Nightmare Fuel / Metroid Dread

"You are faced with overwhelming power. Accept your helplessness."

With a title like Dread, you can expect this game to be chock full of scary moments. As the Grand Finale of the Metroid story arc, Dread pulls out all the stops to go out with a bang and a great many screams.

Moments pages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned!

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E.M.M.I.

• The E.M.M.I. robots are essentially the SA-X up to eleven, capable of walking on and climbing any surface, shrugging off basically any weapon, and chasing Samus relentlessly once they detect her; your only real choice is to run away. While the first one you encounter in the game is damaged, it still requires a powerful charge weapon to defeat; after which you run out of juice and encounter one that is in full efficiency, has got a plating to better shield the head, and doesn't even flinch from a missile blast. And that's just the beginning. Oh, and unlike SA-X, if they happen to catch you and you don't counter with perfect timing, it's an instant Game Over as they hold Samus down and shoot a spike straight into her sternum.
• Everything about the E.M.M.I. is unnatural in every way. Their movements look wrong, their limbs, torso and head contorting in all the wrong ways, moving at a horrifying speed. The electronic chirping sounds they make will be seared into your mind much like the SA-X's footsteps, and the chirping sound they make as they stab Samus will haunt your dreams. All in all the E.M.M.I. feel less like highly advanced killer robots and more like horrifying Mechanical Abominations.
  • The E.M.M.I. bear some resemblance to the AMEE antagonist from Red Planet, a Killer Robot incapable of feeling empathy or mercy towards its target, and utterly focused on eradicating them, because that's what it's defined its mission parameters as. As a machine, it won't get tired, won't get distracted, and won't stop until its target is dead— and the target has little to no hope of being able to take it on in a head-on fight, despite their own unique skillset, because the machine is simply designed to be a better killer and fighter than them.
  • The first E.M.M.I. Samus encounters, 01P, is absolutely wrecked, even missing a limb and can at least be taken out. That means there's something out there that's even worse than something Samus has no choice but to run from. Collecting 100% of the items in Ataria grants bonus art revealing who its attacker was: Raven Beak himself.
• The music associated with the E.M.M.I. units is auditory nightmare fuel.
  • First, there's the Patrol Theme, which sounds rather... empty, like you've entered some unnatural place within ZDR. The Ascetic Aesthetic is emphasized, as the robots' patrol zones are all clearly artificial areas solely for the purpose of being where an E.M.M.I. lurks and searches for Samus. It combines with the unsettling chirping noises the robots make to make the message clear: you're in the E.M.M.I.'s territory now. Tread carefully.
  • When/if an E.M.M.I. detects your presence but hasn't seen you yet, the Search Theme kicks in. It has elements of the Patrol Theme, but given a substantially more tense variation, drilling in the idea that this Super-Persistent Predator knows you're close and is heading your way.
  • And finally, the Chase Theme for when an E.M.M.I. spots you and begins to hunt you down in earnest. It's frantic and energetic, incorporating what sounds like alarm sirens to match a player's likely thought process as they realize the Killer Robot has seen them and is closing in for the kill. The tension doesn't let up even when you have the Omega Cannon, as now you have to whittle the faceplate away with the Omega Stream before prepping a blast to the eye. All while the E.M.M.I. slowly makes its way to you, where either it dies, or you do.
• If an E.M.M.I. spots Samus, it goes into Pursuit Mode which locks down all the E.M.M.I. Zone doors, meaning that you're trapped with the killer robot until you somehow lose it through quick stealth tactics or running fast enough for it to switch into Search Mode. And given that E.M.M.I.-04SB has the Speed Booster, that's easier said than done. The sole exception is E.M.M.I.-05IM, which doesn't go into Pursuit Mode when it spots Samus, giving her a chance to get through the E.M.M.I. Zone door. Unfortunately, it's equipped with a freeze shot that both damages Samus and renders her immobile enough for the lack of Pursuit Mode to not matter anyways.
  • The E.M.M.I.'s A.I. is a huge improvement compared to the SA-X, which means any tactics you used against the SA-X will not work on the E.M.M.I. robots. For example, if you think sliding into a seemingly safe chamber would stop it, think again as the E.M.M.I. will always find an alternate route no matter how far or convoluted it may be. They can plow through breakable blocks, climb on walls and ceilings and suddenly alter their patrol routes to catch you off-guard. They even change their timing flash every time just to throw off your attempts to counter. Oh, and best not forget that starting with the green E.M.M.I, they can crawl through any small space Samus can gain access to and special hatches in the walls to shortcut into other rooms! In other words, nowhere is safe.
