This was nice! Far from my favorite Kirby game, but I feel like it's aged a bit better than most out of this pre-Superstar era. The animal friends were neat to mess around with, albeit hardly any combination of animal and copy ability can quite beat Koo with just about anything, since she's the only one that can maintain Kirby's flight ability.

The rainbow drops were a nice wrinkle; Adventure had some secret areas but given they just unlocked minigames it hardly felt worth finding them all. And it is one of those "find the hidden mcguffins to unlock the true ending" dealies, a-la Chaos Emeralds, but most of them were relatively simple to find and satisfying to figure out.

The only outright bad part of the game is that one bit in one of the last levels (I think 7-6?) that had an auto-scroller with dead ends that you couldn't see so you just get killed for not being able to see the future. Lame in an otherwise nice game. Oh and also hitting bosses with copy abilities is really unsatisfying because it barely does any damage, you might as well just play it Dream Land 1 style with them. Overall a game where I'm up in the air about giving it 3/5 or 3.5/5. It's just right there evenly in the high-C, low-B range.

Probably among the most "it's fine" games I've ever played. Pleasant and inoffensive, it just feels like it lacks a bit of the punch other Good Feel games have had. Epic Yarn may technically be impossible to lose, but it still felt gripping in the level theming in a way Showtime dabbles in, compared to. I still to this day can pick out individual levels from Epic Yarn, even without having played that game since it came out, but having just finished Showtime, some of the levels bleed together in my head.

That isn't to say there's nothing there, cause it's satisfying as Cowgirl Peach to lasso up barrels and crack them over the heads of Sour Bunch goons, or kick tables and pots into groups of enemies as Kung Fu Peach. It's just also a game that, as you've probably heard, lacks in difficulty and has plenty of QTEs that barely punish you for button mashing through them. Level theming is alright, and I like the sorta magical-girl-esque energy the flamboyant villain-of-the-week motif it has for each costume's villain. Right down to Madame Grape feeling like a good foil for Peach. And it caps off with a satisfyingly extra finale.

Epic Yarn and Woolly World especially benefited from level completion adding a decent amount of depth. And it probably does so in this game too, but a combination of long loading screens and a lot of points of no return with auto-scrollers and the like turned me off of trying to 100% each level.

It's an overall fine variety pack of games. I'm alright with games that mostly exist to sell a vibe existing; if something like Devil May Cry is a roller coaster then this is a chill dark ride.

From a gameplay standpoint it's a fine update to Metroid 2, but feels slower and clumsier than Fusion or Zero Mission did. Especially with the addition of Aeon Abilities that adds what feels like another unnecessary resource into the game and the melee counter attack, which halts Samus in place while using it and devolves a lot of the combat into waiting on enemies to do their very obviously telegraphed attack that allows you to insta-kill them and then your encounters with anything that isn't a boss becomes robotic and boring.

I'm mixed on the presentation. On one hand, I appreciate the soundtrack being reasonably faithful to the original; really atmospheric and unsettling tracks. But then it throws in random remixes from other game like Ridley's lair and Red-soil Brinstar and man. Remember when Ridley's lair was a cool track hyping up your approach to Ridley, it got brought back in Prime 1 as a nice simple callback, and here it's been reduced to "Fire level music". Jesus.

The backgrounds on their own are nice looking, but they really undercut the tension of Metroid 2 because of how brightly lit and visibly teeming with life they are. Metroid 2 is one of the mainstream Nintendo games with THE most rancid vibes ever and it feels off that a remake of it sticks in a giant fungus forest for no reason.

Speaking undercutting the tension, remember how in Metroid 2, it's just a constant decent deeper and deeper into a cave system, a linear trek downwards to a point where you can't help but think "wow I am really deep underground at this point, when the hell am I ever going to see the surface again?" Well, they stuck teleport stations in so you can just zap back to the surface whenever it's convenient to you. Yay.

And y'know, Metroid 2 is not a glorious game. You're almost basically doing a villain's dirty work by going to a planet to wipe out all of a species by some vague metric of them being "too capable of being used as bioweapons". And it felt very purposeful that killing a Metroid in the original game hardly ever felt gratifying. And that hits especially hard in a post-Fusion world where we see the consequences of Samus' actions, cause it turns out playing god and killing an entire species because they're too inconvenient isn't a very good idea because it can fuck the ecosystem up to a catastrophic degree. So it then feels RIDICULOUSLY tone deaf for Samus Returns here to have all these glory kill cutscenes against these things like it's trying to sell us on how cool Samus' job is.

