A game that could have won a marathon, but its legs fell off before the finish line.
Metroid Prime is a very interesting game, in that it's forced to answer the question of how to design a first-person shooter to be played with only one stick in a world where Halo: Combat Evolved exists. It's also a question that I didn't have to reckon with, because I played this with PrimeHack. I felt like that was cheating, considering how the game was very much not designed for you to be moving and shooting as fluidly as you can with keyboard and mouse, but I decided that I didn't care. The recent Metroid Prime Remastered added support for the second stick, meaning that Nintendo's official stance with the benefit of hindsight is that the game should have been played like Halo to begin with. This marks the second time that Metroid Prime has been re-released with an alternate control scheme, which might betray the fact that this had a pretty rocky development history.
You could put Retro Studios in charge of handling Twitter and you probably wouldn't notice a difference, which is as damning of a statement as it sounds on both ends. The company is notorious for being run like shit, regularly dipping into heavy crunch and general project aimlessness that has doubtlessly impacted everything they've made for the worse. Make no mistake: just because a lot of their work is good doesn't mean that it can't be better, nor does it mean that their successes are entirely their own. Metroid Prime only exists as it does because Shigeru Miyamoto got involved — this was back before he became the angel of death who descends upon and stamps flat every interesting choice Nintendo tries to make, but I digress — and told Retro Studios to take everything they had, throw it out, and use the skeleton of one of their original games to make something under the Metroid license.
So, several hundred-hour-long weeks of work later, all condensed down into a little over a year, Metroid Prime releases. And man, can you feel the stitches holding it together about to burst apart once you get to the end.
It's strange, because there are so many little loving touches here that show off how much the team really did care about making this. Flashes of light refract inside of Samus's visor, letting you see a reflection of eyes after lightning strikes or nearby explosions; different types of gaseous materials leave different colors and viscosities of fog on your helmet; equipping the X-Ray Visor lets you see Samus's fingers contorting into different positions within her arm cannon to change beam types; just about every object or enemy can be scanned to let you read a unique piece of history or flavor text for whatever you pointed at. These aren't the hallmarks of something passionless.
In spite of this, though, the game really starts to feel as though it’s padding for time as you get towards the end. The backtracking isn’t that bad — and it is a Metroid game, so I was kind of expecting it — but it’s long, and it’s tedious. The game starts spawning Chozo ghosts in every other room without any cooldown, meaning that you can enter a room, clear the ghosts, step out, step back in, and have them all immediately respawn. They're fairly unique in this behavior, too. It makes it significantly more expedient to just ignore every enemy and run past them whenever possible, with exceptions like when the game spawns foes that can only be damaged by your dinky Power Beam and will knock you off the spider ramps to force you to start entire segments from scratch. Samus starts to feel less like she's an unflinching, unstoppable bounty hunter and more like she forgot to turn the kettle off and needs to get home before it catches fire.
The gameplay loops are mostly satisfying, and it is legitimately impressive how Samus's fairly limited arsenal doesn't really feel all that limited. You'll probably get a fair amount of use out of all of your base weapons and visors, with a few notable exceptions: the Power Bombs are fucking worthless as anything other than keys for unlocking new areas; the Super Missile is the only missile-consuming beam power that's worthwhile, which means the other three are irrelevant; the X-Ray Visor only reveals like four different platforms or hidden areas total by the end of the game. The Ice Beam and Plasma Beam feel great to use, though, and the Wave Beam sees a lot of early use as a Space Pirate taser. Missile spamming, while technically a glitch, also makes missiles feel way smoother to blast away at your foes with. Core combat is enjoyable, but frequently wasted on enemies that soak too much damage for their own good.
Of course, this is a "first-person adventure" game and not a first-person shooter, so the acts of traversal are surely where most of the fun lies. And they're fine. Exploration is pretty good, and Samus gets a decent amount of options to clamber around with. There's nothing that's going to blow the game wide open the way that something like the Shinespark or Symphony of the Night's bat transformation manage, but there's enough here to get by. I would have preferred some wackier stuff to really destroy the balance; triple jumps, jet packs, omni-directional dashing, gravity/magnet boots to climb up walls, the works. There's a lot of potential here that feels kind of unrealized. I thought for sure that the Screw Attack was going to make an appearance here at some point, and it just never did. This is probably iterated on more in the sequels, but this feels like less of a holistic package and more like a proof of concept. It's a good proof of concept, mind, but it needs more. It's a dish well-cooked, but one that's lacking seasoning.
