, here's the short version on Metroid as a whole. Samus Aran (IS A GIRL!) is a bounty hunter. In the first game (and the GBA remake) she's contracted by the Galactic Federation to attack the planet Zebes, and stop the Space Pirates there who are using Metroids (flying enery sucking jelly fish parasites) for evil.

A Metroid.

The Metroid games (along with Castlevania: Symphony of the Night) were the forerunners of the modern "Metroidvania" genre. Wander around a big map, find new gear/powerups/magic, use that to access more areas, repeat. You might start the game with only basic abilities (walk, a shortish jump, a weak attack) and then find a better weapon somewhere. That'll let you kill stronger enemies, and blow opened armored doors. One of those doors will have an item that lets you jump further or double jump, that'll let you climb higher to find the armor that lets you enter the lava cave, etc.

Dread is the 6th mainline title, and the most recent in both the real world and series chronology.

Metroid II: Return of Samus moved the series to Gameboy (it's kind of drifted around but is more on the handheld side of things ever since). Most famous for introducing Samus's giant pauldrons, and for the dramatic choice of having you genocide all but one of the titular Metroids on their home planet of SR388. It got an okay remake on the 3DS (same devs as Dread), and a much better fan remake on PC that Nintendo tried to shut down, but isn't too hard to find.

I could've had this game for free. I picked Dr. Mario instead. Mistakes were made.

A couple years later, Super Metroid came out for the SNES. At the end of the last game, Samus found the final Metroid in its larval state and took it back to a lab for study.  Ridley (a Space Pirate that looks like a dragon, and Samus's arch-nemesis/backstory parent murderer) attacks, steals it, and takes it back to Zebes. It's a perennial best game ever choice, and still holds up. In the end, the baby metroid sacrifices itself to save Samus, and no games came out for almost a decade.

Which brings us the Metroid Fusion for the GBA, the game which Dread IMO, was made to "fix", but failed at. Metroid Fusion is a good videogame, but not a great Metroid game. It controls well, the power ups are fun, the bosses are solid, it's creepy when it wants to be, etc., etc. But you spend the whole time with a computerized version of your ex-boyfriend bossing you around. That's not very "wander around in caves nonlinearly), which is what most people wanted/expected. Doors are locked, paths are marked, it's a very cool guided tour of a research space station with new/different alien parasites (the X Parasites, which have gone out of control without and Metroids to prey on them), but a very guided tour.

There's also Metroid: Other M a Wii game that everyone hated that didn't really advance the story (it takes place between Super and Fusion). And a ton of spin offs, most notably the very popular first person Prime series, which takes place between the first and second mainline games.

So, why is Dread bad?  Short version: MercuryStream (the out of house developer that worked with Nintendo) learned all the wrong lessons from the "problems" with Fusion, and made them worse. Thus, instead of a good game/bad Metroid, we wind up with a flat bad game. Before I go any further, I want to link this blog post by Michael "Kayin" O'Reilly, the developer of I Wanna Be the Guy. It covers a lot of the same ground, and he knows way more about games than I do.

The two issues that people like to site about Fusion are:

1. The SA-X

2. Railroading

And neither one of these is wrong. The SA-X is a cool idea for a lot of reasons (which I'll get back to later) but its AI sucks, and that really hampers its potential. And Fusion is by far the most railroady Metroid game. While they vary in where they fall on the truly wandering around aimlessly to aggressively nudging you in the right direction spectrum, none lock you out of areas and say "GO HERE!" as much as Fusion.

How do they make those things worse? E.M.M.I. and slightly different railroading.

