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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Metroid Dread discussion

curl-6 on 11 October 2021
JWeinCom said:
curl-6 said:

I deeply, deeply hope this is the case, and that if it happens I won't have to restart my file to use it.

I am loving this game so damn much, it's easily "top 10 games on Switch" material, but I am so anxious it'll all be ruined when I hit a brick wall in terms of difficulty.

Most of the complaints about the difficulty are related to how easy it is to get lost, so, worst case scenario, you'll have to watch a guide. In terms of conventional difficulty, there are a few bosses that are pretty tough. Definitely a step up from other Metroid games, but not hugely so. If you got through those, you'll probably be ok.

The only Metroid games I've beaten are the three Prime games, and probably the hardest games I've ever beaten are Ori and the Blind Forest and the SNES Donkey Kong Country games. I'm willing to watch guides and to keep trying if it takes me several tries to beat a boss, it's just people are hyping up some of the later bosses and EMMI sections as major difficulty spikes and I am not the most skilled gamer.

Last edited by curl-6 - on 11 October 2021

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JWeinCom on 11 October 2021
curl-6 said:
JWeinCom said:

Most of the complaints about the difficulty are related to how easy it is to get lost, so, worst case scenario, you'll have to watch a guide. In terms of conventional difficulty, there are a few bosses that are pretty tough. Definitely a step up from other Metroid games, but not hugely so. If you got through those, you'll probably be ok.

The only Metroid games I've beaten are the three Prime games, and probably the hardest games I've ever beaten are Ori and the Blind Forest and the SNES Donkey Kong Country games. I'm willing to watch guides and to keep trying if it takes me several tries to beat a boss, it's just people are hyping up some of the later bosses and EMMI sections as major difficulty spikes and I am not the most skilled gamer.

The EMMI sections really aren't that hard IMO. If you've done them already, they really don't get that much harder. Some of the later EMMI have attacks that can stun you from a range, but the same basic principles apply. If you take your time and act carefully you'll be fine. Or, if you're impatient like me, you can plow through the sections at full speed. You'll die a few times, but within a few minutes you'll get through, and dying generally just sends you back to the beginning of that sequence.

When you actually fight the Emmi, it's more like a puzzle game then an action game. You just have to find the right spot to ambush them (generally the longest hallway available) and as long as your aim isn't complete shit, you'll be fine.

The bosses are kind of tough towards the end. the last one in particular. But, none of them really require amazing reflexes, just good pattern recognition skills. Again, I'm an impatient person, but I think if I took less risk and focussed more on dodging than firing, they would have been not terrible. I haven't played Ori and it has been a long time since I beat Prime 1/2. IIRC the bosses are harder than Prime's, and a little bit more than Prime 2, especially if you played it on Wii. The SNES DKC games were actually kind of tough. Not so much the bosses, but I feel that if your reflexes are good enough to handle the tougher levels in Country, you should be capable enough for this.



TruckOSaurus on 11 October 2021
Hynad said:
TruckOSaurus said:

Wow! What a ride this game was! Brilliant controls and level design. Samus feels like such a badass in this game and she moves like she's on a mission (well... she is....). The bosses were solid and I didn't mind the repeat ones because it felt good to see how much better you got at handling them (with a combination of experience and new abilities). The Flash Shift has got to be my favorite new ability here, it helps make boss fights really dynamic.

I didn't really see the supposed difficulty some people mention. Yes bosses can dispatch you pretty quickly but they allow have very telegraphed moves that can be avoided without too much hassle if you're attentive and outside of bosses and EMMIs I never even came close to dying from regular enemies.

I finished the game in 8h30 with 60% items found so now it's time to go on a hunt for collectible. I might let myself be tempted by the hard mode.

Edit: Also, something has to be said about the quality of the animations, the slide, Samus pushing against wall, the backflip when you counter from morph ball, how she braces herself when changing direction while in speed boost, all top notch!

I am close to the finish line, so I won’t get into spoilers territory just yet. But I have to say that the bosses are definitely a stand out. Sometime I get into a new one and they dispatch me quickly while I try to figure out how to dispatch them and learn their behaviour. Many of them require twitch reactions. But it’s always a matter of adjustment on the player’s part rather than them being unfair or exaggerated (although they can appear as such at first). On the other hand, I think the E.M.M.I.’s are poorly developed and overstay their welcome by how repetitive and uninspired their sequences are and they ultimately mostly break the flow of the game. Of they would have mixed things up gameplay wise and not have them all play out the same way, that might have worked better. But as it stands, it reinforces how stellar the flow and overall game design of Super is superior to everything else in the series since then. Which is amazing and worrying at the same time, considering the game came out in 1994.

