Ideas for a Gothic Monster-Hunting RPG

 This is extremely tentative - I literally just had the idea in the last hour while having lunch.

The first thought that came to me was how Curses in D&D are kind of disappointing. They are mechanically distinct from other magical effects, but only in that there are other spells (Remove Curse, mainly) that can dispel them. If anything, this means a Curse is actually less of a problem than other kinds of magical afflictions, which feels utterly wrong.

I was thinking about how in Dark Souls, getting cursed required you to go through a pretty involved process to cleanse it, and the notion was that a Curse could never just be eradicated, only transferred to someone else. Even the items you could get to cleanse them were technically a person's spirit who was just taking on that curse. True to the game's themes of entropy, on a long enough timeline, everyone would be afflicted with this curse, which feels very, you know, curse-like.

But that got me thinking about how it would be cool to have a D&D-like system that could handle curses in this way.

I've long been drawn (as documented in this blog) to the idea of Monster-Hunters in a world of Gothic Horror. In my homebrew setting, there is a group called the Nachtjagers (and then I expanded this to an older branch in another kingdom called the Night Hunters - same term, just in English) who play that role of secret monster-hunters who go village-to-village fighting monsters. It's actually not too dissimilar to The Witcher in concept - this is an archetype that goes way back. And while Van Helsing from Dracula is not precisely this archetype in the novel, he's been portrayed that way in reimaginings (like the Hugh Jackman movie from the late 2000s where he looks like Solomon Kane, although to be fair, Van Helsing is Dutch and Kane's a puritan who might have adopted Dutch fashion while there in exile from England - I don't know actually when Kane's books take place).

Anyway, it's just scattered thoughts for the moment, but I think this would be a bit more than just a 5E hack. Here are some concepts I'd want to build around:

1. Borrowing Draw Steel's "Everything Hits"

I really like the idea that there's no Null Result in Draw Steel's combat, but I also think that the Power Roll is not the only way to implement this. In D&D, after all, we have damage rolls, and I think you could play around with those rather than standardizing to just three potential results.

2. A Focus on Fighting Individual Monsters

Monster-hunting as a subset of the dark fantasy genre does really tend to focus on a single, interesting monster. It should be a shocking reveal when there's more than one of them. There can be exceptions, of course.

But not only are they usually only fighting one monster at a time, I think that a monster fight needs to be a really climactic effect. If you figure that a monster hunt should be the rough equivalent of an adventure, that means you'll want to potentially allow the party to spend multiple sessions going after an individual monster. This, then, inspires two other pillars:

3. A Focus on Hunting, not Just Fighting

Every character must have some skills that contribute to tracking down the target, with different classes having different methods of doing so. There needs to be interesting gameplay related to finding the target, and we might actually have to reinforce that mechanically, like you need to earn a certain number of "tracking points" to actually find where you can fight the monster.

4. Deathblows

This, I think, would be the radical change compared to most RPG combat systems. I think we'd use Stamina in place of HP like Draw Steel does, but we are really going to reinforce the notion that Stamina is merely your ability to keep fighting. If you are knocked down, you're basically out of the fight but kind of just have the wind knocked out of you.

I think that actually killing a creature (whether a monster, NPC, or PC) would require separately taking a moment to get the killing blow. And this moment would require dice to be rolled to determine if you successfully kill it.

A failed Deathblow would probably net the monster some Stamina, but just enough to give them the opportunity to flee. Certain class abilities might give you a better chance at successfully executing a Deathblow, and maybe other class abilities could mean that a Monster that survived a Deathblow is easier to track and maybe is less likely to survive the next. Monsters probably wouldn't have abilities that make it harder for PCs to survive Deathblows (especially because, given the genre, we probably aren't going to have any kind of resurrection mechanics).

Deathblows could also help give iconic monsters some of their iconic features - you can't Deathblow a vampire unless you have a wooden stake to drive into their heart, for example. Likewise, you might not be able to Deathblow a werewolf without a silver weapon.

The actual mechanics of the Deathblow are something I don't quite know how I'd handle - I think potentially it's that you need to do some minimum amount of damage in a single attack (or turn - we could count someone stabbing a monster a dozen times in quick succession as one collective attack). Each monster could have a Deathblow threshold that needs to be met, and certain player abilities might add to the damage of their Deathblows, or perhaps make certain types of damage count as higher when used for a Deathblow.

5. Thematic Classes

Part of why we'd want to build a new system is to ensure that we don't fall into the same genre conventions as D&D. I think like Draw Steel, we'd also want class design that gives just as much versatility and options to martial characters as it does to spellcasters.

I have three spellcaster concepts in mind:

A Witch who deals in natural magic, with a very mud, blood, and thorns aesthetic.

