no schmovement + linear + cringe + ratio

Prime takes its series to new heights in atmosphere, environmental storytelling and polish, but also sacrifices a little too much of Super Metroid's sweaty energy and genius level design structure for my tastes. Morphballing over bumpy terrain, side-stepping around Space Pirates and double jumping between platforms is fun, but is it as fun as it could be when every room is a tiny self-contained box? It sucks ass how you can get the Ice Beam, see eight Ice Beam doors on your map and then realize that seven of them are dead ends.

The wide-eyed little gamer in me hopes Retro will take inspiration from more loosey-goosey schmovement sandbox FPS games like Quake, Titanfall 2 or Halo Infinite for Prime 4. As it stands though, I can appreciate this more rigid Ocarina of Time-style take on Metroid for what it is!

A phenomenal title and I can easily see why it's still considered a landmark of video games: it really does feel like Super Metroid but in a 3D environment. The abilities feel incredibly satisfying to use and there's so much to see and explore, with tons of great lore should you choose to go down that avenue. The atmosphere thanks to the excellent soundtrack and visuals is also incredible, just getting to explore this once vibrant and now desolate yet peaceful planet now being torn apart by pirates. I could easily see myself playing this again in a year, which rarely ever happens even with games I adore. I'd also highly recommend PrimeHack, as this game feels right at home as a first person shooter. All in all, this absolutely lived up to the praise and is definitely one of my favorite games of recent times.

Uma das maiores injustiças do mundo foi Metroid Prime não ter inspirado jogos da mesma forma que Super Metroid inspirou.

Super Metroid não criou o estilo de progressão que hoje chamados de Metroidvania, mas trabalhou ele de uma maneira fenomenal que mostrou a todos do quê esse estilo realmente é capaz - e o quão divertido ele consegue ser.
Metroid Prime fez exatamente a mesma coisa: pegou aquele estilo de progressão já conhecido da série (e que, nesse momento, já havia sido utilizado em outras séries e jogos) e trabalhou ele como sendo um jogo FPS. Lendo assim, pode não parecer grande coisa, mas a forma que o gênero Metroidvania foi adaptado para 3D em primeira pessoa no Metroid Prime foi PERFEITO!!! E dizer isso não é exagero! Parece que você tá jogando um Metroid 2D só que em um universo 3D primeira pessoa. É EXATAMENTE O MESMO JOGO, SÓ QUE EM UM FPS - O QUE É ASSUSTADORAMENTE DESCONCERTANTE, PORQUE É UMA MUDANÇA RADICAL DEMAIS E MESMO ASSIM CONSEGUIRAM ADAPTAR DE UMA MANEIRA PERFEITA DEMAIS!

E é aí que entra a parte que me entristece MUITO:
Enquanto Super Metroid se tornou uma base do gênero Metroidvania e é usado até hoje para moldar inúmeros títulos, Metroid Prime, que foi um trabalho tão revolucionário no gênero quanto foi o Super, manteve seu estilo isolado à apenas a série Metroid Prime.
Sim, é óbvio que montar um metroidvania 3D dá muuuuito mais trabalho do que um 2D (que já é bem complicado de fazer), mas não é estranho que não tenha absolutamente NENHUM outro jogo até hoje que tentou fazer o que o Metroid Prime fez? Pelo menos eu, quando pesquisei, não achei nenhum. E ISSO ME DEIXA DE CARA!!! COMO É POSSÍVEL QUE NINGUÉM TENHA TENTADO COPIAR A RECEITA DE UM JOGO TÃO BOM??? AINDA MAIS UM JOGO QUE SOUBE DEIXAR ESSA RECEITA TÃO EVIDENTE E BEM DETALHADA NA GAMEPLAY!

Parando para pensar agora, as séries Metroid e The Legend of Zelda tem muita coisa em comum, e essa é mais uma delas: Ter tido um jogo 2D que retrabalhou magnificamente um estilo e se tornou modelo para inúmeros jogos (Super Metroid e A Link to the Past) e depois ter se adaptado fantasticamente bem ao universo 3D (Metroid Prime e Ocarina of Time) mas não ter nenhum ou quase nenhum jogo feito com base nesse título 3D...

...Mas é.
Meio que eu acabei usando essa análise mais pra desabafar a minha indignação... Porém realço que toda essa minha pagação de pau com o Metroid Prime não é sem motivo: esse jogo é uma obra-prima!

