So… Meta Ridley sure was a boss fight, huh?
In Metroid games, atmosphere is paramount. The fundamental ability to effortlessly immerse a player into the imaginative planets they embark upon is crucial to their success, and it’s arguably Metroid’s defining characteristic as a video game franchise. Much like its predecessors, Prime succeeds in crafting a captivating ambience that convincingly places the player in the boots of Samus through unmatched realism in both its audio and visual design. This much should be undisputed - the amount of detail encoded into the various lifeforms of Tallon IV should not be overlooked, with every room richly constructed with detailed lighting and natural sonorousness to make them feel like genuine articles. The implementation of a first-person perspective and by extension the scan visor further amplifies the scale of Prime’s scope, literally allowing players to view the world from Samus perspective and unravel the narrative surrounding the world at the same pace she does. As a nice additional bonus, the visor also takes into account minor changes in Samus’ POV - fog can cause Samus’ vision to become clouded, and bright flashes allow players a brief glimpse into her eyes. Overall, Metroid Prime is inarguably a masterclass in terms of how it pushes the technical boundaries of its audio-visual presentation, certainly one of the most beautiful looking games, even today. Given how rushed Prime’s development appeared to be, this is nothing short of a miracle.
What isn’t a miracle, however, is Metroid Prime’s unfortunate pacing problems that distills the illusion of immersion.
Metroid Prime takes a puzzle box-esque approach to its level design, much akin to the likes of Super Metroid before it, fashioning every area as their own self-contained environment which revolves around a particular puzzle or platforming challenge players must solve in order to progress to the next task. This isn’t an inherently poor concept, however most puzzles in Prime demand the acquisition of an item that you’re unlikely to have obtained at that point in the game, mandating backtracking to retrieve said item to bypass the gate only to then be immediately gatekept by another unretrieved item! This scenario is ever-present throughout an average playthrough of Prime, with items uncovered in the second half being conveniently scattered at great distances between each other following the otherwise butter smooth pacing of the game’s first half - this only serves to inflate the runtime beyond what was necessary. Generally, environmental traversal is further worsened by the sluggish movement speed Samus seems to travel at in this game (this is an exception if you know scan dashing - a technique most newcomers and casual gamers would be unaware of).
As aforementioned, Super Metroid did take a similar approach in how it designed its world layout, and does frequently require backtracking for certain items if played linearly. However, one thing that draws a major divide between Super and Prime is that Super is much more open-ended - speedrunners can defeat Phantoon even before obtaining the Gravity Suit, whereas in Prime Samus needs her entire arsenal to even access the Impact Crater without glitches. Super also does have the reduced drawbacks of being a 2D platformer with a run button, as well as less connecting tunnels between every area compared to Prime. Most crucially, however, is that most doors in Super only require regular shots to unlock them after using the required weapon on them the first time - this is not included in Prime, forcing players to constantly swap awkwardly between beams while backtracking for hidden items.
Another glancing difference between the progression flow of Metroid Prime and Super Metroid can be observed in terms of how they handle endgame enemies - in Super, players are rewarded for deep progression into the game with strong weapons such as the Plasma Beam and the Screw Attack, which instantly trivialise most common enemies that had previously troubled them throughout their travels on the planet. This is a trend that future games opt to emulate, and often the gratifying satisfaction of steamrollering past what once were annoying obstacles empowers the player as they near the climactic finale of their journey.
In a puzzling design choice, however, Prime opts to go in the opposite direction - enemies introduced later into the game are much more substantial in hit points, with most of them requiring several charged attacks to destroy, and with a number of these encounters being mandatory fight sequences. From a narrative perspective, this makes sense - keen observers of the scan logs in research facilities reveal the Space Pirates are learning to adapt to Samus’ numerous weaponry by enhancing their armor’s resistance towards most of her beams. The fact that they are capable of learning is frankly terrifying and adds to the abnormality of your presence in this hostile environment and leaves you feeling encased in a grueling, bitter fight. Unfortunately, in an ironic twist, their armor has a singular weakness - the beams which share the same colour as the pirates themselves. This results in a very clunky and arbitrary combat mechanism, where players have to once again clumsily flip-flop between different beam configurations to defeat these colour-coded pirates. Additionally, their absurd ability to tank hits, further hampered by the lock-on reticle feeling more like an incredibly rough approximation than a guaranteed hit, makes these fights unnecessarily tedious and much worse, boring. The same can unfortunately be said about the Chozo Ghosts, which despite being a stellar setpiece when first discovered, only serve as another fancy roadblock that’s fortunately rather easy to ghost past (haha).