An Esotericist (that might be a mouthful, Mystic could work better. Alchemist could also work, but we're leaning more toward the esoteric traditions than the "beakers and bottles" aesthetic). Oh, Occultist is probably the best: this is the archetype of the person who employs deep and forbidden magic, with hellfire, rune circles, and dark tomes as their aesthetic.

Inquisitor would be the "divine" spellcaster, with a really harsh fire-and-brimstone aesthetic using searing light and white-hot silver.

For "martial" archetypes, truthfully we're probably talking roughly the Fighter, Ranger, and Rogue in broad terms. But I think we'd have some different terms:

Warrior is probably our only heavily-armored (remember that everything hits, so this would mean lots of Stamina) class fighting with big medieval weaponry, and I think their tracking capabilities are more about keeping morale up on the move.

Hunters (a name that might need to change if the game were just called Night Hunters - I'm between that and Deathblow) are all about special techniques and knowledge about monsters, and likely would have some mechanic where they can prepare special poisons for their weapons, or if that doesn't work mechanically, they might have a lot of abilities that impair the monster (slowing it, reducing its damage, etc.)

Assassins are your quick, nimble, and sneaky monster hunters who likely fight with daggers or other small weapons, and probably have very high mobility.

6. Thematic Stats

I like the flavor of using alternative stat names - while I think Draw Steel kind of goes contrarian in its insistence on calling everything something else (Strength is fine - though as someone whose first class-based RPG was WoW, Agility does actually feel kind of better than Dexterity) here we're narrowing the tonal focus of the game and would want the stats to reflect that.

For example, Brutality would be the stat for raw physical power - Warriors would likely want to focus on this, but I'd also want the stats to be appealing to more than one class. Cunning would probably be the spellcasting ability for our Occultist, reflecting, yes, cleverness and forward-planning but with a somewhat sinister vibe. Will might be what an Inquisitor uses - a raw channeling of one's power and conviction upon the world.

We don't have to have 1:1s for all the classic D&D stats, and I'd even be kind of curious to play in a space where some classes might want to split their stats a bit, like how in Soulsborne games you sometimes would rather have 40 Dex and 40 Int instead of 80 Dex.

Maybe we can design class abilities that scale with two stats, but in a limited manner - if you're going for more of a melee Inquisitor build, you might want to have 3 Brutality and 3 Will, while if you're going for a pure spellcasting build, you'll want to have a full 6 Will (the numbers are made up here, but I imagine we'd want to just make the scores whatever you add to your rolls).

Like, say we've got an ability called Purge the Wicked, which deals holy/radiant/whatever we wind up calling it damage. Say it does 3d6+Will. Then, we have another Inquisitor ability they can pick called Searing Brand, which does 1d10+Brutality (max 3) physical damage and 1d10+Will (max 3) fire damage. If you have 6 Will and nothing to Brutality, you'll be doing 16.5 on average with Purge the Wicked and only 14 with Searing Brand, but if you're split between the two, you could potentially do an average of 17 with Searing Brand.

7. Relatively Flat Levels

I think it was wise for both Daggerheart and Draw Steel to compress to just 10 levels. The legacy of 20 levels in D&D has left a lot of campaigns ending well before the level cap.

I think this game has an even lower level cap. Like, probably 5.

The reason is that, while we do want our players to be fighting scarier monsters as they get more experience, the core tone of the game is for them to be these rough-and-tumble killers for hire, not superheroes. If any of the characters gain the ability to fly, it's going to be very limited, and probably just one person (the Witch, most likely).

I wouldn't want the power escalation to get to the point where the party can just teleport across the globe or phase through walls. A monster that is extremely dangerous at level 1 should still remain a threat, even if it's a more manageable one, at the cap. At no point should a vampire be a trivial encounter (to be fair, that's the kind of monster I imagine being beyond the players' capabilities until the later levels, like 3 at the absolute earliest.

8. Extensive non-combat mechanics

I always get a little wary of complicating non-combat situations with a bunch of mechanics. At least with my players, naturalistic roleplay tends to be what we want to focus on when we're not looking at minis on a battle grid.

I was, thus, pretty skeptical of Negotiations in Draw Steel. I have yet to actually run one (or even see it in play) but I will concede that its solves some issues, like preventing players from just brute-forcing social encounters after failing a ton of charisma checks.

Actually, I think I wouldn't have a "Charisma" equivalent stat (beyond Will, being only roughly equivalent) in order to make it feel like players don't feel they need to be a certain class to be the party face and interact with NPCs.

What I think would really need to be robust would be a system for detective work.

I'm tempted to adopt something like the Time Clocks in Blades in the Dark - while we'd mostly want to situate the monster hunt as a narrative thing, we'd also have an underlying numerical system to track how close the party is to finding the monster.