Caso você queira jogar, eu recomendo usar o PrimeHack, que é um mod feito no emulador Dolphin pra jogar Metroid Prime Trilogy com mouse e teclado - e, acreditem, É MUITO BOM E FUNCIONA QUE É UMA BELEZA!

E antes de finalizar, se vocês souberem de jogos que sejam similares a vibe do Metroid Prime ou Ocarina of Time, POR FAVOR ME DIGAM!
Eu amo MUITO esses jogos véi! Então qualquer coisinha que se pareça com eles eu to aceitando!

Ever felt nostalgic for something you’ve never played before? Okay, maybe that’s not entirely true, I had a neighbour with a gamecube growing up, one of the things we played was Metroid Prime (others included Sonic Adventure 2 and Super Mario Sunshine). Never saw past the Parasite Queen, but that whole intro level on the frigate stayed locked in my brain. Now that I’ve played it through in it’s entirety, all I have to say is god damn. The world, the atmosphere, the music, all just evokes something in me. The combat, the platforming, the discovery, the enemies and bosses, the puzzles, I love it all. I love the bluntness of its setup, how Samus just spots Ridley, has those Kill Bill sirens go off in her head, decides “I’m gonna kill you” and everything just escalates from there. Most of all I just love how much respect it has for the player’s intelligence, like Super Metroid it trusts you to pick up on it’s subtle ques. It doesn’t patronize you with objective markers and walls of tutorial text, just has faith that your memory and lets your curiosity will guide you in the right direction. Even the artifact hunt towards the end I didn’t mind. I found a few of them by accident throughout the game, the rest were all placed in a way that I could conveniently collect them all in one consistent loop around the map. Only mild complaint is that it’s kind of finicky to aim on slopped surfaces with the gamecube original controls, but they otherwise hold up well, not to mention with the remaster comes the option for dual stick aiming so you can avoid it altogether.

Honestly a near perfect video game, a definite new favourite.

This is right up there with Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle for "Franchise entries that everyone thought would be terrible but turned out amazing".

When news broke that a western studio was developing a Metroid FPS, fans were beside themselves. A younger internet was littered with concerns that Super Metroid's long-awaited successor would have more in common with Goldeneye than Samus' three previous outings. Shortly afterwards, a clarification from Retro Studios dubbed the game a "First-Person Adventure", which led to even more confusion. Metroid fans waited 8 years for a follow-up to Super Metroid, and this was NOT how they expected it to go.

But the biggest surprise of all came in November of 2002: The game was actually fantastic.

When I finally saw Metroid Prime in person, I didn't realize what it was. I came into a room where my cousins had set up their GameCube, and I was amazed by the beautiful 3D alien world they were exploring. When I asked what game it was, my eyes widened. This was the Metroid FPS? This was the malicious FPS come to ruin a beloved-yet-niche IP?

Beyond being a good lesson for young, impressionable Alex about the dangers of judging something before experiencing it, that moment made me a Metroid fan for life. I soon afterwards sold all of my Pokemon cards to the only kid at school who was willing to buy (he gave me like $45 in quarters, a deal I still regret) in order to buy a GameCube of my own as soon as possible. I borrowed a copy of Metroid Prime from a friend after their parents got it for them, and began my own journey across Tallon IV.

In the years since, I've replayed Metroid Prime a handful of times. There are a few things that stick out to me today.

1.) This is one of the most beautiful games on the GameCube. The sixth console generation was barely taking the training wheels off of 3D, and Metroid Prime came right out the gate with visuals that wouldn't be topped by 99% of games for the remaining 3-4 years of that generation. I'm consistently impressed by what Retro did so early in the GC's lifespan.

2.) The method of storytelling is brilliant. If you want, you can blaze through the game without reading a thing. But if you're more interested in what's going on with Space Pirates, Phazon, and the Metroids themselves, you can scan all sorts of things, adding entries to your log which you can study at any time. These scattered bits of information amount to some seriously compelling lore, and the way they're never forced on you makes it all the more enjoyable. Instead of skipping cutscenes filled with dialogue, you choose to go out of your way to study up on the world around you. That choice makes you value the information more, feelings as though you discovered it rather than having it shoved in your face.

3.) The music is flawless. That's it.

4.) I don't mind the backtracking as much as I thought I would. It doesn't take too long, and because the world is so interesting and engaging, I don't mind taking trips back and forth across it.

