white girl with dreads (new metroid thread)

King of Posters
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So I decided to give this game a fair shake. It’s kind of an amazing artifact. The creators seem to possess a genius level understanding of what makes the action of Metroid great, and they executed it almost perfectly (aside from some overly-complex controls). Unfortunately, they understand almost nothing else about Metroid – the graphics, music, and story all range from boring to ugly. Feels like this game’s art and story were realized by people who’ve never read a book or seen a movie before, you know? I will say that they did nail Samus’s character though. I love the way she’s animated.

I think this game is victim to a phenomenon that has been dulling the exciting “new-media” energy that video games used to have: they’ve been a popular enough medium for long enough now that a lot of people making games today are primarily influenced by other games. Pop creators are no longer forced to, e.g., find a way to translate what made a sci-fi movie like Alien cool into a video game. Now they can just iterate on what other games have done, and stuff gets rote and undifferentiated.

Anyway, despite my pedantic, nerd-ass contempt for parts of this game I’m having a solid time with it. I would rank it pretty low for a Metroid game but it feels good to play and the boss fights are great. So far, the Kraid in pink nylon chains fight was the biggest highlight. That was some of the only imagery to really stand out to me so far.

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A lot of comments on that Marta Trivi story are along the lines of “It’s a shame that these problems have to cast a shadow on such a well realized videogame”, and it’s driving me crazy because it’s so obvious to me that the game is a perfect reflection of the circumstances of its development – a Spanish developer trying to please their faraway bosses despite the culture and language barriers, multiple bad practices ingrained too deeply in the core of the studio to achieve real communication and clarity of vision, the developers get paralyzed by indecision and office politics so they focus on reworking the core design elements that have already proven to work in previous titles (probably even looking for inspiration in the romhack scene) while the other aspects of the game suffer. Of course its scope was two times as big as it should have been at the start because of bad producers and it would have remained as such if it wasn’t for some levelheaded programmer hero who has pointed it out to Nintendo, it’s such a common thing in these burgeoning European markets

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I’m just dropping in the the thread that taking it as mostly it’s own thing, albeit one directly building on Fusion and Zero mission, makes it hit a lot better.

It also does a lot of cool stuff with physical space and movement? I’ve been really impressed by the use of space in the game and it’s deliberate attempts to mess with assumptions from previous Metroid games.

I’ll get to a longer post eventually after playing it more but a few bosses in and I’m really digging it at this juncture.

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I want to hear the rest of your thoughts, but…

it doesn’t really work for me to think of dread as its own thing. it’s treated, like mercurysteam’s work on metroid 2, as a redemptive effort. metroid evolved; legitimized. mercurysteam is devoted to iconography as design philosophy unto itself, to “legacy” in precisely the way only gamers think about this kind of thing. their house style is roughly equivalent to telling roger ebert to play shadow of the colossus.

I had a lot more thoughts about this game after completing it that I couldn’t really bring myself to post because it was all dour blather about never really getting used to the fact that I’ll just never be the target audience for any popular media again. that it is collectively agreed upon that “nothing personnel kid” is the desired affect of the metroid series, and there’s really no going back from that.

dread isn’t, like, an experiment. it’s a roadmap in a pitch meeting, and everyone’s on board

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I guess I’m so used to the idea that I’m never getting catered to, that I…really don’t expect it. I exist in a world where I gotta search, and mine, and explore to find the real gems of games that resonate perfectly with me.

But part of that is…sometimes that also means looking at a game as as it exists, even if it’s not the exact thing I wanted. I had a very ambivalent approach to this game, since Samus Returns was at best competent and quickly turned awful.

There’s definitely a lot about Dread that I think pales in comparison to most previous installments. But…if this wasn’t metroid I know I’d say it was a flawed but cool game. And I don’t want to ignore that just because it’s a weird piece of an older, long dead, legacy of continuity. Other M all but confirmed the story a lot of folks read into metroid wasn’t how it’s creators viewed the story, and ever since that game I’ve known that my headcannon Samus, my understanding of the world of Metroid, was just mine and never the actual creators.