And as if that wasn't enough, it completely butchers the ending. Like, Metroid 2's ending stands out because pretty much every other Metroid game ends on some big, climactic setpiece, escape sequence or not. Metroid 2 instead has you quietly take the baby Metroid back to the surface, in an almost somber and reflective manner. You just murdered this species out of existence when it's just an animal all the same as anything else. Is what you just did right? Or does it just make you as much a cold killer as the ones supposedly posing to use Metroids as weapons?

That's too lame for us gamers, gotta take the baby Metroid around the world to go 100% the game and then fight a boss because we need a big red arrow pointing at the REAL bad guy in this situation. Bllllluuuuuuuugh.

I like this game in the end, it's not like my mountain of problems with it makes it unplayable. But look at this game and all the missed potential and feel very :/

This one's weird to judge. The multiplayer was a fun Sorta-Kinda-Quake-Thing, almost like a hero shooter a decade before hero shooters took off. Each hunter has their special quirks and unique alt-forms, and there's something inherently cool about giving Samus a rogues' gallery of competing rival bounty hunters when she's not taking on her more personal/serious-business missions.

But in an era after Nintendo Wi-Fi is gone and Nintendo has still yet to rerelease this game, (and you're not using netplay or whatever), you're stuck with either playing against bots, or doing the single-player campaign.

And. The devs admitted it's an afterthought and it shows. This was apparently going to be a multiplayer-only game until they cobbled together a story mode that's very obviously made of hallways connecting multiplayer maps together. It's an ankle-deep Metroidvania, because basically the only upgrades in this game are the other hunters' beam weapons, and those are just glorified keys in a lot of cases.

Conceptually it's cool that you can run into the other hunters just randomly, but they're comically easy to ignore in some situations, and in situations where you HAVE to fight them, well, they're bots in a mid-2000s multiplayer shooter.

And god the actual bosses are so lame. The tower and the eyeball were already nothing to write home about, but then you realize you gotta fight both of them three more times after than and Jesus. Then of course after collecting The McGuffin Whatever, an escape sequence starts, except it's never clear what you're even escaping from. The planet's not blowing up or anything, and you just die randomly when you run out of time. What's Samus running from? Her performance anxiety???

It has its moments of atmosphere and having Metroid Prime on a handheld system in 2006 was nothing to sneeze at, but. Eh. S'alright.

It's a great game in its own right, but feels like a downgrade compared to its trilogymates just because the other two games are just that good. It introduces motion control aiming, which is great for having a mouse-and-keyboard-esque experience, and they have enemies that take advantage of having lock-on and actually aiming be separate actions now. I just think everything else they do with motion controls is annoying. There's several different types of interfaces throughout the game, all of which being a weird little motion-control input gimmick that feels like it's only there because Nintendo mandated showing off the motion controls. Gotta pump this thing or turn that thing or have Samus physically input a passcode. The only waggle gimmick that feels good is flicking the nunchuck for the Grapple Lasso/Beam, and then yanking it back to pull an enemy's shield off or pry something open.

I just wish the combat and map design didn't also go down with it too. It's a step down in difficulty from Prime 2, which is fine, but it gets even easier in light of the Hyper Mode feature, where you can chug an energy tank to infuse your beam with phazon for a bit, and doing so absolutely melts just about any enemies for comparatively little sacrifice, especially since you're effectively invincible in this state. And of course, to make up for Hyper Mode taking an energy tank off of you, it feels like enemies drop and obscene amount of energy, meaning you can afford to use it carelessly and still get your energy back.

The maps are far less organically connected, instead now having basically a level select screen to go to different sections of different planets from your ship, and because of that a lot of the areas, while being some of the most visually creative areas in the Prime trilogy, are comparably smaller and traversing them feels far less involved. Individual puzzles are still the Prime goodness, but globe-trotting is far less satisfying this time around.

