A few months ago, I wrote an extensively in-depth retrospective of the Metroid Prime trilogy and posted it at a couple message boards. I've decided to touch it up a bit and repost it here along with a new article that will focus on the fantastic art of the series and finally I'll wrap the week up with my own purely speculative vision of the Metroid series' future. Yesterday I posted about Metroid Prime. Today I take a detailed look at Metroid Prime: Echoes.
Echoes - Like Dark Chocolate. Very rich, but bitter...
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes works to recapture the magic of Prime, but to take the experiences even further. The world of Aether is bigger and more expansive than Tallon IV was. The puzzles are more involved, the enemies tougher and more numerous, the bosses more extravagant. Unfortunately, Echoes also seems to take Prime's weaker aspects and worsen them. Travel is more tedious, the pace is slower and more methodical, nontrivial enemy encounters are too frequent. Then there are the key hunts. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Immediately following the events in Prime, Echoes sees the heroine traveling to a new world even more alien and mysterious than the last one she visited. She has been called upon to locate a missing troop of GFMC Marines who vanished in pursuit of a Space Pirate frigate near the planet Aether. Upon entering the atmosphere of Aether, Samus' ship is struck by lightning and crashes, breaking through the ceiling of a cave and landing inside.
Echoes begins much the same way as Prime, with Samus investigating a mystery. This time, rather than immediately uncovering the activities of Space Pirates, Samus discovers the unfortunate fates of the marines. It's not as intense a beginning as Prime, but the story is a poignant one. Initially, the tale is told by the carcasses of countless alien insects and the environment itself. These caves had been converted into a temporary base by the marines, where they apparently came into conflict with swarms of aggressive creatures. Then the marines themselves pick up the tale, or rather, their corpses do. Each sad find adds the final notes of a personal log revealing bit by bit the thoughts, activities, and fears of these lost soldiers. Their tale is concluded when Samus arrives at their own landing site, their ship having suffered similar damage as Samus'. Here, a cut scene shows me the marines' last desperate stand against the hostile swarms of strangely possessed bugs.
Echoes is slightly more cut scene heavy than Prime was, and I found these short vignettes very well done, nicely animated, and conveying mood and emotion with simple clarity. This, combined with the excellent writing gave the characters (mostly deceased) a depth and reality of being. I have a great love of animation, and I especially appreciated the elegance of movement portrayed in the gestures of the moth-like Luminoth. U-Mos is my initial living representative of this graceful species and he tells Samus of Aether's current struggle: the history of the war on Aether and of the Ing who are behind the world's slow death as well as the deaths of the space marines. He asks Samus for her help and without so much as stopping to negotiate her contract, she sets off to explore the world.
Temple Grounds – Buff colored stone canyons and small leafless trees covered in shimmering webbing greet my eyes. Giant cocoons dot the landscape and spherical fungus pour green spores into the air. Everywhere there are fluttering moths that gather around the glow of Samus' Morph Ball. When first stepping off of Samus' ship on Tallon IV, the landscape was somewhat recognizable with its green growing things; the first introduction to Aether is of a stranger more unfamiliar world, but not an unlovely one.
Agon Wastes – This is the land of stone and sand. Here grows the blue root tree, brilliantly neon blue and enigmatically insubstantial. Pillar like rock formations and tunnels meld into Luminoth architecture and iconography. Nestled deep in this quiet land is a nest of pirates. They've burrowed deep and built a fortress directly into the sandstone cliffs.
Torvus Bog – The bog has the feel of an industrial site set within flooded canyons. Dull brown vine like trees tangle into knots in this gloomy landscape of steamy falls and toxic plant life. The rooms beneath the temple are partially submerged and home to predatory fish and odd machinery.
Sanctuary Fortress – High tech, alight with color and alive with alien technology. Holographic cubes, glowing energy cores, circuit board streams of light etched in the very air, this is a place of wonders. Sanctuary Fortress is a contender for best environment in the Prime Trilogy. There is so much variety here that it is difficult to characterize to those who have never seen it.
Dark Aether – The very air here is fouled with darkness. Passages are blocked by giant writhing worms and monstrous claws. The landscape is saturated with dark purple and black beneath a glaring red sky. The very land intimidates the warrior and crushes the spirit. This is the dark tunnel the heroine must travel down, beware, a dragon waits at the end.
Prime is a visual stunner. Echoes is even more so. The graphic leap between these two games is palpable. Textures seem sharper and more detailed and creatures contain more geometry. The Space Pirates in particular enjoyed a real improvement in their design and have never looked better (though I question the wisdom of an exposed beating heart. Sure it looks cool, but wouldn't that be a little, I dunno, fatal?). I also love the shadowy, bubbly pools that form into the Ing, frightful in how they ooze about the walls and floor. Samus herself enjoys a couple new looks. I'm a bit neutral on the Dark Suit but the Light Suit (i-Suit?) is silky, sleek, stylish, smooth, and other slick S words. I really wish it had been made available a bit earlier in the game.
Design-wise, Aether lacks Tallon IV's environmental diversity and outside of Sanctuary Fortress, the landscapes are rather samey. The Temple Grounds are mostly barren stone and the Agon Wastes are little different. Torvus Bog differentiates itself with water and wood but is an altogether dreary place. Dark Aether coming in on top of all this is, perhaps, a bit much. Colorful Sanctuary fortress comes as a relief. If I could make a change, it would be to Torvus. Too bad it hadn't been visualized more akin to Tallon Overworld or envisioned as an alien cypress swamp.
