At this point, I'm pretty sure I have the door to the final boss. So now, I, in the honored tradition of video games, will be doing everything but progressing to the end of the game in order to try to get 100% of the items hidden around ZDR.
I believe there is one Aeion Power I have yet to find, which is odd, as I'd think you'd need it to finish the game (to be fair, you don't need the Spring Ball in Super Metroid. Or the X-Ray Visor). I remember hearing something about the ability to slow down time, which might help in the difficult Shinespark puzzles that I'm beating my head against.
I'll reiterate that I think there are a few too many minibosses - when I got the Power Bombs (which seems like the last mandatory upgrade - the sequence here is way different from Super Metroid,) I was immediately confronted by one of the standard recurring minibosses, and then I progressed back just a couple rooms and found myself fighting yet another (though I think it's likely the last of them.) The game kind of front-loads the EMMI encounters, but about when you get the Screw Attack, things really open up in a way that lets you truly explore (and also makes it a much bigger challenge to figure out where you're supposed to go next. Indeed, the Screw Attack, as in Super Metroid, basically means that ordinary enemies are unlikely to cause you any problems anymore. You still have a few upgrades after the Screw Attack, but that's the moment where the game really says "ok, no more rails whatsoever."
I do think that the rate at which you get items is maybe a little too fast. There are some items that feel almost redundant. For example, when you get the Super Missiles (which just replace your regular missiles,) you don't go terribly far before you unlock the Ice Missiles. And even that feels a little underwhelming in its application. There are these weird burning plants you need to destroy with an Ice Missile to pass them, but you never have to freeze enemies to use them as platforms like you did with the Ice Beam (in fact, I think you have the Space Jump by that point, so you wouldn't need to anyway.)
Bosses are also hard in Metroid Dread. You'll need to figure out their tells and really dodge their attacks. Yeah, you might have eight energy tanks, but when a boss' strike takes out two of them, that doesn't mean much (and there's a hard mode, apparently). Earlier bosses tend to have some way to recharge mid-fight - Kraid will cough up his weird phlegm balls, which you can shoot to A. not get hit by them and B. get health and missiles back, but later bosses will require you to be pretty well-stocked going in. That said, I have yet to run out of missiles except maybe on the first boss (when I had a max of like 13). But don't expect to have an easy time recovering your health if you just wait for the phase where the boss shoots things at you that you can destroy.
True to its name, Metroid Dread is dark. Let's go into spoiler territory:
The villain of the game is Raven Beak, the leader of the Mawkin Chozo tribe, who is basically a fascist asshole who wants to conquer the galaxy. After you eradicated the Metroids on SR388 and the last one died on Zebes, Raven Beak's plans to use the Metroids as an unstoppable bioweapon were seemingly foiled. However, when Samus got her Metroid vaccine in the beginning of Metroid Fusion, she took on some of the characteristics of a Metroid, able to absorb the X-Parasites.
The Mawkin, who call ZDR their home, journeyed to SR388 after Samus had wiped out the Metroids in an attempt to harvest some for their purposes, but they got infected by the X-Parasite, and it spread through the tribe until basically only Raven Beak was unaffected (as well as a member of a different tribe, the Thoha, who he had coerced into working for him. The Thoha created the Metroids in the first place to fight the X Parasites, but they refused to help the Mawkin weaponize them, and so Raven Beak had them massacred.)
Raven Beak manipulated the Federation into sending the EMMIs, and then captured and reprogramed them to hunt Samus, knowing that she's the last surviving organism with Metroid DNA - effectively making her the last Metroid. As her ability to absorb life force like the Metroids awakens, Raven Beak wants to capture and clone her to make an army of Metroids - specifically the kind that's human with an infusion of Chozo and Metroid DNA, who are all 100% loyal to him.
So yes, the whole premise here is that Samus was lured there. It's one big trap.
Worst of all, after you discover Elun, the region where the infected Chozo were contained, their transformation is really horrific. If not for the still somewhat stylized graphics, we'd be talking full on John Carpenter's The Thing. The Chozo warriors you fight have two phases, and in the second phase, their heads split open horizontally, so that they have this massive, oozy maw (these, by the way, are the minibosses I've been talking about. The other version is this type of Chozo robot, which you start having to fight two at a time, which is very not easy.)
After you visit Elun, Raven Beak unleashes all the X-Parasites on the planet. In fact, even the health and missiles you get from defeating ordinary foes becomes X-Parasites, and after defeating one, they'll often transform into a different creature before you can actually absorb them.
It's pretty clear that ZDR's gotta go, and having spoiled myself ahead of time I know that this'll be another planet Samus winds up flying away from as it blows up.
That's actually a bit of a shame. One thing I love in Super Metroid is that you get to see locations from the original game in a ruined state, and I think it would have been cool if ZDR had remained a thing that we could return to.
One thing of note is that Space Pirates make almost zero appearance, with the exception of Kraid, who is a prisoner of the Mawkin (why they took him I don't know, though it could honestly just be because they wanted to have a classic Metroid boss in there, and Ridley was overplayed.)
As is often the case with a game, I'm feeling a little sad that I'm nearing the end, but other than the somewhat excessive boss fights, this game does very much feel like Super Metroid, and I can imagine coming back to it many times.
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