Looking back, it's hard to believe that the Metroid Prime Trilogy even exists. Retro Studios managed to conjure up a miracle when it bucked all expectations and released the original Metroid Prime to almost universal acclaim. To think—Metroid expressed so tremendously with such a drastic alteration in perspective, and by a freshman studio no less! Now, seven years later, we get a chance to relive the entire trilogy with a consistent presentation, and can really see how the franchise has evolved.
As a compilation, Trilogy is truly excellent. Retro went back through all three games and made little tweaks here and there to provide what's effectively a director's cut of the whole series. The PAL (European) release of Metroid Prime on the GameCube already included a fair number of changes, and the most notable therein have been applied here. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes received some slight alterations to its more infuriating boss encounters, resulting in a more playable experience overall. Finally and most notably, the first two Primes have been enhanced with all the big-ticket items from Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. That means widescreen display, fantastic Wii-tailored motion and pointer controls, a third "normal" (easy) difficulty level, and a token-based system for bonus unlockables.
Now I'm not usually one for series marathons, but so entranced was I by this package that I indeed blew through all three games in quick succession. In doing so I was able to really feel the progression from title to title, and a lot of things stood out along the way.
Metroid Prime is almost shockingly similar to Super Metroid, especially when compared to later Primes. The plotless progression, the world so interconnected, the backtracking in search of new paths and items when you hit a wall—these all invoke the sensation of its 2D ancestors. A lot of locales and set-pieces themselves are clear tributes, like the space station intro, the sunken wreckage, and the Magmoor Caverns music. That it feels like a true Metroid game is astounding to this day.
While the Wii controls really breathe new life into these older Primes, the lock-on / free aim feature, which I praised in my Metroid Prime 3 review, actually causes more pain then pleasure. For the uninitiated, lock-on / free aim decouples your aiming reticule from your lock-on one, so the lock affects the direction you face but not where you point your gun. In Prime 3, enemy encounters are designed around this functionality. In the first two games, however, you'll find yourself battling critters that offer up only the briefest of openings—enemies that assume your cursor and blasts are locked on to their position at all times. This is especially noticeable during the battles for the missile launcher and morph ball. I'd recommend that players leave the feature off for the first two games, and re-enable it for 3.
As I moved on to Prime 2, I quickly became aware of its extra visual polish. This isn't to say that Prime 1 doesn't look good—to the contrary, it's astounding how good it looks after all this time. What Prime 2 brought to the table was a more complex and densely detailed world. Even the silliest little throwaway rooms are unique and developed with immaculate care. This care also extends to its scan system, where each logbook scan you acquire displays multiple levels of categorization as you scan it, making a complete logbook a very manageable task.
That said, this extra detail and complexity seems to at times take its toll on the overall experience. The game world is very organized and well-connected, but much of this connectivity doesn't emerge until late in the game, so it comes across as fairly convoluted earlier on. The addition of the Dark World can make this sensation pretty severe, especially since its artistic design causes everything to blend together in your mind at points. The key-quest late in the game follows a similar route, with the keys very logically split and organized across certain locations, but there are a lot of different clues to manage and repetitious steps to take in order to actually find and obtain them. Prime 2 really tries to do a lot, and while it definitely succeeds in many regards, it occasionally stumbles over itself.
While Prime 3's flick-Remote-to-morph-ball-jump functionality is present in all three games now, Prime 2's strong morph ball emphasis makes its back-porting the most noticeable. Being able to hop on demand, repeatedly even, makes the morph ball a much more valid method of environmental traversal. Puzzles that were once plodding now clip along at a brisk pace, and morph ball boss battles invariably end up more action-based. Jumping is no longer just a planned event—it can be a reactionary decision.
Despite having played Prime 3 the most recently, I found myself taken aback by it repeatedly. The context given by playing its predecessors immediately beforehand was surely to blame. There's a maturity evident throughout the game—a feeling that these guys at Retro really know what they're doing now, and trimmed things in very intelligent ways. Backtracking is often invisible, with new paths being opened up right when you need them. Beam stacking removes the frustration of constant swapping to get through different colored doors, and non-beam colors have been relegated to "blast shields" so you only have to do something fancy the first time you open them. Even the ability to trade health for a quicker battle via the Hyper Mode (perhaps health you'd have lost during a prolonged battle anyway) can be taken as a form of streamlining.
