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):

A Second Run Through RE4

 While I had done Ada Wong's "Separate Ways" campaign, it wasn't really like the "second run" you get in RE2. That's arguably to its benefit: RE2's second run, giving you the opportunity to play as the other character, is nearly a full second playthrough (I don't remember exactly how it changes outside of the ordinary Leon/Claire differences, but Mr. X at least shows up earlier - which does make his perfect helicopter-hauling entrance sort of redundant). Really, though, I was curious to see if I could get every last treasure I had missed in my first playthrough of RE4, and also see how it felt to go in with fully-upgraded weapons (in fairness, I think I only had the Blacktail truly fully upgraded, but your handgun is generally your default weapon in these games, and especially when you are hitting pretty hard with it, it will serve you quite well).

I have just defeated Ramon Salazar. While the first time against him took me many, many attempts, this one only took me two - the one death came from his insta-kill attack when I lost sight on him and didn't realize how close he was.

Ramon is a great villain and a terrible boss fight, which is a shame. It's a fight that feels designed to frustrate, giving you tiny windows in which to actually damage him, some attacks that feel undodgeable (when he does the horizontal black-bile spray). To be honest, I'm not really enamored with any of the bosses in... well, most survival horror games. (I think the ones in Silent Hill 2 were more interesting than frustrating - I struggled a lot on Eddie, but appreciated it).

Castle Salazar is generally agreed upon as the best part of the game, and I agree. The Gothic Castle (thinking of an Arrested Development joke - if you know, you know) has a grandeur to it, has cool new enemies, and really amps up the feeling of being displaced in time.

Basically, if we are to rank the three main acts of RE4, I think there's a consensus that the Castle is a firm #1, the Village is a respectable #2, and the final act on the Island is a distant #3 - which I, again, agree with.

But playing through again, I can't help but notice the linear design of the castle. There are kind of segments of it that we need to do in a strict sequence, and rather than a comprehensive and cohesive space, it feels a bit like a series of set-pieces that stand mostly in a line from west to east.

One of the detours from this eastward movement is Leon's trip along the castle walls. It's a thrilling sequence in which we need to dodge hurled explosives by a Gigante that has armor like that sapper Uruk-hai from the Two Towers (the one that ignites the bombs under the big wall).

It's a memorable part of the castle, but it's also weird, because the walls project out from about a third of the way into the castle and reconnect before they can protect other parts of the castle.

RE4's combat is more satisfying than that of RE2 (again, talking about the remakes of both) but the level design is less impressive. It's kind of mad that the RPD and the sewers below all fit together like a big jigsaw puzzle.

Survival Horror rewards (and sometimes in the same breath punishes) exploration. RE4 has a whole mechanic for this, giving you treasures that make up a big bulk of the Pesetas you need to make your weapons more effective. More effective weapons mean enemies that are dead faster, and enemies that die faster mean you're both less likely to take damage from them and also you use up less ammo on them. So there's a really strong incentive to explore the map.

But there are a lot of points-of-no-return in RE4 - I realized only after the knife fight with Krauser in the mines that there was one treasure back in the Hive area that evidently would have required me to blow open a wall, but because I had fallen down the ledge into the arena where we fight Krauser, and I had saved in the Chapter End screen (something that is usually unnecessary because we tend to immediately find a new Typewriter at the start of each chapter) I was SOL, and finished the castle with 40/41 treasures collected.

It's interesting, because I remember playing a lot of games in the mid-2000s that embraced linearity in the name of storytelling. I didn't play RE4 until a couple months ago, but I remember playing the Prince of Persia games of the same generation, and I remember having a frustrating moment where I realized in Warrior Within that I had missed just one of the shrines where you can increase your health and earn the Water Sword, which in turn gives you the true final boss of that game.

Earlier games, in the 90s, often had discrete levels that could be re-played, even if there wasn't anything you needed to unlock in them. But I think as games were starting to be treated more as a legitimate storytelling medium, particularly in this PS2/Gamecube/Xbox era, there was a greater drive to move forward with the story by continually pushing the player through the game.