9. Resource System

I definitely like the Draw Steel Heroic Resource system, but that really truly only functions fully while in a fight. Out of initiative, the use of Heroic abilities is kind of kludgy. I'm tempted, then, to borrow ideas from Daggerheart, where combat and non-combat situations operate along similar lines.

But that might be a later consideration.

    Ideas are Cheap. I'll be honest, I'm kind of getting excited about this concept, but I also know it would be very difficult to put it all together. If I could figure out at least an initial core dice mechanic system (I actually don't hate ability modifiers and proficiency bonuses with a d20 - just that it wouldn't be so common to roll d20s in combat) and put together a rough level 1 for some classes and a monster, we might see if we get any traction.

Ability Score and Characteristic Flexibility

 I haven't posted about Draw Steel in a while, because, well, I have still not had a chance to play it. I need to be the one pushing my friends to try it out, and between the D&D game I play in and the one I run (and hoping we can one day return to the Sunday game I play in that hasn't played in like 7 months) and everyone having packed adult schedules, I've been struggling to find the oomph to actually set a date and get it running.

Still, while my admiration for the game is still theoretical at this point, I wanted to point out one other thing that I really appreciate about the game:

Naturally, this is going to be in comparison to D&D - the 800-pound Gorilla of the TTRPG space, to which Draw Steel was designed largely in response to.

If you are playing a Bard in D&D, you will most likely have Charisma as your top stat, potentially even if you're going for a melee build like Dance or Valor. While I think they only get simple weapons now, back in 2014, they got proficiency in Longswords as one of the specific martial options they were granted. A Longsword is not a finesse weapon, so barring something like True Strike or Pact of the Blade, you'll need to attack using Strength with it.

Now, I like the idea of a strong Bard. But because Bards are limited to Light Armor, if you don't invest pretty heavily in Dexterity (or somehow upgrade your armor type through multiclassing or a feat) you'll have a pitiful AC, which is a real liability (though I do think monster attack bonuses outpace AC growth unless you get lots of magic armor).

We do, in theory, have a lot of options for how we want to express our characters with different stats, but it's quite difficult to make it impactful without hindering our characters. Basically every character wants at least a decent Constitution score, and to have decent armor, you need at least a 14 in Dex unless you can wear heavy armor, in which case you will want at least a 15 in Strength. (Armor Artificers are a rare exception, who truly don't need a good stat for AC, but given that the armor you wear still contributes to the weight you're carrying, if your table uses any kind of encumbrance rules, you might still consider investing a bit in Strength).

Different classes have different degrees of flexibility here - a Rogue really only needs high Dexterity and probably decent Constitution, though certain subclasses will then want to invest in Intelligence as well, and possibly Wisdom to aid in important perception checks and the like. A Paladin, though, who really wants to maximize their Strength, Charisma, and ideally Con as well, has very little flexibility on getting decent Dex, Int, or Wis - in fact, the "optimal" build using Point Buy is to take 15s in Str, Cha, and Con and 8s in the rest.

There are two ways in which Draw Steel, to me, really fixes the friction here:

First, there's the way that Stamina (the equivalent of HP) is calculated - there's no Constitution stat, and so your Stamina is determined by your class, level, and potentially your Kit, all of which are basically divorced from your stats. There is also no concept of an Armor Class - all attacks will do something, it's just a question of how much of an impact they have (think of it as damage rolls without attack rolls). Again, there is no stat minimum for your Shining Armor or Cloak and Dagger kits.

The second element is that your class guarantees that the most important stats for you go up, hitting the maximum for any stat you could have at each level it could reach that (basically each echelon of play - their version of tiers of play).

The Censor, which is the rough equivalent of the Paladin, for example, always has Might and Presence both at the highest amount you could get at any level (the equivalents of Strength and Charisma).

Now, for the other stats, the player has a choice - they can either have a relatively flat spread between the other three stats (Agility, Reason, and Intuition - the equivalents of Dexterity, Intelligence, and Wisdom) or they can actually take a low score in at least one of them to keep another at or near the level of their primary stats.

I realized this when I was building a Talent - the psionic class that doesn't really have a 5E equivalent until they come out with the Psion, presumably in some upcoming Dark Sun book. Talents earn more of their heroic resource when a creature is force-moved near them, and while that would most classically take the form of some kind of telekinetic movement, it actually works just fine if you shove someone.

A Talent is among the "squishiest" classes (meaning purely that it has lower Stamina) and so you wouldn't think it would be a class that lends itself to having a high Might. But there's actually nothing really stopping you from doing that. Thus, I built a Hakaan (think sort of Goliaths but made of stone and literally one size category larger than most characters, though they still fit on one grid square) Talent whose Might was just one point lower than his Reason and Presence (the core stats for Talents). Because you can shove creatures as a maneuver (think bonus action) I figured he could start off a turn if someone was up in his face by shoving them away, thus immediately gaining some extra Clarity, and then drop some nasty psionics on them.

