Metroid Prime meets A Link To The Past

Author's Rating:

Pros: Fun fun fun til the Daddy takes the Game Cube away!

Cons: No Ice Beam, No Wave Beam. That's all, seriously.

The Bottom Line: 
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is just as good as the original. What in the world could have kept me all this time!?

Author's Review
Boy oh boy, you remember back in the days of the first Mega Man games, how every single one of the games looked, felt and played almost identically? Were you to walk in and see someone playing any of the first six Mega Man games on the NES Console, you'd have to watch for a little while before you'd know which one it was.

Not all video game sequels handed this luxury out. Least of all any game involving Mario or Link. They were always changing things around.

Which I guess is why Metroid Prime 2 just kind of took me by surprise, because it turns out that the game looks, feels and plays in nearly identical fashion as the original Metroid Prime.

Some might call it a cheap rip-off of the original game, but in the words of Al Pacino, "Consider the source." Metroid Prime was, in my mind anyway, the greatest Game Cube game I had ever played. And Metroid Prime 2? It is every bit as good.

I can't imagine why someone would be looking to purchase this game without at least having played the original, so as far as a detailed description of how the game plays, you can click the above link to learn all about it. For now, I'll just give you the short, short version.

In a realm chock-full of first-person shooters, the Metroid Prime games are a sterling example of how undeniably terrific they really can be. The aim and lock-on controls are easy as pie to learn, and switching guns or visors becomes second nature within a mere matter of hours. If you are a Metroid Prime veteran, you'll probably be back to kickin' it old school within minutes.

In the game, you interact with your surroundings in countless ways, predominantly by scanning. Those who are into getting a 100% completion of the game will have to be sure and scan everything, and I do mean everything. As before, you will roll through tunnels as a Morph ball, only now we've got a few awesome three-way intersections going on in those tunnels. You will cling to Spider-Ball tracks and roll up walls and across the ceiling, only now you will be using your Boost Ball capabilities to cannonball yourself away from the tracks, usually onto another track. You'll even find yourself rolling around spheres with entire Spider-Ball magnetism on their surfaces!

The doors all remain the same, with each specific color of door requiring a different weapon to disarm and open it. You'll grapple across giant chasms a la Spider-Man with the greatest of ease. Almost too easy, actually. And how can we forget that nifty little charge beam and its ability to suck in nearby power-up items.

The More Things Stay The Same, The More They Change
If you're like me, you procrastinated getting this game because you figured it was a mere re-hashing of the original Metroid Prime with some half-witted plot trying to justify its existence. Okay, I won't try to deny that; the plot indeed is pretty typical fare for an action game.

Samus Aran, the closest thing to Alpha Female there is, is in her ship just cruising along ever so innocently when she hears that there is trouble brewing on planet Aether. Upon investigating, she discovers that a "dark" version of this planet has been created, and the dark version is trying to take over the light version. That's the barebones version, anyway.

So that's one new thing. Instead of a single world, you are going to have to literally explore this world twice -- once on Aether, and again on Dark Aether. And with all the accolades Zelda: A Link To The Past gets, you'd think they'd be splorching their pants over this one. Or maybe they're just mad that the same device is being basically "plagiarized" in a way. But it's like Al Pacino says, err see above.

The biggest other new thing to note about MP2 is the artillery. This is one way in which Prime 2 does diverge pretty far from the original series, and that is that we have no Ice Beam or Wave Beam. These have been replaced by the Light Beam and the Dark Beam. Which okay, yeah, I can see how that would sound pretty lame to some of y'all. There is also an Annihilator Beam which is like Light and Dark mixed together. And as you might have guessed, there are also Light and Dark doors that can only be opened by a blast of the respective Beam.

To make matters even more unsettling, you only get so much Ammo for the Light and Dark beams, and the only way to make monsters drop replenishment of one of the Ammos is to kill it with the opposite type of beam. But you will also discover that when charged, the Light beam is like the greatest thing since the Murder Beam from Super Metroid (look it up), and a charged Dark Beam has a knack for freezing enemies, which is especially useful in a place called the Sanctuary Fortress.

The Light and Dark Beams are found surprisingly early in the game, but they are put to pretty good use right away. Because as you will discover, Dark Aether is a very nasty place. The entire world is soaked in a dark atmosphere that saps away Samus' energy any time she walks around in it. Her only respite comes when she wanders near one of the Light Beacons which are surrounded by a sphere of light. In some cases, it is a cylinder of light, but most of the time it will look like a "dome" of light since the Beacons are naturally on the ground. I mean, this is pretty intimidating stuff. The first several hours I had to wander around in this atmosphere, watching the boils on Samus gun/arm or her Morph Ball form, I don't know, it just made me feel kind of desperate. And fighting an entire Boss Battle in this stuff? Forget about it!

