NintendObs Thinks: The extreme difficulty of Metroid Dread.
An understanding of the game's design.
I lost. There’s no other ways to put it. After countless bosses, and countless retries, I finally made it to the final boss (maybe?), the now iconic Chozo warrior who starred in the trailer that really put Metroid Dread on the map. Part one of the fight was as hard as it was epic, and it took a good ten or more times for me to be able to make it through unscathered. Then part two hit and was a real war of attrition that consumed the full capacity of my original Nintendo Switch’s battery life. On this fated and ultimate attempt, I reach part three of the final fight which seemed to be the very end… and I lost. At this point it was just too much, and so I gave up.
What I mean by gave up is, I gave up on fighting Samus’s new nemesis without being respectfully equipped. I am now on my way to obtain all of the items in the game for that objective, and if I’m honest with myself, I currently have a lot more energy and missiles than I used to when I first met my doom, so I could probably go back to battle and emerge victorious this time around. But considering I have already lost when I was scenaristically expected to win, I’d rather just do my due diligence and explore the full game before I return to face my destiny. Metroid Dread is just that hard. The game’s greatest foes truly do not want you to finish it. And when you inevitably see that Game Over screen, the game itself looks at you in shame and suggests the options to continue or to stop, as if to taunt you and say: “It’s okay, you can always admit your defeat.”
The part that really got me thinking that this was too hard, even though I eventually won and in all fairness that skirmish wasn’t too unfair, was this one time when you have to face two bosses at once in an ambush. That’s not all: you really do not have a way out then. At that moment, there’s nowhere you can go back to in order to grind some more items, nope. You are stuck here within a few rooms, with only one way to follow, and that’s where the bosses are awaiting to tag team Samus. So you try and try and try just to get out of that mess. I can guarantee a good amount of players will never make it past that spot and consequently will never beat Metroid Dread because right now, there is no easy mode to activate in the game. And yet…