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Metroid 5 Dread - 16 Years IN The Making!


Jovahexeon Jax Joranvexeon

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20 minutes ago, Wraith said:

You can execute the move by pressing the jump button without moving the stick. If you input a spin jump it won't come out. It seems unintuitive at first but spin jumping to reposition yourself and then inputting a normal jump gives you a surprising amount of control over when and where it comes out. Once the "windup" animation starts you can just point the stick in any direction and Samus will shoot that way.

One thing that helped me was tapping the L button to snap Samus out of the spinning state and then pressing jump.

Yeah I'm aware of all of this, not that the game makes any of it clear. The game just has tons of these shinespark puzzles where I know exactly it what I want to do, but the button presses that it's asking for feel messy. Why isn't it just mapped to pressing the left stick, seeing as it's an extension of the speed boost anyway? I have a similar issue when using the grapple. It's fairly contextual, but you end up holding L, ZR and Y to grapple and hold whilst aiming, and knowing which button to let go of when you want to shoot can lead to problems. Why can't I just use the right stick to aim? It goes unused. 

I just think that the control scheme is prohibitively cumbersome. It's workable, but it's far from elegant. 

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Yeah, I'm not gonna bother going for 100% because I just don't find the Shinespark stuff fun.  There are so many inputs to keep in your head, and it's just no fun at all when you have to string together a cheat code's worth of button presses with perfect timing and then you screw up right at the last second by thinking the correct thing but accidentally hitting L intstead of ZL or whatever.

 

That aside though, I had a really good time with the game.  The first 2D Metroid I've ever beaten, and it is fairly impressive how well designed the bosses are.  They're brutal, but by the time I had learned the tells and gotten the patterns down to beat each one, it wasn't even close, I was taking very little damage at all, which feels really cool.  I've given up on every 2D Metroid I've ever played after getting stuck on where to go next, but Dread does an exceptional job of suggesting you towards the critical path without ever giving you an arrow or quest marker or anything.  There were so many times where I felt like I didn't know where to go next but I could see a few existing things I wanted to explore and they'd lead me right to the next area.

The story was great too, nothing too complex but Samus' characterisation is perfect here, so super cool during boss cut-scenes but showing her fragile human side beneath the suit EXACTLY when it matters with an utterly stellar amount of restraint from the developers in how much we get to see (major plot spoilers):

Spoiler

I'm utterly enamoured by stuff like the decision to show Samus' face beneath her visor for some cut-scenes, but to leave it to our imagination for stuff like when she is taking a moment to look at the deceased Quiet Robe before moving on.

I also really like that they kept the smooth segueing between cut-scene and gameplay from Other M.  It was one of my favourite things about that game in spite of everything.

My only disappointment would be that the soundtrack was mostly forgettable.  It works and has a good atmosphere, but I didn't feel like there were any tracks with a strong, memorable melody to add to the series' repitoire of classics like Brinstar, VS Ridley or Metroid Prime's main theme.  The fact that it is synthesised absoloutely butchers the attempts at some of the most orchestral music too, some of the boss music almost felt cartooney due to it's instrumentation choices, and the end credits theme was such a lame and old-fashioned triumphant fanfare business, not a good cap-off for the game's tone whatsoever.

To end on a positive aesthetic comment though, the visuals were utterly breathtaking. I'm a particular fan of how frequently the backgrounds suggested real locations where you can see how a non-platforming space heroine would navigate around them via walkways, ramps and stairs.  The outside parts of the watery area with the crashing waves and rain was just gorgeous.

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I had the same reaction to the shinespark stuff too(man fuck that I don't want to learn how to do all that BS etc) but like everything else with this game it really does get easier the more you mess around with it. I had a lot of fun going for 100% by the time I got to the end.

Also, just knowing how to leverage shinespark opens up a lot of little shortcuts in the game for subsequent playthroughs. Nailing one of the harder shinespark puzzles early
 

Spoiler

Nets you a shortcut to the gravity suit, letting you bypass the  underwater section of the game where you have to use the space jump to progress.

 

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