Well, of course, eventually Samus will discover a Dark Suit that makes her less vulnerable to, but not entirely immune to, Dark Aether's atmosphere. The majority of the game will be spent in this suit, in which the atmosphere takes off about one energy point a second, the same rate at which your energy goes UP if you're standing in one of the domes of light. After a while, you just don't even think about it, although it can be maddening when you're in a Boss Battle and he's got you down to 10 Energy, and in any other circumstance you'd think you still had a chance, but not in that atmosphere!

Later, you will acquire a Light Suit which renders you fully invulnerable to the atmosphere, but you still gain 1 Energy per second standing in the domes of light. Thereby making Dark Aether the safer of the two worlds! Not to mention, just wait til you see the Light Suit. MAN is that thing cool-lookin.

One of the more risky endeavors was implementing the Screw Attack into this game. It's no secret that the Screw Attack was the sikkest of the sikk powers to have in the first two Metroids, but in a 3-d FPS? Not so easy to do there. Well, they've put it into Prime 2 and the result is about a 7 out of 10. It takes quite a bit of practice, and is used more for long jumps (basically five additional Space Jumps with the camera outside Samus' helmet, thank God!) than for actual attacking. At least, I haven't tried much attacking with it. The hardest part about learning how to use the Screw Attack is that if you hit a wall before hitting the ground, you'll bounce back away from the wall, more often than not sending you straight down the toilet. The Screw Attack also gives you wall-jumping ability, which I thought was a nice touch.

Finally, there are a new set of Visors for Samus to use. These to me were one of the coolest new additions. The usual Scan Visor comes with the package, as you'll need it to obtain 100% from the very beginning. In place of the Heat and X-Ray visors, is the Dark Visor (I know, I know, how lame) which allows you to see invisible platforms as well as monsters who seem to be "caught" in between the light and dark worlds and beat the ever-livin' snot out of you the whole time. Then we have the coolest one of all, the Echo Visor. With this one, everything appears black except for vague gray outlines of where platforms are. The visor sends out a sonic signal every couple seconds, so you can get kind of a feel of what's going on. It's not a practical way to play the game, but boy does it look cool. Some doors in the game are controlled by sonic security systems, and only by looking through the Echo Visor can Samus determine (in other words, see) where those sound waves are coming from.

Metroid Prime 2 is a rare type of game. It's not too hard, and not too easy. However there are times when it can get frustrating. Some of the monsters seem to take absolutely forever to kill unless you know precisely "the" way to do it. Otherwise, you could spend as much as a minute and a half or longer shooting the heck out of some monster while it tricks out your lock-on, and losing 200 Energy in the process. Fortunately, enemies that nasty don't appear until pretty late in the game. It is strongly advisable to just go all out and be liberal with the Light Beam while fighting the Dark Monsters, or you're gonna get carpal tunnel syndrome. Then you'd probably just sue Nintendo for it, thereby causing the Revolution to go up $100 in price. So save us all the trouble and use your Light Beam =)

The music in Metroid Prime 2 is pretty much standard issue for a Metroid game. It's even less conspicuous than it was in Prime. Whatever that is trying to pass as "percussion" in the Temple Grounds music got to be grating the first several hours, no matter how epic or hardcore it sounded. Fortunately, I don't even notice it now. You might also recognize another Super Metroid song creeping in on the soundtrack.

This would have to be one of the few times I can say that I was glad I procrastinated something. Because next thing I knew, there it was, Metroid Prime 2 on Wal*Mart's "useless" shelf, going for an unbelievable $19.84. Good old George Orwell looking out for me there, I guess. I've gotten a good three months out of this game, and still haven't achieved 100% yet.

There is a feature in the game where you can play in "Multiplayer" mode against your friends, which seems to be a thing they're doing in a lot of other popular games like Star Fox, but as long as you own Super Smash Bros. Melee (and if you have the Cube, certainly you MUST have this game) I don't really see the point. Still, it's kind of an interesting little twist.

So if you liked Metroid Prime, but you're worried about this one, don't be! It is every bit the game its predecessor was, in spite of its missing certain "key" elements. Ultimately, it was just plain fun, and that's all I'm looking for nowadays.