This will not be a Feel Good story about Metroid: Dread finally correcting course. I am here today to be a hater.

Not a hater out of spite, or to be a contrarian, or even to shame people for liking the popular thing. Metroid: Dread is many people's(Even John Cena's) favorite Metroid game. The game is a critical and commercial darling. I'm not here to try and make you feel stupid for liking a game I don't enjoy. My values are likely very different from yours and that's fine. A lot of folks I respect deeply enjoy this game. I've lived through enough forum arguments like "Is Metroid Fusion a good game?"(It isn't 😒) to care about winning the Video Game Opinion War.

I'm writing this because my feelings come from the heart. Because 2D Constructed Worlds get into my fucking soul. I can't help but to feel very strongly about them. If I just think a game is bad, I simply stop playing it(Bad is kinda a weasel word here. Bad for me usually means 'Boring' and I love some bad, awful TRASH games). I walk away. Hate happens when I care and I find Metroid is especially good at getting me to care a lot.

I don't want you to hate Metroid: Dread, I wan't you to understand why someone would.

"We got to the point where Metroidvanias were "Ah yes, I got the GREEN COLORED DASH, which will break GREEN BLOCKS, and I can find all the spots I missed by checking my map. It's an ATTACK and a MOVEMENT OPTION--" and like idk at that point the genre was cooked for like a decade."

As usual, with these posts, I start by going off on twitter(Don't worry about this though, I'm just gonna rehash all of it here), this time about Metroidvania, and as usual it's time to salvage a messy thread from a dying platform.

Animal Well is apparently good(It's Sylvie Lime, but for normies.) and with that, comes the think pieces and opinions on what the nebulous and poorly named genre of Metroidvanias is and how they should be, mechanically.