  • The E.M.M.I. also circumvent a certain weakness known in the SA-X. The SA-X can only kill Samus with its Ice Beam and a barrage of Missiles from a certain distance, which makes it easy to simply crawl into a tight Morph Ball corner and laugh as the SA-X goes back and forth randomly trying to get Samus. The E.M.M.I., on the other hand, homes in and simply touches Samus, forcing her out of her Morph Ball form into a counter event that will most likely end with her stabbed by the E.M.M.I.
• The Central Units that Samus has to destroy to be able to claim the Omega Cannon from look more than a little familiar, don't they? That's because they're essentially Mother Brain copies, complete with the Tourian weapon defense systems in place. If Raven Beak below wasn't responsible for using these to control the E.M.M.I. units, then that means the Galactic Federation had to drop them down personally, having built upon the Aurora units and the entire Bottle Ship incident to perfect their Mother Brain clones for nigh-unstoppable machines not even Samus can defeat without their own power.
  • And if Raven Beak was responsible for the Central Units in controlling them, he effectively contained these seemingly-undefeatable entities with energies and systems only he and Quiet Robe could design, highlighting that a Chozo could singlehandedly hijack some of the greatest creations of the Galactic Federation with no effort given how quickly the E.M.M.I.s went offline. All by reusing and iterating upon their past designs from Mother Brain's creation.
• As if being a bunch of Nigh-Invulnerable Killer Robots wasn't enough, each E.M.M.I. (barring the first one) has their own gimmick to make tracking Samus down even more nightmarish.
  • E.M.M.I.-02SM (White) has the Spider Magnet, allowing it to crawl on walls and ceilings. It makes its entrance by hanging on the ceiling like some mechanical Xenomorph. While not mentioned, this is a standard feature of the E.M.M.I., as other E.M.M.I. will use this should it allow them to get to Samus quicker.
  • E.M.M.I.-03MB (Green) can compress itself to fit into tight spaces, meaning anywhere Samus run or hide it can follow. This is revealed to be also a standard feature of the E.M.M.I., meaning that the tactics used to escape 02SM will no longer work at all.
  • E.M.M.I.-04SB (Yellow) is equipped with the Speed Booster allowing it to quickly close the distance between it and Samus. Its introductory cutscene has it chasing Samus and quickly catching up to her only to be stopped by a trap door, forcing it to find an alternate route.
  • E.M.M.I.-05IM (Blue) is equipped with a freeze shot that will paralyze Samus if it hits, which is especially bad considering she has Metroid DNA and is more vulnerable to cold.
  • E.M.M.I.-06WB (Purple) can hear you everywhere you are no matter where you are, it can see through walls, and it's equipped with the Wave Beam, which will paralyze Samus if it hits her. It's introduced by firing the Wave Beam through a wall and immediately capturing her, only failing thanks to Quiet Robe shutting it down. The purple E.M.M.I. zone is basically just a long, mad dash to escape.
  • The last E.M.M.I., 07PB (Orange), has the Power Bomb. Just two rooms into its zone, it detects Samus ^note It will detect Samus even if she's using the Phantom Cloak. and drops one, stunning Samus long enough to capture her and forcing Samus to use her Metroid Energy Absorption to defeat it.
• Even the way you kill an E.M.M.I. is terrifying. Firstly, upon obtaining the Omega Beam and Cannon, the E.M.M.I. immediately knows your location and begins to make a mad dash for you. Then, once you've lined up the Omega Stream, it takes an agonizingly long time to melt the face plating off of the damn thing while it rapidly is approaching you while you, it bears repeating, cannot move. THEN you need to charge up your shot as the thing stands on two legs and lumbers towards you while you are, again, planted in one spot. Worse still, if the E.M.M.I. gets to Samus in this standing-up state it immediately grabs her with no counter, giving her only one short chance to Press X to Not Die. And even worse? If you are not paying attention to your surroundings or even your map, the E.M.M.I. can sneak up from behind and capture you that way.
  • Speaking of which, you eventually get corralled into a mostly vertical room when dealing with 02SM. The only way to proceed is to lift a floating bridge up to a height where you can slide down a chute and get away from the E.M.M.I. The mechanism is a pressure switch near the far end of the bridge, which means you - once again - cannot move while the water pours in. While your progress with the bridge is saved if you have to leave the switch, you won't be thinking that when you're being chased down.

