For me, Metroid is a very magical game. Although I know it’s one of the pioneers of the Metroidvania genre, I only played Castlevania when I was young and didn’t have much interest in this series…
Until the early 2020s when I was in Guangzhou for two weeks due to the COVID-19 pandemic. My laptop had no games to play, so I only brought my 3DS home and didn’t know what to play. That’s when I tried Samus Returns on the 3DS. At first, I didn’t find it particularly interesting because I’ve played this type of game before, and playing action games on the 3DS is quite tiring…
But what makes Metroid so magical is that even though I don’t think it’s very fun, I couldn’t help but… beat it all the way through… This is similar to The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds on 3DS. Both are not games I particularly want to continue playing, but once I start playing them, I… just beat them all the way through…
What made me re-evaluate this series again was when I started playing Bloodstained… Bloodstained is a classic combination of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Aria of Sorrow, and everyone called it a spiritual sequel to Castlevania. But after actually playing it, I realized that I didn’t like Bloodstained as much as I liked Aria of Sorrow. Apart from its poor disk reading performance on the Switch, I clearly felt that Bloodstained had heavier RPG elements and more combat compared to other games in the series. At the same time, I also found that compared to combat… I actually prefer the exploration part of these games…
So I bought Metroid Dread (生存恐惧) at the original price… After spending a week beating it, I felt that its experience was much better for me than Bloodstained…
I hope there will be a sequel to Metroid in the future…
