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: Echoes. Today I take a detailed look at
Metroid Prime: Corruption.
Corruption - White Chocolate. Lite and mild, easy on the tongue but lacks the robust flavor of the other two.
I enjoy
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption almost as much as I enjoy Echoes, but for opposite reasons. Echoes took the cerebral elements from Prime and expanded on them, resulting in a content dense, if slow moving game. Corruption took the action oriented parts from Prime and streamlined them, resulting in a fast paced, but simplified romp. This is something I need to state up front as my review of the trilogy's final game contains the highest amount of criticism. I really find Corruption fun, but I do not find it as satisfying as its precursors. In many ways, Corruption is very different from Prime or Echoes, demonstrating a versatility of vision and execution within the Metroid framework. Corruption distinguishes itself from the previous two games right from the start with the plot.
No mystery greets Samus when she arrives on the scene in Corruption. It is made clear in the opening cinematic that the Dark Hunter is alive and well. As soon as I have control of our heroine I guide her to a meeting with three fellow bounty hunters and Admiral Dane, who leads a fleet of GFS battleships. The admiral briefs the gathered hunters on a pirate attack on the GFS Valhalla which preceded a strange computer virus infecting the Aurora super computer network that the Federation relies on. The admiral barely finishes speaking when Space Pirates assault the fleet and Samus is thrown into action. The first goal is simply to make it back to her ship, rescuing space marines along the way (if you're quick enough). I enjoyed this quite a bit, both as a change of pace and on its own merits. Saving endangered marines is satisfying and passing by Samus' fellow hunters, kicking pirate ass in their own ways, is fun. Reaching the ship required, in true Metroid tradition, an inventive detour. Finally aboard, Samus flies to planet Norion to join the battle raging inside a military base.
Planetside, Samus is given new orders. Here, she must help reactivate the generators that power a cannon capable of destroying orbiting ships. The time she has to do this is short, as a new menace called a Leviathan is hurtling towards the planet. While working to bring the cannon on-line, Samus battles Ridley (not dead yet) and interacts with her peers: the hunters Rundas, Ghor, and Gandrayda. I like the little exchanges between Samus and the other hunters. Rundas and Ghor especially interest me, which makes their ultimate fates quite bitter, if not unexpected. It would have been nice if Retro had allowed the gamer the chance to bring about different outcomes when forced to confront the hunters after they'd been corrupted. Unfortunately, the story telling remains static. The fast paced intro segment ends with the planetary cannon destroying the Leviathan ship in the nick of time, but not before Dark Samus shows up and blasts the good guys and gals with phazon. A month later, Samus awakens with a new suit and a new burden (and that crew woman's face probably gives Samus nightmares too).
Plot plays a much more direct role in Corruption than it did in Prime and Echoes. Rather than flowing freely, the story telling emphasizes objectives, handing out missions to Samus through cut scenes and (for the first time) fully implemented voice acting. If there's anything I find disheartening about Corruption, it's how intrusive some of the “story telling” is. I have no problem with the cut scenes. What annoy me are the transmissions Samus receives. Apparently in the world of Corruption the purpose of super computers is to tell you the obvious. A lot of the information on where to go and what to do is unnecessary (example: being told I need to find a way to unlock a door separating me from my target. No, really?). In games like those of the Metroid series where exploration and discovery are among the main draws, having the feel of someone's hand on my shoulder guiding me through the world step by step is incredibly detrimental to the experience.
For those who do need prompting, Corruption, like the past two games in the series, employs a hint system. Unfortunately, Corruption weaves the hint system into the narrative and there's no way to turn it off. Certainly, I can toggle off the hints option, but the only effect is a question mark not being added to the map when the Aurora Unit interrupts Samus' investigations. I could ignore the prompt to open my map or the prompt to listen to the communique, but the “press button” message displayed on the screen obstructs part of my view and I just want it gone. Might as well let the game force me through the map view or listen to all the jabber just to get it over with and out of my face.
Once Samus is finally released from the care of the Federation and set loose upon the galaxy, her missions take her to a handful of planets and one very creepy space ship.
Norion – The small GFS base on Norion consists mostly of plain metal corridors, demonstrating that the humans aren't as prone to artistic expression in their architecture as other civilized species tend to be.
Bryyo – The most diverse of the alien worlds, Bryyo offers a wonderfully bizarre landscape of bulbous, spiked growths and cyclopean golems. The planet's moons are held in low geosynchronous orbit by gigantic chains. Luminous butterflies swarm about lakes of brilliantly lit fuel gel, a caustic fluid taking the traditional place of lava as an environmental hazard. Hidden away within the alien jungles is a warp point taking Samus to a small snow enshrouded citadel, glistening with ice.
Elysia – Planet Elysia is home to an ancient Chozo research station called Sky Town, a city that literally hovers amongst the clouds, held aloft by rocket thrusters. The city is broken up into small hubs of rooms and elevators separated by suspended walkways, zip-lines, and open space. The Chozo bird motif is seen throughout the metal structures, their forms bronzed with age. Tiny repair robots skitter about, frantically working to keep the shuttering structures aloft.