This is at the end of the day fan game for a franchise that’s never going to live again, but it’s got stuff it’s really good at so far that I’m really enjoying. I’m not going to let it not being my perfect Metroid 5 stop me.

(Although, it might make me think about what it would take to make my perfect metroid 5)

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this is an awful snobby post to make but this is why i’m more interested in film these days. Possession or Personal Shopper are probably gonna be more gripping than any AAA game, and they take 2-3 hours instead of 20-30

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I mean I relate to most of that. I’m not chafing against expectations. I’m long past having any. I tend to be the first to favor wresting your own enjoyment back from lazy tyrants!

I’m just saying that everything Dread is doing is too consciously riffing on the self-satisfied knowledge that it’s The New Metroid Game for me to personally separate the results from its very obvious goals in a way that I find flattering.

As a Metroid I question its priorities, as anything else I’d just be making fun of it for the same reasons we’d make fun of Shadow Complex having a triple jump.

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finished this off two more times last week, and my decently high opinion remains. this is definitely better than whatever the series was trying to do the decade and a half following prime and fusion (tho that’s not saying much lol). there’s a degree of confidence and workmanship that was missing from those later titles that’s present here, even if the overall direction remains muddled. genuinely glad they made this, though I have plenty of doubts that they’ll be able to top it.

The EMMI zones, while lacking the same storyboarded precision of the SA-X encounters, lose far less of their luster on replays. I’m personally glad that you never get any abilities that can hinder the march of the EMMIs, because idk I find it slightly annoying that the only really interesting SA-X chase sequence in Fusion happens after you get the ability to effectively neutralize her as a threat. Pac Man only needs superior pathing and a power pellet, and the same is true of Samus (the omega blaster thing is good, actually).

A full-area or full-game EMMI zone (with infrequent safe zones) would be the dream, yes, but a game of this large of scope benefits from the variation of pacing and heart rate that comes from them entering and exiting them frequently.

Still laughing at that one, random recent-history hieroglyphic wall in that one EMMI zone. (i love the ways this game is stupid like that)

If I had to pin down this game’s most crucial flaw (as a coherent atmospheric-aesthetic experience), it’s that it’s too fast. You can zip around and aim with such astonishing ease and just mash that fire button as fast as you can handle and reload from checkpoints and and watch sick counter animations and and and etc. etc. etc. So all this kinetic action just comes together to bring us a paucity of moments of stillness — moments to reflect on the environment, on the ecology of the place, on the architecture of the areas, on the vignettes in the backgrounds and just the general artistry at work. It’s all so frustratingly close to being there and coming together, and yet what is there is made as if to just glaze past our eyeballs as we pore over the map and mantle over ledges from point A to point B. I mean, nobody who’s completed this game would believe me if I told them the EMMI zones in each area actually have distinct theming (as distinct as any of the ruins in Metroid 2), even though that is actually the case (don’t ask me to actually compile evidence to support this assertion lol).

On the other hand, all this business about going fast makes this game a very fun way to have a controller mangle my hands, so I expect to come back to it relatively frequently. (In contrast, I rarely revisit Eris, as beautiful as it is, because it is so frequently not a fun way to mangle my hands.)

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As someone who is constantly moaning and wailing through these games, I’ll say my only complaints for Dread so far are:

  1. Weird lack of feedback on some of the bosses
  2. Wrangling like three different shoulder buttons to shoot different kinds of beams

To MercurySteam’s credit, the zones feel more distinct than they did in Samus Returns (though the inclusion of a big honkin’, utterly homogenous EMMI zone in each kinda kills that diversity), and they eased way the hell off their precious parry mechanic.

I guess I’ll add that so far (about 3 or 4 EMMI’s down?) I don’t find the EMMIs that scary? Normally the whole “unkillable enemy that stalks you constantly” thing is a no-go for me, but they’re kinda more annoying than anything. The generous checkpointing probably helps.

To that end, SA-X was way goddamn scarier. Hell, getting hunted by Space Pirates in the Zero Suit segment of Zero Mission filled me with more dread (oh ho ho).