What's kind of fascinating is the way that the next big move in video games was the Open World genre, which went the opposite direction. Obviously, titles that pre-dated RE4, like Grand Theft Auto 3, which kind of invented the modern open-world game, existed. But I wonder if the popularity of games like Assassin's Creed were born in part out of the idea that, because the missions didn't take you to some unique location, meant you could always revisit places and continue your treasure hunts.

But to turn back to RE4, the forward momentum means that there's less of an intricate puzzle box approach to the level design. Castle Salazar implies a lot of unvisited rooms, or is the most inefficiently-designed castle in the world. (I think the implication is the former because there's no bedrooms or kitchens or other pretty necessary parts of a castle).

In contrast, the RPD is madly designed, but there's something more believable about the fact that all of its chambers fit into a rectangular footprint.

But I think that this linear design in an exploration-focused game creates a major problem: it punishes exploration. If you take a wrong turn, and you haven't solved this one puzzle, you're screwed. In my first playthrough, I think I had the third tile for that one puzzle in the lakeside village where you have to swap hexagonal tiles around to make an image, but because I had gone far enough that the game wanted to funnel me toward the eventual Father Mendez fight, I couldn't actually get back to the place to plug the third piece in and collect the idol treasure (on my second run, I did finish this puzzle, and the idol was kind of underwhelmingly low-value, but I had to remind myself that in the first act of the game, when you're just barely able to afford the first couple upgrades on your weapons, that treasure is probably worth more, relatively speaking).

I'm thinking about, like, the locker room in RE2, and how I could totally imagine forgetting to go and plug in the second spare button, thus being unable to claim the super-valuable hip-pack there. But until you go to the Nest, there's nothing stopping you from returning there, and by that point, you've probably got a fairly fast route to return to the RPD from the sewers.

Anyway, having finished the Castle, I'm trying to decide if I want to finish the final part of the game. I died something like fourteen times in the real Krauser fight, but maybe I'd do better this time. I kind of dread the part where you need to deal with both an Iron Maiden and four Ganados trying to grab Ashley from behind a bunch of metal bars, but maybe with my fully upgraded LE5 or Stingray, I might be able to down the Iron Maiden quickly and be able to deal with the Ganados at a leisurely pace (when I finally beat that encounter, I didn't kill the Iron Maiden, instead just dropping it into the chasm and forfeiting any treasure I might have gotten. Like fleeing Verdugo the first time, this time I killed it, so we could see).

Really, I'm mostly contemplating what I want to play next. Truly, there is something very satisfying to the combat in RE4, so there's a hook there.

Metroidvania and D&D

 The first time I played Super Metroid was either in 1999 or 2000. While I had gotten an SNES in 1996 (after the N64 had already come out) I got my N64 just the next year, so those two console generations - which represented a pretty big jump - kind of overlapped for me. I was familiar with Mario and Zelda, but it was 1999's Super Smash Bros. that introduced me to Samus. After she became my favorite fighter in Smash, I decided to check out one of her titles, and the only one that was on a console I owned was Super Metroid. I got a used cartridge for 5 bucks. Probably the best 5 bucks I ever spent.

Nowadays, Super Metroid is remembered as an absolute classic. It's the Metroid game that most ROM hacks use as their foundation. It has a killer soundtrack and a fantastic world design. While the first title probably invented the Metroidvania genre (the other half, Castlevania, wouldn't actually work like one until the PS1 era's Symphony of the Night, which I've never actually played) Super Metroid is maybe the most quintessential example.

What is a Metroidvania?

Well, for context, in the SNES era, most games were divided into discrete levels. Even a relatively open-world game like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past still put you into dungeons that were kind of separate from the rest of the world - you could be confident that once you got inside a dungeon, you would find all the tools you needed to beat it within.