Raven Beak

• Raven Beak, the game's main antagonist, may be a serious contender for the most terrifying villain in the Metroid franchise, as he embodies every inch of the ruthless Proud Warrior Race Guy attitude the Chozo race tried to abandon. His strength, skill, cunning, and sheer ruthlessness cements him as one of Samus' deadliest enemies to date.
  • His backstory. Remember the Chozo tribe of SR388 that was slaughtered in one of the Chozo Memories in Samus Returns? That was him. The Thoha tribe wanted to destroy the Metroids as they had become too much of a threat. However, Raven Beak wanted to use the Metroids as bioweapons and massacred the Thoha when they tried to intervene, leaving only Quiet Robe alive so he could control the Metroids. While the act alone is horrifying, it's made even more so by the ripple effect this would have. Because he slaughtered the Thoha tribe, they were unable to destroy the Metroids, leading to the Federation discovering a live Metroid on SR388 which in turn would lead to the Space Pirates discovering them and desiring to use them as bioweapons. In other words, so much of the destruction, of the suffering, nearly every single crisis that happened in the series can all be traced back to Raven Beak.^note The only instances Raven Beak couldn't take credit for much as he'd probably like to being the massacre of Samus's home colony and the independent actions taken by Mother Brain out of her envy for Samus and raging superiority complex.
    • At one point, Samus discovers a mural depicting Raven Beak ordering the purge of the Thoha tribe which angers her to the point of triggering her developing Metroid powers. The man is such a narcissistic sociopath that he has commemorated himself slaughtering his own people for posterity. What makes this even worse is that this mural is placed on the wall outside the laboratory where he forced Quiet Robe to work for him, meaning he probably had it created to constantly demoralize his captive and rub what he's done to him in his face.
    • The gallery images that are unlocked after the game shows more of his backstory and what happened after SR-388... and it makes him look even worse. From having his men torture Kraid after he was captured and secured with spears, to stripping members of his tribe who opposed him to their underwear and then feeding them to Drogyga on ZDR ala a James Bond villain, to straight up having the Mawkin Tribe put on the Reich, complete with their own Nazi-esque salute.
  • Raven Beak's character is best described as an evil version of Gray Voice. Like Gray Voice, he is technically Samus' genetic father and showcases a far less benevolent side to the Chozo. But unlike Gray Voice, his personality is a hybrid of Mother Brain's megalomania and Ridley's sadism. He claims he's going to bring order to the galaxy for the greater good, but doesn't seem to care about his people's plight with the X Parasites, and it's heavily implied he's only in it for the thrill of conquest. He is exactly what Samus feared Gray Voice was in Metroid (Manga).
    • Just the fact that Raven Beak is directly responsible for the death of his race. Whether it's ordering the extermination of the Thoha, purging his own Mawkin soldiers, or exposing them to the X Parasite, it all rests at Raven Beak's feet. Whatever happened to the Chozo, some of them survived, until Raven Beak killed them. And he doesn't care.
  • His first battle with Samus is a terrifying example of Always Someone Better as for the first time in her career, Samus learns what it's like to be truly helpless. Even with all of her weapons and skills at her disposal, Samus is unable to even scratch his armor and Raven Beak shrugs off everything she can throw at him. It takes a Super Missile to the face to finally dent his armor, but that only succeeds in pissing him off. The only reason he doesn't kill Samus right then and there is due to her accidentally awakening her Metroid powers.
    • Later on during the final battle after his second phase, he gets one of his wings blasted off by Samus, and doesn't even flinch. Then he proceeds to rip off the other, completely healthy one like one would rip off a Band-Aid. Even after that and one final phase he barely seems fazed, pulling a Neck Lift on Samus and choking her out as she's reduced to desperate struggling. Again, the only reason he loses is thanks to Samus awakening her Metroid powers.
  • Tying directly into a mention in the E.M.M.I. section above, the first E.M.M.I. you come across is one that's horribly battered and mangled, to the point where it can't pursue Samus to any degree beyond slowly walking upright. No matter how powerful Samus becomes, nothing in her arsenal can so much as scuff an E.M.M.I. Not her strongest beams, not the Super Missiles, not even her Metroid powers, which just drain its energy. E.M.M.I.s are explicitly made with the strongest alloy known to exist in the universe and for all intents and purposes are invincible. So what the hell could do this to an E.M.M.I.? The answer is Raven Beak. And he did it with his bare talons.