I think the best example of Prime 3's maturity, though, is in how its end-game key hunt is devised. The Artifacts in Prime 1 were fairly manageable, but it was unlikely that you'd stumble upon more than one or two of them before you had to go looking for the rest at the end of the game. In Prime 2 it was actually impossible to find any of the Sanctuary Keys before you got the Dark Visor, and even then there were hints that lead to corpses that themselves lead to rooms in the Dark World that had to be explored to find the enemy that had to be killed to earn the key. It was well organized in the logbook at least, but still quite an extravaganza.
In Prime 3 you're looking for batteries, and there are a myriad of improvements. First off, you don't actually need to get all of them, assuming you use them intelligently. Secondly, you're rewarded with batteries for several mandatory parts of the game. It's impossible to get to the point where you absolutely need them without already having quite a few. What's great is that they're actual things, not ambiguous and insubstantial constructs that all get exchanged at the end for a final boss. You physically grab and remove each battery you find (or earn, as several are found at the end of tremendous environmental puzzles), which causes a tangible change to your surroundings. You use each individual battery in the same fashion to gain increased access to a very cool area of the game. As you explore that place you find hints as to the location of the remaining batteries. You can eschew the whole hint system, though, since the Chozo Observatory that you gain access to late in the game marks the location of every collectible expansion on your maps, including the batteries. It doesn't at all feel like an end-game chore, but rather a fully integrated and natural series of collectibles.
There's more to Prime 3 than batteries, though. Since all three games in the trilogy are so similar artistically, it's easy to gloss over the graphical improvements. Prime 3 manages to carve out a pretty unique feel with its use of bloom lighting. It almost looks like the fog you'd see in old shooters like Turok, but instead of obscuring what's far away, it hugely oversaturates it with light from no source. It's like the universe is made of some kind of crazy ether that coalesces into corporeality as you approach it. It's certainly not the most realistic effect, but it really does give a cool feel nonetheless.
What's most striking about Prime 3, though, is its artistic design. It outclasses literally every other game I think I've ever played. Retro managed the astonishing feat of making every new place you visit more creative and more impressive than the last. It's not just how things look, or the attention paid to their modeling and integration with their surroundings, but the way they move. There will be a million complicated little moving parts that comprise some mechanical structure that lives in only one room that you might only see a couple times. It evokes memories of big-budget RPGs with prerendered backgrounds, and how much artistry went into every little place, regardless of its importance.
Finally, there are the somewhat drastic changes made to Prime 3's overall progression. Fine, it's Metroid meets Halo, it's true—at least for the little bits that bookend the hugely Metroidey parts. Now I don't think I want this to be the new direction for the series, but a little bit? Maybe for a game or two? Sure, it's a cool thing to try out. You can only ignore the fact that the Prime series is channeling a first person shooter for so long before you just give up and see how well the two actually mesh. The series started with trying to make first person fit into a traditionally Metroid world; why not have a go at making Metroid fit into the traditional first person world? I think what we got was pretty interesting, and I don't regret the experience whatsoever.
So there we have it. Metroid Prime is done. What comes next? Was Prime just an interlude, or is it the definition of Metroid now? If Other M is any indication, first-person gameplay seems to be at least a part of the franchise's future. There's more to Metroid Prime than just first-person, though. The scanning, or at least the notion of having intimate knowledge of the world around you, is huge. Everything in Prime had a history, and it was expressed in both the design and the vast amounts of lore written for every single item of interest, be it a vicious beast, a decrepit machine, or a dead civilization.
Is it okay to go lose that? And for that matter, is it okay to lose Retro? Their artistic expertise is incontestably a huge part of what made Prime as compelling as it was. Other M looks pretty okay from what little we've seen, but none of it holds a candle to the artistry present in Retro's masterpieces. For me, the expression of living detail that suffused the Prime series is a large part of what defines the franchise for me now. Can Metroid's universe really be as engaging without Retro's talent?
