the shadow drop of this game was the coolest moment of my pathetic life

Samus please, please consider marrying me

GooeyScale: 90/100

Metroid Prime has not aged a day. That is to say, Metroid Prime Remastered is just as annoying as Metroid Prime was in all the exact same places.

A complete lack of touch ups or re-works to the original in any significant manner may disappoint returning players (as it did me), but the truth is that Metroid Prime is still a contender for the best entry in the franchise, and possibly the greatest Metroidvania ever made. It shows absolute faith in the original product, and I believe that that was ultimately the right call.

I decided to play Prime, again. Only I thought I'd try hard mode, as I did the same on my 2nd Dread playthrough and I had a great time. Of course they are the same thing...

It was pretty much business as usual until I got to the Phazon Mines. That soon started to give me a kicking. But once I picked up the plasma beam, it felt like I was in god mode. And then I got to Ridley. Spent the last 3 days basically doing 2 (3 if you count the 2 stages of Metroid Prime, the boss, not the game itself) bosses. Ridley took more attempts than the final boss, but it was just a case of repetition and grinding it out. If you get complacent or greedy, you get punished for it. Safe to say I did both several times. What, am I supposed to learn from my mistakes?

But it was a rewarding playthrough, and finishing it felt great. I was in two minds just to fuck it off, but I'd come this far, and surely to give up at the last boss would be pathetic. So I soldiered on. Overran on my lunch break, but it was worth it.

This might have overtaken Dread as my favourite Metroid.

It is pretty astounding how effortless Nintendo made it look to transition from 2D to 3D. This game feels almost exactly like playing a 2D Metroid game despite all the extra design and gameplay considerations that come with a 3D, first-person experience. There are so many amazing little touches, like Samus’s face reflecting off her visor when there are bright flashes of light (definitely startled me the first time it happened) or the x-ray visor showing Samus shifting her hand in her gun to select the different beams. Just very cool, very immersive, very engaging.

I will say, I think the back half of the game loses its shine just a bit. The scavenger hunt for the Chozo Artifacts just feels like unnecessary padding, especially because traversing the map never really stops being a little slow and clunky. If you’re going to have us scour the entire world for the last few of these artifacts, I would have appreciated some kind of limited fast travel a la Symphony of the Night, or even just something like the space jump / screw attack combo you get at the end of Super Metroid that simultaneously eases the monotony of traversal and makes you feel immensely powerful.

I know there’s an argument to be made that having no fast travel makes it a more immersive experience, but personally I don’t think trudging through those first few rooms of the Chozo Ruins or Magmoor Caverns 40 times is any more immersive than doing them 20 times. You reach a point where you’re just slowly walking through a dozen huge rooms with basically no threats, which I just found to be pretty tedious, and tedium generally ruins immersion for me.

I feel like I’m being really down on this game, so I’m gonna try to end on a positive note. The exploration is some of the finest that I’ve seen in the series. For the first few hours, the game feels absolutely bottomless, and the rate at which you acquire new items sets a pretty much perfect pace of drip-feeding you new ways to open up more and more of these giant areas. Going through the Phazon Mines for the first time was a highlight, as the jump up in combat difficulty made me actually desperate to find a checkpoint, a pretty rare feeling in an age of autosaves and scripted near-death experiences.

So yeah, maybe unsurprising, but the game did in fact pretty much live up to the hype. It really reminds you why there’s a whole genre named after this series. Check it out if it passed you by like it did for me.

I've been a Metroid fan since childhood and I'd known Prime 1 was consistently ranked as the best or second best of the franchise, alternating with Super Metroid. Since I never had a GameCube, I relished the opportunity to finally get to play this. It's obviously good - it wouldn't have been remastered if it wasn't - but I have to admit it left me disappointed in several aspects that I wasn't expecting.

For context, the last Metroidvania I played before this was Metroid Dread, and I loved it. It felt like a refreshingly modern take on the classic 2D style with excellent boss fights and most of the level backtracking only coming into play with finding optional bonuses and secrets. In stark contrast, Prime is built entirely on the concept of backtracking. The core goal of finding the 12 chozo artifacts is married to the design philosophy of the player coming across something gated behind a lock that can only be unlocked with an ability that will be gained later. As a result, you're destined to have to retread the exact same rooms, obstacles, and enemies dozens of times before finally getting what you're looking for. I know the whole series is built on that design philosophy, but this game pushes it to the extreme.

My other major complaint is that the enemy respawn system is gratuitous, and this point is another reason why the lengthy amount of backtracking got annoying. You'll enter a room, kill all the enemies in it, move to the next room, realize you took the wrong exit after a few moments, return to the prior room, and all the enemies will have already respawned. This got so tiresome that I started simply running through rooms ignoring enemies in the later parts of my playthrough. Regarding bosses, they're okay for the additional challenge they present, but on Normal difficulty they feel like they have way too much HP. Fights went on for so long that I grew bored before they ended.

I'm still glad I got to play this piece of gaming history, especially as a die-hard Metroid fan, but this is my least favorite of the ones I've played. A good game that may have been a masterpiece when it first came out, but by the newer standards both of its own series and of others, it's still somewhat dated.

(One more positive thing: the ambient music absolutely slaps!)

As I'm nearing the conclusion of this game on my first playthrough (I watched my brother play as a kid growing up) the one thing I keep thinking about this game is that its timeless. This game could've released in 2023 and it would still feel fresh and modern. Thats a testament to what Retro studios pulled off in 2002.

The gameplay is excellent mixing in puzzles into the traversal as well as some of the combat with your different beams and visors. The music is superb and the art direction is still so unique even till this day.

The story told through no dialogue whatsover but rather scanning the environment, computers, scriptures etc and piecing together what happened to the chozo feels like a direct inspiration for modern souls game story telling

The only real change that was made with the remastered apart from graphical upgrades was the introduction of modern controls.'

In terms of negatives I have 2. The enemy respawn rate is where this game shows its age the most. You go into a room kill the enemies leave the room and then immediately go back in and all enemies have respawned. Very early 2000s and prior game design. Theres also a big difficulty jump in the Phazon mines.

Overall this is truly an all time game that might still feel fresh 20 years from now.

A melhor transição de 2D pra 3D em conjunto com OoT. A Nintendo tem a maestria em fazer esse tipo de jogo.

Metroid Prime nos mostra a primeira aventura 3D da Samus da melhor forma possível, como um FPS guiado. É estranho falar dessa forma pois sempre que via o jogo de fora, achava que não seria tão bom jogando e meu deus eu não poderia estar mais errado.

Em questão de gameplay, é exatamente a mesma coisa q o 2D, temos todos os conhecidos upgrades e armaduras ao longo do jogo. As duas grandes diferenças são em relação ao tiro principal e ao sistema de análise. Com a perspectiva tridimensional, temos agora uma mira igual de FPS com a diferença que ela não é totalmente livre, mas ainda sim funciona muito bem. O sistema de análise é praticamente a alma do jogo, todos os inimigos e diversas partes do mapa podem ser analisadas para entender a história e se aprofundar em documentos. É muito útil também para chefes onde podemos ver os pontos fracos de cada um.

Metroid Prime eleva a franquia a outro patamar, abrindo diversas portas para experimentação e aprimoramento. Se a Nintendo fizer o favor de portar as sequências para o Switch e finalmente dar data para o 4, serei feliz.