ok!
you should know that I feel about Super Metroid the way I do about Dark Souls, relatively – it’s my least favorite in a series I love
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artaria underwater sounds like crash bandicoot
e: aeion is such an ugly word, who let this be
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finally a hellblade thread
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Yeah I beat this game. Some welcome new additions but in the end it’s just a well made one of those kinds of games. Also maybe a few too many boss battles that went on for a little too long. Probably the most benevolent Metroder I’ve played tho? Some clever gating and directions mean I was never lost once this whole game. Forgiving checkpoints too.
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Also god damn did this game use every button on the controller.
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It’s very sharp and fluid for sure, very happy with the technical decisions if it has to be polygons.
The atmosphere so far (~1 hour in) is very similar to Fusion’s, if that helps anyone on the fence hop off.
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from what ive played (first few areas & bosses, just watched the bad lore cutscene lol) i would place this about par w zero mission: fun, very playable, but not remotely as singular as the others. solid b tier, which seems to echo everyone elses’ thoughts
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I’m going to be so embarrassed if the lore works for me. I used to think about the corners and details a lot as a teenager, especially post-Fusion
The music is a little weak so far, if I had one complaint
i think a lot about fusion too. samus on the run, knotty kinship relationships w invasive species… there is so far none of that
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damning review imo
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Yeah, your reaction to this game can be predicted by your reaction to the phrase “quality of life” in re: games.
a friend described samus’ gamefeel as being akin to sliding a mouse cursor around and I can’t really disagree
re: exploration, the guiding hand is both more cleverly disguised and more oppressive in dread than it was in fusion, to the point that the momentum all feels sort of inevitable and I can’t really bring myself to participate in the illusion that there’s much of any reason to try to scrape up against the edges of the level design until it tells me to. it goes against all my instincts as a player! I feel like I crawled into a being john malkovich hole and now I’m forced to experience what it’s like to be felix playing a game for the first time
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What a fucked up thing to post.
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I read in a review that this game implements a map feature where it can highlight all doors or obstacles of a particular type (or something like that), and my first thought was how SM: Redesign: Axeil Edition added an overzealous hint feature that displayed all undestroyed power bomb/speed booster blockades that you have run across once you get those items.
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im dreading this game
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apropos of nothing, I want to recommend Returnal as the best Metroid game since Prime 1.
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I regret to inform this forum that I quite like what I’ve played of this game so far (just got the Spider Manget).
There are a lot of obviously opposing design goals wrestling for the identity of this game, but it seems to be working for me even with those tensions at work. I wrote a post elsewhere about this:
The tensions inherent in the game’s design goals are already readily apparent. On one hand, this game is meant to be a sequel to Fusion narratively and Samus Returns mechanically, but on the other hand the game is acutely aware that for a large portion of its audience this may very well be their first Metroid game — so as a result of these disjoint goals we get a game that is on one hand very lore-dense, technically demanding, and high-concept (or rather, has a lot of design conceits), while on the other hand is rather exposition-heavy, has a lot of tutorializing, and has done a lot of railroading in the first area (probably in the service of demonstrating the game in miniature). I would not want to be the designer worrying about balancing these needs.
The EMMI Zones are another area where ideas are colliding in weird directions (in terms of lore). On one hand they’re literally called “EMMI Zones” and Adam’s dialogue implies the EMMI were literally designed to function within them which creates a dizzyingly non-sensical set of implications, while on the other hand their visual motifs and such imply that they are little-Tourians, which creates the exact opposite set of implications (much more sensical ones, really). Very baffling. I’d like to be the fly on the Zoom call for when they were trying to hammer out these ideas.
I would probably like something less at war with itself, but whatever. Hoping to see if these good vibes persist.
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okay, so right after I made that post I fought a boss and was like “I want to poke around the rest of this area.” Instead, I found that my ways back to the rest of Artaria that I could use previously were blocked by a (previously open) door that was literally labeled “Access Closed” on the map and a weird plant (labeled “???” on the map) growing off of a pipe I routed thermal power to (good joke, actually), which ended up kettling me towards the next area.
I’ve played up to getting the Varia Suit, and while nothing else has been quite that arbitrarily heavy-handed, this game sure loves kettling the player around in various ways. It’s like if the designers saw bit in Super Metroid where you’re locked down in Norfair until you get the Ice Beam and thought “this is neat… let’s do this everywhere.”
idk, this is kinda aggravating mostly because this game has a lot pretty neat ideas and surprises that it executes quite well, so it’s disappointing to see the edges of its exploratory design sanded down out of fear the player will Do Something Wrong. There’s so much in this game that nips at the edges of greatness that I’m just like… *sigh*
On the other hand, now that I just got that item there doesn’t seem to be anything in the way of me freely exploring the majority of the first area (EDIT: nevermind I’m blind (EDIT2: okay I just had to take the long way around)), so maybe the game is opening up a bit (like people claim it does). Also, people have supposedly found sequence breaks already, so maybe there’s more to it I’m not seeing (though the detail of the map makes that rather hard (100% map completion would be an unfathomably tedious category in this lol)).
Anyhow, I’ve been trying every heat-run and cold-run I’ve run into, and I’m pleased to report that so far there have been 2 heat runs and 1 cold run that have netted me early items (and this despite the fact that heat damage accumulates at a rapidly accelerating rate (unsure if cold does that too)). Also, right after getting the Varia Suit there’s a missile tank sitting in a pool of lava begging you to tank the damage to get it. I love it.
Still enjoying this, but my expectations have been tempered.
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scratch that, if zero mission is a b this is b-. i enjoyed it a lot but the back half dipped a bit. i think dread establishes very early that you can trust the game to guide you to where you need to be and it suffers for it. the big casualty of this is the emmi zones. they don’t amount to much - you dip in and out pretty quickly, and the zones arernt very puzzle or traversal heavy areas. if you die so what, the autosaves at the entrance. just try again and the emmi will likely spawn in a different spot. and then the final one just dies in a cutscene lol
they’ve also bulked out the combat and the bosses and minibosses are pretty taxing. so a long mid-game stretch that funneled me through 3-4 bosses and mini-bosses was… tiring. its possible i missed something, obv, but it was very anxious to lock doors/ block paths behind me.
hollow knight (& souls before it) feels like the obvious inspiration in boss design and quantity. i got tired of it there and i got tired of it here.
i’m hoping with some familiarity the bosses will be a bit less trying and the game as a whole willi feel a bit more even to me. looking forward to when this turns up at gdq as well. in the interim i think im gonna dip back into rain world
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