When I first played Metroid Prime, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed playing it. It was cumbersome to control, and most things were conveyed in text, but I liked it. I've not played it since - it's on a very long list of games to get back to in no particular order - but it was one to look out for.
A couple of blinks later and it's time for Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, the sequel that brought multiplayer gaming to the series for the first time. That's a scary thought, knowing the control scheme...
Anyway, what does the single-player content do differently from the first game? Do we get some voicework this time around? Any new mechanics? How much detail can we get from scanning our surroundings? There's only one way to find out.
Frustrations
I am emulating once more, but before I get into the game itself, I have to work out how to navigate the menu. You'd think that would be easy, but it took a while for me to see that it was a 3D menu, where the option I wanted would have to be pointing towards me more than the other choices I had.
What a ridiculous idea. Onto the game.
Of all the Metroid introductions I can remember, Metroid Fusion has the longest, and that's a Game Boy Advance title. The ways you're dumped into the story in these games all seem to be incredibly simple and, arguably, samey. One sentence to set the mission, one spaceship descending to a planet, either on its own accord or through having crashlanded, and one silent protagonist emerging from a hatch in her iconic golden armour.
Sometimes, I wish things were a bit more dramatic, that's all I'm saying. And all I'm doing is reacquainting myself with the funky first-person controls. One analogue stick, a few shoulder buttons to enhance or modify its use... yeah, give me a minute.
Fun Times
The environments on the planet Aether aren't remarkable, but it only takes a doorway opening to reveal that, like Prime before it, there is something special going on with the graphics. The detail might not hold up today, but as a whole, Echoes looks quite nice. The visor and HUD elements help with the immersion, even though they may contribute to a sense of claustrophobia, and the framerate keeps the game moving at a slick pace, although I was getting some emulation hiccups here and there.
Peering down a corridor, I saw a hole. I don't particularly want to go falling into any holes, but I would like to get a better view of what's down there if the controls allow. As I walked closer, I triggered a cutscene. Lovely. That'll show me what's down there, then.
Oh. We're just going to jump down into this hole without my input are we, Samus? I'll remember that.
As it happens, this is where we need to be. Let's investigate.
Further Frustrations
The scanning visor obviously makes a return. You switch over to it with a push of the D-pad, locking onto targets with the left shoulder button, waiting for your target to be scanned, after which a sentence or two of text lets you know whether a door has been unlocked or not. In this case, the protective armour on the door has been removed, allowing you to shoot the locks open. Ok. Couldn't the switch just open the door?
The way you scan isn't slow, per se, but the rewards for doing it are so insignificant in the moment that it renders the task itself into a chore. Walking into a room, I have to equip my scanning visor, use the controls available to me to point in the vague direction of the object I want to scan, scan it (which means waiting for a short loading bar to finish animating), then read a single sentence of backstory that makes no sense, unless I do the same for every other object in the room as well. Pesticide supply at 13%? Excellent. Glad that took me five seconds to find out.
"Five seconds? You're irked by five seconds?" Plus the time to point the camera in the right place. Plus the time to press all the 'advance text' buttons. Plus the time to re-equip the visor, because the A button both skips text and immediately exits the scanning visor...
It's an utter faff, and this is how the backstory is delivered. You want to know the plot? This isn't a movie where someone tells you what's going on. This is a game. Investigate it for yourselves.
Further Fun Times
This first section does a good job of introducing you to your abilities, however, ask it has you hop into a morphball to navigate around these caverns in search of a power source to open the next door.
It just so happens that you are a pretty good energy source for door opening. I had to scan a few things to work that out, but here we are, making progress, slowly, painfully, learning about the fate of these soldiers, I think they are. I forget already. I scanned some of them for their logs. The menus to actually read them had to you clicking on so many options that, once again, by the time I got to learn something, it was inconsequential, and I wish I hadn't.
It'd be easier if they left audio logs scattered around the place like other games. Well, it'd be easier still to just ask them what happened. If they weren't dead, of course.