E.M.M.I. (Extraplanetary Multiform Mobile Identifier) are nigh-indestructible DNA harvesting robots. They want to drill into Samus's skull and suck out the Metroid DNA that got stuck in there at the beginning of Fusion. A lot of people have complained about these for a lot of reasons. I'm not here to rehash the argument (yes, they're bad, and I think the devs knew it, but were stuck with them), but I want to show how they're emblematic of MercurySteam learning all the wrong lessons from Fusion, and how they represent the greater problems with the game's design as a whole. Those issues are:

1. Stuff for the sake of stuff

2. The story is, "Fuck you, player!"

3. Not letting you play Metroid.

4. Parry this, you filthy casual! 

There are 8 E.M.M.I.s in the game. The middle 6 are largely interchangable. They chase after you with increasingly effective powers, which are, in general, slightly outpaced by Samus's upgrades. The first one is actually kind of cool. The last one gets cutscene murdered when MercuryStream realized they let you get 90% through the game and they forgot to put the plot they wanted in.

The first E.M.M.I chases Samus, but is visibly damaged. It kind of does a zombie shamble after her. A better game would use this for atmosphere, but Dread just uses it as a tutorial for how they work and how you'll fight them throughout the game. It is, by far, the best one in the game, since it's one of the few that actually does anything besides chasing you around being annoying. That lack of personality is the first sign that the devs had no idea what they were doing when they "fixed" Fusion.

The E.M.M.I.'s replace the SA-X from Fusion. In theory, SA-X is even more unstoppable than they are. In the opening of the game, Samus is escorting some scientists, when a yellow blob pops out of a small alien she killed, globs onto her, and almost kills her. They have to partially cut her out of her famous powersuit (see Metroid 2 pic above), as the alien has taken over her nervous system. (Short aside for non-fans, Samus's powersuit was created by the Chozo, a species of bird-aliens with super advanced technology. Even its weakest form is on par with anything that the galaxy at large has access to. It's physically integrated with her body and, up until this point, she's basically never seen without it, except as a reward for clearing the games under a certain time. They also enhanced her physically with some of their own DNA. Taking her down and losing the suit is a big deal.) They inject her with some Metroid DNA as a last resort, and it's able to fight off the parasite, and modifies the suit. It's blue now (usually orange before), more organic, and less bulky.

The parts they cut out are sent to a research lab, but eventually reanimate due to the parasite forming the SA-X (Samus-Aran X parasite). Other than having no pupils, it looks just like Samus's iconic form. 

It's a cool story/gameplay idea. Samus is depowered (this happens between most games, but losing the suit is one of the better reasons), turned into something new (your previous enemy), and you have to deal with something that looks like the old Samus chasing you around and trying to murder you. It's an obvious near final boss, and finally beating it is so satisfying.

All that aside, it only show up about half a dozen times throughout the game, is predictable, and pretty easy to dodge. Yeah, it's invincible and can freeze you (the Metroid DNA makes Samus vulnerable to the Ice Beam, one of her trademark weapons, and the primary one used by the SA-X) and then kill you easily, but it also has the pathfinding of a 6 month old baby.

Fusion ends with Samus facing down (and losing to) a cloned Omega Metroid. At the last second, the seemingly defeated SA-X rushes in, fights the Metroid (whether this is because the X sees the Metroid as a bigger threat, or some of that Samus-heroine DNA is shining through is left up to you), loses, and is absorbed by Samus. Samus finally looks like Samus again (taking on the suits traditional orange color scheme), gets the Ice Beam back, and beats the Metroid.

It's really cool.

E.M.M.I. are generic robots with almost no backstory and no reason for you to care. They're color coded, and have slightly different abilities, but mostly kill Samus by bumping into her to trigger a crappy quick-time-event cutscene. Most of the bosses are actually QTE cutscenes for the most part. In a game that came out in 2021. Why? It's not even for bonus damage, some just become invincible when you take off enough health and make you go through their attack pattern until you hit the counter to advance to the next stage.