As a little aside tangent, this might have two of the worst final bosses I've faced in a game in a long, long time. The titular Metroid Prime is long and boring, and Meta Ridley is long, boring, and unfair. I don't know whose idea it was to put pinpoint shooting mechanics into a game where the lock-on acts as more of a suggestion for where your shots are going than as an actual means of aiming, and the incredibly aggressive aim assist means that you can't hipfire where you want to without your shots magnetically swinging towards the lock-on point. This isn't a problem during normal gameplay, but is absolutely critical on these last two bosses. Ridley's second phase requires you to pump shots into his mouth, but the lock-on seems more content with sending your beams into his forehead; the Metroid Prime requires you to shoot it between the eyes, and the lock-on selects its entire face. It turns these fights into a frustrating, mechanical slog where your controls simply refuse to do what you want them to. If the game just let me free aim without making my shots track to where it thought they ought to go, I would have been fine. Instead, I eat fifteen Ridley charges in a row, uselessly fire my beams next to his face, and then take a death that I absolutely shouldn't have. It's immensely frustrating and retroactively soured the prior ten hours. All of that backtracking for artifacts to face two annoying, sponge-y, stalling bosses that feel like a complete waste of my time? Yeah, I'm being a sore loser, but this just feels bad.
Metroid Prime is a title that, ultimately, I'm very much of two minds on. I like a lot of what's here, and it makes up the bulk of the game, but the bad brings it all down like cement shoes. If this had more time to be made, and if it was helmed by better management who didn't crunch the ever-loving shit out of their employees, I think this had the potential to be at least a full star higher than I'm willing to give it. History has been kinder, obviously, and I'm clearly in the minority of people who are a bit cooler on it than the rest, but Metroid Prime waited right until the final hours of gameplay to really start letting me down. Hopefully every complaint I've had is remedied by the later entries in the series, and they're games that I'll have way less to be critical about. If these complaints aren't addressed there, then I hope that the management behind Retro Studios have shaped up in the past two decades, and can release Metroid Prime 4 without forcing the creative team through a meat grinder to make it happen on time.
Metroid Prime is a very interesting game, in that it's forced to answer the question of how to design a first-person shooter to be played with only one stick in a world where Halo: Combat Evolved exists. It's also a question that I didn't have to reckon with, because I played this with PrimeHack. I felt like that was cheating, considering how the game was very much not designed for you to be moving and shooting as fluidly as you can with keyboard and mouse, but I decided that I didn't care. The recent Metroid Prime Remastered added support for the second stick, meaning that Nintendo's official stance with the benefit of hindsight is that the game should have been played like Halo to begin with. This marks the second time that Metroid Prime has been re-released with an alternate control scheme, which might betray the fact that this had a pretty rocky development history.
You could put Retro Studios in charge of handling Twitter and you probably wouldn't notice a difference, which is as damning of a statement as it sounds on both ends. The company is notorious for being run like shit, regularly dipping into heavy crunch and general project aimlessness that has doubtlessly impacted everything they've made for the worse. Make no mistake: just because a lot of their work is good doesn't mean that it can't be better, nor does it mean that their successes are entirely their own. Metroid Prime only exists as it does because Shigeru Miyamoto got involved — this was back before he became the angel of death who descends upon and stamps flat every interesting choice Nintendo tries to make, but I digress — and told Retro Studios to take everything they had, throw it out, and use the skeleton of one of their original games to make something under the Metroid license.
So, several hundred-hour-long weeks of work later, all condensed down into a little over a year, Metroid Prime releases. And man, can you feel the stitches holding it together about to burst apart once you get to the end.
It's strange, because there are so many little loving touches here that show off how much the team really did care about making this. Flashes of light refract inside of Samus's visor, letting you see a reflection of eyes after lightning strikes or nearby explosions; different types of gaseous materials leave different colors and viscosities of fog on your helmet; equipping the X-Ray Visor lets you see Samus's fingers contorting into different positions within her arm cannon to change beam types; just about every object or enemy can be scanned to let you read a unique piece of history or flavor text for whatever you pointed at. These aren't the hallmarks of something passionless.
