Dare I Say, Too Many Bosses?

 Metroid Dread is great. I think that in the future we'll be looking back on it as an exemplar of the series. I don't know if it'll top the legendary status of Super Metroid (give it another 27 years and I'll get back to you) but I think it's an excellent translation of an old-school genre to a new age.

If there is one flaw, it's actually something that would be the opposite of a problem in most games:

There are too many bosses.

I should note that I'm including minibosses. At one point, you're going to find yourself fighting some agile, very hostile and fast monsters, and periodically these guys are going to ambush you as you make your way across ZDR. These fights are hard (especially when you get attacked by two at once. Especially when those two get you when you've got just one energy tank remaining and you're not in a great place to farm health - thankfully I figured out that if I could respawn one of the minions in the room where I was fighting I could get a full-health upgrade, but only after like seven attempts on these guys.)

The unique bosses have all been very cool (well, with one exception - there's a bug thing that you fight that's not terrible memorable). They do have a somewhat more modern design philosophy - they tend to have something of an "attack window" that you have to do other things to get to. I will say that the earlier bosses are a bit more old-school, but there's definitely going to be a bunch of phases and you'll need to adapt on the fly.

This is one way in which the fight's aren't quite as old-school as the exploration gameplay. It might be an asset or a liability, depending on your preferences.

Oddly, later in the game, the EMMI, who seem like such a ubiquitous presence for much of it, are not encountered quite as much. There is one EMMI zone you'll have to cross a few times (underwater before you get the Gravity Suit, mind you) but I don't believe I'm ready to actually take that one down.

One thing I will truly complain about is that the number of times you're unable to backtrack makes it hard to really notice when you get better gear. I've finally returned to the starting area of Artaria having gotten the Gravity Suit, Plasma Beam, and Storm Missiles, but due to reasons I won't spoil, many of the enemies there have gotten tougher. Even if the Gravity Suit reduces my damage by half again (after the Varia does it the first time,) it doesn't really feel like I've got better armor when I'm four times as much damage.

On my first playthrough, of course, I wouldn't even have the foggiest notion how to sequence break in this game. But to be fair, that's never been my playstyle. I do think I'll do multiple playthroughs - this is going to be a nice game to have in my back pocket for an airplane flight or something like that (though I imagine it'll be hell on my hands if I use the Joy-Cons - even with the Pro controller I'm not at 100%, though that might be because I've been playing pretty consistently over the course of the day (I doubt my completion time is going to impress anyone.)

Given the age we live in, I wonder if Nintendo will release any DLC for this. It's obviously pretty hard to shoehorn in new content for a game like this - Metroids are always kind of an intricate puzzle-box. Still, perhaps there's a place for some mini-adventure. We shall see.

I suspect that I'm getting close to the end of the game. I can only think of a handful of upgrades left to pick up (notably, I haven't gotten the Power Bombs, but I did get an expansion for them, which is currently listed as a "mysterious item" as if Samus had never used a Power Bomb before).

Obviously, beyond Samus getting her arsenal back together, I've gotten more comfortable with the controls. So I suspect that when I play again I'm going to be a lot more adept in the early parts of the game. Being able to read a boss' tells is a big part of surviving - unless there are a ton of energy tanks that I'm just not seeing, you're going to have a hard time brute-forcing any of these boss fights.