How Metroid Dread Reframes The History Of The Chozo

How Metroid Dread Reframes The History Of The Chozo

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For a majority of the Metroid series, the Chozo are a mysterious part of the lore, but Dread drags them out of obscurity to be a central plot element.

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How Metroid Dread Reframes The History Of The Chozo

The Metroid series has existed since 1986 and consists of plenty of games, including this year’s Metroid Dread, but still has a rather nebulous backstory and history, especially as regards Metroid’s race of bird-like aliens, the Chozo. Each game depicts events that are pertinent to the present day safety of the galaxy, but said events are largely a result of actions taken by the mysterious Chozo race sometime before the plot of the original Metroid. The mysterious bird-people are hardly ever seen, but their presence is felt by the widespread ruins of their once great civilization. Over the course of the series, the Chozo gradually become more central to the plot, with Metroid Dread finally bringing new revelations into just how much influence they’ve had recently despite their relative absence from galactic life.

[Warning – Spoilers for Metroid Dread appear below.]

For most of the series, the physical attributes of the Chozo could only be inferred from the many statues they left on various planets they previously inhabited. It wasn’t until Metroid Dread that a living Chozo was seen in-game. For the first three games in the Metroid series, the Chozo are largely a background influence, but Fusion and Dread especially help expound the lasting effects of the race’s actions. In a way, the Chozo feel like a sort of retcon to the series, or an attempt to tie the narratives of all five mainline games together. This may be because it took 19 years for Metroid Dread, a fifth game, to finally be made, but in reality, Fusion and a prequel manga that released around the same time already began pointing at the Chozo’s modern involvement.

Regardless of how the Chozo gradually become a larger part of the series, they are central to the plot simply because of their association with protagonist Samus Aran. After her parents were killed in a Space Pirate raid on the planet K-2L, Samus was adopted and raised by the Chozo. They infused Samus with Chozo DNA, allowing her to wear the Power Suit they gave her. At some point before the original Metroid, Samus left the dwindling and reclusive Chozo and entered galactic society, joining the Galactic Federation Police Force. She would soon become the massively successful bounty hunter she is in the games, and despite her once close relations with the Chozo, the alien race faded into mystery, with Samus never divulging her full knowledge of them.

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The Chozo In Metroid’s First Three Games

How Metroid Dread Reframes The History Of The Chozo

Samus being a Chozo-raised orphan creates a particularly enigmatic case of ludonarrative dissonance wherein the player controls Samus, but is drip-fed information on the Chozo over the course of numerous Metroid games prior to Dread. This is particularly apparent in the series’ first three entries, where the Chozo are little more than set dressing for the present conflict. Metroid, Metroid II: Return of Samus (and the remakes of both), and Super Metroid all take place in areas previously inhabited by the Chozo, yet their involvement through past actions is presented as little more than speculation. Chozo ruins litter the planets Zebes and SR388, but their purpose for creating the dangerous Metroids remains a mystery until later games.

The Chozo would later be implicated in the events of the first three games by the prequel manga as more than just creators of the Metroids, but the inventors of Mother Brain as well. The Chozo invented the AI long ago, but were betrayed by their creation when the Space Pirates invaded Zebes. Mother Brain took the opportunity to free herself from Chozo subjugation and seize power as the mastermind behind the Space Pirate army. The manga also reveals that Samus spent much of her childhood under Mother Brain’s supervision. This is another narrative instance that feels like retconning, but actually helps fill in gaps of the Metroid story left untold by Samus’ general in-game silence.

The Chozo In Metroid Prime & Fusion

How Metroid Dread Reframes The History Of The Chozo

In the series’ chronology, the entire Metroid Prime trilogy takes place after the original game, but before Return of Samus. Throughout the trilogy, Samus travels to many planets and explores a wide array of Chozo ruins, but the games only help the player understand the Chozo’s once immense reach in the galaxy, and expand on their disappearance. According to the Metroid Prime Instruction Booklet, the Chozo began to shed their great technologies and removed themselves to a hermitic life in response to rising violence in the galaxy. Tallon IV was once a Chozo colony prior to the Phazon’s arrival from interstellar space. The Chozo attempted to contain the Phazon before leaving Tallon IV, implying that groups of Chozo still exist in remote regions of the galaxy.

Metroid Fusion truly begins the process of reintroducing the Chozo as main players in the galaxy prior to their central role in Dread. Though it was the fourth mainline game in the series, Fusion finally explains the reason for the Chozo’s invention of the bioweapon Metroids: to combat the X Parasites discovered on SR388. In Metroid II, SR388 is presented as the Metroid home world, but they were not native to the planet, only invented there. At some point in the distant past, the Chozo decided to colonize SR388, and soon came into contact with X. Since the Parasites were capable of infecting, killing, and subsequently mimicking all forms of life, the Chozo bioengineered a predator to hunt the X. The advent of the Metroids must have, to some degree, been successful, since Samus does not encounter a single X on her first visit to SR388 in Metroid II, and is only infected by the X after she returns at the beginning of Fusion following her own annihilation of the Metroids.

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The Chozo In Metroid Dread

Prior to Metroid Dread, the Chozo are only alluded to, and even Samus expresses intense emotion in Metroid Dread’s story at seeing another (friendly) Chozo when meeting Quiet Robe. Dread directly addresses the parts of Chozo history teased in the Chozo Memories from Zero Mission (the remake of the original Metroid). Two Chozo tribes are directly responsible for the events concerning the Metroids and X in the series – the Thoha and the Mawkin. This, combined with the knowledge of the group that once lived on Tallon IV, implies modern Chozo society is comprised of scattered, semi-nomadic tribes. It was the Thoha which created and controlled the Metroids, though it’s theorized that the bioweapons’ proliferation directly contributed to the fall of the Chozo civilization.

After the Metroids were largely successful against the X on SR388, the Thoha realized the threat the Metroids posed to the galaxy at large. The word “Metroid” roughly translates to “ultimate warrior” in the Chozo language, according to Nintendo’s Metroid Dread Report Vol. 3. While the Thoha prepared to eradicate the apex predator they invented, the Mawkin tribe wished to harness the Metroids’ abilities for galactic domination. Lead by Raven Beak, the Mawkin betrayed the Thoha on SR388, leaving only Quiet Robe alive as a puppet to control the Metroids. The timeline of the Mawkin tribe’s exploits is rather fuzzy, especially as it pertains to Kraid’s potential survival of Zebes’ destruction, but sometime before SR388’s destruction at the end of Fusion, every Mawkin tribe member except Raven Beak was infected on the planet and replaced with an X copy.

Raven Beak was forced to quarantine the rest of his tribe in the Elun region of ZDR, and his plans to harness the Metroids’ power were waylaid in the meantime by Samus’ eradication of the species in Super Metroid. Thus, the events of Metroid Dread transpire and the only two confirmed living Chozo are killed. Presumably, the Tallon IV colony exists somewhere, and other tribes may be similarly living in farther corners of the galaxy, but Fusion and Dread effectively depicted the Chozo’s rise from obscurity in the Metroid series’ recent past, and their fall back into scattered solitude. Metroid Dread’s story successfully took what was once little more than background lore to the original games and turned the Chozo into a central narrative component.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/metroid-dread-reframes-chozo-history-lore-plot/

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