  • The thing that makes Raven Beak so terrifying isn't just his skill, but his intelligence. Despite being a textbook Proud Warrior Race Guy, Raven Beak isn't some savage barbarian. He's capable of long-term planning, can improvise if said plans go off the rails, is smart enough with tech to reprogram the E.M.M.I.s to go after Samus and harvest her Metroid DNA, and is a skilled enough actor to flawlessly imitate ADAM and manipulate Samus like a puppet on a string. It's little wonder that he comes so close to winning.
    • The reveal that he had been impersonating ADAM after Samus lost contact with the surface, essentially watching Samus from afar for much of the game and subtly manipulating her into fulfilling his goals with her none the wiser until the final showdown with him. It really gives the impression that he could've killed her anytime he wanted to and the only reason he doesn't is because he needs her Metroid powers.
  • His Evil Gloating in the end reveals that he made an addendum to his plan after he saw during their first encounter that Samus had Metroid powers. His new plan was to awaken her powers and turn her into the ultimate Metroid, and then clone her. Remember in Fusion when you panicked about how there were at least ten of the SA-X? Now imagine a whole army of evil Samus clones with Metroid powers under the command of a madman with delusions of galactic conquest.
  • Compared to other villains, Raven Beak is no Silent Antagonist like Dark Samus, nor is his depravity only implied in-game and fully shown in non-game media like Ridley. Raven Beak is the first game antagonist that is fully and blatantly established as a sentient, speaking, and truly diabolical being, a stark contrast to all other antagonists coming before him.
  • Partway through, you hear that Raven Beak unintentionally brought back the X Parasite on his forces to ZDR when a soldier was infected without anyone knowing, which led to a contained spread that Elun was holding together. A gallery image even showcases this with a horrified Mawkin Chozo gazing back at his infected comrade — and Raven Beak and his forces standing there ominously. Then you fight the Chozo Soldiers, who all enter their X Parasite form midway through their fights, yet seem to be following Raven Beak's orders as his personal elite guard. Not even the X Parasites are safe from enslavement in Raven Beak's thirst for power.
    • Alternatively, if one interprets QR-X’s actions in helping Samus as proof that someone with a sufficiently strong will can overcome the X Parasites control, then it’s possible the Chozo-X warriors that Samus encounters have retained their sense of self and being out of pure fanatical devotion to Raven Beak and his vision of a galaxy ruled by the iron talon of the Mawkin Chozo.
  • Another thing that makes Raven Beak so disturbing is his absolutely insane narcissism, to the point that even his status as a Proud Warrior Race Guy seems completely hollow. He never shows any real pride or loyalty in the Chozo as a race, or even in the Mawkin tribe, and would kill any of them without a second thought the second they cross him. He performed a genocide of the Thoha tribe not because they planned on using the Metroids against him or were scheming against him in any other way, but because they refused to go along with his plans for galactic conquest, and even celebrated the genocide with a mural depicting it. Memories show him brutally executing Mawkin who dissented against him and it's implied that when an outbreak of the X Parasites began assimilating the Mawkin, he simply locked the city down and abandoned the rest of the tribe to keep himself safe. In the end, his only real pride is in himself, and he'll only tolerate anyone else as long as they're furthering his goals.
  • Though he more than had it coming, Raven Beak's ultimate fate is not pretty. An X infects him and turns him into something akin to a giant Xenomorph... if said Xenomorph's outer maw was instead Kraid, with Raven's head inside it, likely having assimilated them both. It's easily one of the freakiest designs in the whole series. Also, as he desperately lurches towards Samus, he rumbles "SAMUUUS... HADAR... SEN OLMEN ^Translation  POWER... IS EVERYTHING. " one last time. Samus then proceeds to use her newly acquired Hyper Beam to vaporize his new monstrous form, and even destroys the X Parasite containing the last traces of his DNA to ensure he can never come back. Again, he deserved his fate, but that's not a good way to go.
  • An unused voice clip at the end of this video is another one of his X form's, and it's even more disturbing in that it almost sounds like he's in perpetual agony from just existing in his eldritch form.
  "SHAREK SEN... ULU HADAR... NOMU SHADAHA..."^Translation THERE IS... NO POWER... WITHOUT SACRIFICE...

