Now that I’m done with Metroid Prime, I figured it was time to delve into Prime 2: Echoes, which is considered by many to be the "oddball" in the series. I was really excited about playing it because I never got to play the original on the Gamecube.
Personally, I’m not sure why this is, because Echoes strikes a good balance between the elements that made Prime 1 and Prime 3: Corruption what they are. It’s a great link between the two games, and from a story standpoint, I think it’s arguably the most important game in the Prime trilogy. I didn’t want to spend too much time doing a separate playtest for Echoes alone, but I thought it’d fun to try a feature entirely based around the "food for thought" concept about this game and about Other M, which I dearly hope will make me cry tears of happiness. Here goes:
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes
– Samus’s suit looks a lot nicer in Echoes. Ironically, Samus herself looks the worst in Echoes.
– Why did they make her Varia Suit less metallic in Prime 3? I don’t get it. It looks the most convincing in Echoes.
– Did they tweak the morph ball physics in this game? It feels like you don’t roll around as much, and move more like the tire from a vehicle.
– The Ing look a lot like the monsters from the Twilight Realm in Zelda: Twilight Princess. Even some of the sound effects you hear while fighting them seemed similar to the ones from TP.
– I didn’t notice it initially, but the Luminoth are way taller than you. It’s just that they seem to kneel while talking to you as a sign of respect. It says a lot about the kind of people they are. I thought that was a nice touch.
– I love how Echoes fleshed out the Space Pirates. When you enter their research lab and witness all the brutal experiments they’re conducting on the Metroids, it really makes you loathe them.
– On the flip side, reading about how some pirates tried to use Metroids as pets amused me to no end. Perhaps some of them aren’t so bad?
– Echoes is probably the most worthy of the "Metroid" name, since it gives you the most insight into just how versatile they are, and the way they’ve been hounded through the years. It also contains some awesome remixed music from Super Metroid.
– It’s also the most important game in the Phazon saga, since it bridges the gap between 1 and 3, and sheds a lot of light on the evolution of Metroid Prime, her goals, and her relation to the Space Pirates as Dark Samus. Looking back, Metroid Prime showed great presence of mind when it absorbed Samus’s DNA at the end of the first game.
– "As terrible as it sounds, there are two of them now." is the funniest pirate log entry in the game.
– Aether feels much more like a real planet than Tallon IV did.
– To the guy from Retro Studios: drop by in the comments sometime.
Metroid: Other M
– There will be hell to pay if I have to scan stuff obsessively in this game. I love scanning in the Prime games, but leave it out of Other M please.
– Similarly, if there’s any 100% completion achievement in Other M, it better be something more significant than a 10-second video clip.
– I’d love to see the suit take physical damage and get battered as you take hits from enemies, now that the game is finally in third-person and running on capable hardware.
– Actual statistical differences between the various suits would be nice, too. Perhaps even a difference in combat style?
– The first-person sequences had better not be scripted events. That’d be such a waste of a potentially awesome mechanic.
– The Metroid theme is back to being creepy as opposed to the "alien" twist it took in the Prime trilogy.