5.) As much as I dislike the trope of "Start with all your upgrades, then OH NO they're taken away!!" it really is satisfying to get them back in MP. Reclaiming abilities you used earlier makes them feel more precious and necessary. When you get the grapple beam, for example, I didn't think "Okay cool, a new ability", I thought "Finally! I knew I needed to get that back, I'm so glad I found it!"

6.) The Phazon Suit might be the coolest thing I've ever seen.

I keep feeling the urge to replay this game, but I'm holding out for that rumored Metroid Prime Trilogy HD to come out on Switch.

...any day now.

Fine enough for what it is but it suffers from issues that would not have arisen had they been less faithful to Super Metroid and the template established in 2D. Endless backtracking, movement powers that are disempowering when used to motivate vertical play without an easily utilised free look camera, enemy design that doesn't support combat progression or world hostility, lack of sense of place similarly due to a lesser ability to survey it. Weapons feel wet, Samus can barely dodge attacks, and the boss design is pretty atrocious. I get it was a biggish deal but we had better shooters, and better console shooters, that knew how to compliment their backtracking without exciting terrain traversal as a slog; Prime, unlike Super, as a world just isn't enlivened with multivariate incidence. But who knows, maybe there would be no Dark Souls 1 without it, so minor pass.

Astonishing for its presentation as well as its creative eye for adaptation. I don't believe in essence, but Retro certainly managed to capture the elements that make Metroid appealing when compared to other platformers. The genre switch here really doesn't feel at odds with what came before, and I think that's commendable. It is a tad more limiting, with progression less reliant on an expanding move-set and more on abilities which act as keys. Still, it's an impressively designed title that feels purely Metroid.

It's not perfect though, and I'm going to centre on flaws now because at this point everyone knows why this game rocks.

The map design could have used more interconnectivity, with a few too many trips though the linear Magmoor Caverns to and from more interesting destinations. The individual areas are not just segmented, which is fine in principle, but are also completely environmentally disparate. Dark Souls rose the standard for this, so much so that Dark Souls II doing something not unlike Prime was met with derision; is the elevator from Earthen Peak to Iron Keep really all that more offensive than Magmoor Caverns to Phendrana Drifts?

There's a few issues with how enemies are handled. Bosses suffer from extended lengths and too often defer to a rigid and repetitive formula. Enemies respawn frequently, and while this is usually understandable, I think some should have stayed down. Chozo ghosts completely lose their lustre after a while, and make backtracking more irritating than it should be.

Great game! A few missteps here and there which we can see more clearly in retrospect, but still. Unbelievable for 2002, still looks great today. Play it for sure if you get a chance, both Gamecube and Trilogy version are great.

Apart from a couple of dodgy bosses, this is a solid Metroid. Delves a good bit into the lore which I'm always interested in, and translates so well to 3D.

The first person perspective combined with the Wiimote and Nunchuck almost feels like some kind of precursor to VR games. It's brilliant.

Samus kills aliens, becomes a ball, and drinks cold beer.

After Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda, Nintendo translated the Metroid series into the third dimension. And just like with Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time, Nintendo created a milestone. Trying to convert a 2D franchise into 3D can easily go wrong, especially with a game concept like Metroid, which works perfectly in 2D. That’s why Metroid Prime is even more astonishing. The transition was a tremendous success.

In terms of immersion, this game was able to leave the 2D titles behind. The feeling of isolation and the ominous atmosphere of a game like Super Metroid reached its climax in Metroid Prime. The first-person perspective puts you right into the action and effects such as raindrops on the visor or malfunctions of the HUD shown on the inside of the helmet make the world feel authentic.

The world consists of beautiful ice landscapes, ancient ruins, rainy jungles, laboratories and lava caves, all accompanied by the best soundtrack the GameCube era ever had to offer.