We'll just have to wait and see. Retro hasn't actually denied the possibility of returning to the series at some point in the distant future. That said, I don't mean to be down on what Other M could bring to the table, as there's a lot there to be excited about. It says something for the quality of the Metroid Prime series, though, that it could inspire such worry. No matter where the franchise heads, Prime's legacy will always remain a standard to strive for.
As a compilation, Trilogy is truly excellent. Retro went back through all three games and made little tweaks here and there to provide what's effectively a director's cut of the whole series. The PAL (European) release of Metroid Prime on the GameCube already included a fair number of changes, and the most notable therein have been applied here. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes received some slight alterations to its more infuriating boss encounters, resulting in a more playable experience overall. Finally and most notably, the first two Primes have been enhanced with all the big-ticket items from Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. That means widescreen display, fantastic Wii-tailored motion and pointer controls, a third "normal" (easy) difficulty level, and a token-based system for bonus unlockables.
Now I'm not usually one for series marathons, but so entranced was I by this package that I indeed blew through all three games in quick succession. In doing so I was able to really feel the progression from title to title, and a lot of things stood out along the way.
Metroid Prime is almost shockingly similar to Super Metroid, especially when compared to later Primes. The plotless progression, the world so interconnected, the backtracking in search of new paths and items when you hit a wall—these all invoke the sensation of its 2D ancestors. A lot of locales and set-pieces themselves are clear tributes, like the space station intro, the sunken wreckage, and the Magmoor Caverns music. That it feels like a true Metroid game is astounding to this day.
While the Wii controls really breathe new life into these older Primes, the lock-on / free aim feature, which I praised in my Metroid Prime 3 review, actually causes more pain then pleasure. For the uninitiated, lock-on / free aim decouples your aiming reticule from your lock-on one, so the lock affects the direction you face but not where you point your gun. In Prime 3, enemy encounters are designed around this functionality. In the first two games, however, you'll find yourself battling critters that offer up only the briefest of openings—enemies that assume your cursor and blasts are locked on to their position at all times. This is especially noticeable during the battles for the missile launcher and morph ball. I'd recommend that players leave the feature off for the first two games, and re-enable it for 3.
As I moved on to Prime 2, I quickly became aware of its extra visual polish. This isn't to say that Prime 1 doesn't look good—to the contrary, it's astounding how good it looks after all this time. What Prime 2 brought to the table was a more complex and densely detailed world. Even the silliest little throwaway rooms are unique and developed with immaculate care. This care also extends to its scan system, where each logbook scan you acquire displays multiple levels of categorization as you scan it, making a complete logbook a very manageable task.
That said, this extra detail and complexity seems to at times take its toll on the overall experience. The game world is very organized and well-connected, but much of this connectivity doesn't emerge until late in the game, so it comes across as fairly convoluted earlier on. The addition of the Dark World can make this sensation pretty severe, especially since its artistic design causes everything to blend together in your mind at points. The key-quest late in the game follows a similar route, with the keys very logically split and organized across certain locations, but there are a lot of different clues to manage and repetitious steps to take in order to actually find and obtain them. Prime 2 really tries to do a lot, and while it definitely succeeds in many regards, it occasionally stumbles over itself.
While Prime 3's flick-Remote-to-morph-ball-jump functionality is present in all three games now, Prime 2's strong morph ball emphasis makes its back-porting the most noticeable. Being able to hop on demand, repeatedly even, makes the morph ball a much more valid method of environmental traversal. Puzzles that were once plodding now clip along at a brisk pace, and morph ball boss battles invariably end up more action-based. Jumping is no longer just a planned event—it can be a reactionary decision.
Despite having played Prime 3 the most recently, I found myself taken aback by it repeatedly. The context given by playing its predecessors immediately beforehand was surely to blame. There's a maturity evident throughout the game—a feeling that these guys at Retro really know what they're doing now, and trimmed things in very intelligent ways. Backtracking is often invisible, with new paths being opened up right when you need them. Beam stacking removes the frustration of constant swapping to get through different colored doors, and non-beam colors have been relegated to "blast shields" so you only have to do something fancy the first time you open them. Even the ability to trade health for a quicker battle via the Hyper Mode (perhaps health you'd have lost during a prolonged battle anyway) can be taken as a form of streamlining.
