I Kinda Just Want There to be More Metroid Dread

 Metroid Dread is a good game. It's hard to get a total aggregate of players' opinions, but I think most people have been very positive on the game.

The second time around, the density of bosses didn't bother me so much, though I suppose when you're blazing through the game you're going to hit a whole bunch of them in a row anyway. I still think the music doesn't really have the iconic quality Super Metroid did. Is that just the benefit of almost 30 years of familiarity? Possibly. The thing is, the musical moments that excited me the most were the ones that were updates of those familiar tunes - the prologue is just a rearrangement of the Super Metroid prologue music, and the lengthy cutscene around the middle of Dread uses a rearrangement of the Lower Brinstar/Red Soil theme from Super Metroid (which, to be fair, is one of the best tracks from that soundtrack.)

The only new piece of music that I think really got stuck in my head was the Ferenia music, which does have an ominousness to it, but I also think that the electronic instrumentation they've chosen reflects an issue I've had with a lot of Nintendo music in the past couple decades - there's a kind of tininess to it that makes it seem less grand than it could.

Granted, I think it's fully appropriate for Metroid to have a somewhat electronic sound - we don't need to go fully symphonic for it - but I think there could have been something a bit bigger about the sound. I'm not a music theorist, so I don't really have suggestions on how one would improve it.

I think the game's most profound victory is the feel of its controls. While it took a little time to get used to holding down the various shoulder buttons and such, once you're comfortable with the free-aim system, it makes you feel extremely precise. Samus is also so much more agile than she felt in Super Metroid (the wall-jump, which was not so ubiquitous an ability in 1994, was always this kind of super-special technique that was very difficult to pull off. I'm glad that Metroid Dread makes it very easy.

I do think that the graph-paper-y layout of the environments feels a little odd in this modern day of video games. Even supposedly natural cavern systems look as if they're constructed out of evenly-sized blocks, though I appreciate how the game nods to the idea of a more natural three-dimensional space, such as how the backgrounds in Ferenia show staircases that would allow someone who isn't hopping around like a lunatic to access its floors.

Dread is hardly small for a Metroid game. Indeed, I think it's likely that its whole map is actually significantly larger than that of Super Metroid (I'd like to see ZDR overlaid on Zebes to compare them - should google that). But I guess just in this day and age (when I'm a more practiced gamer and also less likely to give up for a play session if I die to a boss) it couldn't last super-long. Metroid Dread is decidedly old-school, and was built in part as a new playground for people who have been speed-running Super Metroid for nearly 30 years. While my second run (a sort of "foot off the brake but not always on the gas" attempt) reduced my time from 12 to 5 hours, I've seen people pulling off runs that go under two hours already.

I'm not really someone who wants to dedicate himself to shaving off seconds from a completion time, and if anything, I'd love to do another run where I stop to smell the roses. (In a way, I almost regret going for 100% on my first run).

One thing I think could be cool is if there were to fully remake Super Metroid with the mechanics of Metroid Dread. You'd certainly have to tweak a few things (for one, having Missiles and Super Missiles as a separate attack in Super Metroid allows them to introduce the latter far earlier.) But most of the items you gain in Super Metroid already exist in Dread, so I think the biggest challenges would just be creating the proper assets (and hey, you've already got Kraid!)

As I've said earlier, creating DLC for Dread could be difficult, as ZDR is kind of a self-contained labyrinth. But I wouldn't mind having some kind of shorter, mini-metroid game that maybe allows you to carry over your abilities from the main game and pick up a couple new ones.

The big hope is that this game's sales numbers (which I think have been quite high) will reinvigorate the brand, meaning we could get more 2D Metroid games without waiting another 19 years. We'll see.