The bosses in this one are a mixed bag. For every Rundus, Gandrayda, and Omega Ridley, there's a Helios, Security Drone, or Mogenar that feel like they go back to Prime 1's boss philosophy of spending long periods of time being invincible and multiple phases of the same thing happening, But More.

At the end of the day, it's still a Prime game, and comes with all the goodness that entails. It still has a lot of atmosphere and cool moments, and feels like a satisfying conclusion to the Phazon trilogy, but I'd still recommend 1 or 2 more.

I've always said that one of the most core pillars of Metroid is atmosphere, and the queen of atmosphere is Metroid Prime 2, here. It takes a notably drearier tone than Prime 1's already fairly dark mood did. And that definitely suits the mood of the game in general; Prime 1 felt like the aftermath of a post-apocalyptic disaster, but Prime 2 makes it feel like the apocalypse is still ongoing, in part because you're the final vanguard keeping the Luminoth from going extinct. And while there is certainly something dark in having a big Chozo city with nothing but the remnants of a dead civilization around, there's something a lot darker but also kind of badass about stopping the Luminoth from suffering the same fate at nearly the last minute, but also should you fail, the Ing will be successful in their eradication.

I complimented how much Prime 1 supported its atmosphere by having visual effects appear on the visor, but Prime 2 doubles down on this with effects like blinding lights, the visual of being enveloped in sludge as an Ing attempts to possess you, even up to rather amusingly having an enemy that causes the suit's system to hard crash, making you Ctrl+Alt+Delete to reboot it.

This game's ammo system is smart, in that it forces you to balance out which weapons you use and not JUST rely on what's good. Especially since this game has a rather binary light world denizens are weak to Dark Beam, and dark world creatures are weak to Light Beam system, and both these beams really wreck the enemies they're good against. Almost too easily, but they take it as an opportunity to ramp up the difficulty a bit. Being on Dark Aether saps your health quickly, and they introduce enemies like Space Pirates and Dark Pirate Commandos (basically Chozo ghost reskins) way earlier than in Prime.

They make some really inventive dimension-hopping puzzles, only really faltered by how going through a portal means looking at a loading screen. It really feels like it pushes the Prime engine to its limit, especially with how the levels are just as, if not more expansive than the ones in Prime 1. Prime 2 also asks for a lot less between-area backtracking, the only particularly stand-out moment being going back to Torvus after getting Spider Ball in Sanctuary. But they really tone it down a lot by making it so all the areas are more conveniently interconnected, with there being a shortcut to Torvus right there in Sanctuary so long as you look for it. This also makes the end-of-game Sky Temple Key hunt far more bearable, and even then it doesn't bother me that much. You should be able to get the keys so long as you know where they are and can get to them, but you'll need Dark Visor to acquire them first. Other than that, a victory lap around Dark Aether, an area that was previously difficult and hostile to traverse is earned. Just to flex that it's your stomping grounds now.

And see like, this is why I love Echoes so much. Prime 1 was so close to being up there as one of my favorites of all time if it wasn't for the handful of faults it had, almost all of which get addressed in Echoes. Because the bosses are far more active, fun, and interesting this time around. Even the minibosses kick ass, and I don't mind that much if Spider Guardian is a bit of an asshole, I just think it's impressive that they made a boss that's fought entirely with Morph Ball.

Amorbis is the closest to being a Prime 1 boss, with it largely being three phases of the same thing But More, but they amp it up by having the worms act more aggressive when there's more of them. Chykka and Quadraxis are both awesome multi-phase epics that both almost feel like they could've been final bosses in and of themselves. Quadraxis especially asking you to act fast and figure it out, since there's no save zones in its arena. And the Dark Samus fights are just killer. And the final boss, unlike Prime 1's absolutely delivers both in challenge and scope.

Metroid Prime 2 is the ideal sequel.

A very cool update to the original Metroid, making it feel a bit more of a filled-out experience with added bosses, maybe none of which are all that amazing, but at least Kraid and Ridley are less stat-checky now. The game actually does a nice amount of work keeping as much of the original atmosphere intact, with a lot of the environmental spritework being dark or even strikingly black like on the NES.

There is something to be missed out on, because enemies are a lot more manageable in this one, and that on top of Samus having a lot more finesse with her movement means this is less of a nail-biter than the original Metroid, when if anything I feel like the difficulty could've been kept since we have a good saving system that doesn't reset you back to 30 energy after you die.