There’s definitely some tension in melting their shield and popping their head off, but I feel like you know pretty quickly if you’re gonna make it or not, and if not, it’s back to the checkpoint and setting up your runway again.

(Though I did have a good one where I didn’t account for an opening in the ceiling, and instead of popping up down the hall it just clambered down right in front of me and killed me. Fair enough!)

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id be into hacks of old metroid games that make the map readable like the metroid dread map. love staring at that map

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After 90 minutes of play I have to return this thing. For reasons too numerous, specific, and petty to mention, it gave me a “weird, angry” energy while playing according to my (100% correct) partner. It was made to upset me personally and I’m pretty sure that the game’s ending sequence is I die IRL.

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Love this summary of how you felt. This describes perfectly how I experienced Zero Mission. So when someone compared this game to Zero Mission upthread, that was what I needed to solidify my trailer-based skepticism into a decision to skip this game, even if folks I respect like RT-55J say it’s good.

The thing about having a whole-body allergic reaction to a game’s aesthetic is that it’s not even very satisfying to complain about the game on SB afterwards. My criticisms wind up more Captain Obvious than insightful, and nobody else wants to be infected by petty spite energy. So it’s better all around if I just leave games like Dread to be enjoyed by folks willing to give them a chance, which for better or worse I sense I am not.

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even the top current speedrun of this is unsatisfying

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that’s your first mistake, buddy

Really though, knowing your tastes I doubt that you’d vibe with it. If the trailers made you feel it was somewhere on the spectrum of cool to silly, then you might enjoy it, but if it looks dumb or boring instead I don’t think it would change your mind. If you’re not enjoying the stuff that it is doing for what it is, then thoughts of squandered potential will overwhelm the experience.

Outside of the usual reddit/twitter/speedrunning hiveminds, I find it interesting how mixed the response to this has been amongst the corners of the fanbase I’m familiar with. Like, in the hacking scene I know that DMan (the Eris/Vitality guy) absolutely hated the sound design and lack of any foreground detail (thought it was very mediocre overall), while Drewseph (the SM Redesign guy) was largely enthralled by it (coincidentally they stole his idea of tiered missile pickups lol) — and now that I think of it those reactions are kind of a good heuristic for whether or not you’d enjoy this game (assuming you’re already familiar with the vibes of their hacks). (Those two are the extremes of the responses I’ve seen, with most folks falling somewhere in the middle.)

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this sounds like me playing spelunky

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uh oh, if the Redesign guy likes it, that definitely lowers my chances

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finally getting a chance to play this… I not having super strong feelings about it as a whole so far, but I don’t hate it as a successor to fusion.

my biggest complaint is the way in which the production values are just kind of chintzy. the audio is super compressed, I don’t feel like I’m actually hearing anything that’s happening, it’s just this kind of washed out soup of sound that vaguely corresponds to onscreen action. and the rendering of the game itself just has this kind of xbox live arcade feeling to it, though I think the art direction is trying its best.

it plays real smooth though. that’s nice.

really just can’t help but feel that I’d much rather be enjoying whatever the gba version of this would have been. and thinking how ballsy and cool it would have been of nintendo to just do the whole thing in pixel art, if nothing else.

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I think they’re a few years late to have revived metroid as a lavish, spared-no-expense pixel art game, but only a few – 2.5D stuff has gotten a lot less chintzy looking fairly recently, and the number of sprite artists who are still willing and able to work to a constrained style (eg a neogeo palette) and produce twice as many frames of everything as any other game seems to be falling off. it’s a nice suggestion, but just like how even the best animated productions these days are mostly 3D model keyframes with a tiny bit of hand animation superimposed over them, I don’t think there’s enough of a reason to go back. but I wouldn’t have necessarily said that as recently as 2015

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like if you look at eg cadence of hyrule… the art in that is very good, but mostly to the point of “passing” as a Zelda spinoff, it doesn’t have anywhere near the complexity of an undulating alien biome that they would need in order to feel like they’re shipping a credible mainline metroid game. at that point you’re basically asking “why doesn’t capcom make another street fighter 3” when, like, they’d have to build a team from scratch to ship something fairly niche.

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