Guessed by @TruckOSaurus
I still can't get over how a Spanish development was entrusted with making a sequel to 19-year-old Metroid Fusion and made it feel so natural and true. There's a vast difference in technology between this and its predecessor, but outside of the technical factors surrounding the games, nothing else feels off - this feels exactly like what Metroid 5 should feel like, it feels like it's exactly what Metroid Dread was supposed to be all those years ago and is now. This is especially notable given that it's a Nintendo property, and most Nintendo games recently have failed to feel like "organic" continuations of their predecessors, even when they're sequels being led by the same developers, never mind something this far removed from the original team.
I... don't have much else to say about it. This game is so amazing. I've played it and replayed it many times, I even did a randomizer run recently, it's always so much fun - in truth, this is the first Metroid game where it already feels incredibly fun to control Samus from the very start, without any power-ups or upgrades, just moving around feels awesome! The fact that they chose to bring living Chozo into the story was risky, but it paid off big time, it felt like a 35-year build-up to something that was always planned to happen, it was just that well executed. The atmosphere is... well, it's pretty unique, and that's awesome because every 2D Metroid game has been very unique from each other, though the soundtrack was far from memorable. And that final boss, just, wow.
Metroid Dread is a classic, it was an instant classic when it came out. I don't know how you make a sequel two decades on beloved by everyone - after all that time, there's so many built up expectations, so many perceived notions of what the series should be like, some people are bound to be disappointed. But Dread disappointed nobody, it's just that good.
