So, Echoes. I guess the obvious answer is that it was basically the same game as the first Metroid Prime. Now I get that in terms of game play. Metroid has always been about running, jumping, shooting, etc. You probably don't want to get too far away from that, but Echoes just seemed so damn similar to the first one, it felt like a waste.In Metroid Prime, Samus lands on a space station hunting Space Pirates, she spots Ridley, one of the major bosses, and shortly after that gets hit by a power surge and loses several suit functions, which she then has to track down on the planet below.
In Echoes, Samus lands on a planet to find Space Marines, comes across Dark Samus, one of her major enemies, and shortly thereafter loses most of the powers her suit had at that point, because weird creatures attack her and somehow eat the abilities out of her suit, so Samus has to travel all over the planet killing the creatures and getting the upgrades back.
I think the game is banking on you really enjoying fighting a "dark" version of yourself, and the fact the game has essentially two worlds, a dark one and a light one, for you to run through. Unfortunately, the designers didn't decrease the amount of backtracking any, so I seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time running through Dark Aether, to find a doorway back to Aether, so I could spend 20 minutes running through that world, to get a power-up I needed back in Dark Aether. It's some sort of endurance exercise.
As to Dark Samus, I don't have a problem with "dark reflections" as part of a larger story, but I'm not a huge fan when they tend to be the focus. In Ocarina of Time, there's a mini-boss battle where you fight a mirror of yourself. It lasts a couple of minutes, you win, you move on. That was fun. But getting jumped every so often by an evil version of myself got old after awhile. Maybe I was having flashbacks to '90s Amazing Spider-Man, when Venom would pop up about every 15 issues. At some point you just say "Enough!", you know?
Even beyond that, I didn't really have the feeling that the new weapons or tools changed the game play that much (I preferred the beam weapons from Prime to those in Echoes), and this is just my feeling, but the story doesn't resonate. The first game, Samus hunts the Pirates and wrecks their operations because she hates the Pirates and wants to destroy them. She ends up saving Tallon IV, and enabling the Chozo to rest in peace, but I never felt that was her primary goal.In Echoes, she's there to find and assist the marines (who are already dead), then gets drawn into trying to save Aether from being overwhelmed by Dark Aether. There are Pirates, but they feel more like a nuisance than anything else. Also, it made no sense how the beings of Aether - who ask Samus to save them - can't venture into Dark Aether without being hurt (neither can Samus for that matter), but beings from Dark Aether seem to hop over to Aether with no ill effects. That always made me wonder if I could trust the Aetherians, or if this plan to save their world was really an evil scheme. Plus, I'm rarely a fan of games that revolve around me doing things for people who seem unwilling to save themselves. If you're unable due to injury or age, then that's different, but like I said, I didn't really buy the "their world is poisonous to us, when ours doesn't seem to bother them" line. I guess I prefer vengeance stories.
On the whole, I guess I expected that with these better consoles we've had this decade, that there would be more ways to structure games, so that they could retain that basic essence, but not just be a copy of the earlier story. But I guess there's something to be said for finding a winning formula, and sticking with it. Look at Marvel and their use of zombies!
1 comment:
I can't really comment on this, since I never really played the Prime games too much. I played a little of the first one and skipped the second entirely (not out of any sort of distaste for the first one, just a lack of interest and/or funds at the time).
I have, however, been playing Metroid Prime 3 on the Wii, and I think it's really good. But I'm not entirely positive how it compares to the first two.
The whole "collecting powers" thing seems, to me, like a way to spin wheels, at least in the case of the second one. It's more of a driving force to lengthen the game - "Well, Samus can't fight Evil Guy X because she doesn't have all of her powers yet!" If that weren't the case, there's not much reason for her not to fight Evil Guy X right off the bat. That kind of technique works maybe once, but in the second game you've gotta come up with something new.
-M
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