Hello and welcome to Under the Super Scope where we take a look at someof the most famous
games of all time and try to work out if they still hold up today.
And this week we’re looking down the visor at what’s often considered not only the
best game on the GameCube but also one of the very best games this medium has to offer.
Wave Race: Blue Storm – Metroid prime.
Up until Samus Returns it may have felt rough to be a Metroid fan but it’s kind of always
been this way.
Super Metroid may have captured the hearts and money of many but while Mario, Link and
Donkey Kong all went 3D on the N64 – the galactic bounty hunter was no where to be
seen.
Between 1994 and 2002 not a single Metroid game saw the light of day.
This made it all the more special when not only did we see the continuation of the core
series but also one of the most ambitious jumps any franchise has made into 3D both
on the same day.
Metroid Prime has since been heralded as one of the most atmospheric games to ever hit
the scene, but is it deserving of that pedigree?
Afterall something must have made it special for something so bold and new to stand above
the tride and true.
First up for this analysis we played through Metroid Prime using the Trilogy compilation
on Wii.
This utilises the same IR aiming found in Metroid Prime 3 and I personally find it to
be the ideal way to play through both Prime and Prime 2.
The GameCube controls are built solely around a single stick in a similar way to Goldeneye,
and while this allows you to quickly Switch between beams and visors using the Dpad and
C Stick, I find pointing far more comfortable myself.
It’s all a matter of preference but those used to modern dual stick setups will likely
lean towards the Wii remote and nunchuk.
To boil it down to a basic description; the Metroid series is one where you explore alien
planets in large, non linear environments.
You’ll find areas and paths you can’t reach until you obtain the correct item.
So as Samus grows, the world does too.
This constant loop of progression produces such a gratifying feeling and with the simplicity
of a single dimension, navigation is as straight forward as going left, right, downwards and
upwards.
The game puts this to great use immediately in both Metroid and Super Metroid where if
you try running right as you would in most games, you’re met with some kind of road
block.
Instead you’re encouraged to do the unthinkable and go left in a sidescroller.
With just these four directions though Super Metroid is able to convey such a strong sense
of isolation and dread – so how do you even begin to make a world where you can go in
360 directions?
Look no further than Metroid Prime.
While the prior games certainly built convincing worlds, many elements weren’t exactly grounded
in realism.
How many long vertical rooms can you count with random floating platforms scattered about
in the original Metroid?
How many can you count in Prime?
To be remotely approachable, every room in Metroid Prime needs to be visually distinct
and contextually make sense.
Retro Studios crafted a real world in Prime, not just a bunch of video game rooms.
I mean look no further than the platforms.
This is actually something Retro Studios excel at; in Donkey Kong Returns and Tropical Freeze,
every single platform is stitched into the environment and this process of world design
started with their first Nintendo game, Metroid Prime.
With its alien setting, Metroid’s able to take some liberties but with Tallon IV being
such a varied world, these liberties only apply to certain locations.
In the Chozo Ruins nothing floats.
Platforms are tethered together with ropes and chains or they’re made up of the crumbled
remains of what were once thriving structures.
The Magma Caverns take on natural formations with barely standing platforms suspended in
pools of lava until you get further into the caverns and towards the entrance to Phendrana
Drifts.
Suddenly we start to see their operations and a large manmade structure houses an elevator
between the two locations.
Space Pirate activity is all over Phendrana Drifts even if it may not seem to be at first.
The platforms here are far more technically advanced with thrusters propelling them upwards.
Platforms only mystically float in one lone location and that’s the stairwell leading
to Metroid Prime.
And if there’s anywhere to not question suspended platforms floating in the air, it’s
the leadup to the strongest alien force on the planet.
A huge part of the atmosphere behind Metroid Prime can be attributed to its strong sense
of context.
Everything in this world makes sense and chances are if you ever wonder what something is,
you can find out by scanning it.
Samus’ scanner serves multiple purposes but more than anything it lets you truly connect
with your surroundings.
You can read every single monitor and figure out just what the space pirates are experimenting
on, you can scan any enemy and find out what they are and their weakness and you can look
at just about any object and find out why it’s there and what it does.
So those moments in the 2D games where you’re not sure what to bomb or what walls you can
blow up and so you roll along bombing everything, aren’t here in Metroid Prime simply because
you can flip on your scanner and see the weaknesses for yourself.
There aren’t tutorial popups saying “If you shoot this enemy from the back, it’ll
die!”
simply because again, you can scan for yourself.
The game doesn’t need a cut scene with Samus’ monologue about the Space Pirates experimenting
with Phazon because again you can scan the environments and find out for yourself.
When there’s such a hands off approach to world building, story telling and mechanical
teachings, the sense of immersion and mastery grows exponentially and in truth Metroid Prime
isn’t even that hands off, all of these tropes are still here, only you’re the one
executing them.
The pure ambition of taking Metroid and rethinking it in 3D space was not only special at the
time but it’s still incredibly special now.
We see hundreds of games trying to capture the excellence of Super Metroid but replicating
it in 3D is not only a massive task but it’s one few games seem to even attempt.
