E.M.M.I. Defeated: 6
The end is getting near. At least it feels like this. I wasn't able to finish the game this weekend, but that's okay, because I'm on vacation right now. Story spoilers incoming, so please don't keep reading unless you either don't care or you've defeated at least six of the E.M.M.I., which is all except for one.
Now, after acquiring the Ice Missiles it didn't take long to get to the next E.M.M.I. encounter and even get you stuck with it. One of the next accessible power-ups is the Scan Pulse at Ghavoran, which is really great. It gives you the exact information that you want, without leaving any "marks of shame" on your map, like the Pulse Radar in Samus Returns did. But you'll quickly learn that you can't go back right now from where you got this item, so you have to proceed forward.
Overall, I like the usage of Aeion a lot more than in the Nintendo 3DS title, especially since it's a simple cooldown mechanic, instead of another resource that needs to be replenished. Whenever you needed Aeion somewhere to progress in Samus Returns, like with the Lightning Armor or the Phase Drift, the game also needed to provide these big Aeion orbs for refills. This isn't necessary here and feels a lot more smartly designed. Except maybe the Phantom Cloak...
Your next nightmare is the Wave Beam E.M.M.I. that can you detect through walls and shoot a stun projectile at you. Adam gives the "advice" that you should have nothing to fear with your Phantom Cloak, as if it were this easy...
Well, for me it didn't seem like the Phantom Cloak was doing me any favors. This particular E.M.M.I. is extremely "in your face". You go through an E.M.M.I. Zone Door and it's right there, waiting for you. You can use the Phantom Cloak right when entering the area, but if you stand still, the E.M.M.I. will bump into you eventually. And if you move, you're quick to use up all your Aeion, where then the Phantom Cloak uses up your health energy instead.
So, what to do? Well, the solution at this point was to just "run, run, run" and hope for the best. If the cloak isn't doing me any favors, I'm not using this and my best chance was to run for my life. To make things worse, large parts of the Ferenia E.M.M.I. Zone are flooded and I still didn't have the Gravity Suit yet...
But after successfully running from this E.M.M.I. like three or four times, the game gives you the Space Jump ability, which is like "gg" for the E.M.M.I. – good luck chasing me when I'm flying all over the place. You also get the Gravity Suit not longer after, so you have the full underwater mobility as well. This is also where the game finally opens up and the real fun starts. In fact, yesterday I spent most of my play time with simply backtracking and becoming stronger.
And become stronger you must. At this point it was made perfectly clear that your ultimate goal is to defeat Raven Beak, which was to expected from the start, but Adam keeps pointing out that Samus wasn't a match for that guy when she was at full power, meaning that she must become even stronger. This is an exciting prospect, where it would be interesting to go further beyond Samus's abilities in previous Metroid titles.
A way to do so seem to be the X, where their boss fights sometimes leave the Core-X containing new abilities, much like in Metroid Fusion. Overall the X also provided a good shift in difficulty. It turns the normal enemies everywhere into even stronger variants that can also respawn as different creatures. It's a very smart way of increasing the difficulty in all the environments that makes sense within the story. The Metroid Prime Trilogy games or Other M simply just swapped the enemies for stronger ones later on, but this is much cooler.
But at the same time it also feels somewhat weird to have the X back like this. The X always seemed like this typical one game gimmick, like what you normally have in Zelda games. Imagine that Breath of the Wild would suddenly bring back the Twilight Realms and turn you into a wolf in the middle of the story. It could work, but it certainly would feel like a rehash.
It does make sense within the story of Metroid Dread, though, so this isn't a major complaint, but it also feels a little bit unnecessary, because the threat of the Chozo Warriors in itself was already interesting enough. Instead you're now fighting Chozo Warriors infected with X, which somewhat takes away from the original idea of Samus going against some evil Chozo.
Now, the abilities that you get from the X don't seem to be that revolutionary, however. There are the "Storm Missiles", which is similar to the Seeker Missiles that Samus had before, but only in 3D games. The main difference is that you can lock only to one target and then fire all missiles onto that, which is very powerful. Then there are the "Cross Bombs", which can be used as a nice way to cross pitfall blocks and do some easy bomb jumps, but it's probably nothing that will make Raven Beak to tremble with fear.
You're also collecting mysterious artifacts everywhere, which kind of reminds me of Metroid: Zero Mission, where those turned out to be abilities that didn't appear first in Metroid, like the Gravity Suit. This gave me hope that this might be something similar, but then I realized that those must be capacity upgrades for the Power Bombs, which I don't have yet. So, nothing special.
The X aren't the only thing that has changed during backtracking, where there was one interesting part that had most of Artaria frozen solid. Now, that was really cool (pun intended) and even turned small ponds into obstacles that can't be overcome. Of course this was mostly to funnel you to the next major boss fight, but I liked that sequence a lot, especially with visuals.
At first I thought that this was something the X were doing directly. Like, they are somehow capable of lowering the temperatures, which they do to protect themselves from Metroids (meaning from you). But it was really just that they've blocked the thermal energy flow from Cartaris. Considering that Artaria has some giant magma caverns surrounding it as well, even some with Bottle Ship-esque tunnels running through them, it doesn't make much sense that the whole place would suddenly freeze up like this, but whatever...
Then it was boss time with "Experiment No. Z-57". They teased this fight a while ago, because in the early game you could see how they were operating on this creature in Dairon:
And now it was gone... At first I thought this was the Corpius boss from Artaria and that they are trying to bring it back somehow. They do look somewhat similar, though.
Anyway, the boss fight itself could be best described as the new Diggernaut of Metroid Dread. It felt very similar, because you have this huge monster in the background that keeps sticking its head in and attacks you with its arms and beam attacks. And you have to truly master this fight to make it. There is not much room for error here.
I've said this before, but I feel like the normal difficulty is much harder than Samus Returns used to be, but I could be wrong, because it's been a while. And it makes sense canonically, because Samus is supposed to be weaker in her Fusion Suit.
Still, it's not much fun to receive like 200 damage on every hit from a boss, while you have to hit the same boss like 200 times. But I've already seen what you can do to the boss to quickly finish it by using Storm Missiles on the arm and the Speed Booster at the end of the heavy wind sequence to ram its head. It's impressive and if there's one thing that MercurySteam gets right, then it's making really good boss fights with a high learning curve.
This whole part of the game was still very tough, but really enjoyable, where this is the quality that made Samus Returns my favorite Metroid game. If it weren't for the E.M.M.I. and the needlessly convoluted Grapple Beam, I would probably be hyped about Metroid Dread right now, but I'm not.
At least the Grapple Beam became obsolete as a traversal tool thanks to the Space Jump. There was still one sequence where you had to use the Grapple Beam to get through an E.M.M.I. Zone, where I actually used the Phantom Cloak to do this with less pressure, but once you've obtained the Space Jump you can just rush through the zones straight to the Central Unit and the E.M.M.I. will shout "wait for me".
They are turning the E.M.M.I. destruction sequences more and more into a puzzle, however, where you need to find enough space and time to melt away their armor, but this is more or less scripted and the E.M.M.I. don't use their ability any longer for some reason, so it's usually not as bad.
One last E.M.M.I. remains and right now I expect it to hold the Power Bombs, which would be a nasty ability to have for these things. It also seems like the last major power-up in the game that I'm still missing, which would be lame, but let's see. An alternative is that Raven Beak will use the last E.M.M.I. to protect himself somehow or maybe it's both. But don't mind me, I'm just speculating. I will probably find out later today...
No comments:
Post a Comment