Metroid Prime

The Good
Everything! The graphics are outstanding like any Metroid game. The detail in the surroundings were out of the charts and switching from an energy cannon to a freeze beam was an extra bonus. Additionally, the enemies looked super cool! The controls were very easy to handle and the story unraveled very well with no flaws. The game lives to its name, PRIME!

The Bad
Nothing.

The Bottom Line
Buy the game now and be hooked for life.

The Good
When a successful franchise is irrevocably altered to a new genre, it will be met with resistance, or at the very least, skepticism. Metroid Prime, the first American incarnation of a Japanese title by Retro Studios, achieves a highly polished game with some surprises, and tragedies. Many were alarmed when Metroid fans heard the infamous news... First Person Shooter. The transition from side scrolling action to 3D exploration is no small jump, and Retro Studios answers the call with slick graphics and the morphing ball... a narrow glimpse into what Retro really wanted. The visual appeal of the game is incredible. There are many places in the game where a player can just stand in absolute awe of what the artists have achieved with this game and GameCube's power. Effects are top notch, nearly second to none. Backgrounds in places are genuinely creepy. Mood, lighting all of these elements make for an extremely satisfying visual experience. The morphing ball experience speaks untold volumes about what this game could have been... This was undoubtedly the most exciting and liberating aspect of Metroid Prime. Allow me to step in here in person and say that, I think this was the game Retro was shooting for. The sense of movement and response was so compelling! I get the feeling they were going for 3rd person but they could never get the combat / lock on system to work well enough, so Miyamoto opted for the solution he knew Retro could do well... a FPS.

The Bad
Controls, the universal key to any game, in Metroid Prime is shot. It is Chaotic and non-intuitive and in terms of First Person Shooters it fails. Putting a camera lock and strafe mapped to a shoulder button is a mystifying concept. Why, when it is such an integral part of the game? Having you fingers fly all over the controller for scanning, aiming, locking, switching visors, switching weapons, strafing, jumping during combat is just ridiculous. It frustrates the player to such an extent of never playing again. Controls in Prime make no attempt to be logical or versatile. If a characters abilities increase during the course of the game, "progression" becomes a relevant term. When the player gains new abilities Samus is enabled to do more, and it means just that. You have to do more, not less. In the standard rule of gaming, powerups are for the purpose of making your life easier, not difficult. Case in point, the visors. Switching visual spectrums is to view the world to find more is an incredible idea. Switching visors to fight a boss is tedious action and pulls the player right out of the gaming experience. In Super Metroid the X-Ray scope was only used for finding items or finding your way through the world... Why? because it stopped the game, literally. The same rule applies in Prime as well, it interrupts the flow of the game and is thoroughly annoying. Compare progression in a game such as Legend of Zelda, everything you gain makes your life easier and less tedious as you journey towards the end of the game. There are no powerups in Metroid Prime that enable you to do your job faster or with less tedious action. In fact, you could say the game becomes more tedious the longer you play. The challenge the game presents is not by what you are trying to defeat, but trying to overcome the controls! This is not logical game design. The worlds are vast and visually diverse, but not gameplay diverse. The Magmoor caverns readily displays the fact it's hot and hazardous to be in there. In contrast Phendrana Drifts only visually show snow and ice... Well what are the characteristics of ice? Cold for one, slippery and brittle. All of those listed were potential gameplay aspects. Little or none of these aspects were incorporated into the design of the level to differentiate it from any other world.

The Bottom Line
Metroid Prime is pretty to look at. Had design been at the same level of the artists, I believe Prime would have been a truly extraordinary game. Metroid Prime frustrates the player on complexity of control, lack of progression and gameplay that is uninteresting by forcing the player to jump through gameplay hoops that don't work.

The Good
After eight years of hiatus, Metroid returned in a big way. On the same day in 2002, Metroid Fusion for the Gameboy Advance and Metroid Prime for the Gamecube were released in North America. Fusion was a traditional sidescroller developed internally at Nintendo and closely follows the gameplay of Super Metroid. Prime, on the other hand was given off to the unproven western developer, Retro Studios, and flipped into the first-person perspective. In a post-Halo world, much of the fanbase was worried that the focus would be changed to be more action oriented. It’s possible that Nintendo also lacked confidence in the results, as Metroid Fusion contained an introduction that labeled it “Metroid 4”, while Metroid Prime was given no such status within the series. Nowadays, however, gamers tend to look more favourably on Retro’s work, and for good reason.

Despite the drastic change in perspective, Metroid Prime draws heavy inspiration from Super Metroid and largely ignores the features that are typically found in conventional first-person shooters. Perhaps the most disorienting is that it doesn’t use a dual analogue control scheme. Instead, the Y-axis is locked during movement and only by using the free-look button can you actually look up and down. Combat instead uses a lock-on system, rather than allowing free aiming. This, along with the game’s meagre selection of weapons, limits combat to a secondary role and helps the game push its exploration focus.