+this and re4 make gcn the go-to for best-of-all-time tank controls. obviously it's cheating a little bit here since you can toggle into strafing at any time, but I think it accurately captures the feeling of super metroid: just a wee bit clunky, but satisfying in its own way.
+another gcn-era relic: cutting-edge visuals on nintendo hardware. part of this is because of smart constraints on room sizes, but even bigger areas never drop in quality. runs at a smooth 60fps too!
+incorporating samus' visor into the UI is done so effectively and effortlessly that I'm surprised more developers haven't keyed in on this. it helps establish her sense of identity even without dialogue, and the reflection of her face in the glass is always stunning.
+having the temple + artifacts open from the get-go was a really smart choice. I didn't run into that many before the endgame but whenever I found one early I felt rather accomplished!
+hint system was honestly a smart move here. there's a lot of jumping back and forth between regions, and with the map not giving a lot of insight into where various "locks" are placed, it was good to get some insight into next steps.
+the morph ball translates so perfectly into 3D that I'm shocked they got it first try. legitimately fun to roll around in it, and including bomb jumping puzzles was a neat addition.
+environmental variety is absolutely on point, especially when it comes to memorable landmarks. I suppose part of this is because about half of the rooms in the game are loading hallways (god did my wii sound like it was choking playing this) but even revisiting old areas I never felt lost or confused at my location. each chunk of each region realizes an internal narrative and relation to the world around it that really hits the mark, especailly in phendrana drifts.
+I was surprised at how well the platforming was handled in this game, especially since the gravity jump boots are obtained so early on. given how constrainted the field of view is it's surprising how natural it feels. being able to switch to strafing in the air is also a clever moves on the devs part.
+scanning is such an inspired addition, both in that it's highly optional and yet allows for easy story-telling potential without moving into proper cutscene territory. the space pirates' commitment to methodical and structured evil is a little too on-the-nose, but their legitimate fear of samus and their own observations of tallon iv yield a surprising amount of depth. being able to scan enemies to quickly understand their behavior is an excellent strategy for a game like this as well.
+overall the first half is meticulously crafted and perfectly captures metroid's solemn exploration in 3D. gaining insight into the death of the chozo's civilization, wandering their ruins, solving small puzzles, and encountering each new area without significant threat is almost relaxing, which I rarely experience in first-person shooters.
+I honestly prefer having puzzles for most obtainable items rather than the more common movement-based challenges of the 2D series. there are so many unique contraptions around tallon iv that encourage creativity and experimentation!
+frigate orpheon is an all-time classic game opening, and such a smart way to acclimate the player to the controls before their kit is wrested away from them.

-a defining part of metroid to me is the power scaling: the annoyances you'd face traversing through hallways of creepy-crawlies melts away when you can tear through whole areas with the space jump and the screw attack. enemies are temporary obstacles in most cases to avoid backtracking from becoming stale. here, the game will throw stronger enemies into certain rooms as the game progresses, and you lack the same sort of all-encompassing firepower as in previous iterations. makes backtracking more of an annoyance than it should be.
-beam-switching is a core mechanic in the second half of the game and I hate it. if switching were snappier I would be less opposed, but it's cumbersome and sometimes unresponsive. it also inordinately unbalances enemies: ice pirates are trivial to eliminate since they can be frozen, but the regular beam pirates only take damage from your standard pea shooter, and thus are much harder to deal with. having to switch them constantly for doors is a bit of a hassle too.
-power bombs are effectively useless outside of opening doors. so much wasted potential. in the room right after you get them there's four security turrets that seem to imply the power bomb would be useful, and yet they aren't!
-late game pacing really suffers. there's a point where you get the x-ray visor, the power bomb, and the grapple hook back-to-back, and it makes it difficult to tell what should be used next. this is esp an issue for x-ray visor: there really needed to be a way to tell when it should be used to find hidden platforms (looking at you metroid quarantine A)
-having to return to the temple to get more hints for the artifact hunt is unquestionably a timewaster. making a full round trip to collect everything would have been much more satisfying than having to do it in two.
-the map really needed better visualization of where various locks are. there's too much to commit to memory!
-x-ray visor as a whole... was this supposed to be used to locate hidden items? because for the most part walking around with it on made me feel like I couldn't see two feet in front of my face. this is something that also should have been included in the map! tho I got 66% which is def better than some of the other metroid games I've played.
-boost ball sucks to use imo. takes a while to charge, and the game is really picky in the half-pipes about not having your thumb on the analog stick when you release the boost
-strafe-dash feels unresponsive. imo it comes down to controller limitation, since having it overide strafe-jumping is annoying and it would have made a lot more sense with a dedicated button (making it accessible without lock-on).
-not a single good boss. every single one far wears out its welcome, lacks moveset variety, and forces the player to wait around to open its weak point. ridley may be the most offensive one to me: he's always been a total slugfest, fire off your weaponry as fast as possible and dodge when you can. here I felt like I spent so much of his fight waiting for his mouth to be open or for him to fly closer to the ground.
-the special moves for each beam type are not very useful in combat given how easily they can miss and how long they take to charge up. wavebuster I at least used on wave pirates occasionally (even though they chug missiles like crazy), but I never used the ones for ice or plasma in a practical setting.