In spite of this, though, the game really starts to feel as though it’s padding for time as you get towards the end. The backtracking isn’t that bad — and it is a Metroid game, so I was kind of expecting it — but it’s long, and it’s tedious. The game starts spawning Chozo ghosts in every other room without any cooldown, meaning that you can enter a room, clear the ghosts, step out, step back in, and have them all immediately respawn. They're fairly unique in this behavior, too. It makes it significantly more expedient to just ignore every enemy and run past them whenever possible, with exceptions like when the game spawns foes that can only be damaged by your dinky Power Beam and will knock you off the spider ramps to force you to start entire segments from scratch. Samus starts to feel less like she's an unflinching, unstoppable bounty hunter and more like she forgot to turn the kettle off and needs to get home before it catches fire.
The gameplay loops are mostly satisfying, and it is legitimately impressive how Samus's fairly limited arsenal doesn't really feel all that limited. You'll probably get a fair amount of use out of all of your base weapons and visors, with a few notable exceptions: the Power Bombs are fucking worthless as anything other than keys for unlocking new areas; the Super Missile is the only missile-consuming beam power that's worthwhile, which means the other three are irrelevant; the X-Ray Visor only reveals like four different platforms or hidden areas total by the end of the game. The Ice Beam and Plasma Beam feel great to use, though, and the Wave Beam sees a lot of early use as a Space Pirate taser. Missile spamming, while technically a glitch, also makes missiles feel way smoother to blast away at your foes with. Core combat is enjoyable, but frequently wasted on enemies that soak too much damage for their own good.
Of course, this is a "first-person adventure" game and not a first-person shooter, so the acts of traversal are surely where most of the fun lies. And they're fine. Exploration is pretty good, and Samus gets a decent amount of options to clamber around with. There's nothing that's going to blow the game wide open the way that something like the Shinespark or Symphony of the Night's bat transformation manage, but there's enough here to get by. I would have preferred some wackier stuff to really destroy the balance; triple jumps, jet packs, omni-directional dashing, gravity/magnet boots to climb up walls, the works. There's a lot of potential here that feels kind of unrealized. I thought for sure that the Screw Attack was going to make an appearance here at some point, and it just never did. This is probably iterated on more in the sequels, but this feels like less of a holistic package and more like a proof of concept. It's a good proof of concept, mind, but it needs more. It's a dish well-cooked, but one that's lacking seasoning.
As a little aside tangent, this might have two of the worst final bosses I've faced in a game in a long, long time. The titular Metroid Prime is long and boring, and Meta Ridley is long, boring, and unfair. I don't know whose idea it was to put pinpoint shooting mechanics into a game where the lock-on acts as more of a suggestion for where your shots are going than as an actual means of aiming, and the incredibly aggressive aim assist means that you can't hipfire where you want to without your shots magnetically swinging towards the lock-on point. This isn't a problem during normal gameplay, but is absolutely critical on these last two bosses. Ridley's second phase requires you to pump shots into his mouth, but the lock-on seems more content with sending your beams into his forehead; the Metroid Prime requires you to shoot it between the eyes, and the lock-on selects its entire face. It turns these fights into a frustrating, mechanical slog where your controls simply refuse to do what you want them to. If the game just let me free aim without making my shots track to where it thought they ought to go, I would have been fine. Instead, I eat fifteen Ridley charges in a row, uselessly fire my beams next to his face, and then take a death that I absolutely shouldn't have. It's immensely frustrating and retroactively soured the prior ten hours. All of that backtracking for artifacts to face two annoying, sponge-y, stalling bosses that feel like a complete waste of my time? Yeah, I'm being a sore loser, but this just feels bad.
Metroid Prime is a title that, ultimately, I'm very much of two minds on. I like a lot of what's here, and it makes up the bulk of the game, but the bad brings it all down like cement shoes. If this had more time to be made, and if it was helmed by better management who didn't crunch the ever-loving shit out of their employees, I think this had the potential to be at least a full star higher than I'm willing to give it. History has been kinder, obviously, and I'm clearly in the minority of people who are a bit cooler on it than the rest, but Metroid Prime waited right until the final hours of gameplay to really start letting me down. Hopefully every complaint I've had is remedied by the later entries in the series, and they're games that I'll have way less to be critical about. If these complaints aren't addressed there, then I hope that the management behind Retro Studios have shaped up in the past two decades, and can release Metroid Prime 4 without forcing the creative team through a meat grinder to make it happen on time.