By contrast, it's very unlikely that a Sorcerer in D&D would be able to afford having a high Strength when they need to have a high Charisma, decent Con and decent Dexterity.

It does honestly make me wonder if D&D would be better off if armor was less stat-dependent, and if we could make room for weirder stat arrays.

Raven Beak in 3

 Well, 5 years later my re-play of Metroid Dread saw me take down Raven Beak in three attempts. While I love this game as a fitting follow-up to the series, my biggest complaint as someone getting a bit older is that it's tough on the hands - when you get either the Plasma or Wave Beam, you can start damaging bosses with your uncharged beam weapons, which is theoretically a good thing but given that Dread's beam weapon more or less shoots as fast as you can hit the Y button, I just found my thumb getting extremely tired doing it, and so I wonder if I actually would have taken him down faster if I had stuck to missiles with a slower fire rate but I assume still higher damage-per-hit. When I got the parry-cutscene damage opportunities, I just shifted so that I could tap the Y button with my pointer, which was was better-rested and made it easier to really rapidly blast the guy.

My first go I got absolutely trounced, but I got better at reading his tells, and in both attempts 2 and 3 I barely took any damage on his flying phase. I also remember hitting his void-bombs with Storm Missiles 5 years ago, but this time I had trouble getting the lock-on and launch in time, and found it easier to just aim Ice Missiles at it.

Despite having very little screentime, Raven Beak is a really memorable and compelling villain. For one thing, we've generally seen the Chozo as benevolent figures. For all the cosmic horror we encounter in Dread, the fact that the final boss and main villain is just a philosophically evil conqueror and tyrant is an interesting twist. Given his end, though, it seems very unlikely that we'll ever see him again.

Kraid and Ridley have died multiple times and come back via cloning or whatever - it's not super clear how the Mawkin captured Kraid (to be fair, Kraid just kind of sinks into the ground when we beat him in Super Metroid, the last time we canonically saw him, so maybe he got off Zebes before it blew up. Or, again, could be a clone). But given that Kraid appears as part of an X-Parasite (the same that infects Raven Beak and creates the truly horrific Kraid/Raven Beak Hybrid. Kraven Beak?) does that mean he's perma-dead?

If memory serves, there's a Ridley clone in Metroid Fusion (oh, and it turns out I can't play it on my Switch because they have a tiered subscription) but even though Ridley shows up more than any other Metroid villain, I believe his canonical death happens in Super Metroid (he literally blows apart).

My total play time was 8 and a half hours, though there's also a counter for when you're on the map screen, which bumped mine up to 11.5. I cannot imagine I spent a full 3 hours looking at maps in this playthrough, but I assume I left the game paused for a long time while doing something else. I saw that a previous speed-run of it I'd taken only 3 hours and maybe 40 minutes, but only had like 37% of the items. I believe you get art rewards for getting under 4 hours, and I just never got that on Hard Mode (doubt I ever attempted it).

100% But for Raven Beak in my Revisit to ZDR, and Thoughts on Super Metroid

 I seriously doubt that I'm getting any reasonable completion time, but I've gotten 100% of all items in my 5-years-later play of Metroid Dread.

I was shocked that I managed to pull off the difficult shinespark puzzles in Burenia and Cataris in only a couple attempts. I also realized that the one I recalled struggling with in Ferenia actually doesn't require you to use the shinespark until the very end, rather than having to preserve it on slopes, which might explain why I had so much trouble with it back in the day as well. This is the one in the lower left part of Ferenia, through a hidden passage next to the lift that goes down to Dairon. You have plenty of space to get the speed boost up, and then you just slide under a small gap, run up a slope, wall-jump to another slope, and then get your shinespark activated right at the top of that slope and shoot straight up.

Similarly, the one in Artaria (upper left) that I thought required you to get the shinespark, bomb through a wall, and then flash-shift through one of those barriers that will close if you step on the ground near them... could also be done much more simply, as you actually have just enough space to get the shinespark on the other side of the bomb-block barrier, making it actually pretty trivially easy (you can just space jump over the barrier with plenty of time to get in position to spark up through the speed blocks).

I really love Metroid Dread. I still think that I like Super Metroid's world design better - particularly, I find that Dread locks too many doors behind you, so that frequently the zones feel less like an expanding world than levels that you have to commit to completing before you can go back where you came from. I appreciate that you can use the teleporters to go to any other teleporter after getting to Itorash - it was convenient for my item hunt - but I also kind of prefer the way that Super Metroid only rarely traps you where you are - you can usually return to the ship if you want (the exception being I think when you go down into Lower Brinstar and I think you really need the Ice Beam to climb back up).

