Super Metroid (split from dungeon crawler recommendations)

[Steven]

Dread is still a better game than Fusion, though, aside from having worse music, as Dread does pretty much exactly the same things that Fusion does but does it way better. Again, worse music, but Dread is just an upgraded Fusion. After that awful Samus Returns on the 3DS, which is worse than the original Metroid II, I had no hope for Dread, given that it's the same developer, but I surprisingly ended up mostly liking it even though it has some really odd design choices.

[Air Master Burst]

AM2R is probably still the best Metroid game because it actually has a couple bosses that don't totally suck. I never understood how people found the traditional damage race against unavoidable bullets in a tiny arena with no cover to be in any way engaging. At least Dread leaned into this by adding a shitty parry system.

Castlevania's bosses are stupidly easy to grind past, but at least a lot of them offer some semblance of a proper boss fight if you get to them at the right level.

[Steven]

Best bosses in the series are Zero Mission hard mode low percent. For most bosses you absolutely must dodge everything or you're going to die very quickly if you don't. The final boss can kill you in one hit if you are doing 15% or under, and the attack pattern is semi-random, which makes it even more... um, interesting. The wrong combination of missiles + arm attack = you're fucked because it's impossible to dodge everything, so make sure you get the Screw Attack to kill the missiles. Have fun in hard mode 9% where you can't have the Screw Attack.

Fusion hard mode 1% is actually significantly easier than Zero Mission hard mode 15%, too. People say Fusion is the hardest Metroid game, or at least they used to before Dread came along, but there is absolutely no way in fuck that Fusion is harder than Zero Mission for low percent clears. Fusion 0% is probably harder than anything else in the entire series since it requires either some ridiculous frame-perfect shinesparks or I believe some out-of-bounds glitching, but it's such a pain to do that for some time it was thought to be impossible, and even now basically nobody does Fusion 0%.

[Volteccer_Jack]

The final boss can kill you in one hit if you are doing 15% or under

So just a normal Fusion 1% boss fight then? Zero Mission is easy except for Mother Brain (the best boss in ZM because they just copy-pasted a good boss instead of trying to make up new bad ideas). Zero Mission is also trash and so are its fans.

Dread 0% is harder than Fusion, although to be fair a big part of that is just the fact that Dread's final boss is absurd under 0% conditions. Especially if you go for "below 0 percent" and skip some abiilities like Space Jump.

AM2R is probably still the best Metroid game because it actually has a couple bosses that don't totally suck.

AM2R's bosses do totally suck though. It's pretty wild to think that we got 2 completely different enhanced remakes of Metroid 2, and both them are bad. Then again, both remakes saw "it's a slow tension-based adventure where you have to fight the same miniboss 10+ times" and decided that the best course was to make the game an action-fest and to make that miniboss take LONGER to kill, which tells me the Metroid 2 remakes are not being made by the smartest chaps around.

But hey, at least AM2R didn't completely ruin its own ending by shoving in the worst boss battle ever conceived and a bunch of shitty anime battle cutscenes that totally undermine the main plot themes, so it could be worse.

And then enter Metroid Dread, which streamlines the game so bad it essentially takes all of that away from you

Not really. Granted, the first half hour of Dread sucks. But as soon as you get morph ball it opens up greatly, it's got better sequence breaking and routing than the rest of the series, second only to Super.

[Lander]

AM2R is a curious beast, I should probably go back and finish that now we're living in a post-post-Samus Returns world.

I recall it seeming tangibly fan-made, less so in the sense of 'look at the rough edges' since it's quite polished, but rather in the brutality stakes it brings to the table for some of the later metroid encounters.
Particularly for when it came out; SR and Dread would later ratchet the challenge a bit with the parry system, but AM2R seemed notably harder than anything Ninty would have put out at the time.

