Metroid Dread Mission Log, Entry 2

E.M.M.I. Defeated: 5

Last time I left off at when you get the Morph Ball and I was lamenting how the game made it hard to actually backtrack. And just when I said this, I ran into the red Teleportal, which brings you back to Artaris. But my joy didn't last long, because I decided to check out the new area above the portal, which turns out to be a slight mistake if you actually want to backtrack.

You come into another stressful sequence of running, this time from rising heat, and already get rewarded with the Varia Suit. But this also blocks off the passage right below the Teleportal, so you can't just easily backtrack through Artaris again. I decided to do so anyway, where you have to backtrack all the way over from Cataris, but I was curious what I could find inside the E.M.M.I. Zones, now that they are "peaceful".

Well, at least more peaceful than before, because they now get roamed by a variety of enemies. This feels a little bit similar to the final areas of Metroid II - Return of Samus (but not Samus Returns), which were devoid of enemies, because all life there was probably wiped out by the Metroids. Now, in Metroid Dread only some drones reside inside the E.M.M.I. Zones as long as the E.M.M.I. are there, but life comes back right when they get defeated. Almost as if the living beings on ZDR are scared of them or simply get killed by them.

The Teleportals themselves don't strike me as very useful, however, unlike the teleporters in Samus Returns. Since they only connect two points with each other, they are effectively just a different form of elevator. In one case there are even two same colored Teleportals right next to an elevator tube connecting the same areas...

Anyway, with the Varia Suit equipped you can make your way to what's probably the most classic boss in the game: Kraid. Since Nintendo has already showed the encounter in their trailers, only the second phase was a little bit surprising here, but it's essentially a complete throwback to the Super Metroid fight at that point.

It's not an easy battle, but what I loved about Samus Returns is how you have to master all of the bosses, slowly but surely. On my first try I could hardly make it to the second phase and later on I could go through the first phase unharmed. It's this rewarding feeling of getting better at combat that MercurySteam really gets right in their Metroid games.

This also gave the higher difficulty options a lot of replay value, because you truly had to show there that you've mastered these fights. It feels to me like the normal difficulty is already very tough, however. And the overuse of the Melee Counter as essentially a quick time event during battles is still quite prominent. "Push that X button at the right moment or you will die!"

It also feels like an unnecessary step back that Save Stations don't heal you. I actually got stuck in a situation where I saved at low health and I had to be extremely lucky not to die in the surrounding areas...

Now, the next E.M.M.I.was the yellow one with the speed upgrade. Weirdly enough, it felt also quite quick to get to its Central Unit and defeat it, even though it had the largest area to cover of all the E.M.M.I. so far. And this is how you get the Speed Booster, which is one item that I really didn't need back...

It was fun to use in Super Metroid, actually it was really cool in Other M as well, but both Metroid Fusion and Metroid: Zero Mission really turned those Shinespark puzzles into an abomination, where this seemingly makes a return in Metroid Dread. Well, to be fair, one impossible Shinespark stunt I've created myself at the following point in Burenia:

There were Speed Booster blocks right where I'm pointing at and I first thought that you some had to come from where I'm currently standing, so you can get to the Energy Part in the air stream to the right. But after a dozen of failed attempts, I ended up getting the item by speed boosting from the shuttle area and then hitting it with a Ball Spark from the right.

Of course the much easier and intended solution is to speed boost against the air stream. It's so obvious that this hurt a little... You even learn this quite early, but I was insistent on backtracking before that point, because I had trouble fighting the first Robot Chozo Soldier at Ferenia. I only had three Energy Tanks when I first encountered this mini-boss and it can hit like a truck, so I decided to go back to some of the previous areas to find more Energy Tanks. And this Energy Part was going to be my fourth, so I really wanted it...