Metroidvanias place the character in a large and complex environment, but only give you access to a small part of it initially. The player must search that territory for items and upgrades that enhance their abilities and open up new paths. In Metroid games (the recent Dread actually being an exception,) the first upgrade you tend to get is the Morph Ball, which allows our badass armored space bounty hunter to roll into a sphere and quickly travel through narrow crevasses (this series staple was actually because they were struggling to give Samus a crawling animation in the NES original). So, your experience with these games begins by funneling you to that first item, with various barricades and obstacles that cannot be overcome until you get the next item in the sequence. (That said, the designers often put in extra-challenging ways for knowledgeable players to break that sequence, which is how you get people who do "backwards" runs of Super Metroid where they beat the four major area bosses in the opposite order of how the game expect you to do it).

Having beaten Resident Evil 2's remake recently (Leon's first run and Claire's second) I was trying to decide if it counted as a Metroidvania. The answer is kinda-sorta. With the exception of the Nest lab at the end, the whole game is one interconnected map, with the baroque police department headquarters up on the surface level and a vast sewer complex below. These connect in unexpected ways, and until you get on the tram that takes you to the Nest, you can always return to the RPD's main lobby that acts as the real start of the game for Leon (other than a prologue that takes place in locations you cannot revisit - just as Samus cannot return to the destroyed Ceres Station in Super Metroid).

The distinction I might make here, though, is that the key items and opened passages in RE2 are not based on abilities you gain that aid you in other ways (with rare exceptions like how getting a combat knife allows you to cut through some tape over a control panel). There's no use for the various card-suit keys other than opening the doors with those locks on them, and RE2 lets you know when a key item is safe to discard, meaning that these don't enhance your abilities over time - they are only useful in the finite instances for which they are intended. Not only do you no longer need a pair of bolt cutters after you cut the three or four chains holding doors closed, but the bolt cutters cannot be used for any other purpose, and just jam up your inventory space, incentivizing you to toss them (and unlike a Skyrim-like game, the item vanishes from the world when it's discarded).

Still, the structure of these games are both about exploring a space in a kind of sequence that gradually opens that space up. Part of the challenge of the game is that you don't know what that sequence is initially, and so when you get a new tool, you need to consider all the locations where you saw barriers that that new tool can overcome (newer games in these genres often mark such places on a map).

This structure isn't limited to Metroidvanias - Silent Hill 2's remake (yes, I've spent a lot of the last year or so familiarizing myself with the classics of the Survival Horror genre through their recent remakes) puts you in "dungeon" like environments that need to kind of be solved like a big puzzle, but once you depart, you don't come back to them - the overall structure is linear even if individual chapters require backtracking.

Anyway, I think part of what I love about DMing D&D is the opportunity to be an amateur game designer. I know nothing about the digital tools required to build video games, but I like to think I've absorbed a lot of game design philosophy over my very soon to be four decades.

D&D began in the 1970s, and while there were rudimentary computer games at the time, the revolutionary development of the medium in the 1980s had not yet taken place. Still, I think that those dungeons that people built back then were in many ways the blueprint for a lot of these exploration-heavy video games.

But I also don't think that it totally works, because of the generalities built into D&D that might clash with dungeon challenges:

Consider keys:

In RE2, finding keys is a huge part of the game. Leon and Claire each find three of the four card-suit keys (there's one exclusive to each of them, Clubs for Leon and Hearts for Claire) and there are plenty of other keys to find, as well as lots of items that might not be literal keys, but are effectively (like the aforementioned bolt cutters).

In D&D, picking locks is a valuable skill that Rogues in particular tend to be good at. Rogues and Artificers (as well as PCs from some backgrounds) start with a set of Thieves' Tools, and the expectation for those characters is that they're going to be able to use those tools to get around the need for a key. Wizards (and maybe other classes?) can get the Knock spell. And any character could try to use an Athletics check to just knock a door down, ignoring the challenge of the lock.

D&D is built to allow imaginative and creative solutions to problems. Metroidvania design is about discovering the intended path that is obscured by its expansive world. Straying from that path might reward you by finding optional collectables - the missile expansions or energy tanks that give you more longterm combat power, for instance.