Hmm. They're not so dead anymore. That's interesting.
Combat in Echoes is like that of Prime. Look, a lot of this game is like that of the first - I'm not seeing a whole lot of difference right now (and I've not played a whole lot of either to even know of the differences). You move around with the left stick, shoot with the A-button (or with your missiles on the Y-button), and for a much better time, get someone locked on with the Left shoulder button and start circle-strafing them.
It's awkward to get to grips with when you come from a background of two analogue sticks, or keyboard and mouse, but at least you're usually allowed to set yourself up or react competently. It's not like you have to have absolute precision in getting headshots, for example. Just lock on and fire away. With the ability to charge up your blaster for a more powerful burst, you'll have no problems. Just move and shoot.
A few reanimated marines later and the caverns open up. We catch a glimpse of a shadowy figure, alarmingly armoured like ourselves, staring into a black and purple orb of some description.
Everything about it is wrong. Everything points towards this being a bad thing. The figure walks into it and disappears. What's going on here?
Dimensional anomaly, you say? I think we better just walk right into one of those.
And that's the story of how I lost all of my cool gear and abilities. Funs over. Your toys have been taken back. Want to play with them again? You bet.
Through some light environmental puzzle-solving and some bug squashing, we work our way to the Temple Grounds. The surface of Aether doesn't look too bad if you ignore the purple lightning storms raging across the entire atmosphere. It's dusty and devoid of peaceful lifeforms, but it's a place I can see myself exploring more of.
Getting lost is a common problem with these games, especially the Prime titles, despite them being in three dimensions and with a fully rotatable map. Backtracking will also poke its head out at some point, but until then, playing through Echoes is like following the breadcrumbs. Once you find some, at least.
After opening up a traversable route through the temple grounds, and dispatching a few more foes, we find ourselves at the marines' ship, surrounded by the dead. What happened here? We were supposed to find you and lend our assistance. We seem to be quite late.
Further Frustrations
There were definitely some human voices in that cutscene... It's a shame I had to hit the menus, then logbook, then lore, then trooper logs, then Force One, then Captain A. Exeter to learn more. And by 'more' I mean 'another paragraph'.
I'm unpicking the story a little too slowly for my liking. I'm exploring new areas and interacting with the environment in some interesting ways, but it's so choppy and self-contained at the minute that it feels a little 'bleh'. It's not a story that I'm following, but a series of connected micro-challenges. Maybe I'm overthinking it.
After grabbing some missiles and morphing into a cannonball a couple of times, I found a save room and called time on Metroid Prime 2.
Final Word
But, just like Metroid Prime, although admittedly a little less so, I am intrigued by it and want to see more, despite its flaws.
It isn't the most straightforward game in the world to control. Learning anything about your surroundings is a hassle. Having to root yourself to the floor just to look up or down isn't a mechanic that I want to see too much of, but even with all these grumbles, I want to play more of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes.
I'd probably play the first game through before I do, though I don't think there's a whole lot of need to do so, plotwise. I haven't discovered much, but I think it's all new and doesn't rely on prior knowledge. Something about alternate dimensions or shadow realms maybe, I'm not sure. It was all the rage on Nintendo consoles of the day, purple lighting, black smoke, and a doppelganger.
I'm not sure why both titles have to be on the 1001 list. The writeup even goes into detail about its flaws, and from what I've read, the multiplayer offering wasn't anything to write home about, save for the fact that it was a series first.
I guess if you like Metroid Prime, you'll probably like Echoes as well. You really do have to play them to know for sure though, what with their weird control schemes. Even with my gripes, I like the games enough to want to know more and see them, if not play them personally. That's got to say something.
Says something about me, at least. I should be a reviewer of the Let's Play sometimes, let alone the games themselves.
Fun Facts
Inspiration for the shadowy figure came from Metroid: Zero Mission. Spoilers for that game I want to play more of, I guess. Good job, Wikipedia...
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, developed by Retro Studios, Nintendo, first released in 2004.
Version played: GameCube, 2004, via emulation.