RolStoppable said:
Nope, in previous Metroid games you didn't die by taking five hits or less. That's why these games didn't have to fall back on the use of checkpoints to be at least somewhat fair. The purpose of checkpoints is to mitigate lacking difficulty design; if Dread didn't have checkpoints, it would be a very frustrating game, be it the E.M.M.I. sections where one wrong turn can result in instant death or the bosses that aren't located anywhere close to a save point. That the later bosses in Dread routinely deal damage that exceeds 100 points hurts the upgrade system. There's no real point in trying to find more energy tanks when a tank isn't going to result in being able to sustain at least one additional hit. The previous Metroid games weren't like that. On top of that, Dread puts almost all full energy tanks directly on route to the next major upgrade/boss, so going out of your way to explore isn't of much value. Regardless of how someone plays, it's highly probable that every player will have little variation in their number of energy tanks at any given boss, unlike in previous Metroid games where this number could greatly differ based on playstyle. One key point of the Metroid gameplay is that the difficulty isn't set in stone, so any player who struggles with a particular boss always has the option to explore the game world and get more powerful. But Dread is pretty much limited to "learn the boss patterns" because there's no real alternative in light of how hard these bosses hit and how the energy tanks are distributed in the game world. I am not saying any of this, nor the remarks regarding Speed Booster collectibles, because I can't handle it. I finished hard mode with 100% in 4:36, after all. I am pointing these things out because there is a good chance that they'll be offputting to many players based on today's standard of what constitutes a normal difficulty curve. It won't surprise me in the least if a regular complaint about Dread will be its difficulty spikes, because it's apparent that they do exist. Elitist gamers take the approach to tell other players to git gud, but that recommendation has to be forwarded to the developers instead. If they had been capable of fair difficulty design, they could have done the game without a checkpoint system, the most basic bandaid to fix something where you messed up. |
In Fusion, the SA-X will kill in 7 hits in the penultimate boss battle (the final battle is more of a cinematic). Had 1099 HP. The plasma beam does about 150 a hit, and hitting the body does significantly less. (About 60 or so). Not sure about screw attack.
In Samus Returns the final boss killed me in 12 hits, just hitting there letting him hit me with w/e. Some of the attacks in its first phase do 100 damage even, and in the second it can do more. In the last phase I'm pretty sure one attack does like 300. Worth noting that the aeion ability can mitigate it, but this drastically reduces your offense.
In Dread, the final boss killed me in 16 hits standing and letting him hit me. 6 of those were sort of 3 hit combos, so you can take 4 off and call it 12 if you want. Had 1099 energy at the end of this one. Like Returns, it hits harder in the later phases, but the scaling seems similar. Not going to test out every possible combinations of hits or anything.
There are other things impacting the difficulty, but in regards to the amount of damage enemies deal, this has been going on for about 20 years or so. At least for the final bosses, the damage is pretty consistent, and for me at least (from my recollection the other bosses in Fusion which I replayed right before Dread also hit for more than 100, but I haven't fought any other bosses in Returns for around 3 years), the amount of energy I wound up with was pretty consistent with more or less the same playstyle.
On an unrelated note, anyone who is enjoying this should really consider Samus Returns on 3DS. Not quite as good, but laid the foundation for this game, and is pretty awesome in its own right.
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