And, again, there are 8 of them. You get to cutscene the last one, but that's 7 almost identical boss fights. Oh, and to beat them you have to absorb the power of a nearby Central Unit to temporarily unlock the OMEGA CANNON. Each CU is also a virtually identical mini-boss fight, followed by a forced tutorial for the gimmicky super cannon you have to use to kill the E.M.M.I. by standing there and shooting its face for a long time until it melts, followed by firing a charged blast. The camera and controls in these sections are different than for the rest of the game (something people complained about in Other M, another unlearned lesson), and they basically just consist of "find a long hallway and aim good." It's okay, since every one is preceded by the exact same forced tutorial, in case your forgot. (If you have to insert the same tutorial a half dozen times, maybe just make the awkward mini-game better?) There's about 10 other repeat boss/mini boss fights throughout the game, again leading to the question of why we need so many of them in the first place?

One E.M.M.I. could've been a unique, if meh, boss. 6 more are just filler. The Central Units are a little better. They have some callbacks to old Metroid bosses, and don't really scale, so they let you see how you're powering up. I don't love them, but I might forgive sprinkling four or five through the game to show your progression. 

SA-X wasn't bad because it was uninteresting thematically, it was bad because (once you learned the pattern) it was trivial. E.M.M.I. are thematically boring, and only slightly harder to get around once you learn how to deal with them. Except the game shoves in an extra power up and tells you to deal with them the wrong way.

E.M.M.I. are really movement and memorization challenges. Find the route, execute it quickly and with percision, and 90% of the time you'll be fine. (The other 10% is when they spawn in a bad place and you just have to wait.) But the game doesn't say, "Plot your route carefully and move quickly to minimize your exposure to E.M.M.I. Instead, it says, "Use the Phantom Cloak." Phantom Cloak is a new ability that lets Samus go invisible for a limited amount of time while stationary or moving slowly. Stealth is not totally unheard of in Metroid games (though never a core mechanic), but the implementation here is poor. Basically, while cloaked, you move slowly but E.M.M.I. can't find you. They can still bump you to trigger their attack. Even if we accept the use of a stealth mechanic here, the conflict between the high speed acrobatics that are your main defence against E.M.M.I. and the slow speed of the cloak is confusing and annoying. And neither of these fit with the overall gameplay of Metroid, which is explore-shoot-platform. There's not time to explore when you're trying to clear a room in 10 seconds, you don't fight the E.M.M.I. (even SA-X could be stunned with some weapons), but you do get to platform around, I guess. The Cloak is basically useless outside of E.M.M.I. (it lets you avoid "normal" enemies, but is almost never worth it due to the speed/time issues and opens a few doors), making it the first of the game's completely pointless power ups, which (along with the excessive bosses/minibosses) are point one on my list.

In short, the player has no reason to care about E.M.M.I. from a story perspective, they're not fun (sometimes even anti-fun) to deal with, and there's at least twice as many as their needed to be.

The same thing happens with power ups and bosses in general. I'd often sit down to play for half an hour or so, fight three or four bosses (at least one of which was usually a repeat, and at best one of which would be interesting) to get a couple power ups. Sometimes I'd get one that replaced the previous one only a pick up or two later (why do cross bombs exist?) 

Missiles are probably the best example of this. The traditional progression is Missile>Missile Tanks> Super Missile. Samus gets the basic missiles pretty early (usually item one or two) expands her ammo by finding "Missile Tanks" (in most games these are actually the same power up and the first Missile Tank gives you missiles), and eventually upgrade them with Super Missiles. Fusion swapped the Super Missile for Ice Missiles, since Samus can't use the Ice Beam (Metroids are allergic to ice), and added a charge missile. It was cool, shot a giant snow flake all over the screen. Dread starts you with missiles (weaker than they were in previous games), gives you Super and Ice Missiles as separate upgrades, and then adds a weird mini-seeker missile. And has two kinds of missile tanks. Regular (+2 missiles, down from +5 in most games) and Plus (+10). By the end of my non-completionist playthrough, I had over 200 missiles. I sure loved doing puzzles to find powerups that gave me less than 1% more ammo capacity. (For the record, I don't think there's much advantage to going over about 150, even for the toughest bosses.) But hey, it let them put 80-some missile pickups in the game, and more is better, right?

