This game is like playing out one of those travel montages on a TV show with the dotted line crawling across a map of the world, where they get lost and bang into random continents. Only, that's the intentional game route. Whatever points of concession may be granted the necessary progressive gameplay tools to be called "Metroid." they're negated by an evident spite for this ruleset that the sequencing takes the utmost pains to utilize in the most monotonous and time-consuming fashion. And in spite of capitalizing on what may seem a "new" approach to the level progression, the reality is it serves a miserably formulaic pattern. The vast majority of the playtime, which is an eight hour game stretched to the ballpark of 20 by strategies like this and a series of separate, ongoing keyhunts that comprise the game's whole goalset, will be spent crawling back through the same rooms, re-navigating through the same morph ball mazes and puzzle rooms, which serve as the MOST DIRECT means of reaching obvious points of destination on a single intended route. Exploration is minimal. Instead, there are systems of portals that further inflate the game length with repeated objectives, achieving novel gameplay ideas like getting from one side of a room to another. A promising new alien race design revs up the series' universe by installing glorified keycards into Samus' helmet during expository cutscenes. Combat is a series of Simon Says routines where enemies arbitrate states of invincibility and make you wait out their pattern in furthering the game's bid to be "the biggest Metroid game ever" (by technicality). The only challenge present is a battle of attrition between the game and your patience, and is only exacerbated by the game's Veteran difficulty which does nothing but make enemies take five super missiles to the face to go down. I can't believe there are snowflakes who call this the best Metroid game.
This game is like playing out one of those travel montages on a TV show with the dotted line crawling across a map of...
haha arm gun goes pew pew
Tell us how you really feel
I'm really glad OP didn't use "reddit spacing". This text is perfectly readable and I'm definitely going to go through all of it and express my opinion about it, shortly! Just you wait!
>complaining about backtracking in metroid
You know what, I think I jump too much in Mario. I'm gonna go make a thread about that.
didn't read.
Missing the point. Metroid games are typically a series of interweaving paths, you might detour down one way and end up intersecting with the foregone path regardless, and you'll go back down that way at the pace you want to. This game rigorously limits what you can do at any given time. You'll go halfway through an area, get an item, but be roadblocked *immediately* by the need for an upgrade you haven't gotten, that you couldn't get yet (not because you missed it like might have been the case in another Metroid game), but because now you have to go back into the last area with that new upgrade in order to get the other one that actually moves the game forward. This is the game's formula. EVERY AREA works this way.
How different would you say that is from Prime 1?
I don't disagree with your assessment at all, but you could have expressed your opinion in a far simpler, clearer and easier to read manner than that gargantuan wall of text.
Prime 2 is when the novelty wore off.
I think the biggest offender and best example I can give, is how in the Sky Sanctuary in Prime 2, there are several alternate elevators that lead to the various other areas--but you can only reach them at staunchly predetermined times, after getting specific upgrades. You can see the trappings of a very good design in the maps themselves, but the house what are essentially sets of objectives one-at-a-time that only up just as much of the game as it wants you to see. Compare that to Prime 1 or other Metroids in general, where you're liable to encounter different manners of routing and more lenient sequencing.
they house*
only open up*
No, you could've.
>but you can only reach them at staunchly predetermined times, after getting specific upgrades.
I don't really see how different that is from past Metroids or other franchises with similar progression systems.
Do you mean Prime 2 has very few shortcuts to circumvent long travel times and how level design can fail to accommodate future upgrades?
If that's the case, I can kind of see where you're coming from. But that said, I feel like that was deliberate in design. So while someone could complain about it, it's a system working as intended. And personally, I don't see many "shortcuts" in any of the Prime games.
The easiest way to put it is, in most of these kinds of games and pretty much any other Metroid, getting upgrades opens "more game." In Prime 2 your upgrades are glorified keys for variously shaped keyholes. The pacing is designed as though the game world is a hub like a Resident Evil game, only it isn't.
It totally does work as intended, though. If there's one thing truly impressive about it, it's that the game never completely shits itself and falls apart despite using such roundabout sequencing with so many different variables. It's a very thoroughly crafted mess.
>getting upgrades opens "more game." In Prime 2 your upgrades are glorified keys for variously shaped keyholes
those two things are not mutually exclusive. some people might even say they're the same thing.
I mean, get what you're saying now. There's nothing in Prime 2 like the half of Brinstar in Super that you won't be able to go through until later (at least not extensively, Prime 2 has some side areas for the special charge beams and such)
This sounds like an argument in principle that doesn't take into account the practice of Prime 2's design. By variously shaped keyholes, this means there is little overall utility or application for the various new abilities other than backtracking to the previous map to use it to get a new thing that lets you finish the latest area you got to. You get the spider ball upgrade, so naturally you're excited to get to use that in interesting ways, yeah? Well, that's too damn bad. That's a power bomb door immediately past the boss chamber. Guess you get to backtrack to Torvus Bog instead, so you can reach that ledge your gravity pack reached just barely shy of, so you can fight a boss for the power bombs then go all the way back. Nothing but a boss chamber halfway backwards in the game isn't "more game." It's plodding.
I somehow managed to finish both metroid prime 1 and echoes albeit on an emulator, they are not perfect games by any extension but you can really easily waste a weekend finishing them
I mean, this is the exact kind of gameplay I look in Metroid, though.
I want to literally get lost in a massive connected world. What people might call backtracking the main appeal of the franchise for me. Prime 2 definitely could have done it differently, sure. There's not huge love loss between me and 2. But it's still more of what I have come to enjoy.
I think they're a wonderful trilogy.
Prime almost feels like a successor to the n64 zeldas to me. Not necessarily in terms of gameplay, but definitely in terms of atmosphere. Prime 1 captures that intensity and sensation of exploring an unknown so well.
Based
I fucking hate that when I seperate paragraphs I get called Reddit. This shits been happening for a decade.
ITS BASIC FORMATTING!
Didn't read, but Metroid Prime 2 is the best Prime game but also the most flawed one.
Tell that to the character limit. I wanted paragraph breaks, trust me, but I wasn't going to do that (1/3) shit.
Different strokes I guess. These rants do come from a place of ambivalence at there being certain redeeming qualities. Like, going halfway through an area for the first time is generally great, and already entails a decent amount of problem solving and map awareness. Probably more than the latter halves, I'd wager, being that I never had to do much thinking to figure out where or how to get to the next part past those midway impasses; it'd just take forever and entail a bunch of redundant sightseeing. I do think there was a lot of "we have to make this 10 hours' worth of map content last for 20 and Metroid is a bunch of backtracking anyway" going on.
>20 hour long game
filtered.
I don't get this. Like I'd understand this take if it did something new and changed it up, but it doesn't really. It takes a normal Metroid game and just makes it more convoluted and less varied at the same time.
>I do think there was a lot of "we have to make this 10 hours' worth of map content last for 20 and Metroid is a bunch of backtracking anyway" going on.
probably worth pointing out that Nintendo had a pretty strict deadline with both Prime 2 and 3.
As soon as I got to the first part you can go to the "dark world" I turned it off and never touched it again.
make sure you use big words so zoomers think you're smart like joseph anderson
>your upgrades are glorified keys for variously shaped keyholes
welcome to metroid
>joseph anderson
I mean, he does look like a pretty smart dude.