Also, Super Metroid's soundtrack is among the greatest of all time, and I don't know that any of Dread's music achieves the same iconic memorability. Indeed, Dread re-uses some music from Super Metroid - its theme now sort of functions as Samus' theme (which is funny because she has a theme, which plays near her ship in Super Metroid) and they use the Red Brinstar theme when Quiet Robe gives you the mid-game lore dump. (I remember when I first played the series after discovering Samus in Super Smash Bros., I was surprised that I didn't hear the Brinstar theme in Super Metroid. This, of course, had been the Brinstar theme for the original game, which has a far more heroic space-adventure vibe compared to the brooding and dark stuff from Super Metroid (even if the Green Brinstar theme is kind of a banger, there's still a bit of a "what a weird and mysterious world we've found" tone to it).

Actually, fun fact, when I first played Super Metroid, I was a Middle Schooler in, like, 2000, and at the time I had very strong and strict opinions on what kind of music was cool, and objected to the kind of dance-y, synth-y vibes of that Green Brinstar theme. Naturally, I'm a much more mature person now and understand that it's one of the game's best tracks (with solid competition).

I think that the issue I have with Dread's music is that it feels like it pulls back on its bombast a little, as if it's afraid of being distracting. But given that the gameplay cues in Metroid Dread are largely visual, I don't think it would be a problem for them to go bigger and really claim their space the way that the Super Metroid tracks do. Lower Norfair has always been a favorite of mine because it truly makes Ridley out to be demonic, these fire-and-acid-filled ruins feel like hell, and the music evokes some kind of Latin choir. Upper Norfair is much more subtle, and arguably is one of the more forgettable tracks from Super Metroid, but it's kind of a prelude to the insane bombast you get when you go after Ridley.

Also, coming back to Green Brinstar's theme, I love how it's especially designed for when you first arrive in the zone. You've only been to Crateria at this point (as well as a somewhat ironically rearranged, I think, version of both the first room from the first game and the original Mother Brain boss room and escape shaft - though I think that neither is counted as being in Brinstar or Tourian, the zones each were respectively in in the first game). But Crateria is mostly lifeless, just bluish rocks (which honestly sounds a bit more like the NES version of Brinstar). As the music changes when you go down into Brinstar the first time, you hear the little rhythmic intro while Samus is in the elevator shaft, and right as the main melody kicks in, you see the area covered in thriving plant life, green moss and different, maybe healthier-looking creatures.

Actually, while ZDR's destruction kind of becomes a necessity after the X Parasite infection rabidly spreads (damn, how the hell did Raven Beak manage to quarantine them in Elun in the first place? Like, minutes after it's opened up, the entire world is basically dead,) it honestly feels a bit of a shame 32 years later that Zebes was destroyed at the end of Super Metroid. I think it's the only world that the Metroid games have ever revisited (at least among the ones I've played).

In some ways, even though it is explicitly a sequel, Super Metroid is also kind of a remake of the original game. Released only 8 year later, the game's a showcase for both the evolution of the design and the big jump in power from the NES to the SNES. But it's filled with callbacks that flew over my head the first time I played the game - not only the rooms from the beginning and end of the original game that you find very early on, but also the kind of creepy faces in green and purple metal right before facing Kraid and Ridley, respectively. The weird bubble area of Norfair, and some of what I thought were odd choices for terrain design.

While I'd prefer that they keep moving the series forward, I've found myself wanting a remake of Super Metroid using the engine, controls, and perhaps some mechanics from Metroid Dread. Dread isn't easy - I think that the greater precision of control you have in it allows them to be far more punishing with their bosses (does any boss have an attack that doesn't do a full energy tank's worth of damage?) Certainly some challenges in Super Metroid would be trivialized by things like Samus' ability to slide. But if you could rebuild Super Metroid to control like Metroid Dread, I'd be really eager to try it.

Anyway, with literally nothing left to do but fight Raven Beak, I suspect that this trip back into the heady days of 2021 is drawing to a close. Bake a loaf of sourdough in a saucepan and cut your own hair if you feel nostalgic.

On to Cleaning Mode on ZDR!

 Metroid games have a very satisfying gameplay loop - you push forward, discover some new area, challenge, or boss, defeat it, and are rewarded with a new ability that allows you to push forward some more.

Metroid Dread is truly old-school in its approach, and so the game itself isn't that long. I'm already ready to go up to the Itorash and confront Raven Beak. But, naturally, I'm not doing so yet.

There are items to collect!