I think the best example of Prime 3's maturity, though, is in how its end-game key hunt is devised. The Artifacts in Prime 1 were fairly manageable, but it was unlikely that you'd stumble upon more than one or two of them before you had to go looking for the rest at the end of the game. In Prime 2 it was actually impossible to find any of the Sanctuary Keys before you got the Dark Visor, and even then there were hints that lead to corpses that themselves lead to rooms in the Dark World that had to be explored to find the enemy that had to be killed to earn the key. It was well organized in the logbook at least, but still quite an extravaganza.
In Prime 3 you're looking for batteries, and there are a myriad of improvements. First off, you don't actually need to get all of them, assuming you use them intelligently. Secondly, you're rewarded with batteries for several mandatory parts of the game. It's impossible to get to the point where you absolutely need them without already having quite a few. What's great is that they're actual things, not ambiguous and insubstantial constructs that all get exchanged at the end for a final boss. You physically grab and remove each battery you find (or earn, as several are found at the end of tremendous environmental puzzles), which causes a tangible change to your surroundings. You use each individual battery in the same fashion to gain increased access to a very cool area of the game. As you explore that place you find hints as to the location of the remaining batteries. You can eschew the whole hint system, though, since the Chozo Observatory that you gain access to late in the game marks the location of every collectible expansion on your maps, including the batteries. It doesn't at all feel like an end-game chore, but rather a fully integrated and natural series of collectibles.
There's more to Prime 3 than batteries, though. Since all three games in the trilogy are so similar artistically, it's easy to gloss over the graphical improvements. Prime 3 manages to carve out a pretty unique feel with its use of bloom lighting. It almost looks like the fog you'd see in old shooters like Turok, but instead of obscuring what's far away, it hugely oversaturates it with light from no source. It's like the universe is made of some kind of crazy ether that coalesces into corporeality as you approach it. It's certainly not the most realistic effect, but it really does give a cool feel nonetheless.
What's most striking about Prime 3, though, is its artistic design. It outclasses literally every other game I think I've ever played. Retro managed the astonishing feat of making every new place you visit more creative and more impressive than the last. It's not just how things look, or the attention paid to their modeling and integration with their surroundings, but the way they move. There will be a million complicated little moving parts that comprise some mechanical structure that lives in only one room that you might only see a couple times. It evokes memories of big-budget RPGs with prerendered backgrounds, and how much artistry went into every little place, regardless of its importance.
Finally, there are the somewhat drastic changes made to Prime 3's overall progression. Fine, it's Metroid meets Halo, it's true—at least for the little bits that bookend the hugely Metroidey parts. Now I don't think I want this to be the new direction for the series, but a little bit? Maybe for a game or two? Sure, it's a cool thing to try out. You can only ignore the fact that the Prime series is channeling a first person shooter for so long before you just give up and see how well the two actually mesh. The series started with trying to make first person fit into a traditionally Metroid world; why not have a go at making Metroid fit into the traditional first person world? I think what we got was pretty interesting, and I don't regret the experience whatsoever.
So there we have it. Metroid Prime is done. What comes next? Was Prime just an interlude, or is it the definition of Metroid now? If Other M is any indication, first-person gameplay seems to be at least a part of the franchise's future. There's more to Metroid Prime than just first-person, though. The scanning, or at least the notion of having intimate knowledge of the world around you, is huge. Everything in Prime had a history, and it was expressed in both the design and the vast amounts of lore written for every single item of interest, be it a vicious beast, a decrepit machine, or a dead civilization.
Is it okay to go lose that? And for that matter, is it okay to lose Retro? Their artistic expertise is incontestably a huge part of what made Prime as compelling as it was. Other M looks pretty okay from what little we've seen, but none of it holds a candle to the artistry present in Retro's masterpieces. For me, the expression of living detail that suffused the Prime series is a large part of what defines the franchise for me now. Can Metroid's universe really be as engaging without Retro's talent?
We'll just have to wait and see. Retro hasn't actually denied the possibility of returning to the series at some point in the distant future. That said, I don't mean to be down on what Other M could bring to the table, as there's a lot there to be excited about. It says something for the quality of the Metroid Prime series, though, that it could inspire such worry. No matter where the franchise heads, Prime's legacy will always remain a standard to strive for.