Like previous Metroid games, the game world is a large web of rooms and other nodes connected together. Progression is limited by what upgrades have been picked up, so certain doors will be impassable until a specific arm cannon upgrade can be found. It really does feel like Super Metroid with an additional dimension to the point where it sometimes feels like it’s reading off the same script. Many of the power-ups from the previous games can be once again found here, with few additions to actually take advantage of the extra dimension. Likewise, the game’s minimalistic story features numerous settings and obstacles that are repeats from the series’ seminal entry.

Metroid’s lore has always been rather disconnected and abstract which makes it difficult to get a handle on how things work. The space pirates, for example, are a race of sentient creatures vying for galactic dominance, yet they were always depicted as sluggish, dimwitted, and extremely vulnerable, and it was hard to believe that they’d have the ambition to build an empire, let alone weaponize a creature such as the Metroid. Metroid Prime does a decent job of making the space pirates a more rounded threat. They’re depicted as an amoral, technologically advanced, militarized society. You can learn a lot about the world, the backstory, and what you’re up against using logs that are read by scanning terminals and enemies with Samus’ visor. There’s an awful lot of text, much of it disposable, littered throughout the game, but it does a good job of adding depth to the space pirates’ organization while dropping a selection of five-dollar words for that added sci-fi effect. For the first time, there’s a lot of context to what’s going on and it really adds some useful perspective to the events in the game.

At the time of its release, and even throughout the Gamecube’s lifespan, Metroid Prime was considered to be quite the graphical powerhouse. By today’s standards, it has lost its dazzle, featuring blocky environments and low resolution textures, but at the time it was rather impressive. However, one part of its visual design that hasn’t aged is its attention to detail. The HUD in particular is creatively done, bordered by the edges of Samus’ visor to give the impression of looking out through her eyes. That’s not necessarily anything new, but it also reacts to environmental effects to further cement the illusion. Rain beads on it, vapour sticks to it, and if there’s a bright flash nearby, the image of Samus’ eyes appears reflecting in the glass as she looks around. While this is all greatly superficial, it’s a rather impressive attempt to further immersion, and there are many other small details like this that add to it.

The Bad
While Metroid Prime was quite the looker in its day, it came at a price in the scope of its environments. Prime’s world boils down collection of nodes and corridors, which is fine since that’s the sort of structure that previous games featured. However, the effect that it does have is that Talon IV doesn’t feel like a real place. While the topology is a little strange, demonstrating a variety of biomes in ridiculously close proximity to one another, it’s not the only reason for the preposterousness of its world. There’s nothing to really give you an idea of how everything links up. If it wasn’t for the map, keeping a sense of direction would be nearly impossible. The map screen itself shows an abstract honeycomb when zoomed out, rather than a view of the overworld, and it’s difficult to place everything together mentally. This could have been solved by giving the player a view of the world from a high place, or having Phendrana Drifts visible in distant mountains and the Phazon Mines from atop a cliff, but no effort was made to tie everything together believably, making the world feel tangibly phoney.

Considering the game plays out entirely in the first-person perspective and a lot of attention has been given into the visor to make it actually appear as though the game is played out through Samus’ eyes, it’s a little unfortunate that Prime still falls into the old standards of establishing shots. Cutscenes are pretty rare, but when a new environment or particular enemy is introduced, the game cuts away to show Samus standing rigidly on the doorstep as she looks around. Obviously, this doesn’t have much of an impact on gameplay aside from taking the player out of the moment, but I feel that the camera should have never left Samus’ helmet.

There’s a lot of backtracking late in the game; more than usual for a Metroid game. The worst example of this occurs towards the end of the game where you’re required to collect a number of artefacts to reach the final area. There are some very specific hints available that reveal their positions, but it’s still necessary to walk across hell’s half-acre to actually reach them. Some can be picked up as you go throughout the game, but others require you to have a vast collection of power-ups before you can reach them. This isn’t a major ordeal, but it is the weakest portion of the game by far. It reduces the game’s already sluggish pace to a glacial crawl as you hop around the environment on a treasure hunt.

The Bottom Line
I replayed Metroid Prime and Metroid Fusion in tandem and came to the conclusion that while I enjoyed Metroid Fusion more than I did previously, I enjoyed Metroid Prime less. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy Prime, it’s an OUTSTANDING game, but in my youth, I loved it. Metroid Prime never really reaches the high points of Super Metroid, but it still delivers a pretty tight experience. The atmosphere is excellent and the attention to detail is almost peerless. It’s commendable that Retro was able to translate the exploration based gameplay of the earlier sidescrollers so deftly to the third dimension. I have my doubts that any other developer will meet with the same success that was found here when it comes to translating the Metroid series to 3D.