Outside of the Prime Trilogy and that game we don’t talk about, the Batman Arkham games
and the Souls series are some of the only 3D Metroid like games that come to mind.
That’s obviously not because Prime wasn’t successful, it just speaks to how difficult
it is to make a 3D Metroid game and Retro Studios nailed it the first time.
The sequels may have provided interesting takes and twists but in terms of pure consistency
and intelligence, it’s hard to beat the first Metroid Prime.
When looking at how to translate this complex labyrinth design into another dimension, it’s
clear Retro Studios examined Super Metroid closely.
There’s a lot of similar beats particularly in the first 20 minutes.
See the original Metroid just throws you into the world and says go.
And that’s fine for how simple that game but Super Metroid and Prime both have a completely
separate starting area solely intended for the player to find their bearings.
Neither of these areas have diverging paths and so the exploration part of Metroid is
temporarily put on hold but you’ll certainly find a few similarities between the two:
Both are brief areas that teach movement, platforming, combat, tell subtle story elements
and then climax with a self destruct sequence that encourages you to get a grip of all those
elements under pressure.
It’s the same template but Prime of course has some of its own twists.
Immediately after the great first person transition sequence in gaming it isn’t platforming
or shooting you have to master, it’s scanning.
Scanning is such a huge part of Prime and throughout this short area you’ll be forced
to use it on a variety of doors and panels with the hope that you’ll extrapolate that
task and use it on just about everything else.
Another technique Prime incorporates is what I call a late game test drive.
Samus starts off with a variety of abilities like the morph ball which allows players to
previous Metroid games to feel a sense of familiarity and also gives players a preview
of how strong you’ll become down the line.
Samus of course loses all these powers right at the end of the segment and so when you
finally crash on Talon IV, you’re motivated to get back to the state you were in, you
were given a taste of the power you can wield and to be stripped away to a venerable state
makes the sense of isolation and motivation even stronger.
Retrieving your abilities is actually more rapid than you may think however and it soon
gets to the point where Samus’ gear is more impressive than the opening and so now you’re
not trying to get back to where you familiar, you’re trying to see just how far you can
go.
The first person perspective changes everything and much like Ocarina of Time, items and movement
had to be restructured to work in this new viewpoint.
In fact just like Ocarina, the perspective changes from first person to third person
whenever you enter the morph ball.
Such an iconic attribute of Samus couldn’t go amiss and in 3D I actually feel the morphball
is more organic than ever.
While in 2D, morph ball tunnels are either impossible to miss or incredibly vague but
in 3D you have areas like this where it literally feels like you’re squeezing through part
of the environment.
It’s not often you see Samus in the third person but these transitional glimpses help
keep the character of Samus intact.
Her reactions when she initially lands on Tallon IV conveys what are likely the same
thoughts of the player “where am I, where do I go?”
Samus is human and this isn’t something the series often goes out of its way to remind
you of but I think Prime finds the greatest balance.
Throughout most of the game you are Samus, looking down the visor through her own eyes
and usually in the midst of a firefight or areas with explosives you’ll catch the reflection
of a woman.
As robotic and aggressive as Samus is, the game will always nudge you to remember that
there’s a human behind that mask.
This is way more effective than Samus taking off her suit at the end of the game or constant
monologues.
In fact, Super Smash Brothers Ultimate pulls off a similar trick in the Ridley trailer
where this brief look through Samus’s visor shows her breathing in and then preparing
for the entrance of Ridley.
This one intake of breath sums up their relationship better than any other instance of Metroid
storytelling and it feels completely influenced by Metroid Prime’s approach.
Of course it’s a game of showing rather than telling and these flashes are so powerful
in reinforcing that.
First person characters are usually blank slates but with just an arm canon, Samus has
just about as much character as any other video game hero.
We get a longer look at Samus when riding in elevators where we again see a somewhat
lost character taking in her surroundings and what’s interesting is this is actually
a load screen.
In Metroid Prime you never leave the world as this is 100% a game about maintaining atmosphere
and to cut away to blank screens that shout “NOW LOADING” completely demolish that.
Instead what happens is this and doors won’t always open straight away but it somewhat
works, especially in the lower tech areas of the game.
When developing Metroid Prime, Miyamoto suggested to the team, what if Samus had a bug head.
And by this he was referring to the ability of swapping how she can perceive her surroundings.
I believe this became the multiple visors.
In addition to scanning, there’s also a thermal visor and an X Ray visor and what
I love about these two is it’s very rare that the game requires you to use them and
so when you feel you need to seek their benefits, that’s when it’s time to flip over to
them.
Like as soon as you get the thermal visor, the lights dim and you’re now in pitch darkness.
This of course incentivises you to use this new visor to navigate in the darkness.
Outside of this building though, there aren’t very many other areas like this.
And that’s why this room here in the Phazon Mines rewards your mastery of Samus’ mechanics.
You almost instinctively swap over to the thermal visor here despite this rarely being
something that’s reinforced.
In fact in the late game you’re juggling so many moves; the morph ball, the grapple,
different beams, different visors but because of their gradual build up and constant iterative
nature, it never feels overbearing.
Afterall no matter what power you’re using, every action requires you to move and point.
