Metroid Prime

2022-08-08
I was so excited to play this because I love a good metroidvania but I have to say while I did enjoy it I was pretty far from loving it. I'm honestly in between making this a 7 and an 8. It's a game that really holds up amazing in a lot of ways and is frustrating in a bunch of other ways that detracts from that initial amazing stuff.

First off all with some nice component cables this things looks really good on the GameCube. And judging by some videos I saw online of it running in an emulator for Wii it can look downright incredible. There's a certain timelessness to the graphical design of that era, the kind of low-ish poly but still pretty high fidelity stuff. A lot of cool graphical touches like the water on the visor and the reflection of Samus when a bomb goes off nearby are great. All the weapons look really great too.

I like the sound design as well but the music was kind of meh which was kind of a bummer.

The combat is interesting because it predates Halo popularizing the dual analog stick shooter so instead you have an auto aim function. It works pretty well! Though apparently the Wii version lets you aim with the Wiimote which sounds much better. While the core mechanics of it are interesting they throw a lot of spins on it with different weapons and types of enemies to keep things interesting.

There's a lot of puzzles and I enjoyed those as well.

As far as platforming I was actually surprised how much I enjoyed it. I'm not exactly the Platformer Guy but it was tight and responsive and I was only enraged at one or two places where they gave you a tight jump and a long fall to restart the sequence. Also morphing into a ball had really nice controls. The little half-pipe sections where you have to use the boost to gain momentum was you go up and down each side was actually really tight and fun by itself. Probably my favorite puzzles were the ones utilizing the ball.

Alright, all of that is the good stuff. What about the bad? Let's start with backtracking, a staple of the metroidvania genre. Way too much. Way too slow. I must have spent like 4 hours of ~10 hour playthrough backtracking. That's kind of fucked up. And to add insult to injury enemies respawns as soon as you leave the room. That means even though you know how to deal with enemies and have done dealt with them a million times before you are forced to fight them over and over. Now sometimes this felt great because you'd get a weapon like the Plasma Beam and you'd be able to go back and roast enemies that would really hassle you before. But that's 1% of the time. I understand it's a game from 2002 but fuck the backtracking, man.

It became onerous enough that I started using a guide for the vast majority of the game just to save time. And it still felt painful. I mean, collecting all the artifacts was so dumb.
Mixed with that there are some really annoying enemies like the Chozo Ghosts. You can only kill them with super rockets and when you first fight them you can barely see them. And they make the whole area so dark you can't really see enough to just run out and leave. Fuck that.

Finally, bosses are way too long. Just way way too long. Thardus the rock turd boy was a realllll piece of shit. Really we need fucking like 7 pieces of armor all with the same process? And he's going to roll around and then make a snowstorm so I can see even less with your shitty brightness levels? Fuck off. Or how about Meta Ridley bugging out and not taking damage. Ah and of course the final boss who is two stages and for certain color combos basically doesn't take damage (thanks white and purple, I hate you). And then stage two when you're low on health he spawns a shit ton of annoying enemies.

Truth be told I actually died on the final stage of the final boss when he had one hit left. And I still consider the game completed. Because I'm not going to spend another 20 minutes playing a drawn out boss fight just to prove I can beat the guy I basically beat.

People love the bosses and honestly they are visually spectacular and when they're over pretty quickly as some of them are I'm totally on board. But when they try to make every fight a 10-20 minute affair I'm so out.

Yeah so after listing the complaints, I really got to give this a 7. I would bump it to an 8 for like the historical appeal but ultimately it's just not that fun of a game for.

Totally glad I went back and checked it out. This must have scared the shit out of people back in 2002.