These aforementioned issues seem much more bizarre when viewing the narrative of Prime’s story as a whole - upon landing in Tallon IV Samus is intentionally heavily nerfed following the tutorial, serving as an effective incentive to motivate players into regaining their lost abilities and storm through this foreign planet quicker. Plopping more challenging enemies runs contrary to the usual narrative Metroid games usually follow, and leaves a conflictive bottleneck in terms of player empowerment by leaving them just as helpless as they were at the beginning, despite being arguably more powerful than before they set foot on the planet!
All this culminates in an endgame scavenger hunt that while on paper is an intriguing premise - a trek throughout previously explored caverns and ruins in search of 12 missing artifacts sounds incredibly fun! Rooms that were previously written off as trivial are suddenly given renewed purpose, and it is up to the player to solve the puzzles enlisted at the Temple to find these cleverly hidden pieces. I’ll be the first to admit that I enjoyed the Chozo Artifact searching. What I very obviously didn’t enjoy, however, was the mind-numbingly tedium of backtracking through unchanged rooms just to reach these specific artifacts. The slowness of your movement, the frequency of long, empty hallways, the repetitive and frustrating enemies, combined with all the previous backtracking you already had to do unless you discovered the Artifact Temple early (which I fortunately avoided because I’m a curious bastard who opens every door I can possibly open first chance) and have to return to it to obtain the second half of the clues which, why, just why, results in the pacing of Metroid Prime coming to a screeching halt towards its climax, which is subsequently followed by an arduous, sluggish crawl inch-by-inch across the finish line. Obviously, this does not have great forebodings on my perception of Metroid Prime.
Nevertheless, it cannot be understated the positive outlook that this game provided, which revitalised public interest in the Metroid series - Metroid Prime, alongside the release of the (much better title) Fusion that same year, proved to be a watershed moment in its long history, resulting in two further sequels being released before an Other M brought the whole brigade down in an embarrassing heap of flames. It still remains a fantastic case study into how detailed visuals and appropriate sound mixing can enhance the atmosphere of a video game environment, and provide maximum immersion into the wondrous boundaries of Metroid’s nuanced environmental storytelling.
Despite this, it should also serve as a warning sign of how poor design implementations can likewise shatter that immersion and disrupt the pacing of an otherwise brilliant game.
Final score: 7/10
Focus: Metroid Prime’s second half and its pace-breaking issues.
In Metroid games, atmosphere is paramount. The fundamental ability to effortlessly immerse a player into the imaginative planets they embark upon is crucial to their success, and it’s arguably Metroid’s defining characteristic as a video game franchise. Much like its predecessors, Prime succeeds in crafting a captivating ambience that convincingly places the player in the boots of Samus through unmatched realism in both its audio and visual design. This much should be undisputed - the amount of detail encoded into the various lifeforms of Tallon IV should not be overlooked, with every room richly constructed with detailed lighting and natural sonorousness to make them feel like genuine articles. The implementation of a first-person perspective and by extension the scan visor further amplifies the scale of Prime’s scope, literally allowing players to view the world from Samus perspective and unravel the narrative surrounding the world at the same pace she does. As a nice additional bonus, the visor also takes into account minor changes in Samus’ POV - fog can cause Samus’ vision to become clouded, and bright flashes allow players a brief glimpse into her eyes. Overall, Metroid Prime is inarguably a masterclass in terms of how it pushes the technical boundaries of its audio-visual presentation, certainly one of the most beautiful looking games, even today. Given how rushed Prime’s development appeared to be, this is nothing short of a miracle.
What isn’t a miracle, however, is Metroid Prime’s unfortunate pacing problems that distills the illusion of immersion.
Metroid Prime takes a puzzle box-esque approach to its level design, much akin to the likes of Super Metroid before it, fashioning every area as their own self-contained environment which revolves around a particular puzzle or platforming challenge players must solve in order to progress to the next task. This isn’t an inherently poor concept, however most puzzles in Prime demand the acquisition of an item that you’re unlikely to have obtained at that point in the game, mandating backtracking to retrieve said item to bypass the gate only to then be immediately gatekept by another unretrieved item! This scenario is ever-present throughout an average playthrough of Prime, with items uncovered in the second half being conveniently scattered at great distances between each other following the otherwise butter smooth pacing of the game’s first half - this only serves to inflate the runtime beyond what was necessary. Generally, environmental traversal is further worsened by the sluggish movement speed Samus seems to travel at in this game (this is an exception if you know scan dashing - a technique most newcomers and casual gamers would be unaware of).
