Kraid is a good boy. I don’t know why he’s locked up in a room full of boiling lava in Metroid Dread, which arrived on the Switch last Friday, but he doesn’t deserve it. If you’re a monster who’s willing to make his life even more terrible, however, players recently discovered a much easier way to kill him off, provided you spend some time gathering equipment beforehand.
It should come as no surprise that you’re able to grab power-ups out of order. The open-ended nature of the franchise’s exploration-based gameplay often means players can “sequence break” and improve heroine Samus Aran’s abilities earlier than intended. I can’t tell you how many times I made a beeline for Metroid Prime’s double-jump-enabling Space Jump Boots as soon as I landed on Tallon IV, just so I wouldn’t have to backtrack for them once I got further into the game.
Which brings us back to Metroid Dread and dear old Kraid. While he’s not that difficult to contend with, being just the second boss in the game, there’s a way to make the boss fight even simpler (and a lot more disgusting). As described in the tutorial above, you’re going to want to take a bit of a detour to find the Grapple Beam, which allows Samus to hook onto certain obstacles and yank them out of the way. This requires some tricky navigating over lava pools, but it shouldn’t be too difficult.
With the Grapple Beam equipped, it’s just a matter of using it to acquire Samus’ iconic Morph Ball Bombs. If you’re playing the game normally, these items come way after the Kraid fight, but getting them ahead of the encounter opens up an entirely new way to dispatch the giant lizard.
Metroid Dread’s Kraid fight consists of two phases. In the first, all you have to do is shoot missiles into his gaping maw and avoid a few basic attacks. It’s when the overlooked boss breaks free of his shackles and begins to tower over Samus that the fight can get a little tricky. Fortunately, if you have the Morph Ball Bombs, killing poor Kraid is as easy as uncovering a cannon hidden inside the wall, firing yourself into the creature’s exposed stomach, and absolutely wrecking him from the inside.
Although sequence breaking has been part of the Metroid franchise since its 1986 Famicom Disk System debut, this is the first time—at least in my admittedly diminished memory—that the developers have included a built-in reward for disregarding their intended upgrade path. It’s always a thrill to get an item early or walk into a boss fight prepared with much more energy and missiles than usual, but this unique Kraid strategy proves that the folks at MercurySteam really get what Metroid is all about.