Pirate Homeworld – Industrial and uninviting, it seems the entire world is a warren of metal halls and jumbled machinery. Red and orange are the dominant colors with blue tendrils of phazon reaching towards the sky. Here is the odd beast, victim of pirate experimentation, its massive carcass now simply a part of the room to be burrowed through and built around.
GFS Valhalla – Easily one of the moodiest locations seen in the trilogy, this battered ship reminds me of the Space Pirate Frigate, bringing the journey full circle in a way. Garishly lit by the enveloping nebula, the wrecked capital ship bears the scars of the battle it lost. Smoldering debris drifts through the airless rooms exposed to the vacuum of space. Twisted metal fills passageways and the bodies of marines and pirates alike remain frozen in silent testimony to violence.
Phaaze – Liquid neon shifting blues, flowing like blood through capillaries. Crystalline structures tall as skyscrapers, membranous walls and too many things writhing and pulsating to coral with a few sentences. Everything radiating light. A visual tour de force, but don't admire the scenery too long, Samus' very life is eroding away.
Corruption, like Prime and Echoes before it, displays some of the most beautiful and atmospheric art direction in the gaming industry. On the technical side though, I'm hard pressed to say whether there's as much of a visual leap between Corruption and Echoes in near geometry as there was between Echoes and Prime (though there can be no doubt that Corruption fills the horizon with actual structures as opposed to the simple mat paintings in Echoes). So much detail and polish has been put into each game that there comes a point where “more” becomes irrelevant. There are, however, some visual anomalies I feel the need to address, namely, what's up with the humans?
There is no question that Retro can design some fabulous looking aliens. Also, Samus (her head at least) looked great at the end of Prime. Since then, however, the human designs have left me disappointed. Personally, I don't like Samus' “Zero Suit” look, but aside from that, the bare faced humans seen in Corruption cause me to cringe a little. They have oddly proportioned faces that seem vertically elongated. The animation also felt stiff and robotic at times, and lacking in punch at others (Admiral Dane's melodramatic gestures seemed particularly weightless). The presentation of the numerous (for Metroid) cut scenes also felt a bit uneven with the voice acting adding new pitfalls. None of the dialog was poor, though most of it was merely average. One thing that happens with voiced dialog is; lines that read perfectly well can sound corny when actually spoken aloud. The admiral and the marines/crew tended to be on the low end for dialog, but I thought the bounty hunters and Aurora Units were wonderfully portrayed. Corruption also offered up a new rendition of the Space Pirates that I have to address.
I did not care for the new look of the pirates, but it is what I didn't hear that really let me down. When I first battled the Space Pirates in Corruption, I felt something was missing and I didn't know what. It wasn't until the bridge battle on Norion (where Rundas got involved) that I identified what was absent. That ferocious and defiant roar, that deep growl that so personified the nature of the pirates, that guttural shout that had been one with the identity of these vicious aliens was gone. Now upon death, they simply, politely, fell over without the meekest utterance. What the hell, Retro? Even their theme seemed lesser, more whiny, a weaker aural presence all around which is unfortunate as, combat-wise, Corruption is mostly about the pirates.
In Echoes, the elements of Navigation, Traversal, and Combat all seemed to take big steps forward over Prime, in Corruption, everything seems to have taken a step back. I have to put Traversal in the primary position this time. There is a simplification of the worlds that promotes a faster pace, making travel quick and mostly painless. This streamlining comes at the cost of Navigation, however, which I put as the weakest element within Corruption. I counted roughly 26 puzzle rooms and most of them felt like the game was going easy on me. One brilliant exception, however, was a lateral thinking puzzle involving the moving of a golem's head and a huge battery in order to gain a power cell. I wish there had been more like that. There were around 29 Morph/Spider Ball courses, consisting mainly of quick little tracks. The Spider Ball itself is acquired late in the game so there are only a few magnetic rails, and none display the imaginative diversity enjoyed in Echoes (though the one in the Hall of Golems is a personal favorite). Areas tend to be smaller and basic in design, consisting mostly of straightforward corridors with little need to navigate challenging terrain. Branching paths are a relative rarity. The Aurora Unit telling me what I'll find in any given environment from the outset also puts a damper on the sense of discovery.
Combat is very prominent in Corruption, but I feel it is due to a lightened presence of the other elements. There are actually fewer engagements with significant enemies in Corruption than there were in Echoes (probably a good thing), and the variety of enemies is definitely lesser (a bad thing). There are no grenchlers or sheegoth here that you need to maneuver around to get that shot off. There are no bloggs that require careful timing to affect that kill. There are no elementally vulnerable beasties requiring astute beam switching or machines to dispatch with a multi-missile lock on strike. In Corruption, pretty much everything succumbs to just being shot lots and lots, or tugged on with the Grapple Beam. That's not to say combat is a bore. The directness and precision of using the pointer and motion controls comes to the rescue, making combat quite interactive. It's not a replacement for the loss in variety, but it's still fun in a visceral sense. Unfortunately, many of the boss fights don't live up to the epic struggles of games past. Most of the boss battles are of the simple “shoot the big red target” variety. The usage of different visors is downplayed while the use of the Grapple beam to pull on loose armor is perhaps overplayed. There are no beams to switch and missiles play little to no role. As a result, most of these battles consist of no more than frantic shooting. Again, the direct targeting factor brought forth by the Wiimote adds a new dimension to the game play, but the bosses still lack tactical variety.