As aforementioned, Super Metroid did take a similar approach in how it designed its world layout, and does frequently require backtracking for certain items if played linearly. However, one thing that draws a major divide between Super and Prime is that Super is much more open-ended - speedrunners can defeat Phantoon even before obtaining the Gravity Suit, whereas in Prime Samus needs her entire arsenal to even access the Impact Crater without glitches. Super also does have the reduced drawbacks of being a 2D platformer with a run button, as well as less connecting tunnels between every area compared to Prime. Most crucially, however, is that most doors in Super only require regular shots to unlock them after using the required weapon on them the first time - this is not included in Prime, forcing players to constantly swap awkwardly between beams while backtracking for hidden items.
Another glancing difference between the progression flow of Metroid Prime and Super Metroid can be observed in terms of how they handle endgame enemies - in Super, players are rewarded for deep progression into the game with strong weapons such as the Plasma Beam and the Screw Attack, which instantly trivialise most common enemies that had previously troubled them throughout their travels on the planet. This is a trend that future games opt to emulate, and often the gratifying satisfaction of steamrollering past what once were annoying obstacles empowers the player as they near the climactic finale of their journey.
In a puzzling design choice, however, Prime opts to go in the opposite direction - enemies introduced later into the game are much more substantial in hit points, with most of them requiring several charged attacks to destroy, and with a number of these encounters being mandatory fight sequences. From a narrative perspective, this makes sense - keen observers of the scan logs in research facilities reveal the Space Pirates are learning to adapt to Samus’ numerous weaponry by enhancing their armor’s resistance towards most of her beams. The fact that they are capable of learning is frankly terrifying and adds to the abnormality of your presence in this hostile environment and leaves you feeling encased in a grueling, bitter fight. Unfortunately, in an ironic twist, their armor has a singular weakness - the beams which share the same colour as the pirates themselves. This results in a very clunky and arbitrary combat mechanism, where players have to once again clumsily flip-flop between different beam configurations to defeat these colour-coded pirates. Additionally, their absurd ability to tank hits, further hampered by the lock-on reticle feeling more like an incredibly rough approximation than a guaranteed hit, makes these fights unnecessarily tedious and much worse, boring. The same can unfortunately be said about the Chozo Ghosts, which despite being a stellar setpiece when first discovered, only serve as another fancy roadblock that’s fortunately rather easy to ghost past (haha).
These aforementioned issues seem much more bizarre when viewing the narrative of Prime’s story as a whole - upon landing in Tallon IV Samus is intentionally heavily nerfed following the tutorial, serving as an effective incentive to motivate players into regaining their lost abilities and storm through this foreign planet quicker. Plopping more challenging enemies runs contrary to the usual narrative Metroid games usually follow, and leaves a conflictive bottleneck in terms of player empowerment by leaving them just as helpless as they were at the beginning, despite being arguably more powerful than before they set foot on the planet!
All this culminates in an endgame scavenger hunt that while on paper is an intriguing premise - a trek throughout previously explored caverns and ruins in search of 12 missing artifacts sounds incredibly fun! Rooms that were previously written off as trivial are suddenly given renewed purpose, and it is up to the player to solve the puzzles enlisted at the Temple to find these cleverly hidden pieces. I’ll be the first to admit that I enjoyed the Chozo Artifact searching. What I very obviously didn’t enjoy, however, was the mind-numbingly tedium of backtracking through unchanged rooms just to reach these specific artifacts. The slowness of your movement, the frequency of long, empty hallways, the repetitive and frustrating enemies, combined with all the previous backtracking you already had to do unless you discovered the Artifact Temple early (which I fortunately avoided because I’m a curious bastard who opens every door I can possibly open first chance) and have to return to it to obtain the second half of the clues which, why, just why, results in the pacing of Metroid Prime coming to a screeching halt towards its climax, which is subsequently followed by an arduous, sluggish crawl inch-by-inch across the finish line. Obviously, this does not have great forebodings on my perception of Metroid Prime.
Nevertheless, it cannot be understated the positive outlook that this game provided, which revitalised public interest in the Metroid series - Metroid Prime, alongside the release of the (much better title) Fusion that same year, proved to be a watershed moment in its long history, resulting in two further sequels being released before an Other M brought the whole brigade down in an embarrassing heap of flames. It still remains a fantastic case study into how detailed visuals and appropriate sound mixing can enhance the atmosphere of a video game environment, and provide maximum immersion into the wondrous boundaries of Metroid’s nuanced environmental storytelling.
Despite this, it should also serve as a warning sign of how poor design implementations can likewise shatter that immersion and disrupt the pacing of an otherwise brilliant game.
Final score: 7/10
Focus: Metroid Prime’s second half and its pace-breaking issues.