Five years after its release, Metroid Dread still occupies a permanent space in my brain. Samus Aran’s nightmarish escape from a robot-infested abyss successfully revitalized the dormant Metroid series in 2021 by delivering a tightly designed Metroidvania full of challenging battles. There’s so much that’s still vivid in my memory now, but there’s one moment I have come back to time and time again: that ending.
[Ed. note: This article contains spoilers for Metroid Dread.]
Metroid Dread begins when the Galactic Federation dispatches Samus to Planet ZDR. The mission is to recover the Federation’s lost EMMI robots, who were sent to the planet to find the last living X parasites hiding in the universe. Samus has a vested interest in that mission considering that those are the parasites that nearly killed her in Metroid Fusion, and now threaten to become an invasive species if left unchecked. The simple retrieval operation goes south in a hurry when a Chozo warrior named Raven Beak attacks and leaves her stranded deep underground — without her power-ups, of course.
That kicks off a horror-tinged escape story where a powerless Samus becomes prey to the reprogrammed EMMI Why do the robots want her dead? To extract the Metroid DNA swirling around in Samus’ blood following the events of Fusion. Samus was fused with the DNA at the start of that game to save her life after an X parasite attack, but it turns out that the risky operation painted a target on her back in the long-run.
While there are multiple story threads at play in Dread, Samus’ relationship to her own body is the real heart of the story. Underneath all the Chozo lore is a personal horror story about a woman slowly becoming the very thing that she dedicated her life to killing.
Samus has always had a complicated relationship to the energy-sucking Metroid species. In the series’ first game, they are played as straight baddies. They’re evil monsters that you need to shoot. Metroid 2: Return of Samus seems like it’s doubling down on that for the bulk of the adventure until the very end. After eradicating the universe’s last living Metroid, a baby hatches and imprints onto Samus. The game ends with an eerily silent trek back up to the surface with your new pal, letting you sit with the extinction you’ve just carried out without question. Super Metroid twists the knife even further when that bay Metroid sacrifices its life to save Samus. Samus is not the hero in the first few Metroid games; she is a weapon.
That makes her struggles with the DNA overtaking her body all the more powerful in Dread. In the game’s finest moment, Samus is jumped by an enemy and instinctively rears her arm back to suck the energy out of it, like a Metroid would. She catches herself at the last second and instead blasts it with the canon on her other arm. There’s a look of terror on her face as she realizes that she nearly lost control of her body to her Metroid brain. The entire dynamic is captured in her two arms, which come to represent the war inside of her.
That battle comes to a head in Dread’s unnerving ending. As she finds herself on the brink of death in a climactic battle against Raven Beak, Samus finally loses full control of her body. The Metroid DNA fully takes over in a Kafkaesque metamorphosis that leaves her in a monstrous green suit. How DNA transforms a metal space suit is beyond me, but it’s an effective metaphor nonetheless.
I imagine that the sequence was designed to be badass, with Samus unleashing her ultimate power to defeat Raven Beak, but it still haunts me to this day. It’s a terrifying moment that brings Samus’ deepest held fear to fruition. She quite literally becomes a Metroid, the very thing she drove to extinction. Is she even in control of her body during the fight, or is she acting on animal instinct? The more you put it in context of a story about your past consuming you, the more the Metroid suit feels like a curse rather than a superpower. Even when Samus returns back to normal at the end of the game, she flies off into space as a hunted woman.
It’s part of the reason that I’m so eager to see where next year’s follow-up, Metroid Ravenous, takes the saga next. Its first trailer indicates that developer MercurySteam is leaning into Dread’s themes even more, as Samus has now been reduced to a pure animal state. Again, her arm tells the story: her instinct to use her arm to suck the life out of enemies has won. It’s a full-blown game mechanic now that’s imperative to her survival. We even get a few glimpses at the Metroid Suit, which looks like it will play a bigger role in the game.
Is it a distressing sign that the Samus we know is gone? Or has she embraced the power of a species that was unjustly massacred by humans? If handled delicately, Ravenous stands to add an exciting wrinkle to Samus’ long, complicated relationship to Metroidkind.