I wasn't sure how to structure this review initially... to tell the truth, I picked this game up much more seriously after a series of anxiety attacks led me to quit smoking weed cold turkey. this has been my rock as I've dealt with the withdrawal symptoms, and my daily accompaniment to relax the onset of anxiety, restlessness, insomnia, and constant aches and pains. it's also a game that is deeply nostalgic to me, as my dad played this series regularly when I was a child, and I often would poke around each one myself. I was never adept enough as a child to progress much further than chozo ruins, but returning now made me feel at home, able to absorb myself into samus as we push through a vast wilderness filled with quiet contemplation.

the above is why the second half saddens me so much: every qualm and quibble I have came into such sharp focus as the finish line drew near. it doesn't surprise me -- it's in a long line of obviously-rushed nintendo titles from the GCN era, and retro especially is known for their egregiously poor work policies and crunch -- but it left such a sour taste in my mouth that I can't help but document all of the annoyance and frustration it heaped upon me as I've physically recovered. I can hardly call it a bad game, but it's a shame that the joy this game brought me in the last week has been blotted out by other aspects that perhaps didn't need to overshadow how quintessential the start was. regardless, finally having this game behind me feels like a bit of a turning point, and I can't help but feel almost giddy having two more of these to play in the upcoming months.

Sure, present-day me has some qualms over the design and such, but Metroid Prime still stands as one of the AAA game industry's great achievements in pushing the FPS to new and interesting spaces. And it's a successful collaboration between an American studio and Nintendo, which is interesting. I love the relatively short 15-hour length, too, and the way the game's world feels just nonlinear enough that you're surprised when you can go to new depths, and it was always cool how well the scan visor slotted into the whole experience.

As for my design issues... I guess they're fairly minor, the game is strong overall. The musical and art direction are still amazing, over 20 years on!

The combat in MP is fun, when considered as a simple (and accessible!) FPS. And it's really cool when the game slips into a 'survival horror'-esque register - like going for the Thermal Visor or that late-game Phazon Mines gauntlet as you look for the Power Bombs (I think?). I feel like a modern Metroid Prime could look to various shooters like Amid Evil, DOOM mods, etc, for inspiration in enemy layouts in the more combat-intense sections, though. Or to modern metroidvanias in terms of structure inspiration? I always felt MP1 was really on to something.

At times the enemies feel too cut-and-paste - fire 4 missiles, aim a single super missile, etc. I also feel like a sparser experience, upgrade-wise, could be fun? To convey more of a sense of alien planet rather than perfectly laid out loop corridors that power you up. I always did feel the game shifted too much to exploring Space Pirate stuff as the game went on.

my first introduction to the series. one of the 2 games i watched my brother fully play back to back in the point to where i wouldnt need to play it myself. first time i got scared by a video game was by the chaotic and gremlin space pirates in the extremely cold and haunting phazon mines amplified by its shaking ambience. the ost was also the first time i truly fell in love with a soundtrack from a game, anyones that played this will tell ya how great it is no doubt. i love this game more from when i watched it rather than when i beat it

If slowly walking through lava caverns, scanning things, matching the color of a peashooter to the color of an enemy, slowly walking through lava caverns, fighting the most tedious bosses in all of Metroid, slowly walking through lava caverns, not having a satisfying metroidvania progression or sequence breaks, ignoring enemies and slowly walking through lava caverns sounds like an awesome time then you HAVE TO play this incredible 138 Metacritic score masterpiece.

In all seriousness I really wanted to like Prime but man, this got very tiring the moment the novelty of "Metroid but first-person wore off". Everything related to morph balling was awesome though! Maybe this could've been an even cooler Metroid Marble Blast spin-off.

