#Requiring you to use the stick in 2D metroid feels like a really poorly thought out move because it just changes everything so fundamentall

[kaasiand]

It's kinda weird how, compared to Metroid Dread, Metroid Fusion was so much more blatant in

its prioritisation of linear story progression over exploration

its linear presentation (literally naming the areas sector 1–6), though it still does the classic "linear game pretending to be nonlinear" thing by taking you through them in a different, but still fixed, order

the way it literally directly tells you your every next step constantly

yet when playing the games, it felt to me that somehow, despite all of this, Fusion felt a lot less frustrating in its linearity to me than Dread. In Fusion it was immediately clear that I would just be sticking to a single sector for each part of the game and those sectors themselves would still be mostly freely explorable in a way that felt more similar to Metroid II, but in Dread there was just no telling AT ALL when the path behind me would be blocked off and it also felt wayyyyy less justified than in Fusion, especially with just how often Dread would be doing this.

With Fusion's extremely tense atmosphere being present throughout the entire game and so much of the story taking place and developing during the game itself, I was totally understanding of its structure and restrictions. Dread on the other hand just kinda made me feel nothing, except

frustration at the lack of exploration with every single door locking behind me constantly for no good reason. Even some obstacles don't *go away* but instead switch from blocking the path forward, to blocking the path back: the thermal doors, the lifts that go down if you stick to their spider magnet walls, the big boxes that you had to move with the charge beam (or grapple beam idk? or both?) it just gets soooo annoying

frustration at how you need to use 3 buttons simultaneously to perform one single god damned action

frustration at how abilities felt extremely underused in the level design—you rarely grapple your way across the ceiling to cross a pit like in Super (which is the kind of level design that allows for sequence breaks in completely natural ways that encourage player experimentation), no, you just open the grapple beam door lock with your grapple beam door key. Literally every single ability in dread relies on this WAY TOO MUCH in painfully obvious ways, including literally every single power beam upgrade

frustration at how missile tanks feel worthless because getting only 2 is just not worth my time (yet the total number of missiles is similar to the other games... a sign of the game being too long/padded compared to the old games)

frustration at how energy tanks feel worthless because every boss does 100+ damage per hit; you're just not allowed to be tanky and the game is forcing you to play in only one specific way. The full energy tanks are just straight up given to you at way too hard-to-miss points—it's not a reward for exploration, it's forcibly scaling up Samus's health so it can scale up the next bosses' damage accordingly and absolutely nothing ends up feeling different. And to make things worse, the energy tanks that you DO get to find on your own don't actually DO anything because they're fucking energy PARTS. They just deliberately made exploration as unrewarding as it possibly could've been

frustration at how almost every area looks the goddamn same and has no music to stand out with either

I must say Dread's final boss was actually really reasonable though, it was really generous with the heals/restocks provided in between & low damage numbers making it so that my collected energy tanks FINALLY felt like they were actually making a difference. I will hate that one arbitrarily locked door in the escape sequence though