Samus' Metroid Powers

• The Reveal that Samus has been slowly transforming into a human Metroid, while undeniably awesome, brings its own share of Nightmare Fuel.
  • Just the build up to the reveal alone is scary enough. The first time her powers awaken is in her first battle with Raven Beak which is intentionally left vague as to what happened. The next time her powers start acting up is when she sees a mural depicting Raven Beak's massacre of the Thoha tribe, which angers her enough that her powers start to flare up. But it's the next time they emerge that truly leaves players asking "What the hell is happening to Samus?" One of the lab experiments, a Takumaku, breaks out of its container to attack Samus and her powers immediately flare up. Samus has to actually struggle to resist the urge to give into her new Metroid instincts to feed, opting to blast it with her Arm Cannon and is left visibly shaken afterwards. Later she is attacked by an E.M.M.I. and left with no other choice, is forced to use her powers to drain it of its energy supply. Immediately after, she's attacked by an X-infected Chozo Soldier... and she drains him dry without a moment's hesitation. After this, she starts to get a little too comfortable using them and starts draining enemies left and right. A subtle, yet terrifying display that even the most heroic among us can be easily swayed by the temptation of power.
  • Samus going utterly ballistic on Raven Beak, to the point of letting out an absolutely furious and continuous scream of pure rage as she tries to suck the life out of him. The biggest one, however, is the close up of her eyes (which have turned golden in her transformation) with a look of pure hatred◊ we've never seen on her before. This is one of the few times, if not the only time, where she's full of Unstoppable Rage and trying her absolute hardest to make the one who wronged her die horribly. Not even Dark Samus (who forced her to kill her fellow hunters) and Ridley (Samus' Arch-Enemy and the murderer of both her human parents and Gray Voice) could cause a response like that. Raven Beak managed to achieve that and spell his own doom as a result.
    • Let's talk about the specifics of how Samus attacks Raven Beak for a moment. She gives into a violent and uncontrollable frenzy, much the way it was said Metroids would react to a Mawkin by default. She "bites" through his armor with her hand-turned-claw and latches onto his head...just the way a Metroid would. She screams ceaselessly as she viciously and mercilessly drinks him dry of his life, just the way a Metroid would. And as Raven Beak flails helplessly in alarm and terror, shooting blindly and trying in futility to escape, Samus isn't the slightest bit dislodged, absolutely nothing he can do can save his life — just the way a Metroid attack plays out. In this moment, Samus doesn't just become a Metroid physically, she becomes a Metroid entirely, and attacks her prey —not "enemy", not anymore, this has become her prey— the exact same way. This plays out identically to any Metroid attack ever seen before in the series. And when you realize it, the scene ceases to look awesome, and looks nothing short of terrifying.
    • Raven Beak's armor managed to survive everything Samus could throw at it and a Super Missile to the face only put a crack in it. Metroid Samus? She punches straight through the crack and shatters his entire helmet. It’s also noticeably the first time Raven Beak shows visible fear, struggling to throw Samus off of himself to no avail and screaming in terror. In that moment, his confident, poised demeanor completely evaporates, as he's actually struggling for his life after making Samus hit her Rage Breaking Point.
    • Let's reiterate - Samus, paragon of the galaxy, unflappable hero to many and chosen by an ancient people to protect the world around her... disappears. And in her place, even if just for a few moments, is an unhinged monster brimming with unrelenting rage, transforming into the Metroid Suit in the blink of an eye before going absolutely feral on Raven Beak. It's incredibly frightening considering how Samus' usual character is and shows just how terrifying Samus can be when she's sufficiently pissed off.
    • If she hadn't been interrupted by the Itorash crashing on ZDR (which was her fault, seeing as how she drained the ship too), Samus likely would've drained Raven Beak until he was nothing by a desiccated, dusty corpse. And probably would've shot the corpse to nothing on top of that afterwards. She certainly subjected his X-parasite to the latter.
    • At times, it can be difficult tell in that scene if Samus is screaming out of rage at Raven Beak, or if it’s because she is in incredible pain due to the physical trauma of her transformation.
  • On a related note, Samus's Metroid Suit her form changes to when her Metroid DNA is fully awakened. It's a sickly green color with red highlights, incredibly sharp and jagged, seems to have horns or bone jutting out of the shoulder pauldrons, and there are 4 Metroid-like teeth around the Arm Cannon's muzzle. Whereas the Fusion Suit and the new Power Suit showed trace amounts of her armor's organic components, here they seem to have mutated beyond capacity and fully consumed her body. It looks less like armor and more like an insectoid carapace fused to her flesh.