As a DM, it's kind of an unspoken covenant with your players that if the course of action they describe makes sense with the logic of the world, you must at the very least allow them to attempt to take that course of action. It might be mitigated by a roll, and extreme actions (like battering down a reinforced door) might be met with extreme difficulty, but generally not impossibility. You might say that one important door is impossible to knock down, but your players will start to get impatient with you if say that every door is impossible to knock down, especially because there are in-game tools that they might have acquired to do just that (like a battering ram, a real item that has a gold cost and everything).

I had a moment like this - frustration at having all my character abilities shut down but also appreciation for what the DM was looking for me to do:

My Triton Wizard, in his backstory, was informed of a hidden Age of Arcanum facility called the Cryptorium. The sentient book that sent him on his adventure (and trained him in the Order of Scribes and acts as his Manifest Mind,) and who was originally a living human wizard from long ago, thought that the other members of his ancient order (also turned into books) could be found there. It was the dungeon that I had basically written into my backstory, and truly, my DM (who is also my best friend) did an amazing job with the conceptualization of it (I had given only the name, but the place was built into the lakebed of the Erdeloch in the Dwendalian Empire, and was a sort of magically-high-tech underwater facility, which also gave my Triton some time to feel cool swimming around).

The central challenge of the dungeon was to gradually go up through its levels (it was basically an underground tower carved into a solid piece of rock, entered at the bottom through a submarine docking bay). When we noticed a hole in the ceiling of the central chamber where a hovering disc elevator ought to go, naturally my first instinct was just to cast Fly on myself and secure a rope at the top.

But that would mean skipping the intended solution, which was more fun. So, in a manner I suspect was sort of improvised, the central chamber of the Cryptorium now had an antimagic field. I pointed out that we had fought a monster in that base level of the central chamber, during which I had cast a cantrip, so the field was revised to allow cantrips, just not higher-level spells.

It was, you know, railroading.

However, as we explored that level, we came to one room in which a great glass window looked out into the murky water of the lake. And a lightbulb went off in my head:

If we broke the glass, the water would flood in, and we could swim up through the hole.

This, it turned out, was the intended solution. And even if it was kind of forced upon us in an awkward way, I freaking loved it. Once again, this was tailor-made for my character, who both has a swim speed and can breathe underwater. The rest of the party had to work a little harder - while I had Water Breathing running on everyone as a matter of course given our location, the rush of water was a hazard, and we also needed to ensure that we had collected and protected any valuables we could find that might be harmed by the water.

Now, this isn't really a Metroidvania-style solution. While we would quickly recognize that flooding a floor gave us access to the next floor (something we repeated once or twice to get to the top of the facility) and so could more easily get past the rest of the dungeon, it wasn't some tool that we could use more universally.

And I think that's because D&D's design is not really built for that.

In 5E, player power comes predominantly from our class, and our overall build. Magic items usually enhance those things: a Vicious Weapon still plugs into a Fighter's overall strategy of "hit things with weapon" and rather than transforming how they do what they do or when they can use it, it just amplifies the effect.

I could imagine a campaign in which you introduce monsters that can only be defeated with some special kind of, say, poison, but because the game design has to be modular and generalized, you're never going to get a big monster book with that built in.

To take another RE2 example: in the final stretch of the game, you encounter Plant Zombies. These things will not die unless they burn to a charred crisp (I think - I read somewhere that if you destroy all of their bulbs they won't come back, but I always burned them). With fire as the only means to permanently destroy them, you're incentivized to conserve either the fuel for Leon's flamethrower or the Incendiary Rounds in Claire's chemical launcher.

A rough equivalent in D&D is a Troll's regeneration ability. Trolls cannot die as long as they can continue to regenerate HP. But to turn that off, you can hit them with Fire or Acid damage, both of which are damage types that a spellcaster can get in cantrip form. If you have that available, there's no need to use up any limited resource to ensure you're free of their threat.

Once again, the broad capabilities of D&D characters means that the DM has limited control over what solutions they can force the player into finding.

There are rare exceptions: Flameskulls come back to life after just 1 hour unless they are sprinkled with Holy Water or the Dispel Evil and Good spell is cast on them. While the latter is something that a player might happen to have on them and thus not be limited to some specific resource, it's a 5th level spell, and thus a pretty significant sacrifice of future power.