I can't recall how many playthroughs this is - whether it's my 3rd or possibly more. Back in 2021 I cleared it and then did it on Hard Mode... and I think maybe did another Hard Mode clear with 100% of items. Anyway, I think like my last 100% run, this time I surprised myself by doing what I generally think of as the hardest Shinespark puzzle in only two or three attempts. This one requires you to get up to speed on a platform that is basically as short as will allow you to build up the requisite speed (with a door in the middle, so you need to shoot it before you start running - not a major challenge, but psychologically tricky). Then, you have to slip through a gap, as you're falling shoot down through some beam blocks, activate the shinespark mid-air to go left and hit a slanted platform (and thus preserve the spark,) leap down, do so again going right, and then leap down into a pit where you have some blocks to hit on the right. I think you only get a normal Missile tank, but if you want everything, that's how you get it. It also lets you skip the ordinary path to the Gravity Suit.

I had heard that at some point the various teleporters become a fast-travel system, but after beating the Gold Chozo right before Itorash, I still can't use them that way. According to Reddit, you have to actually go to Itorash first and then come back. I need to test this (the TV is in use. Yes, it's a Switch game, but... shut up).

Anyway, there's a certain melancholy when you get toward the end of a game like this - the world opens up, yes, but there's also no new capability to discover. We're at full power.

Going back, the Wave Beam EMMI gives us our final challenge, where you need to speed through tight corridors with various barriers to deal with and find the tiny straightaway that gives you enough time to Omega Stream their faceplate off. While I had to abort my initial go (I think I actually parried out of a grab) the second time I got a nice clean stream-then-beam.

I both hate and love the EMMIs - I hate them in the moment, especially the latter couple where you have to flee them underwater before you get the Gravity suit. But they do exactly what they're there to do - instill a sense of dread (you know, like the title!) The nature of the Omega Stream also forces this very tense moment with each of them, where you need to make yourself vulnerable as they approach and hope you have the precision and the distance to melt their face shield. Getting off the beam shot right afterward takes practice - my first playthrough I think I always ran again after getting the faceplate off and had to set up again for the killing blow, but once you figure out that they start to stand up once you've done enough damage to the plate, you can switch to charging your beam and get off that final blow immediately.

I think for the first time I managed to get a Shinespark on Escue, which made that fight go very quickly. A few of the bosses gave me a fair amount of trouble - Experiment Z57 killed me several times, even though I thought I knew what I was doing (I managed to flub the parry the first few times and I also somehow missed one of the tentacles with my Storm Missiles once).

Anyway, I'll have to see if that teleporter thing works. I know there are a few really tough Shinespark puzzles, and even if I got the one in Burenia, I'm fearfully anticipating a few I remember (there's one in Hanubia where you have to stop, drop a bomb, and then shinespark down, and I genuinely cannot remember how you are supposed to get up to speed for it). I remember one in Artaria where you have to roll into a ball while you have the Shinespark to get through a narrow passage, one in Ferenia where you have to do a lot of slope-preservations, and another very elaborate one in Cataris with the same thing.

Returning to ZDR and Dread

 Crazy to think it's almost been five years since Metroid Dread came out.

While the long-awaited (and supposedly disappointing - I haven't played it yet because I don't yet have a Switch 2) Metroid Prime 4: Beyond has come out since, this is still the most recent classic 2D Metroid game.

Having gotten to the final boss of RE4 Remake on my second playthrough, I felt I had more or less done what I wanted (other than a single missing treasure in the Castle and the Island each before points-of-no-return) and was trying to find a game that would scratch whatever itch it is that I have, and I've found myself thinking about the Metroid series a lot lately.

In large part, this is in reaction to RE2 Remake. After a brief prologue, you enter the RPD headquarters, and until the game's final act, you gradually open up more and more of the building and the sewers below.

It's not technically a Metroidvania - while characters get new weapons over the course of a Resident Evil game, their fundamental capabilities don't really change all that much. In Metroid games, something like the Ice Beam both allows you to freeze enemies in place to make combat a little easier but also allows you to use frozen foes as platforms to reach previously-inaccessible areas - whereas the Club Key, valuable though it is, is there to let you open a certain number of doors and is then discarded when all such doors are opened.

Metroid Dread was a long time coming. Metroid Fusion, 19 years prior, was the previous entry in the main Metroid series (a series that, interestingly enough, has split its time between home consoles and handheld ones, from the NES to the Gameboy to the SNES to the Gameboy Advance, and then hitting Nintendo's home/handheld hybrid on the Switch).

Anyway, what's interesting to me is the parallels that Dread has with RE2. Not only is there an ever-widening environment for you to explore, but there are also unkillable stalkers that you have to spend a significant portion of your game fleeing. RE2 has Mr. X, the hulking tyrant-zombie in a fashionable trenchcoat and fedora (this was 1998, so the fedora was just a throwback to men's fashion in the 1940s, not some Incel-coded red flag). Dread has the EMMIs, robots that are nigh-indestructible who can potentially one-shot Samus if they catch you and you can't pull off the (very tight, difficult) counters (I guess technically two-shot, as you have two chances to counter).

