I'm in the endgame. I've beaten the last of the minibosses before I hit the final boss encounter, and I'll be honest, I'm a little hesitant. In part, that's because the boss is likely to be insanely hard (at least on this first playthrough, the bosses have been seriously challenging, though I imagine on a second playthrough the first few will go by like a breeze, now that I've figured out their patterns and tells (finding out there's a counter for Kraid makes me sad I never got it, so I didn't get the cool interactive cutscene/quicktime event to blast him in the face with missiles.)
I'm certainly not going to get any kind of speed record, but instead I'm going to try to get 100% of the items.
Of the many regions, I've now gotten 100% of the items in Artaria, which is where you start the game. The final piece was a very tricky thing where you had to speed boost through a door, duck for a shinespark, blow up two bomb blocks, then aeion flash to get in position and then shinespark up to blast through the blocks. It took me probably 30 or so attempts, if only that.
One thing I've found is that after I got the Space Jump and Screw Attack I sort of forgot about the Aeion Flash, which is a really, really useful ability that probably would have made some bosses a lot easier.
Anyway, I'm not working on Cataris, which is the second area you visit. It appears there's another fiendishly tricky Shinespark puzzle here, where you need to run up and then jump between like five different platforms before you can get to the speed blocks you need to destroy. I think there's something about being able to conserve the spark if you hit a diagonal surface, but I certainly have not gotten the hang of it in the least.
There's also a room in Cataris that I know exists but I have no idea how to get into it - and I need to in order to destroy a grapple beam block so that I can then Shinespark from a different room and presumably get some item.
Of course, in this mopping up phase I've found that there are a ton of items I could have gotten ages ago, but either missed them or lacked the item I needed for them and just didn't go back when I got it (to be fair, until you get the Screw Attack, the game kind of forces you into a linear path with little opportunity to backtrack, meaning that for about 3/4 of the game you're just going to try to see if you can get the items you find along the way and make a note for later.
My obvious point of comparison with this game is Super Metroid, having never played any of the mobile-only games and only briefly trying the original. At the moment, this game feels longer, but on the other hand, I basically know what to do in Super Metroid and which item I need to get and where to find it. I've been playing this pretty much guide-free apart from having watched the Treehouse demo.
There are certainly more upgrades to find in this than in Super Metroid - I think that of the ones found in Super Metroid, the only ones that aren't in this are kind of worked into existing abilities. The Spring Ball comes with the Morph Ball, and the High Jump is just there from the start, as are Missiles. There is no Ice Beam, but there are Ice Missiles (though there's way less need to freeze enemies with them).
I do find it interesting to think back to Super Metroid. There are fewer regions in that, but even so, there's really only one item you get in the Wrecked Ship (which, to be fair, is by far the smallest region,) and Maridia (which is not small) only has the Space Jump and the technically optional Plasma Beam.
Given Metroid's item/key style of exploration, the addition of more items actually makes the paths through each of the regions much more linear. I think that, aesthetically, there's a cleanness to the game that I find a little underwhelming. I think the 16-bit sprites of Super Metroid inherently gave things a bit more texture - the graininess of those old sprites enhancing a feeling that things are worn down. Metroid Dread's environments clearly took a lot of care - while you're only playing in a 2D space, the backgrounds seamlessly mesh with that environment to give you a more solid world, but I think that the necessity to make the environment very clear for gameplay purposes leaves everything a little too polished, which honestly is something I've noticed about Nintendo's aesthetic for the past few years.
Zebes in Super Metroid has the feeling of a ruin that's in a real state of decay. The Space Pirates are basically squatting in this ruined Chozo world. You get the sense that places like Red Brinstar were ancient temples or something. ZDR is also a Chozo-settled world, but it seems like it fell to ruin much more recently (which I think it has.) Ferenia, a region that you get to at roughly the midpoint of the game (midpoint of its narrative at least - it might be a little earlier than the actual midpoint) seems less ruined than just abandoned. It looks like someone's been dusting and sweeping the floors.
I will say that my experience playing this has been a bit different than when I first played Super Metroid. Then, I was either in middle school or early high school, and couldn't monopolize the TV for hours upon hours. (Now, if a roommate is using the TV, I can just set up the Switch on my desk in my room and play with its screen - though I've found the Pro Controller is so infinitely more comfortable for me that I regret not getting one sooner). Basically, if you have the willpower, I'd be curious to see how the game would feel taking the pace a bit slower. The gameplay loop of Metroid has always been a fairly page-turning one. You get a new item, and you want to try the item out, and that leads you to another new item.