But cantrips and tools have the potential to disrupt this kind of puzzle-box dungeon.

I don't think it's impossible, but you might have to really go outside the box on what kind of obstacles you set up. Magic is a good start, but even that can be countered by things like Dispel Magic. Even impenetrable physical barriers can potentially be bypassed with things like Stone Shape, Dimension Door, or Passwall.

Certainly, these spells consume spell slots as important resources, but those are also resources that might come back if the players find a way to take a rest inside of a dungeon (like with a Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion spell).

I think my conclusion here is that while you can take a lot of inspiration from the puzzle-box dungeons found in Metroidvania and similar games, on a basic level, D&D is not really built for that kind of experience. A more stripped-down game might make it work. But D&D is very much built to allow players to improvise and color outside of the lines. That's very fun in its own way - as a DM, I'm always excited when my players come up with a solution I never thought of - but it does mean that the experience is going to feel different.

Running a Catastrophe in D&D

 In my very first session of D&D I ever played (and ran) I had the campaign's main villain appear at the party of a debauched local ruler and summon the Tarrasque to attack the city.

The Tarrasque was chosen purely because it was the scariest, highest-CR monster in the Monster Manual (even Volo's had not come out at that point, though the Tarrasque has only had three CR equals - two of which are versions of Tiamat). One of my players, the only D&D veteran of the group, remarked "we're far too low level to fight that," and I realized only later that he might have feared that he had agreed to play with a DM who was just going to pound his players with unbeatable fights.

The Tarrasque never got within a mile of the player characters - by the time it came to destroy the palace in which the campaign had begun, they and most of the guests of the Sand Prince had fled, leaving the already chaotic and anarchic city of Camrada to descend into utter chaos.

I was a brand-new DM, and I was also following the advice of the 2014 DMG, which profoundly under-tuned combat encounters (though I think that the "adventuring day" XP totals compared to the tuning of even a "deadly" combat encounter in that tells you that there were very different assumptions about adventure pacing being made).

Thus, when the three level 1 party members fought two Kobolds (an ostensibly balanced low-difficulty encounter) and then a single Thug (likewise,) they plowed through them - in fact, by winning initiative, they actually didn't even give any of their foes a chance to act.

There are a lot of ways that I'd run the beginning of that campaign differently now with a decade of experience under my belt. But I do really like the idea of throwing the party into a major crisis.

One of the challenges I have running a campaign that has honestly spent most of its time in tier 3 and now a significant amount of time in tier 4 is that enormous catastrophes are the kind of crisis that the party is equipped to stop. The party literally just defeated the Tarrasque, and while I made one suboptimal choice in the combat (I didn't use its legendary action to knock out the Sorcerer's Tenser's Transformation spell, gained via Wish) the party beat the monster fair and square. (Half of them were unconscious at the end of the fight, but that just means I didn't think it was too easy).

Anyway, the point is that I would caution that it's difficult to make this work at higher levels. Earlier in the campaign, back when they were level 16, I believe (it was the start of my Orzhov arc, and the Lich who served as the boss of that arc also saw them hit level 17 - fun fact, the second and probably final time they fight him will be what gets them to 20, though now backed by a ton of very powerful minions), I had spirits of the dead flood the streets of Ravnica after the magical artifact that the Orzhov use to regulate the connection between Ravnica and Agryem, or the "Ghost Quarter" was damaged by the main villain. This happened while some characters were off in separate parts of the city, and so the plan was to have little vignettes where they each had to fend off an attack in pairs before the party could group up. One of these encounters was just skipped - the Gruul Sorcerer used Conjure Animals (the 5.0 version) to get a giant vulture or something and fly over all the undead creatures that emerged.

Truthfully, I think that a catastrophic set-piece is a great way to start a campaign in tier 1.

I've been giving a lot of thought to how to achieve survival horror in D&D, and I think that honestly would probably work best starting at level 1 and throwing several trivial combat encounters (like a single zombie against a party of four) before the party gets to rest.