The EMMIs are limited to EMMI zones, unlike Mr. X, who can enter almost every room in the RPD (though I think he stops wandering the police station after you go down into the sewers - he chases you there, though on my second run I don't know if I even bumped into him there). While you might expect that once you enter an EMMI zone, you can complete it and bring the robot down with the special beam weapon you get, the truth is that you'll often need to traverse them multiple times before you can actually deal with the Pursuer. Their appearance will throw you off - you might be heading for a particular exit, but especially if they're in an active pursuit (which seals the exits,) you need to prioritize fleeing them, which might send you in some crazy direction you didn't intend - which is honestly quite a lot like Mr. X - I think that I always seemed to be getting chased by him when I finally got the lever that lets you move the bookshelves in the library and had to circle back to that room multiple times to get the opportunity to use it. (Evidently that very lever is a key item in the visit to the ruined RPD in RE9, and it's right where Leon and/or Claire left it.)

Once again, playing Metroid Dread is really exciting because of how fast and fluid Samus is. My only significant experience with the rest of the mainline series (I played the original Metroid Prime trilogy as well) was Super Metroid, and Samus is pretty slow, her weapon's fire rate especially.

Actually, as someone who is turning 40 in about two months, I have to say that the rate at which Samus can blast things is maybe more of a hinderance than a help, as my thumb gets sore from mashing Y over and over. (Funnily enough, I remember that the Super Metroid default control scheme didn't really work for me, but you could customize it. Dread effectively canonizes my preferred scheme, with Y for shoot, B for jump. A isn't for dash, but it is used for your Flash Step, which functions similarly (it's actually sort of the classic spot for a dodge button, like in a Souls-like, and that is one major use of the Flash Step). The sore-hand issue was also true when the game came out and I was five years younger (I think I may have freaked out more over being halfway through my 30s more than being at the end of them, but then, I also started seeing a therapist that year).

Samus' agility is fitting for her role as an action hero, and I wonder if her relative sluggishness in previous games was intentional or just a limitation on what they could pull off. One of the really weird things to get used to initially is that she'll angle her shots as you move forward, so you have to learn to really point the stick truly right if you want to ensure she hits things in her direct path. Aiming is far freer than it was in Super Metroid, where you could only angle up or down at 45 degrees (though crouching to shoot low enemies or other targets is still a thing).

One thing I remember about Dread is that there are a fair number of one-way paths. Most of these become two-way once you get a relevant upgrade, and by the end of the game you have free reign on ZDR to go everywhere. I suspect that the creators wanted to help you from getting lost. By cutting off the path behind you, your options narrow and thus it becomes easier to know what you need to do next. This can, however, leave you a bit frustrated when you really don't know when you'll be able to go back to a previous area. Metroid games often tease you with optional upgrades just outside your reach, and a promise that you can get it later. But these are mixed in with environmental puzzles that can be solved immediately, so there's a tension on whether you want to stick around and figure it out or move ahead.

Given that those upgrades help you survive, that's a big deal. I think I died maybe twice to Kraid, until I made a change in strategy on the last phase (charging up to hit the little balls he launches out of his belly rather than trying to take them out with normal beam fire - the rate at which they come is actually just about perfect for this). But while I find I'm a little more comfortable being cavalier with Missiles, for example, given how many enemies drop them on death, it's certainly nice to have a large reserve.

There's a saving grace to these one-way doors, though, which is that you truly can return everywhere (at least everywhere with an upgrade) at the end of the game. There's no point of no return where if you saved the game after going through some barrier, you lost that upgrade forever. This was the huge frustration I had in my second, completionist run of RE4. I was able to do all of the Merchant Requests (I had like two blue medallions left on my first run,) but infuriatingly, I had literally just one treasure left behind on both the Island and in the Castle - evidently I already mentioned that in an earlier paragraph, but that should tell you how frustrating it was). RE4 pushes you through the story and its settings - it's not a totally linear path, as there is both opportunity and necessity to revisiting various places you've been to (for all the complaints about escorting Ashley, she actually functions as a Metroidvania-like tool for all the places you can send her up to go through a high gap in a wall and unlock a door or kick down a ladder).

While it doesn't come until right at the end, the fact that Metroid Dread does allow you to eventually sweep ZDR for upgrades before your final confrontation with Raven Beak is very appreciated - he's a very tough fight and you want everything you can get for him. Power Bomb capacity upgrades are arguably only for one specific move of his. Unlike in Super Metroid, where they're a sort of mid-game tool, Dread makes Power Bombs the endgame nuke.

I'm really curious to see how the Metroid franchise is doing - naturally, Prime 4: Beyond was the most recent release, and while I haven't played it, I know it's gotten a lot of flak online. I'm always a little cautious about taking online buzz too seriously especially in the space of gaming, where not only are "hot takes" prioritized by social media algorithms, but there's also a powerful far-right agenda to shift conversations and culture and get people mad about stuff that we used to consider either neutral or just good.

