‹ Back

 

THE HARDEST KRAID

 

Metroid: Zero Mission - https://youtu.be/2I9iPMJG9tk

 

I'm not sure about "hardest," though that was certainly true at the time this game was made. Dread's might be harder.

While this game gives you Samus's full kit from later games, it keeps the stuff that would totally trivialize the original part of the game away from you until much later, even though you still have to pick it up just to make progress. As such, while the first item collected today is marked as "Space Jump," that's more because I already know what it is by how the symbol matches other games, rather than because the game tells me that's what it is. Instead, it just says "Unknown Item" like if you pick up power bomb expansions in Dread prior to actually getting the ability to use power bombs. In the opposite direction, getting any Super Missile expansion in this game is the same effect as getting the correct initial one, so I get to completely annihilate the miniboss with a single hit instead of having a longer fight.

Kraid is one of those bosses that keeps coming back, though he doesn't have quite the lore reason that Ridley does. I think it's more that he's gotten carted around to every lab that could hold him simply because he's interesting. However, though he's normally difficult to hit, I think this is the game where he's the most difficult to hit. You have to spend a missile just to get him to open his mouth, and then the hand is so aggressively blocking that you really only have time for one hit. At least in Dread you get a larger window to attack. The only reason I would possibly call him harder in Dread is that he's got a much more varied attack pattern, so you can't just hang from a ledge and farm health and missiles until you're all healed up again.