It also didn't take long to find some real Shinespark puzzles, like the one above. Maybe I was overcomplicating things yet again, but to get the Missile Tank+ I had to store a Shinespark right before the right wall, then wall jump up, slide above the beam blocks, lay some bombs, quickly press ZL before falling down, jump and then do a Shinespark to the right... (Update: there is a much easier method, where you simply roll to the upper left corner and do a diagonal Shinespark as a Morph Ball, which also goes through the Beam Blocks.)

That's some crazy finger acrobatics right there and Metroid Dread doesn't like to make things easy for you. For example you have to press the L-stick in order to activate the Speed Booster and you have to perform all sorts of actions just perfectly to get this right. I do like how the ZL button gets used for the instant Morphball in many situations, however, which is something that I really wanted to have in Metroid: Samus Returns.

The use of extra buttons can be convenient and all of this really makes me want an HD remaster of Samus Returns on the Switch, so it could profit from this, because otherwise that game handled things much more conveniently. There was no Speed Booster for example and Ball Sparks were easy to do with the Spider Ball and Power Bomb combination. And the Grapple Beam was so much better...

Oh, the Grapple Beam.. If there's one small thing I could change about Metroid Dread, then it's how you use the Grapple Beam. It's like MercurySteam was challenging itself to make the controls needlessly convoluted.

You have to hold the L button to aim, then hold the ZR button to activate the Grapple Beam mode and then press Y to fire the Grapple Beam. Then you have to hold the Y button in order to swing, then press A to jump, release Y, but keep holding ZR, and finally press and hold Y again in order to get to the next grapple surface... Oh, and don't forget to aim properly during that or you will miss.

It's utterly amazing how bad, convoluted and unintuitive this is. Why not just directly use the Grapple Beam with the ZR button? That's even actually how you use the Grapple Beam in Super Smash Bros. (or the R button, depending on the controls, but it's ZR in my case). Why does everything have to go over the Y button? It would also be better if you could just fire missiles with R in the same fashion.

In the least there should be control options for this kind of stuff. Let me set up the controls in the way I would prefer it. I don't get how MercurySteam can get something so simple and normal so wrong... It really baffles and annoys me, where I don't think I will play the game as often as Samus Returns, unless Nintendo provides a good update for this (which won't happen).

But enough rants... Let's move on to the second major story part, which takes place at Ferenia and was quite interesting. Well, the big, evil Chozo Warrior is named "Raven Beak" and the story is even simpler than what you might have expected here. He just wants to use the Metroids as a biological weapon, like so many before him, and because Samus has exterminated them all on SR388, he lured her to ZDR to get her Metroid DNA. And he also hijacked the E.M.M.I. to reach this goal.

Now, the twist is that the X really are still alive on ZDR and now get released from a containment area, where the game effectively turns in Metroid Fusion. Instead of energy orbs and physical missiles you collect the X viruses again to refill. You could already see some infected Chozo Warriors in the trailers with the black goo, but I didn't really expect the X to return in the same old fashion because of this. This black Venom goo isn't really something that I associated with the X to begin with, where I'm hoping that there is an explanation why it all looks like that now... Otherwise it's really just the same X behavior as before.

Maybe I will find out soon, maybe this is just a different stylistic choice. In any case my latest achievement was taking down the Ice Missile E.M.M.I. – two more to go. Its freezing sight was very annoying and getting past this E.M.M.I. felt more like luck than anything else, where I'm not sure how this game will hold up for speed runners. I'm not invested in speedruns myself, but it's an interesting topic and Samus Returns already had similar issues with the random hiding spots of the Gamma Metroids. Here it feels like you can't really anticipate where the E.M.M.I. will show up...

I've previously compared them to the Phantoms in Phantom Hourglass, but this doesn't hold up, because there you could take you time and study the movements of the Phantoms on the map. In Metroid Dread you might be able to spot the E.M.M.I. on your mini map, but it's often hard to predict where it will be going and whether it's safe to move or not.

Once you get the Omega Blaster, however, the E.M.M.I. turn completely dumb for some reason and approach you slowly without using their abilities. If it just kept freezing you, then you wouldn't stand any chance. But I'm not complaining in that case.