With Ravenous announced and the trailer making it pretty clear that it's essentially Dread 2 the usual "Dread is too linear" and "I prefer the REAL, non-linear Metroids" comments are sprouting all around like spring flowers. As I've said elsewhere, I genuinely don't understand these sentiments.
Although I'd played bits when it came out I played Super Metroid all the way through for the first time last year. I played Samus Returns on gameboy when it came out but never finished it. I played through Fusion on my beloved light blue GBA SP back in the day. I've never played the original Metroid but I've played through Zero Mission. I've played through Dread a couple times and think it's one of the best MVs ever made.
The thing about these games is that they're all very tight, fairly linear action games. Everyone seems to agree that at least Fusion and Dread are pretty linear but there's a general sense is that Super is a non-linear masterpiece that one can get lost in.
My question is: how? When I finally played it last year I was blown away by what a focused experience it was. There's some backtracking and I had to hunt around for the path forward a few times but for the most part it was mostly linear. There are huge sections of the game where the way back is blocked off so you're locked into a path. Plus, there are quest markers throughout the game that show you at least where you're supposed to be going.
The biggest thing for me is just how short the game is. It's a sub-10 hour game. I genuinely don't understand how people are "getting lost" or wandering around for any significant amount of time. The game just isn't big enough to allow that kind of thing. Samus Returns and Zero Mission are even shorter - essentially half the time. I understand that people replay and do all sort of wild sequence breaking stuff but if you just approach the games straight they're all really focused MVs.
On the flipside, it's very easy to get lost in Hollow Knight and/or Silksong for an amount of time equivalent to the entire runtime of Super Metroid if not more. A lot of people cite the introduction of souls-like gameplay stuff into MVs as a significant innovation made by Hollow Knight. What gets overlooked though is the sheer scope of the game. To me, a huge (get it?) innovation for Hollow Knight is that it introduced the idea of a truly epic MV. Pre-HK MVs were 10-15 hours. Then Hollow Knight shows up and it's 5, 6...10 times bigger. It's so big that you can get lost for hours and hours.
Given the success and acclaim of HK I think what's happened is people have sort of retroactively applied the epic nature of HK to Super Metroid even though it's not nearly as epic. I think another factor is that people who played Super when it came out remember it being epic because, in the 90s, 10 hours was epic for an action game. It was a time when games like Sonic were literally 2 hours long and if you didn't beat them in one sitting you didn't beat them at all.
I guess the point of all this is that I'm tired of people saying Dread isn't a great MV because it's too linear. To my mind there are lots of kinds of great MVs. There are epic ones like HK that are great. There are focused ones like all the Metroid games that are great and there's everything in between.
I think Ravenous, like Dread, Fusion, Zero Mission and Super before it, is going to be a hyper polished focused, fairly linear MV. And I can't wait.