Easily my favorite Metroid game, and that might have something to do with the fact that it hardly even is one. Advanced movement tech, sequence breaks, and everything else that, from what I've gathered, makes Super an all-timer according to its fans is notably absent, and that's not even mentioning the fact that you barely have to consider the entire map at large until the very end of the game. Probably a contentious take, especially on this site, but I've always preferred when this series leans into its experiential side rather than its mechanical side, an ideal that Prime relentlessly pursues at the expense of any interesting combat or, frankly, complex exploration. Instead, it's phazon-focused on translating one of Metroid's most essential angles into the third dimension: the sense of Samus's physical presence in the worlds she explores. Here, that's not only the responsibility of rigid controls and weighty jumps, but of the player's very perspective. It's no surprise that so much of this game boils down to how you see things- scanning and X-rays and thermal vision- stuff that really could only be done in an FPS. Prime's about being a first-person game just as much as it's about being a three-dimensional game, and Retro truly went above and beyond the call of duty in terms of reinforcing this theme. Electronic interference scrambling your view, water taking a moment to drip off of your visor after being submerged, and even Samus's half-translucent reflection appearing in certain lighting are just a few of the immersive details that the team managed to cram in here. To me, this is the closest a video game has come to conveying a sense of touch, but the mystique doesn't stop with the visuals. The utterly bone-chilling main menu theme sets the stage for what I believe to be not just an atmospheric experience, but the atmospheric experience, the benchmark that all future atmospheres must be compared to. No game transports me somewhere new to the degree that Metroid Prime does, and the sound contributes a sizeable chunk of the heavy lifting. Phendrana Drifts, for all intents and purposes, is a generic snow level, but it doesn't feel like one. Something about the almost ominously gentle piano as Samus first steps foot into the cold and its evolution into an outright suffocating electronic track as she reaches the area's depths just represents a fundamentally remarkable grasp on how to make foreign environments exciting to explore. The variance in terrain doesn't hurt, either, in terms of keeping traversal skills sharp and sparking area memorability, and even the in-game map makes itself useful. In a series (and genre) where it can occasionally feel like the map is playing the game for you, deciphering Prime's 3D map practically feels like its own little ability that must be learned, another mark on the long list of the game's successes. I was recently underwhelmed by its sequel, but, in hindsight, I almost don't blame it for mostly treading the same ground- the first game really accomplished everything it set out to do.

Una de las cosas que no esperaba de Metroid Prime es que fuera un zelda. Los jefes son de zelda, cada nivel está planteado como mazmorra de zelda y hasta suena la tonada de zelda cada vez que resuelves un puzzle. Pero también es super metroid, así que prepárate para dar vueltas, muchas vueltas, y ahí tienes tus puertas cerradas para más adelante y el tramo final de recolección de 12 artefactos. El tedio de la filosofía Nintendo se prolonga toda la aventura, sala por sala. Llegas a una puerta sin energía, busca tres interruptores con la visión térmica para abrirla. Entras a la siguiente sala, la puerta está sin energía, busca tres interruptores con la visión térmica para abrirla. Consigues una mejora para el blaster, una señal te indica que debes ir a la zona contraria del mapa.

La mazmorra no funciona como lugar creíble pues la verosimilitud se pierde entre artificales secciones de plataformas y rompecabezas. No funciona como espacio a resolver ya que la exploración no es el reto en ningún momento. No funciona como escenario para una acción de repetitivos encuentros con la profundidad de un charco. Y yo me pregunto, ¿en qué funciona Metroid Prime?

Lo que tiene de propio suena mejor en la teoría que en la práctica. La primera persona, que nos pone en la piel de la cazarrecompensas, con su interfaz orgánica, tiene su gracia y da personalidad a un avatar que de otra forma quedaría desdibujado. Aparte, intenta sacarle algo de partido al punto de vista con los distintos visores, aunque acaben teniendo un uso anecdótico. El escáner, la excusa narrativa para conocer la fauna y flora local, termina siendo una herramienta de ayuda al avance y una guía de puntos débiles de jefes y enemigos antes que un instrumento para el aprendizaje y descubrimiento del ecosistema. Poco interés naturalista muestra el juego cuando los únicos seres que podemos escanear son los que tienen repercusión directa en el juego y nada nos dirá de un banco de peces, insectos fluorescentes o las aves del cielo.

Me da hasta pena Samus, pues con todo su traje de terminator y habilidades extraordinarias no deja de tener la misma voluntad individual que el escarabajo que se te lanza al ataque en el mismo pasillo de siempre. En este escenario artificial con apariencia de mundo, ocupa su lugar como eslabón que mueve el engranaje que es el videojuego, pero nunca como exploradora, cazadora o aventurera.

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.

Is it just a shooter? - Nope!
Is it just an action adventure? - Nope!
Is it just a metroidvania? - Nope!

It is a first person action adventure metroidvania shooter!
(And it is the best video game in the world!)