But that being said, there's plenty of legitimate criticism to be had about any medium of art, and the "just let people enjoy things" attitude sometimes veers into "just always like what you're given."

It's neither here nor there, of course, because I haven't played the game and so don't know how I'd feel about it (best guess - I'll probably have mixed feelings about it, enjoying some aspects and disliking certain choices the makers made. Remember that you can like things and still find faults in them, and you can dislike things and still find virtues in them).

Dread felt like a really cool update to a classic franchise, and after nearly 20 years of waiting for it, I really hope that I'm not going to be pushing 60 by the time that we get Metroid 6.

Elvish Unity and Sunwell No More

 With Story Mode available for the final (of two) fights in the March on Quel'danas raid, it's now very easy to finish the campaign quests for the first patch of Midnight. We're going to talk about what happens here, what it implies, and where we think we're going next.

In other words, spoilers abound.

I'm undeniably old-school when it comes to WoW. I started playing at the tail end of Vanilla, and so I've been there for every expansion. In September, I'll have been playing for 20 years.

In those early expansions, the endgame was clear from the start. Shadowmoon Valley was a fel-scorched wasteland with the Black Temple looming (as much as any structure could loom in the days of pretty short draw-distances) and our confrontation with Illidan as the clear endpoint. It was Blizzard's first WoW expansion, and they had ambitiously wanted to get as much of it out as quickly as possible, meaning that its first and second raid tiers both came out at launch, and what was meant to be the final raid came out in 2.1. The expectation, of course, was that players would still have to spend months and months making their way through the content (not only did they need to gear up, but there were lengthy quest chains that required completing dungeons and raids before you could go to the next raid).

Still, having the final raid in the first major patch turned out to be a misstep, and so, maybe a year or so after launch, they created a sort of epilogue with the Sunwell Plateau raid, which gave us the Isle of Quel'danas and our first fight against Kil'jaeden. I think only like 3% of all players even set foot in Sunwell Plateau - raiding was considered an activity for hardcore players, like how Mythic Raiding is today.

Wrath of the Lich King, though, delivered on building to a final climax, and saved Icecrown Citadel, which had always loomed imposingly over Dalaran and all of Northrend (again, looming), with a promise that this would all end with us battling Arthas at the Frozen Throne, which we indeed did. (Yes, the Ruby Sanctum was technically the last raid in Wrath, but that was more of a prologue for Cataclysm).

But in Cataclysm, things changed.

In the leveling campaign for Cataclysm (which was nearly the entirety of the quests we did in that expansion) the final zone was Twilight Highlands, in which we built up to a fight against Twilight's Hammer in the Bastion of Twilight raid. But that plot was resolved in that first patch - we defeated Cho'gall (and Sinestra in heroic mode, which was the highest raid difficulty at the time. Mythic Raids came in I believe the Siege of Orgrimmar).

We knew very well that Deathwing would be the final boss of Cataclysm, but it was totally unclear where we would actually fight him. And that's kind of been the way that things have worked out since then: Blizzard tends not to really clue us in to what we're building to in an expansion. Mists was something of an exception: Blizzard announced in Blizzcon 2012 (if memory serves,) shortly before or maybe after Mists launched, that the final raid would be the Siege of Orgrimmar, with Garrosh as our final boss. But Warlords... was kind of a mess, and we thought Grommash would be the final boss in Hellfire Citadel - Hellfire Citadel was the final raid, but we also got one fewer raid tier than expected in that expansion and the whole Burning Legion angle was a bit of a surprise (in large part because that was kind of what the Iron Horde used to define its superiority over our Horde, that it was never corrupted by demons. Oops). Legion arguably did set up the Tomb of Sargeras from the start, but most of us assumed that Argus would be a full expansion, and Antorus had never been mentioned before. We also hadn't known that Argus was a Titan (/worldsoul? The lore established in Legion was that worldsouls were Titans, and in fairness, I think that that had probably always been intended given that Yogg-Saron refers to Azeroth as a "little seedling," but starting in Dragonflight, the notion that Azeroth is destined to be a Titan specifically has been called into question). BFA seemed to be setting up Sylvanas as our final boss, but the whole N'zoth angle snuck up on us, and again, I'd assumed Ny'alotha would have been a zone, rather than just a raid. Shadowlands made it pretty clear we were fighting the Jailer by the end, but we did Torghast early, and Zereth Mortis was a very new thing when it came out.

Basically, modern WoW, and honestly at this point most of WoW, plays a bit coy with us.

Midnight's leveling campaign built up Quel'danas as the real fundamental point of crisis for the expansion. But now, it's been resolved.

Let's recap (spoilers ahead):