This is different, genre-wise. Here, we want spectacle and bigness while still making things surmountable. I think you can sustain this pretty well at somewhat higher levels. Even going as far as level 5, your Wizard might be able to cast Fly, but only on a single target.

Generally, I think that the next campaign I start running (whenever that happens) will probably skip ahead to level 3 - I think level 1, and to an extent 2, are more like tutorial levels, and unless I have a lot of different players who haven't played D&D before, they'll probably be champing at the bit to at least have a subclass. But that's fine - it just opens up options for what kind of monsters I can use and how flexible they are to endure more encounters over time.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves: what do we mean by a catastrophe?

Something really bad is happening - it's a major event and something that will probably be remembered historically. Urban locales work well for this because there's a concentration of people that raises the stakes: perhaps our party will have the opportunity to save some helpless civilians in the process. They might only be one small corner of the fight.

Draw Steel has a published adventure called the Fall of Blackbottom that I think really does this kind of adventure: the party begins in a multi-story inn in a major town. Enemy soldiers drop an enormous metal sphere on the inn, which plummets through the roof and all the way down to the ground floor, and the sphere contains a portal to the Abyssal Wastes that summons in a bunch of demons. That's really just a single big encounter.

Another catastrophe could be an outbreak of an undead plague (though take careful consideration on how infectious it is - Romero-style zombies don't really work in D&D because they're essentially one-hit-killers).

While having some hints and clues sprinkled in here, the moment of a catastrophe is one of confusion - our most salient evidence of what is going on is just what is plainly happening in the moment. If it's elementals you're throwing at the party, they can put a pin in that and try to figure out who has the means to summon them. If it's an invading army, maybe the party can recognize the banners and uniforms of the invading soldiers, or maybe the insignia they bear is intentionally unknown, a mystery to be uncovered once the crisis of just surviving has died down.

Depending on how comfortable you are as a DM, the players might have some choices in how they want to escape the chaos, but I think that giving them a very clear goal could be helpful: maybe they have a friend with a ship at the docks, or they know about a tunnel built for such a moment. The goal is to reach that escape route, and the challenges and encounters you put in their way become the obstacles to that goal.

Now, what kind of encounters do we use?

Combat encounters are a key staple here, and especially if this is the beginning of your campaign, giving your players an opportunity to try out their new character's abilities is something you don't want to hold off for too long, especially in an action-heavy introduction like this.

An invading force naturally lends itself to combat encounters - enemy soldiers, demons, undead, what-have-you, are easy enough to just throw at your players.

To ensure that there's a certain breathlessness to the escape, you'll want there to be multiple encounters (not all combat) before they can escape, and thus, this first fight (especially if starting at level 1) should be pretty easy. A low-difficulty encounter using the 2024 DMG's guidance will probably suit you fine.

Now, I have a tendency as a DM to rarely re-use monsters in the same campaign, but I you're not bound to that. Especially if this is some unified force invading a city, it would make sense to have the rank-and-file invaders use the same low-CR stat block. Say it's a demonic invasion: it would make sense for Manes to be the front-line fodder.

Later, to keep the stakes clear, a second combat encounter might still be more of the low-ranking monsters the party has seen before, but adding in something scarier - a Manes Vaporspawn, for example, jumps from CR 1/8 (two per player at level 1 for a low-difficulty encounter) to CR 1 (one per four players at level 1/low difficulty). Maybe the party fought off eight Manes in their first fight, then had some non-combat encounter after that, and then this scarier monster makes its debut in the second encounter, with just a pair of Manes to make it clear that these are all part of the same invasion.

We want to give the players a tougher enemy that's certainly reasonable for them to fight and defeat (again, we'll be using tougher things if they're starting at level 3,) but the key is that we want to make sure that the tougher monster feels tougher, and actually starts to make them fear defeat, even if they can still handle it.

The reason for this, is that we want to get them to a point where it's clear they need to flee: ideally, they defeat the Vaporspawn, but maybe they're really rough after that - maybe one PC goes unconscious.

We can be generous with healing items - maybe in the non-combat encounters we make sure they can find a healing potion or two. Getting healed up just means they can keep running.