    • Here's where it gets worse: in this form, Samus is quite possibly the most powerful she's ever been, in any series entry. In her right arm, the Arm Cannon, she has full access to the Hyper Beam, the strongest Beam weapon she's ever possessed now wholly at her disposal. In her left arm, she possesses the hallmark power of the Metroid race, the ability to devour anything that stands in her path through an unparalleled energy siphoning. And she can't control either of these. Discharging her Arm Cannon at all looses a torrent of utter annihilation, and to so much as graze anything with her left hand or even be standing too close to an energy source will see it drained into her. Just as she's about to leave ZDR, she nearly drains her own ship by accident. If the QR-X hadn't come to her aid, she would've been vaporized by the planet's explosion. The two most destructive powers in the series, united in one body, and she can't shut them off. Samus being a destroyer of worlds has always been a bit of a joke in the fandom, but Dread has managed to turn it into a frightening possiblity. Samus Aran has become a Walking Wasteland and a Person of Mass Destruction. No wonder Raven Beak claimed her mere existence was a threat to the galaxy; just landing on any inhabited world like this could be a death sentence for it.
    • If you stop and check the equipment menu during the escape, the Metroid Suit has its own entry — but the description doesn't refer to it as a suit, just say that for all intents, Samus has become a Metroid. Now recall the opening of Metroid Fusion, where it's stated that parts of her suit are bonded to her biology (her nervous system specifically being mentioned) such that they can't be removed while she's unconscious. If her partially-mechanical suit was twisted that much, imagine what's going on with her fleshy bits inside her new exoskeleton...

Other

• During your first trip through Dairon, occasionally a roar will be heard accompanied by metal in the background buckling at some sort of impact. It's never explicitly shown what causes this startling scare.
• Also in Dairon, you can find a giant spider-like corpse in one of the blackout rooms. If you stick around for too long, one of its legs will silently twitch. Returning with the power back on shows it being prodded and shocked by mechanical arms, which explains why its muscles can still contract.
  • This same creature, Experiment No. Z-57, gets infected by the X after they get released on the planet, and you have to fight it as a boss when it tries to freeze all of ZDR over from the lowest levels (even freezing every part of Cataris that isn't a lava room) to kill you (unaware that you have since gotten the Gravity Suit to deal with the cold).
    • By the way, it can be easily missed, but if you return there later before getting the Gravity Suit, you find out that this guy is not in that room anymore...
• Elun is one of the more unsettling areas in the game, as it is where you first encounter the X Parasites of ZDR and where the Mawkin tribe (sans Raven Beak) was quarantined following infection.
  • The scene of Samus entering Elun should raise some alarm bells. The entire area is locked behind two gates, an enormous bulkhead and a smaller set of blast doors. Samus walks through the bulkhead, which closes behind her, and is soon met with several devices hanging on the walls with glowing red dots on them. They thankfully turn out to just be scanners instead of something more dangerous, and Samus is allowed further inside after the scan is complete. However, this is all Five-Second Foreshadowing that there's something dangerous in Elun if there's all this security in place.
  • After the first few rooms were completely devoid of any enemies to fight, Samus is formally introduced to ZDR's X Parasites via shambling, melting Chozo-like abominations that will continuously reform from a puddle of black slime every time they are killed until Samus absorbs the X, traits that Call-Back to the Zombie Researcher enemies in Metroid Fusion. However, unlike the researchers (which were weak early game enemies that crumble in one hit), these Chozo Zombies can not only take much more punishment, they show up in multiple areas after the X break out of Elun.
  • Going off the point above, how about the sheer Body Horror of the X-infected Mawkin warriors? At first they look and act like normal Chozo warriors, attempting to run Samus through with a spear, but that changes once they enter their second phase, especially the first one you fight. It doubles over and lets out a groan that rises into an inhuman shriek as its entire head and neck split into a gooey black maw, their previous refined fighting style turning into that of a feral beast that only seems to barely understand "pointy thing is for stabbing things you don't like". Brrrrr...
