"Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is now my fav GCN game to date."
Welcome to the club. I think it's just the two of us.
Three.
What a magnificent, beautiful, frustrating, invigorating, creepy, challenging, and epic game. I played through this again on
twitch.tv/zapr2k and finished it last night while using a guide, as I have lost the will to wander aimlessly for hours. Though I always knew where I was going and got almost every expansion, it still took me 14.5 hours.
Nearly 15 years later, there is much to love and much that still gets under my skin. For all the frustrating moments, you couldn't complain in 2004 that you weren't getting your money's worth. It's gobsmacking what the geniuses at Retro Studios achieved in only 2 years: bigger world, more intricate environments, completely new enemies, music, and locations, we finally get the screw attack in 3D, a new beam ammo system, some new visors, a little more NPC interaction, and a dash of Link to the Past. I only saw a few similar enemies and a couple structures that looked like they were recycled from Prime 1, but they dressed them up well enough that only a true fan would notice.
The debates in this thread about the graphics are well-founded, for the artistic creativity here is quite memorable. You have to love the creepy, weird, and twisted places Samus finds herself in, far away from the comforting fire/ice/forest tropes of the past. Sanctuary Fortress is a fantastic land of futurist vision and retro-ish square bit artistry and glowy things and energy conduits and strange things on the walls. What are those? Why did the Luminoth build this stuff? Got some steampunk vibes in a few spots, if you’re into that sort of thing. However, the dark world is full of nightmarish enemies and the constantly draining health will get your heart pounding so that when you finally return to the light world you’ll be audibly breathing a sigh of relief. *Hope I don’t have to go back in there anytime soon* Can anyone say that other games from this period still produce the same range of emotions, with upwards of 100 uniquely designed rooms, and without framerate dips?
Our heroine’s story isn’t so lonely as in past games. Caught up in a big battle between the Galactic Federation, the Space Pirates, Luminoth, and Ing horde, I felt so empowered by it all, knowing that I (Samus) succeeded when everyone else failed, so it seemed more epic than Prime 1’s. It’s a little Zeldaish too. Just bring back the light to the temples and help the poor townspeople get back to their lives; no one really knows about it in the end except the Luminoth, you’re just that heroic.
All these great ideas and additions, ironically, are probably why the game is so frustrating, a problem mostly in the boss battles and yet another collectathon ending. I think Retro may have bitten off more than they could chew and ran out of time to tweak some things. A lot of the difficulty in Echoes is simply overpowered enemies that could've been turned down just a bit. The Ing Hunter (long spindly arms) and Rezbit (yellow 8-bit floating thingy that can shut down your suit) are the worst of all worlds: require wayyy too many hits to kill, inflict too much damage, can turn invulnerable for long periods, and/or are nearly impossible to avoid or dodge—yet they’re always in the same room, respawning after you return to do it all over again. Another annoying flaw is that for some enemies, the Annihilator beam, the final weapon, does not seem to do any more damage than the simple power beam, and it’s the Screw Attack that can defeat most enemies in one hit. In fact, too many enemies turn too many otherwise simple rooms into a miniboss battle. Then you add in the dark world auto-damage while you’re waiting for a door to open, as well as rooms, like in Prime 1, that are locked until everyone is defeated, and soon you’ve got a bit of Phazon-induced madness setting in.
Took me awhile on a simple spiderball puzzle because this enemy kept knocking me off. Impossible... until you realize you can kill it with a powerbomb. Oops.
Also, did anyone use the Seeker Missile other than for enemies/bosses/puzzles where it was required? I found it way too awkward to use in the heat of battle unless it was required. Hopefully MP3 (on Revolution) will fix this problem by making the Seeker Missile easier to use.
That was certainly annoying. The best way to use the Seeker Missile is to tap and hold the missile button immediately after shooting a charged beam, otherwise you waste a missile trying to activate it--one of the many times the Cube could’ve used a second Z button (and I think we all know who to blame for that *laughs*).
One of the icons for the visors in the trailer looked new. It looked like sound waves. Perhaps it will be used to detect movement in this dark world. Makes sense seeing as the game is called echoes.
That’s another big letdown; they only used it for a few lame puzzles. Ironically, this game is huge in scope, but some of the powerups at the end seem just tacked on, as if they were obliged to put them there because it's a Metroid game.
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I'm rating it somewhere around a lower 90's score. There are a few things that I just really disliked with the game. Mainly the unnecessary amount of Keys. (4 translation keys, 9 "temple" keys and 9 more keys to the final area? it was just a stupid pain when the only thing in your way was a door you couldn't get past).