The balance of my triad of game play elements has shifted in Echoes. Even though the density and intensity of Navigation and Traversal have increased, it is Combat that has seen the biggest boost over what existed in Prime. In Echoes, I'd be tempted to say that all three categories stand nearly equal but the Navigation of this dual layered, planet wide labyrinth places it as the prominent element.
Echoes, with its twin world element, is a triumph of environmental puzzle design, from simple observational and memory challenges to grand, multi-tier, inventive thinking extravagances. Echoes is the game for those of us who love a good mental exercise, who enjoy playing the detective. It is also a love letter to the Morph Ball fan. There are at least 31 substantial Morph Ball courses and Spider Ball tracks. Unlike Prime, the majority of these are quite involved, putting the gamer's skills and thinking to the test. I also counted around 41 puzzle rooms. Well and truly, Echoes maxes out the cerebral experience in the trilogy.
This is what I call a very crunchy game. Adventure tasks are densely packed and extremely varied. However, all of this content acts as a double edged sword. The world is very complex which is fabulous for meticulous exploration, but frustrating when all you want to do is quickly travel from one point to another and with the Dark Aether element, everything seems to take twice as much walking to accomplish. Even though the different regions of Aether are much better interconnected than they were in Tallon IV, they are slower to work through. The different locales are also much more maze-like, especially the gnarled paths through Torvus Bog. I probably spent twice as much time looking at the map in Echoes as I did in Prime, just to orient myself from room to room. For the less patient gamer, this could lead to tedium and frustration.
Also slowing travel down are the enemy encounters. Mostly Samus runs into low threat but highly persistent foes. Splinters seem to be the most annoyingly common beasties, until all the war wasps show up that is. Also, some juncture points see constantly recurring Ing possessed Pirate Commandos which are tough to deal with until you get the Dark Visor. Then of course, there are the grenchlers in Torvus Bog. These nasties are like the baby sheegoth, only more intimidating and aggressive. Things certainly don't get friendlier on Dark Aether. The Ing make regular appearances in all their myriad forms, harassing Samus as she travels through their bizarro dimension. At least all of these enemies can be dispatched with only a few hits from the right weapon. Some encounters lock Samus in the room with her attackers although most encounters can be run from and rooms may even supply convenient short cuts and escape routes. I really enjoyed the imaginative cast of enemies in Echoes, which is the most diverse in the trilogy, but I think I would have preferred that they cut down on the encounter rates a little bit, particularly of the nuisance enemies like wasps and Inglets.
The Bosses in Echoes are another matter. The temple guardians are simply magnificent. I am especially fond of puzzle bosses, that is, boss enemies that require multiple steps and tools/abilities to take down. My favorite boss is Quadraxis, a mechanical monstrosity that requires some creative combat approaches to finish off. I also really enjoyed the Morph Ball bosses which required Samus to roll up into ball form and tackle them through indirect means. And of course there is Dark Samus, an Evil Twin of sorts who Samus runs into throughout the game. Fights with the Dark Hunter are always furious and fast paced.
A curious addition in Echoes that goes against Metroid norm is beam ammo. Traditionally, Samus' beam cannon could be fired endlessly; only missiles and the potent super bombs needed ammunition. I'm all for new and experimental ideas, but this one didn't come off as compelling. Running out of Dark or Light ammo was never disastrous. All it did was force me to spend time shooting inanimate objects for ammo. Running out of preferred ammo in a boss fight just made the fight drag out without much benefit to challenge. It felt like a weak component, one that probably looked better on paper than in execution. Ammo management works well as a strategic element for games which focus on the combat, but it seemed tacked on in a Metroid game. I wish they'd just left it on the cutting room floor.
One final task we see returning from Prime is the key hunt. Each temple requires three keys to open and the final temple takes a whopping nine. I was fine with seeking out the keys for the first three temples as they are picked up during regular progress through the game, but the nine Sky Temple keys tested my patience sometimes. During regular travel, I'd come across dead Luminoth Warriors, without knowing their significance (assuming this is the first play though) I'd move on without noting their locations. Not until the end portion of the game do I learn these aliens were key bearers, and somewhere near them is a key needed to enter the final temple. Simply relocating the Key Bearer is not enough, however, as the key itself is in the Dark Aether equivalent of the Light Aether room. So now I get to detour to the nearest portal and work my way back to that room's spot, collect the key, then return to the light world and do it all over again seven more times. At least in Prime I could collect some of the keys earlier in the game, but in Echoes, there is little point in trying to collect them until the end when Samus has the Light Suit. This final suit upgrade makes travel though the dark world much easier, and must be obtained before Samus can safely enter dark water, where a few keys are hidden. As a result, the key hunt tends to take up the final portion of the game. It wasn't awful, but it did feel like a lot of walking for little reward, and an artificial way of extending the game time to completion.
Complaints aside, Echoes is an amazing game, but one that I figure is an acquired taste. After my first play through, I rated it below Prime, but each replay sees my estimation of Echoes rise. Echoes is a game of highs and lows and I find it the most intense game in the trilogy. I wonder what thoughts went through the collective mind of Retro Studios when setting out to design Corruption. Aside from the directive of show casing the Wii's pointer function, it appears as though Corruption were designed to be the anti-Echoes. I'll forgive them, but only once.
Check back tomorrow as I revisit Metroid Prime: Corruption
Metroid Prime Trilogy Retrospective: Part One