  • All of this becomes even worse when you realize this is likely how X infected creatures always looked, and the only reason we didn't see all the black sludge and Body Horror in Fusion was the graphical limitations of the GBA. Fusion was already a scary game, now imagine how it would look in this game's engine. This is likely what Samus was seeing all through the BSL mission.
  • Finishing the Elun area truly shows how horrifyingly efficient the X Parasites are at dominating entire ecosystems, as the moment they get released from the fortress, the whole of ZDR's wildlife gets replaced in minutes. ADAM pretty much states that every living organism currently on ZDR can be safely assumed to have been infected and mimicked by that point.
  • There's also one other point to consider here. During Metroid Fusion, the X were waiting on you to open more and more areas of the BSL research station as you had little choice but to do so in order to find more abilities to combat them in your efforts to contain the threat, getting to the point that ADAM slowly resigned to the inevitability of the station being overrun and it being necessary if you were going to have any chance of survival. In this case, Samus merely stumbles into Elun with no knowledge of what it is and even the player is by now likely thinking that the X in the surveillance was as ADAM has suggested by now...a ploy to lure her to ZDR. Cue the exploration of Elun and not only do you find out that the X are VERY much on ZDR, but they get out...
  • Special mention in particular goes to the cutscene at the end of the whole sequence: After finally circling back around to Elun's entrance, Samus walks out only to realize that the sector's entrance is wide open, and all she can do is... stand there, looking defeated, watching resignedly as dozens of X float across ZDR's open plains, ready to make the planet their new home. Watching the parasites swirl quietly through the sky, the X feel for a moment less like dangerous aliens and more like a horde of foul spirits, set free from the darkest pit of the underworld - and in a way, they almost are, because Hell has truly broken loose on ZDR.
• One of Samus' old enemies, Kraid, is revealed to have survived the destruction of Zebes in Super Metroid, albeit now serving as Raven Beak's captive slave/pet. And given the physical condition he's in when Samus encounters him on Cataris, he may have genuinely been better off dead. His usually obese frame seems thinner as if he were famished, and much of his body is now riddled with scars and rotting tissue due to Raven Beak torturing him as seen in the gallery. His neck has become swollen to the point where he struggles to vomit projectiles with the tight restraining collar placed on him. Then there is Kraid’s middle stomach hole which is shown suffering some sort of infection/infestation, oozing purple pus and blood while shooting out rolling globules of toxic fluid. The spikes Kraid shoots from his stomach now appear as gross, twisted chunks of splintered bone thanks to the modern visuals.
  • For players skilled enough to sequence break their way into getting the Morph Ball Bombs before confronting Kraid, the secret method to kill him is rather gruesome: Samus will use a concealed Morph Ball accelerator tube to launch her round form into Kraid's infected orifice, complete with sickening squishy sounds as you lay bombs inside him.
  • Before reaching Kraid in Cataris, his roars are heard far above his lair. It both piques player interest and instills dread for what's to come.
  • The sheer horror that Kraid was most likely Killed Offscreen by the purple X parasite that infected Raven Beak. Revisiting his room after getting the Gravity Suit, and checking the bottom of the pit of lava, will reveal his skeleton at the bottom.
  • Now that his model has been ripped and can be viewed in full, you can additionally see that his lower half has been charred black by the lava at best or-depending on how much stock you put into how he was modeled out-completely burned off below the torso.
• At the game's very end, a final note of dread is hidden in plain sight. A Freeze-Frame Bonus moment, one almost impossible to catch on a first pass in how subtle it is, in the final area of Hanubia, and then within the traditional escape sequence: in the background amidst the storming rain, a pair of Chozo fighters can be seen docked in the background of Hanubia when first entering the area. Once the Itorash has fallen, Raven Beak is no more and Samus must make her escape, you pass through this area again. The ships are gone.◊ And while much of the installations are crumbling and ablaze, that one area remains untouched, pristine. The ships were not destroyed. The ships took off. Something other than Samus and ADAM escaped ZDR. And before you jump to conclusions that X-infected Chozo took off, keep in mind Raven Beak had a small army of robotic Chozo soldiers which may have helped quarantine the X in Elun in the first place, and given how few you face in the game, something had to have happened with the rest of them.
• When fighting a Chozo Soldier in Ghavoran. He is camouflaged as part of the foreground shadows. Eek!
• The opening cutscene features a recap of Metroid Fusion's events. This includes a high definition recreation of the SA-X's introduction (the scene which provides the image for that game's own Nightmare Fuel page).

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Hadar... sen olmen.