Tenuous Path to Them - Metroid Dread pt.2 (2021-10-13)
0Getting the Morph Ball and especially the Bombs dramatically improve the ability to explore the game and it makes me wonder if it was a bad or at least poorly-executed idea to limit how much basic movement and sequence breaking opportunities. I’m still bummed about how much of the map you’re allowed to reach with so little to show for it - especially when so many of the barriers to traversal are just arbitrary plot restrictions rather than ability gates.
Speaking of bombs, Power Bombs are such a joke. You can put a lot of time and effort into picking some up, but you have an arbitrary “Unknown Resource” restriction, despite having a ton of places where you could use ‘em. On top of that, I found out later that it just opens some minor shortcuts and allows for the acquisition of a few more items, so the justification for limiting them seems pretty flimsy. Sure, they do a lot of damage, but you’re plenty strong by that point, and I’d be totally fine with having them be a much weaker item just to have them available earlier.
The Speed Booster and Grapple Beam overall give the majority of the remaining mobility needed to get through the map and find secrets, but it’s funny how the amount of “Access Closed” type gates require you to take such roundabout paths through the map.
Compounding that is how unreadable the map can be. I think a chunk of it is just that the map is no-longer broken up into clear, distinct tiles. The rest I think is just the sheer amount of icons for items you’ve already acquired that look similar to ones you haven’t yet picked up, and similar stuff with Power/Charge beam icons looking the same and most door icons looking awfully similar to Wide Beam covers. I also loathe how the icons for Teleportals and Refill Stations are both abstract and overly similar. I think I overall have the same reaction to just about every map icon. Contrast is abysmally low across the board, both in terms of raw color and the iconography.
It’s cool to meet an actual Chozo for once - some of the other games (Prime especially) made it look like the race had been long dead. The reveal from Quiet Robe makes the overall fate of the Chozo pretty grim, so I doubt I’ll see anyone else other than Raven Beak. It was a nice touch to hear Samus actually speak, especially as it was overall short - and not the atrociously bad dialogue from Other M. Also, her posture relaxing with a sort of “oh, huh…” reaction was a great touch. Overall the game has done a pretty good job of restoring Samus’ reputation as a strong, practical character after Other M completely demolished it.
The music in the background of the cutscene being a Lower Brinstar remix shows that MercurySteam definitely had the chops to do a better job with the game’s music. It’s a shame that they didn’t really do much to add any new, iconic themes with Dread.
The Robot Chozo boss that shows up after the exposition is a pretty hefty difficulty leap, and perhaps a sign of things to come. The game overall has had a combination of few energy tanks and high enemy damage, and this seems to be the current peak. While the boss overall isn’t especially complex, I certainly wasn’t ready for it and had quite a few attempts before I beat it.
Watch me on Twitch: https://twitch.tv/jerp
Updates & Musings: https://twitter.com/jerpdoesgames
Learn more about me at https://jerp.tv
#MetroidDread #Metroid #gameplay
Other Videos By Jerp
Other Statistics
Metroid Dread Statistics For Jerp
Currently, Jerp has 189 views for Metroid Dread across 4 videos. The game makes up 16 hours of published video on his channel, less than 0.86% of Metroid Dread video content that Jerp has uploaded to YouTube.