Where Dread comes on top of Super is in the controls and mobility of Samus. Which makes me hope they’ll give the game the Zero Mission treatment: remake it with Samus’s added mobility and abilities while staying true to its level design. That’d be a wish come true for me.

Also: Samus has never looked this baddass. They nailed that as well.

So far, I’d say it’s my favourite since Super, which is no small feat, considering that spot was help by the first Prime game until now.

I agree that by the 4-5th area EMMIs became more annoying that anything else but Samus is so mobile by that point that I mostly sped my way through their section with no care if they spotted me or not.



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GoOnKid on 11 October 2021

I've seen a short clip of someone having the Screw Attack earlier than regular so I think sequence breaking might be possibe to some extent.



MDMAlliance on 12 October 2021
GoOnKid said:

I've seen a short clip of someone having the Screw Attack earlier than regular so I think sequence breaking might be possibe to some extent.

Sequence breaking is definitely a thing.  There's an any% run on YouTube that's 1hour 55 minutes (cutting out the cutscene times) 



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GoOnKid on 12 October 2021
RolStoppable said:

On the plus side, the regular path through the game is thought through well enough and afterwards it doesn't take ages to collect everything.

But... the game's difficulty is off. Boss fights are all too often "take only a few hits and you are already dead," so at times an additional energy tank would make no difference whatsoever. Hard mode doesn't change the game much, it's basically "you are dead in three hits instead of five." None of the enemies have more health nor is there a penalty on collected items like Zero Mission had. And again, a few of the Speed Booster challenges are more trolling than satisfying challenging level design.

I was on the brink of reconsidering my 8/10 score for Dread, but then the game's art gallery adds Other M as a mainline game instead of doing the right thing and let the game be forgotten. I also looked up the requirements for unlocking the images and it turns out they are simply time-based, so collection rate does not matter at all. If I had known that, I would have finished hard mode right away instead of going for 100% which ultimately put me half an hour above the time limit, so I'll have to give hard mode another go eventually. No variations to the ending whatsoever is also a bit lame; I have no idea why they didn't keep the series' tradition of having Samus taking off her helmet/suit based on completion time and/or item collection rate.

Last thing to address is whether or not Dread is better than indie games because earlier in this thread I had apparently committed an offense by suggesting that Metroid does Metroid best. So...

Dread is better than every indie game. There's no question about it.

Bosses have always been like that, though. In all other Metroid games before you'd have to learn the patterns and figure out how to react to their attacks. Every player who faced any boss in, let's say, Super Metroid gets their ass kicked hard, but once you've learned their behaviours they become pushovers. It's the same in Dread. Once you've learned to read the moves you can beat any boss without even a single hit. So I don't get your point, sorry.

And Other M belongs to the mainline, it's right in the middle between 3 and 4. It's a hard to swallow pill, I know. Just let the dissapointment go, it's ok.

Not having ending variations I agree, that's a bit sad. And I would have loved the ability to crank up the music volume, I think it's not loud enough.



Kakadu18 on 12 October 2021

You know you get two chances to counter an EMMI. The first one is totally doable, I get it every second or third attempt. But the second one is near impossible.
But I managed to do it after like 30 attempts and it's the most satisfying thing ever and looks so cool. The animations in Dread are fantastic.
At first the EMMIs were terrifying, but now it's kinda fun getting caught on purpose and countering them.



curl-6 on 12 October 2021

In a half hour stretch just I got the wide beam, killed an EMMI to claim the morph ball, beat an escape sequence and gained the Varia suit, and the whole time I just always ended up where I needed to be, without ever being given an objective marker, simply through utterly brilliant organic level design. Not a minute felt wasted, I was constantly making progress, exploring, growing stronger.

This game is freaking incredible.



Wyrdness on 12 October 2021

Are people not utilizing the counter and Flash Shift in their fights? Bosses are hard when you first come across them but the moves they use are telegraphed meaning when you see the sign that a particular move is coming the are a few responses to it to do straight away, the best move the game gives you is Flash Shift as not only can it give you an escape route it can be used to set up offence and it's effective in doing so against multiple attacks this becomes even more powerful once storm missile is obtained. You are meant to die in fights as the game expects you to do different things to figure what the best response to each move is hence why it has checkpoints for boss fights, identifying attacks that can be countered is also key and countering moves leaves the boss wide open and in triggered counter sequences deals more damage that you can in open play.

Last edited by Wyrdness - on 12 October 2021

Rick1331 on 12 October 2021

Personally I think it's great, Dread is very much an evolution of what was introduced in Samus Returns (another fantastic game). I love how Its challenging but not unforgiving, I've lost track of how many times Samus has been stabbed in the head by an EMMI only to r1espawn at the other side of the door. Im genuinely enjoying this more than the Prime games but I suppose its each to their own.