I actually agree with this comment quite a bit. While the level design was excellent, it felt a bit lazy and I couldn't put it into words until just now. The old Metroid games didn't have any keys (or very few at least). And while it's not a huge deal, they seem out of place in the Metroid world.
This is also a bummer. They were tacked on like the artifacts, which wasn’t fun in the first one at all. That last bit wasn’t challenging, since the Light Suit let you run around the dark world without taking damage and there were fewer enemies and they weren't hidden within any challenging puzzle at all. Nine… nine keys!
Worst of all were the boss battles. Lots of debate in this thread about them being hard. I know--of course, they’re supposed to be hard. I recently re-played through SM on SNES Classic and I got my rear handed to me in an Easter basket on almost every boss fight. I get it. But too often the boss fights in this series, this one especially, require perfection, they’re not intuitive, the scan visor hint doesn’t help, their attacks are impossible to avoid, Samus’ side dash is worthlessly slow, and the ones in the dark world aren’t any easier when your health is constantly draining! I’m sure I shouted WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO? a few different times as the screen was fading to black. Yes, I died more than a few times, even while reading a guide and with most of the ETanks, and all of them were at boss battles.
Here is a link to a new IGN article, the content of which I feel could be fuel for my anti-Metroid Prime 2 "campaign":
<a target=new class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="http://cube.ign.com/articles/579/579600p1.html?fromint=1">IGN speculates on Metroid Prime sales numbers and their implications[/url]
Could it really be that a lot of other people, too, found the sequel to Metroid Prime annoyingly difficult, and so decided to buy other games on offer, instead?
Of course, I think so! I even heard that people chose Halo 2 over Metroid Prime 2, because it was more "accessible", or something like that.
I could see the mass market getting turned off by this game. Why play a game where you’re wandering aimlessly when you could be playing Halo 2 matches with your bros? Echoes was old and outdated in its time, but I loved it anyhow.
Here are a few old posts I dug up to show how mixed the reaction was at the time. Even a fan of Prime 1 isn't necessarily going to love it, but I would definitely recommend giving it a shot if you can track down the trilogy port for Wii and seeing how long your patience lasts. You'll feel a strange catharsis if you get all the way to the end and a strange satisfaction in joining an elite club of people who have beaten one of the hardest Nintendo games in decades.
...I on the contrary found this game too difficult. Either way, there´s no balance! I definitely not saying that games should be too easy, but they should neither be too hard!
So what I want developers to do, is to have playtesters of al kinds of both hradcore and softcore kind play through games they are making, in order for them to decide when they have hit the exact right balance between not to easy and not too difficult! They did that with Metroid Prime 1, why didn´t they do it with the sequel? There are people, who are dreading that dark world on the other side, and just wanting to escape from it the moment they get in there. Do you think, then, that it´s appropriate to also increase the difficulty of the bosses in such an environment? I don´t! I don´t even think the games is anywhere near as beautifull as the first one. The awesome ice worlds, and the just as awesome fire worlds have been totally omitted, and instead this scary dark one is there. I really feel that beautifull surroundings play an all-important role in any game! In particular, if the game is very very hard. That has a direct bearing on how you feel about it. And in my opinion, the choice of environments in this sequel, has made it a nightmare to play! So I canned it!!
Interesting take. Matt Cassmassiamasssina's review compared it to Resident Evil, which is fair, but the series has always been creepy! The creepy caves, enemies that suck your face. A bad mother who's just a giant brain. Best expect the worst.
The freedom to explore is fine, that´s what made me play the game in the first place. But I don´t like having to face a Boss that´s so difficult that you die again and again, and get no help nomatter how many walkthroughs you consult.
I am not a hardcoregamer as such, but could be taken for one if they didn´t look carefully. But I do know the hardcoregamers, and I do know the casual gamers.
Wait, how do you know if someone's a hardcore gamer just by looking at them? Do you have a...special visor for that?
My point is simply that Retro should avoid making the next Metroid game as difficult as this sequel is.
Retro seemed to learn the right lessons for 3. I remember it being easier, even less isolated, and more linear. I liked it.
The first one was perfectly balanced in difficulty and learning curve. But I still recall having big issues with the buttons, when I had to perform various maneuvers in boss battles. I sometimes felt like my fingers were being twisted slowly, for simply having to cross my fingers to do the required actions. Still, I could juuust make it, and finish the game! But I NEVER expected that the much anticipated sequel would be harder.
Now THAT's a hard mode. Do you think he ever learned to hold the controller correctly?
Topic: METROID PRIME 2 (Read 96268 times)
