#my problem wasn't with the last knight but every other enemy on the map

[dh-tan]

It took seven attempts, but I cleared the second ending!

This was a run that I wish I had recorded, so you could've seen how Goldenglow took Mr. Nothing's victory in taking down The Last Knight at the very last minute.

[cthulhubert]

Finished Metroid Dread the other day.

(I don't think much of this is a spoiler, maybe a comment about the final boss in the last paragraph.)

First, a funny aside: as I was watching the opening scrawl with backstory from Fusion, I realized that despite the fact that I would consider myself "a big Metroid fan boy", Super Metroid is the only one I've beaten (and I've only played a few hours on the original Metroid and the first Prime). Fake geek guy bein' ass...

Nevertheless, Super Metroid is still one of my all time favorite games, so maybe my expectations were too high for Dread (I've also played Hollow Knight which really set a new genre standard in my heart). I certainly don't hate it! But my final score is "better than mediocre". On a Steam review I'd give it a thumbs up but write, "Unless you desperately need to be current on the series, wait for a sale."

The bosses were good. Movement felt pretty decent, though the grapple was underutilized, and they really could've used more places you could use the speed booster to get around smoothly and rapidly (in Castlevania Symphony of the Night, they had a couple of long, map crossing galleries, and those really made me feel like I had accomplished something once I got the wolf dash). And that's maybe part of the problem; there wasn't much moving worth doing! Dread didn't feel like a real "Metroidvania" (ie, exploration platformer), because sure, we crisscrossed the map repeatedly, but every time there was only a single logical destination and the game funneled you towards it in a hamhanded way, with barriers that might as well have been doors with color coded keycards.

Regular enemies weren't very interesting. In a good platformer, every interaction with an enemy should feel satisfying, like solving a tiny puzzle to kill them or to get past them undamaged; this was, in fact, a big part of why I loved Super Metroid. In Dread they were mostly mild annoyances.

I enjoyed the idea behind the EMMI sections; some were a little frustrating, but I like the idea of an enemy in games like this that can't be beaten normally, only run and hidden from.

Enjoyed the big story reveals, and Samus being a laconic badass. And I always appreciate a final boss that mirrors the main character in some ways; that was one of my favorite things from Iconoclasts.