I could also take or leave the added "epilogue" bit. On one hand, there was something almost kinda haunting and mysterious about acquiring items that aren't compatible with your suit. But it almost feels like an anticlimax to just find out they're old familiars that are locked away until you're basically at the final boss' doorstep. The catharsis of plowing through pirates after putting up with a stealth section was nice, but narratively I'm not sure how much it adds. It's the type of Metroid mythos I'm less of a fan of, and feels like it's weirdly there just to be all "See, THIS is how Samus' shoulder pauldrons got huge". Like, okay? And? Who actually cared that Metroid 1 Varia Suit didn't have the big shoulders?

Getting a bunch of upgrades at the last minute also means you gotta get off the pirate ship, go back to Zebes, and do a victory lap to get all the items you couldn't the first time through, and that just sorta killed my interest in 100%ing it. It's got neat and really tricky puzzles to get everything, but eh.

A worthy remake of the original that acts as a cool expansion, even if some of it feels like excess. And if nothing else, it comes with Metroid 1 on the cart, if you REALLY insist.

The decision to have a 3D Metroid game have a first-person perspective was a stroke of genius. While especially for the 2000s it would've felt like trend-chasing, one of Metroid's core pillars is its atmosphere. And they amplify this point so hard with how many environmental effects there are, between walking through stream fogging up the visor, certain enemies causing electrical interference, causing the visor's HUD to glitch and fuzz up with static, and seeing water drop down your face, all really making the visor an extension of the player experience. As corny as it is to say this, it really puts you into the shoes of a power-suit-wearing bounty hunter exploring an alien planet.

Its story really works in this atmosphere-first approach too. The only important things to know is Samus arrived to a space pirate distress signal and she's here to investigate and stop whatever they're doing, eventually leading to destroying the source of Phazon deep in an impact crater. But to get a deeper context into what's going on, you use the scan visor to read both the data logs by pirates and the lore mural left behind by Chozo, allowing the player to piece together the bigger picture themselves, and it's brilliant to make lore more or less a collectible in a game like this.

While it doesn't have the dual-stick controls FPS games usually have, it's generally balanced around how you have to stop to look around, most enemies attacking you from eye-level and having the whole lock-on feature. Using Samus' arsenal is a snap and very intuitive for a game of this age, all the beam weapons being on a c-stick direction.

And it translates the Metroidvania genre to 3D perfectly, with there being a lot of secrets to find. Scan visor and a unique humming noise helps with detecting if an expansion is hidden nearby, especially good for beginners that don't have an eye for how they like to hide things yet.

Something about this game also makes upgrades feel a little more impactful than in 2D. Individual beam upgrades is really nice, but it doesn't quite match getting Plasma Beam for the first time in this game, stepping outside where jetpack pirates are nearby and killing this enemy that was previously a huge pain in the ass in a single charge shot.

As much as I love the game, there's two fumbles that I feel like keep it from reaching perfection, that being how often it asks you to backtrack to a previous area to grab a new upgraded needed to keep progressing through the area you're already in. At its worst when you pick up Boost Ball, have to then get out of Phendrana, trek all the way through Magmoor and Chozo Ruins, all to make your way back to Tallon Overworld to take the half-pipe there to grab Space Jump and then have to walk the entire way back to where you were.

I also feel like the boss fights are really dull. Flaggrha is laughably easy, the fight mainly just taking a while because it can knock down the solar discs you took offline. Thardus spends ridiculously long periods of doing nothing and being invulnerable to damage as you repeat a cycle of using Thermal Visor to find its weak spot, crack it open, switch back to combat visor, and then finish off that weak spot, repeat half a dozen times. Omega Pirate is only slightly better because it's easier to defeat it in as little cycles as possible. Ridley is the one winner of a boss fight, barring how long he spends flying in the background doing a very obviously telegraphed missile attack. And the final boss is just free, being real. Slightly forgivable because combat isn't 100% the focus of the game, but they're still overly long and boring.

