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).