Metroid: Samus Returns

It's so fucking annoying to play this game after Zero Mission because the A and B buttons now do different things.

Aside from that this is pretty fun. I'm not totally sure how I feel about it in terms of ranking overall among the 2d Metroids. This Metroid fighting stuff is getting a bit repetitive.

Got stuck in one spot, had to look it up, felt like a total idiot for missing the thing. It was just so subtle. The thing where the Metroid DNA machine points you in the right direction is so misleading sometimes too. Like I don't think where it was pointing me was the next one, it was the one I ended up doing last.

Save states aren't working for whatever reason on Azahar either. Real pain in the ass for being able to stop and pick up wherever. Was stressing out trying to find a save spot when I was in a new area.

Super stuck on this one fight, I don't want to backtrack because I'm apparently far away from everything but fighting a gamma Metroid low on missiles and energy. Fuckers deal so much energy.

I think this one is my least favorite of the ones I've played recently. It feels like they dole out new function upgrades really slowly. It also just feels very samey as a result and I feel like there could be many fewer Metroids to have to kill on each level or at the very least they could be more different.

Totally lost, just backtracking now, seeing if I missed an upgrade I can now go get.

I think this is pretty easily my least favorite one. My backtracking has not yielded much. The game feels very stingy with upgrades and the path seems very fixed. Like I feel stuck and there are lots of things I can see I CAN'T do and I can't really tell which way to go from here without a new thing.

Yep. So I figured it out and got farther. I'm just very over the bog standard Metroid fights here. I did it once. Do I have to really keep doing it? This chasing me down the hallway thing also sucks and is infuriating.

There are other issues here. The Aeion Pulse thing has made the game worse. I thought this would be an “I’m stuck” button but they’ve used it to make the environments unreadable. Gone is the ability to check the environments with your eyes for vulnerable blocks. You just have to spam the pulse button. You can’t even opt to not use it. Some of the blocks just aren’t differentiable without it.

Additionally this grinder thingy chase through the tunnels sequence made me want to throw the game in the dumpster.

Got the gravity suit. Another annoyance about this game: it has a high number of puzzles that seemed designed to waste my time. "Haha there was no way for you to know that this was a floor that gave away try again idiot."

Defeated the Diggernaut. Good fight!

I really thought I was so done with this game but then I beat this last big-ass Metroid and I got this little baby Metroid and I love it. Insert Brooklyn Nine-Nine meme of "I just met this but if anything happened to it I would kill everyone."

I went around and started gathering up a bunch of the old power-ups I missed just because now the Metroid unlocks, getting rid of all these crystal things that I never knew how to get past before.

It's been mostly fun, except for the fact that I got fed up by these long rows of spikes and I was like, "I have basically everything and I have to assume I am adjacent to the end of the game." How do I get past these long long rows of spikes? The answer is they don't tell you how but you're supposed to use the power bombs and use those to rocket you past it. I got so frustrated that, like, why would you gate this? What a stupid thing to do. The power bombs are like, you don't get so many of them to the point where it feels like you can just burn them on experimentation. Maybe that's just me

Beat this tonight. About 12 hours? Would have been shorter but I unlocked baby metroid and was like well, you can't give me this baby and then expect me to just end the game instantly. So I went back and got a bunch more upgrades which made the final boss significantly easier to boot! 92% completion.

On to Dread next.