Now, I think perhaps we have a combat encounter with a different objective: perhaps we need to save some civilians, reinforcing our party's identity as heroes even as they are also fighting to survive (or giving them the opportunity to show that they're self-centered antiheroes who leave others to a dreadful fate). Here, we stick to those easily-slain, low-CR monsters to make the party feel powerful again.

And lastly, the final combat, in the final stretch to their escape route, is where we force them to flee: An overtuned encounter where it's clear that the fate of the city is not something that they can currently change. What we do is we use several of the tougher monsters. Where once the party was fighting like eight Manes at a time, and a single Manes Vaporspawn was a bit more of a challenge, now the party sees, at a distance, like four of them. The Vaporspawn are not blocking their escape route - instead, they are there to chase the party to their escape.

As a DM, you might feel pressured, especially at low levels, to protect your players' new characters. But I do think that here, you'll have given them the information they need to say that these creatures are going to be too much for them.

A couple other notes:

First off, you want to vary things up - have non-combat encounters between the fights. Massive destruction can block off expected routes: maybe a tower falls down, blocking the street the party was going to take. This could force them down into the sewers (where they might have the encounter with that tougher monster) to get around the rubble. A burning building gives the party an opportunity to save some civilians at the risk of taking damage from smoke inhalation or even a level of exhaustion. Meeting heroic NPCs might give the party allies who show up later to cover their eventual escape.

Treating each of these vignettes as discrete encounters rather than amorphous roleplay opportunities might make you feel like you're railroading your players, but I think it'll help keep up the pace. Linearity in a moment like this helps sell the urgency of it, and once the party escapes the chaos, you can move to a more open campaign design.

The other thing I'd strongly encourage is ensuring that it feels like a lot of things are going on in the city. Imagine a big skybox where other, maybe larger, dramas are playing out. The party might just be fighting Manes, but perhaps we see the city's gryphon-mounted skyguard getting shredding out of the air by Vrocks.

Remember, we want to sell this catastrophe as a reason to become more powerful, and thus more capable of stopping something like this. Depending on your tastes, the carnage might be more visceral or more implied. Will your players feel thrilled by seeing others (maybe the city guard) getting eviscerated by the monsters as our protagonists flee, or will they feel that this is a failure that starts the story off on a sour note? If you feel it's going to be the latter (and here I think session zeroes and talks about tone are important outside of gameplay) consider instead showing more structural carnage - a famed wizard tower collapses, maybe blocking off a more obvious route of escape, or some temple or coliseum. Landmarks that once oriented the players will sell the importance of this event  in their destruction.

Finally: while we want to kick things off intensely, even an explosive opening requires some build-up. If we're going to see a great city fall, you want to give the players some time to get to know it. In a four-hour play session, you probably want to start off introducing your characters in the city - a great time to lay out some of the locations where your encounters will take place. If we see a Wizard tower fall, maybe it belongs to an NPC that the party, or at least one member of the party, knows. We don't have to kill off that NPC, but we can at least raise the possibility that they've fallen along with their tower.

The thing is, without establishing the stakes, the carnage won't land as hard. A lot of stories set in the real world get to take a shortcut here: threatening New York lands because it's a city that most people are very familiar with. Threatening some fantasy city requires build-up because we need to know about it to care about it. Indeed, using an established setting like the Forgotten Realms can help here - if the players are familiar with Waterdeep, you could start the campaign off with chaos and people would feel invested. But if we assume that it's a homebrew setting or even just a more obscure one, we need a little time, at least, to get to know it.

All that being said, that doesn't mean we can't bring the chaos right at the start of a campaign. A connection to the city could happen in the backstories of the characters, or just how you describe it - making it clear that this is a place where people live, where there's a daily bustle of life that gets interrupted by our opening.

We might not know this city, but if you as the DM make some effort to remind people about what people living in a city are like, how a city lives and breathes, with all the humanity in it (even if it's not a human city,) we can feel that panic that makes an opening like this feel powerful.

Later on, the party will discover why this catastrophe took place, will find out who was responsible for it, and will confront the evil that kicked it all off. But for now, survival is the name of the game.