Yep, the Space Pirates are here, and they’re well-established.
Thankfully, dark rooms are a rarity in this game. The main point of making those rooms dark is so you’re forced to use your Thermal Visor, but it also has the side effect of making you really hope you grabbed everything on first visit. We’ll have to go back much later to grab the Artifact at the top, but then we’ll be much better prepared to just ignore the foes within (except when they lock the doors).
Thardus is one of those bosses that sounds a lot harder than he is. The fact that he still takes damage from normal shots and Wave Beam homes in on any target means that even with all the blocking he does, he’ll eventually go down. Super Missiles take up a lot of your missiles very quickly in this game, but still do enough damage to certainly be worth it. Most other charge beam combos are not as effective as Super Missiles for their cost (five missiles per second for two of them!), so I’ll mostly just be using Super Missiles.