How Dreadful!

Metroid.

Dread.

Wow.

So Metroid Dread is apparently a real game. Cancelled years ago and reduced to a throwaway line in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, it's now scheduled for release this October.

Let's start with something simple, yet potentially critical: this game is officially Metroid 5. This implies that it's a sequel to Metroid Fusion, AKA Metroid 4. That game was released in 2002, almost 19 years prior to Dread. (Fun fact: Fusion was the first Metroid game I ever played.) Nintendo released several prequels to Fusion, but not a single sequel in almost two decades. The reason was obvious: they had written themselves into a corner and couldn't figure out how to get out of it. At the beginning of Fusion, Samus loses her iconic Power Suit and uses the less marketable Fusion Suit instead. By the end, she's on the run from the Galactic Federation for destroying her former employers' secret Metroid breeding program. She now has an AI companion created from the mind of her CO, Adam Malkovich. (I'm treating Metroid: Other M  as non-canonical. The less said about it, the better.)  Clearly, Nintendo had no idea where to take the story from here, so they made no attempt to try.

Our heroine, at last.

The first thing we're shown is, of course, Samus herself. She appears to have acquired a new Power Suit, which isn't surprising; I always thought it unlikely that we'd see the Fusion Suit again. (The Zero Suit, on the other hand...) Now, Metroid: Zero Mission  had already established that the Power Suit isn't unique and that the Chozo had the foresight to make more than one. This suit looks a lot like the Other M suit (ugh) plus the shoulders from the Corruption suit, with a white coat of paint. I'm a fan of the white: it reminds me of the Light Suit from Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. Less promising is that the game seems to take place on a space station. Chronologically, this would be the third Metroid game in a row to be set in space, and I'd prefer to see a proper planet again. Next, we have our nemesis:

Boo!

The trailer immediately establishes that this robot is immune to both Samus' arm cannon and her missiles, so we're going to be spending the game running from it, probably in a similar fashion to the SA-X from Fusion. I'd like to see some real conflict between Samus and the Federation, so it would be really cool if this was some top-of-the-line Federation technology, and the Feds have finally managed to surpass the Chozo in that respect. Speaking of Chozo:

What. Is. That.

This might be a real, live Chozo! Of course, this could be a flashback scene, since this is obviously a cinematic, but Nintendo's playing a dangerous game by showing the ravenous fans a half-second glimpse of an actual Chozo. Of course, they'll need to explain why this space station apparently has Chozo statues on it, as well.... The remainder of the gameplay footage looked like pretty standard 2D Metroid, so I'm assuming that Nintendo are saving something juicier for closer to release.

Four months to go. AM2R just jumped way up my "games to play" queue, so expect a post regarding it soon.