I feel like it's bold of a sequel to at least sort of admit it can never be "Super Metroid", so Fusion here doesn't even try to be. It refines the movement to give Samus a little more finesse and the ability to be a little more mobile and makes things like wall jumps and space jump a little more consistent, but to make up for it, it cranks up the difficulty a lot. Samus in Super is a freight train of pain, Samus in Fusion is comparably VERY fragile, which really works for the horror-lite angle of this game. Even the health and ammo drops are trying to kill you in this game.

Speaking of horror, SA-X is a very interesting antagonist, getting to essentially be Samus in her prime but as a much colder, animal-like killer that you absolutely do not stand a chance against for most of the game. In execution, she turns up at set moments in the story and only one chase sequence is forced and is even all that difficult, so SA-X just isn't that scary to me. Though maybe I'd sing a different tune there had I played this when I was a kid and this game was new.

It's comparably very linear to other Metroids, very little being able to be sequence-broken, but it serves multiple story purposes, both in how there's a very set sequence of events to go through in the story and how it's reflective of the Federation keeping Samus under their thumb. It's claustrophobia but from a completely different angle, which then makes it gratifying when you get Screw Attack and can finally freely explore the station on your whim. To which they include a lot of tricky puzzles to practice. This does inevitably mean it has a "lap around the world" issue unlike Super, but I'm not sure how else they could've done it.

Dread is fantastic and all, but I still to this day love Super at least a smidge more. Sure there's a tiny bit of jank to it, especially in the way Samus moves, but there's a very fair margin for error, especially later in the game as you stockpile energy tanks and upgrade the suit's defenses. Samus just hits a point where she can tank an absurd amount of punishment.

What Super absolutely excels in is its map design, which is ingenious with how it organically leads you around and rewards you for paying attention with being able to grab expansions and upgrades in a decent clip basically at all times, even if you're playing casually. There are so many great eureka moments like getting the grapple beam for the first time and realizing there was that one room - also in Norfair - that had a door inaccessible without grapple beam and it gives you the friggin wave beam.

That's another thing. You can miss so much in this game. Items that in other Metroids are 100% required upgrades are optional and missable in this one. You can go the whole game and never find spring ball, x-ray scope, plasma/spazer beam, and even screw attack. And that's just the upgrades you can skip without speedrun tricks. There's something very brave in designing a game where missing out on a lot of content is even possible. Again, especially since in most other Metroids, no upgrade is optional. I can only think of the beam combos in the Prime games.

Such a satisfying game to pick up for a run, I envy anyone who gets to experience it for the first time blind.

Trying to play this again mostly making me realize I didn't give Metroid II enough credit for improving on this lmao.

I think it sucks, not getting to play this when it was new, cause I can see things like the atmosphere, how enemies being best avoided than fought for a good long while, and getting lost only to finally stumble on the next big upgrade being a big source for letting your imagination run wild. Just the take-away at the end of the day is this game is not very fun, cause it's far from satisfying for a bonk from a super bullet-spongy enemy to take down almost half an energy tank, and dying meaning you have to manually refill all your energy. Slowly and agonizingly.

Worth playing as a time capsule that pioneered a whole genre, and also because it makes me appreciate future 2D Metroids better.

It has a lot of jank and questionable design decisions, especially with how many times you fight every single boss. It feels both too based in Resident Evil and not based in it enough; like it's extremely obvious this used to be a Resi game before they changed it into DMC. Its mission structure feels redundant and I'd almost rather just progress through the castle without getting interrupted by a results screen every now and then.

My humbug with difficult games, or at least games that take a lot of learning to get through it, is that I'd rather cut to the chase and get to the part that's actually giving me trouble. Missions are almost never very long, so dying isn't an agonizing loss of progress, but I'm still having to watch Phantom crawl out of the hallway, defeat the shadow lion, solve the stairway puzzle, enter the mirror room, all to get another shot at Angelo. I like the shadow lion fight as a vibe check that forces you to get good at dodge rolling, but I get bored after about the third time clearing it with no hassle.

BUT nonetheless when this game kicks ass, it kicks a lot of ass. It's satisfying to blast through enemy groups that were giving you trouble previously, pull off your first pistol-juggling, and decimate health bars with a clutch Devil Trigger. It's easy to just kind of enter a zen state, at least until one of the more annoying aspects of the game comes back. It's a game where it's easy to forgive the jank because it's otherwise so satisfying, that still involves putting up with it.