[Steven]

So just a normal Fusion 1% boss fight then? Zero Mission is easy except for Mother Brain (the best boss in ZM because they just copy-pasted a good boss instead of trying to make up new bad ideas).

lol Zero Mission final boss at 9%, or any hard mode low% without Screw Attack, is far more difficult than anything in Fusion hard mode 1%. Fusion hard mode 1% is super easy, to the point where it is disappointing. People worry about Nightmare or whatever, but you can Space Jump through his arms when you are charging the beam, so he can barely do anything to you at all. Yakuza is the hardest fight in the game on hard 1%, and even he's not even that bad. The mess of Space Pirates before him and the Kihunters after him are way more dangerous.

Zero Mission is also trash and so are its fans.

Parts of Zero Mission are trash, like that horrible no-suit section, which makes me want to turn the game off every time I get there, but the game is mostly good.

[Air Master Burst]

AM2R's bosses do totally suck though. It's pretty wild to think that we got 2 completely different enhanced remakes of Metroid 2, and both them are bad. Then again, both remakes saw "it's a slow tension-based adventure where you have to fight the same miniboss 10+ times" and decided that the best course was to make the game an action-fest and to make that miniboss take LONGER to kill, which tells me the Metroid 2 remakes are not being made by the smartest chaps around.

I mean, it's a metroid game, so the combat is inherently bad. I can't blame them for trying to change it up, but there's no way to polish that turd without completely revamping the energy tank system. It was a pretty good time exploring the map, though.

Zero Mission plays a lot better than Super Metroid but the map is kinda bad.

[Austin]

For me the first playthrough in something like a Metroid is always special. However, for repeat plays, it's about doing it again, faster and more efficient. Also, the more you repeat these games, you start to find better, more optimized routes. You may start finding shortcuts, or ways to get items way sooner than intended. Sequence breaking, etc. Finally figuring out how to wall jump efficiently was a game changer for me in Super Metroid.

And then enter Metroid Dread, which streamlines the game so bad it essentially takes all of that away from you

Damnit!! I was actually thinking of playing it. Don’t tell me that! Haha.

[Sumez]

Like Steven said, Dread literally feel like Metroid Fusion 2. Not sure that is worthy of praise, though.

I liked Samus Returns way better, it actually retains a tiny bit of Metroid feel to it.

[Steven]

Dread has a decent amount of sequence breaking, unlike Fusion, which won't even let you proceed with the game after you skip the Diffusion Missile, and makes you turn around and get it anyway if you skip it. Most of the sequence breaks in Dread end up taking more time than playing the game "normally" would, which is kind of weird in its own way, but at least they are there.

It's significantly more open than Fusion, although it might not seem this way on a first playthrough, and it still loses to the Metroid, Super, Zero Mission, and NTSC-U Gamecube 0-00 Prime, which let you do most things any way you want, but Fusion goes so far out of its way to make sure that you can only do things in a specific order that Fusion is really its own separate thing. Dread does strongly resemble it, although without the blatant "GO HERE BECAUSE I WON'T LET YOU GO ANYWHERE ELSE AND ALSO HERE IS A FLASHING LIGHT ON YOUR MAP TELLING YOU TO NOT FORGET TO GO HERE" thing that Fusion does; Dread is more subtle about it, but it does basically the same thing while still resembling Super more than Fusion. It's kind of hard to describe it perfectly, but that's how it is. It's Fusion, but much bigger, not as blatant about forcing you down a specific path, and with worse music and weird sequence breaking that wastes time instead of saving it. It is a very odd game but I like most aspects of it.

On like my second or third playthrough I did 0% hard mode no Space Jump and it turned out to be pretty fun, especially since skipping Space Jump will require you to do some interesting shinesparks. They patched a few glitches out but left some others, so you can still skip several bosses and stuff, and they also added the instant death mode, which I have not played yet.

[Sumez]

Sequence breaks exist in Dread, but they are both so specific and so obscure that they feel more like easter eggs. They don't really inform the game's core experience at all.