Even platforming works in first person which is something very few other games have tried.
Now I’m not a fan of double jumps as I’m sure we’ll get into more in the future but
Metroid Prime is one of the very few exceptions.
First up, the second jump is a key to progression much like any item.
You’ll find areas you can’t quite reach with your standard jump and jumping again
is the barrier to entry.
More importantly though, You can actually judge your depth without seeing your character
model which is a very tricky thing to do.
There are later segments with lots of verticality which would be hell to navigate with the default
jump.
I think there’s a reason we’ve never seen this powerup in 2D though and it’s purely
to do with perspective.
Sure, there’s the space jump which Prime 3 also has but the properties aren’t quite
the same.
There was a lot of doubt to whether Metroid could successfully transition to first person
and looking back on it, it’s more of a question of why wouldn’t it.
Retro nailed every aspect of the perspective and while we saw certain elements cut from
the 2D games like being able to sprint, they were worthy reductions.
For a game about immersion, nothing is more immersive than being behind the visor of the
character.
What about the other aspects of the 3D jump though?
Well a lot was actually changed in this approach.
Level couldn’t just consist of vertical hallways with doors on each side anymore,
we end up with something a little more linear in how it’s constructed but with the same
non linear progression.
So rooms in Metroid Prime don’t branch out quite to the same extent as they do in 2D
games and what we often get instead are small hubs.
Large rooms that house different segments of a world however once you’re on a path,
it’s uncommon for it to then split into even more rooms.
This has its pros and cons.
The pro?
You can actually navigate without wanting to rip your hair out.
If they designed a 3D game just like the 2D ones then it would be so overwhelming and
you actually have a really intelligent map which again has been reworked for 3D.
You can rotate it around to get a better sense of verticality or just work out exactly where
rooms in in relation to you.
The game will even nudge you in the right direction if you don’t make any progress
for a while which is my favourite take on waypoints.
The con?
The most linear areas are a slog for backtracking.
I’m talking areas like the Space Pirate Research center in Phendrana Drift and most
of the Phazon Mines.
Your initial run through both of these segments don’t encourage a great deal of backtracking
but it’s the end of the game where it becomes a real issue.
I think 90% of Metroid Prime is near flawless and if it weren’t for the Chozo Artefacts,
we would have something on the calibre of A Link to the Past and Resident Evil 4.
Let’s look at this as if it were your first playthrough.
You’ve gone through all the areas, got all the powerups and you’re now being pointed
to this one seemingly final area.
Only to have 12 pillars stand in your way all with hints.
Quite similar to Wind Waker’s tri force quest, Metroid Prime prevents you from entering
the final boss until you explore every part of the world again and track down 12 artefacts.
Some are easy and you may have even found a few over the course of your adventure but
a chunk require backtracking to areas with items you didn’t have while you were initially
there.
In themselves, the artefacts aren’t a bad idea.
It kind of gives you this feeling of mastery when you’re given a hint and immediately
know just where to go.
It’s the navigation of it all that gets frustrating though.
For instance one artefact is in the Talon overworld, only problem?
It’s in a segment that requires you to dip in and out of other areas to get to, this
is despite there being an easily accessible portion right below it but it’s just out
of reach.
So instead of simply running over to it, you have to jump through a ton of hoops.
And this is true for a lot of the artefacts.
It gets to the point where it’s not a fun scavenger quest but just feels like padding.
If they made it so you only needed 8 artefacts out of 12?
It might have been a lot less tedious but as it is, the artefacts are an annoying gate
that stop you from finishing the game.
It completely demolishes the momentum and the pacing suffers severely.
If these were a side quest of sort I think I might actually like them but on both a first
and repeat playthrough, they’re just tedious to me.
The late game isn’t always friendly to explore either with Chozo Ghosts appearing all over
the Chozo Ruins which get old pretty fast.
The first time seeing them it’s an indicator that you’re going the right way.
I mean afterall Metroid Prime populates areas with new enemies to do this all the time.
Magma Caverns get Space Pirates, Phazon Mines get Metroids and Chozo Ruins get Chozo Ghosts
but they take a long time to defeat, they dull the area and they have very loud music.
Despite not ending on a high note, the journey and sheer effort behind Metroid Prime is something
that can’t be undermined and the lack of games like it is just evidence of this.
There are elements of Metroid that work better in 2D and likewise some elements work better
in 3D but despite the end game bump, Retro Studios got everything right on their first
try and while the I appreciate the sequels and how they expand on these mechanics, I
don’t think they come close to the sheer amazement of Metroid Prime.
The art still holds up 16 years later, the music is sometimes soft, sometimes erratic
but always mesmerising and every single element is dripping in context from both a story and
visual perspective.
Games like Metroid Prime just don’t come along very often and if Prime 4 is even a
slither as good as this then we’re in for a wild ride.
But how can we talk about Metroid Prime without mentioning Prime Pinball!
Now Prime reimagined Metroid in a 3D world but Prime Pinball reimagines that reimaging
as a pinball table.
Just wow.
So what do you think of Metroid Prime?
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more from Under the Super Scope and everything else gaming too.
Until next time, bye!