In another ominous teaser for Metroid Dread, heroine Samus is seen wearing multiple suits, potentially teasing the story significance behind her suit changes in the upcoming game. Dread will mark the 5th installment in the series of Metroid side-scrollers, finally adding more to a legacy started in 1986. Samus has canonically lost and changed her iconic Power Suit many times over the course of her interstellar journeys.
The heavy sci-fi designs of Samus' suits are striking, and they grant abilities that can help Samus in her quest. Typically, Samus will start her journey through an extraterrestrial environment with the Power Suit, sometimes called the Chozo Suit. Despite its name, the Power Suit is generally the weakest suit in her wardrobe. Her first suit upgrade during most games is to the Varia Suit. This helps Samus survive in extreme temperature environments; starting with Metroid II, its basketball-sized shoulder pads were added to help distinguish it from other suits. The final suit in the evolutionary line is the superb Gravity Suit, recognizable by its full body purple coloration and addition of underwater and zero-gravity traversal to Samus' repertoire.
Posted by Nintendo to its YouTube channel, the new trailer for Metroid Dread mysteriously starts with Samus in an orange suit but ends with her clad in blue. The video begins with Samus flying towards Planet ZDR, the setting for Dread, and gives a rundown of the game's introductory story via title cards. It also showed a message from the AI iteration of returning Metroid character Adam. Adam's voice had previously only been heard during his human lifetime in the events of Metroid: Other M, where he infamously bossed Samus around. In Dread he sounds eerily robotic and vocoded, an indication of his afterlife in artificial intelligence. Samus continues her approach on ZDR, but before she lands, the video cuts to black and returns with the protagonist unconscious on the ground. She wears a blue suit instead of the orange she sported within her gunship, and the reason for the change is unexplained.
Watch the Metroid Dread trailer on YouTube here.
Some hints for the outfit swap come from statements made about the game's story during Nintendo Treehouse Live at this year's E3. It was explained that Samus' new suit in Dread is the result of her mechanical Power Suit growing back after its loss in the events of Metroid Fusion, where it was replaced by the organic Fusion Suit. The Fusion Suit upgrades similarly to its predecessor, but its colors are vastly different: instead of yellowish, its first incarnation is blue; whereas the Varia upgrade is orange, its Fusion variant is yellow and mauve.
More evidence comes from the suit Samus is expected to have after the events of Fusion. Though it has no official name in-game, Samus is rewarded with the fan-named Omega Suit for absorbing antagonist SA-X's X Parasite at the end of that game. The Omega Suit is orange and yellow, and though it doesn't look identical to Samus' half-organic suit in Dread, its coloration does fit the suit seen in the first part of the trailer. Unfortunately, Samus is known to lose her suit upgrades at the beginning of Metroid games, so the trailer could indicate that Samus loses the power of the Omega Suit and has it reverted to the basic blue pseudo-Fusion Suit as Dread starts. Whether that's true—and why it happens—won't be revealed until Metroid Dread releases on October 8th.
Metroid Dread comes to Nintendo Switch on October 8th.
Source: Nintendo/YouTube