The same goes for health. Energy Tanks were good enough for the last 40 years, but we need to do Zelda heart pieces that you need to combine to make a tank now (but also regular tanks, and technically they came from Other M, but maybe don't copy stuff from the worst game in the series?)

It even extends to basic weapons and power ups. Many of the classic abilities have downgraded versions (diffusion beam that sort of goes through walls before wave beam, cross bombs before power bombs). Several other abilities are downgraded for no reasons. The Space Jump has tighter timing than it had in Fusion or Super and the "Pulse Radar" is like a boring version of the X-Ray scope.

So much is in this game just to be in there, and even then expect to only take ~10 hours real time on your first playthrough.

So, that's all the ways that E.M.M.I. shows what's wrong with Dread. But the SA-X was only one of the the critiques people gave Fusion. The other was the railroady map routing. 

Traditionally, your exploration in Metroid games is mostly limited by your abilities. There were occasional, "kill the boss to open" doors, but they were rare. Fusion forces you to follow the mission sequence, and just seals the airlocks behind you. Dread pretends not to do this for most of the game, but still has a bossy computer, and randomly closing doors. I just about gave up on the game when, about 2/3 of the way through, half the map froze and it went, "Uhhh, I don't know why this happened, the X Parasites must be afraid of you." You're just forcing me to the next boss fight game, be honest about it.

Even worse are the huge amount of one way doors and other paths. These are fairly rare in most of the Metroid games. But in Dread you're constantly double checking the map to make sure those rooms actually connect, and there isn't a random wall where a door "should" be or anything. Even worse is the completely disconnected area-map. The game is split into several areas, like most Metroid games, and each is connected by a poorly disguised loading screen, sorry, Samus awkwardly sitting in a subway car, no wait... a visual transportation method. There we go. There are even some teleporters scattered around so you can fast travel! Except they're all two way only and sometimes lead to dead ends. By the end of the game I started using a walkthrough to make sure I was reading the railroad right, since taking the time it took to run across the map, dogleg around weird dead ends, etc. was too long for me to waste if I was wrong.

There's just no reason for it to be this way, and it required MercuryStream to actively decide to do it. No one forced them to turn "normal" doors into one ways. Add in the seemingly random boss fights with minimal connection to power ups, and the much weakened movement abilities (no spider-ball, bad space jump, etc.) and it's just a chore to move through the map, even when the game only gives you one way to go.

Besides the big issues, I have a couple smaller complaints:

1. Shinespark Puzzles everywhere: The Shinespark is a special move Samus can do by charging the speed booster and then dashing in a direction. I've always found it a little awkward, but it's a core mechanic at this point. The problem is that Dread's bonus item puzzles over rely on it, while skipping over other options. I don't know that I actually used the Grapple Beam as a swing (as opposed to a door unlocker) a half dozen times in the game. No Ice Beam/Missile free the enemy to use as a platform challenges. One or two bomb jumps total? Why neglect so many classic Metroid puzzles just to squeeze in another "find a close enough flat stretch, then do a jump puzzle"?

2. Health Energy are just Zelda hearts now. A lot of attacks (especially bosses) knock off a whole health tank or more. It's not a big deal, since killing a random enemy (including the filler in the boss rooms) gives back the same amount. It's just weird to go from going +/- 5 or 10 health most of the time in older gamers to +/- 100~

3. WTF is this story? I could probably do a whole post on this, and I just don't care enough. The traditional Metroid games do minimal direct storytelling and keep it environmental. There are, charitably, a half dozen characters across the first 3 games. Dread decides we need dialogue and cutscenes and stuff, but it's all kind of pointless (the big bad wants to conquer the galaxy! He'll use Samus to do it! Samus is kind of a ditz now! There's betrayal! That doesn't really make sense! Characters pop up at random!)

This is the point where I'd normally suggest how to fix the game. I don't have an answer. Throw out the E.M.M.I.s, get an actual plot, redo the whole upgrade structure, redo the map... Have some clue what a good game or a good Metroid game looks like? I'm gonna go back and replay some of the others I think.