Anyway, if you're curious about the regions of ZDR, here's a list in the order that you find them. Spoilers ahead.
Artaria is a rocky cave region that is where the gameplay begins. Until that midpoint shift, your goal is just to escape the planet, and so you start far down. There's a few different environments here, but mostly it's the rocky cave area, vaguely analogous to Crateria. At a later point in the game, Artaria and Cataris get frozen over, with Artaria in particular taking on that "ice level" appearance when that happens.
Cataris is the second place you go, and is the magma-zone. The magma here provides geothermal power to the other regions, and you'll spend your first visit doing a lot of redirecting magma flows to power certain doors (and close other ones). You could sort of think of this as being a bit Norfair-like, but more industrial.
Dairon is the sort of slick technology center of ZDR, a big laboratory filled with robots. At one point you need to turn the power back on in here, which then activates a lot of robots that will attack you. This is the zone closest to the center of the map, though with the teleporter rooms and somewhat circular organization of the regions, I wouldn't really call it the main hub in the way that Brinstar winds up being in Super Metroid.
Burenia is the oceanic region, and about half of it is submerged. Surprisingly, you do a lot of stuff here before you get the Gravity Suit (including its major boss, which requires you to periodically drain the room so you can hit its weak point.) You do get the Gravity Suit here as well. The arrival in this region is one of my favorite - like a lot of zones, you get there via a tram system, and when you show up you're riding above a tumultuous sea.
Gharovan is a jungle/forest region. After all the cold and slick industrial areas, it's kind of refreshing to go somewhere that's primarily natural in appearance. Also, of note, there are creatures here that are pretty much friendly or at least will run away from you, but when a certain event happens later on (we're getting there,) they become quite deadly and dangerous foes.
Ferenia is the central home of the native Chozo on ZDR. The vibe here is ancient temple and castle of a powerful and sophisticated people. But that makes it all the more eerie that it seems abandoned, despite its mostly intact state.
Elun is where things start to get dark. We'll need to get into plot here. Raven Beak, the guy who fights you in the intro cutscene, is the leader of the Mawkin Chozo tribe - a militaristic, warrior tribe that is all about that whole "weaponize Metroids to conquer the galaxy" thing. He sent a bunch of his people to SR388 to try to bring back the Metroids there after he had helped seal them, but not only did they run into the whole problem of Samus having killed them all off, but also, one of his people got infected with the X Parasite, and it spread amongst them until the entire tribe was taken over. Somehow, Raven Beak corralled them all into Elun without getting himself infected, and sealed them in. And when you go in there, he lets them out. After this point, the whole of ZDR gets infected with X Parasites, which even changes the "items" you get off of defeated enemies. Except for things like robots, instead of the old purple health orbs and missiles, there are now Yellow (health) and Green (missiles) X Parasites to claim - and they will often transform into a different enemy after you defeat them the first time. Elun is one of the smaller regions, but it's where the stakes go way up (and the difficulty, not that it was super easy before.)
Hanubia is the surface-region where your ship landed. A storm-battered ruin, this is a pretty short area, with just two mini-bosses, but it's kind of like Ferenia only falling apart and ruined. While I'd be tempted to call it the Tourian equivalent, technically that's not correct, because there's one more region:
Itorash is Raven Beak's ship flying high above the surface. It's actually just a couple rooms and then the final boss, whose defeat has you crashing into the surface and then racing to your ship before the planet inevitably explodes (conveniently wiping out all the X-infested creatures on it). I haven't actually been here yet (I was worried I'd automatically start the final boss fight,) but saw a video of it, and it's really just a short area to build anticipation for the boss.
(Someone pointed out that the regions all have initials that are the first nine letters of the alphabet. Though you don't visit them in order. The first time you go to each, the order is, if I recall correctly, A C D B G F E H I.)
They do manage to make Raven Beak pretty despicable, but there's also something vaguely sad about him - he's the only survivor of his tribe (a warmongering, somewhat fascistic one, to be clear) and is basically just the solitary madman making Samus' life a living hell.
I've also mentioned before that I'm a little sad to know that the planet explodes at the end. Even though I've never played a ton of the original Metroid, the fact that they were able to call back to the events of the first game in Super Metroid, letting you return to Mother Brain's original chamber and the starting area in Brinstar (though the geography makes zero sense - the elevator down into the place where the original game started starts from right outside Mother Brain's chamber?) was really cool. It'd be nice if there was some way to make ZDR a persistent location for future games. But I do kind of see how once the X is running rampant on a world, it's probably for the best if that planet just ceases to exist. They really manage to make the X parasites truly creepy, even if their "true form" is brightly-colored floating gummies.
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