In Echoes, Retro tried to add an ammo management strategy to the combat with the Light and Dark Beams. In Corruption, a similar concept is tried with with PED suit. In this game Samus has the ability to go into “Hypermode”, a phazon enhanced state that heavily increases her damage dealing capabilities and makes her invincible. This state must be managed carefully, for allowing it to overload can result in death. Also, simply engaging Hypermode costs a full Energy Tank. Exploiting Hypermode and managing it properly adds a strong tactical element and challenge to Corruption...but only if you play the game on the hardest difficulty setting. I found the Veteran difficulty too easy to really make full use of Hypermode, and the Normal difficulty setting isn't even worth discussing. Also, possibly as a side affect of Hypermode, most enemies take too many hits from Samus' normal weaponry to go down. As a result, it feels less like Hypermode has an increase above the norm in power, and more like Samus' regular arsenal has been nerfed.
Now, finally, we get to the odds and ends. Corruption takes the Prime formula and really mixes it up with some results I like a great deal. It intersperses the free roaming exploration segments with short missions that have a definitive goal. Although I felt the exploration was handled too lightly, I thoroughly enjoy the variety brought in by the missions, like figuring out how to build a nuke and escorting bomb toting marines who, curiously, have weaker than normal armor. (Considering they carry bombs and don't need high maneuverability since they don't primarily engage in combat, you'd think they would have stronger than average armor. But that's real world logic, not game logic.)
I also really liked the uses for Samus' ship. Sure, calling in an air strike was rather weakly implemented, but using the ship to haul around huge pieces of scenery for large scale puzzles is a brilliant gaming element I want more of. Ultimately though, it is the ship's simplest use that I find has the most impact. I can not stress how fantastic it is to just hop into the cockpit, punch in a destination, and fly there. The ship replaces the traditional Metroid elevator, and that is wonderful. Why? Because it is an elevator that can
go anywhere, not just from point A to point B, it can go to any point.
Metroid games are adventure games, and one basic element of the adventure is revisiting old areas with new toys to do more exploring and item collecting. The bane of exploration is backtracking. In Metroid, it is not unusual to crisscross the entire planet multiple times, and that's a lot of walking. My biggest complaint about Echoes concerned all of the walking: marching through a series of rooms, taking an elevator to a new area, marching through more rooms, taking another elevator, and maybe finally getting to the general vicinity of my goal. Echoes tried to address the issue of all this travel by making sure every area had an elevator to every other area, but there was still a whole lot of walking. How much would the tedium of travel been decreased if I could have just flown straight from Torvus to one of a number of conveniently placed landing pads in Agon? I don't think the impact of convenient ship travel on game pacing should be underestimated, and for that matter, I'd also like to see warp points return in future Metroid games. The surprise of warping into Bryyo Ice, of stumbling upon such an unexpected location, was a high point in Corruption.
The last thing I want to discuss about Corruption concerns the collection of Power Cells, Corruption's variation on the Key Hunt. This is how it should be done folks, the last game in the Trilogy gets it ever so right. First off, rather than just sitting incongruously around the environment, the Power Cells are a part of it. Unplugging them often has a consequence, like setting free a swarm of metroids. Also, they are easily picked up through the natural process of exploring the world, and in at least one stellar example, the act of acquiring one takes thought and planning that fits naturalistically into the setting. Finally, the Power Cells actually do something. They are tools used to explore one of the most interesting locations in the entire game. What a wonderful incentive to collect every last one of them.
Corruption sought to close out the Prime Trilogy with a bang and I'd say it succeeded. I have to hand it to the good people at Retro and Nintendo for the willingness to experiment with a tried and true formula. If you aren't willing to risk a miss, you'll never discover a new hit. All of the Metroid Prime games offer up a wealth of new elements that can only enrich this treasured series in future installments, may there be many more to come.
In closing...
I have written 11 pages on the Metroid Prime Trilogy, and yet I feel I've left out at least as much stuff as I've written in. I didn't mention my surprise and delight of the expanded uses for the Grapple Beam in Corruption, and what more could be done with it. Or, how cool the soldering tool usage of the Plasma Beam in Corruption was. Too bad Retro didn't expand it beyond simply soldering circuit boards. I didn't discuss how I missed reading non lore pirate logs, often a source of humor and totally absent in Corruption. I found the change of Samus' ship's design from one game to the next interesting and wonder why the disturbingly wiggly “plants” first seen in Echoes had no log entry. I badly want to scan them every time I start up a new game. There is much more concerning what was done with Metroid in its premier 3-D outing that could be discussed, and discussion I invite. Finally, I hope above all else that you enjoyed reading my revisit of the Metroid Prime trilogy!
Metroid Prime Trilogy Retrospective: Part One
Metroid Prime Trilogy Retrospective: Part Two