Metroid Prime 2: Echoes

Author's Rating:

Pros: Art style, gameplay additions

Cons: Nail-bitingly frustrating

The Bottom Line: 
8.8/10

Author's Review
Does every Nintendo character need to have a "dark alternate self" to contend with? Link has one, I think Mario has Metal Mario, and this game introduces Dark Samus or something of the like. You can play this one on either the gamecube or part of the Wii trilogy. I vastly prefer the Wii trilogy because the Wii controls are awesome and sitting around with a big orange gamecube controller ten years later seems out of style somehow.

I didn't care for this game when I first played it. It's significantly less polished than the former Metroid Prime which I personally found to be a masterpiece along with many others. The plot here is that the world in the game is split into a light and dark place of sorts and you do the travelling between worlds as the main gameplay addition. The game also adds the screw attack and wall jump from Super Metroid along with a few new guns, but it feels essentially identical gameplaywise from Prime.

Prime started with an intense, cinematically done base attack. This one just sort of drops you into a cave and has you shoot some zombies. Yes, the evil Ing (Stupid name)  have posessed the dark world or something to that effect, and there are zombies everywhere. The zombies are fun to shoot. Actually, the combat here is the best of the three because the enemies are so depressed and menacing looking, even the bugs. You fight a lot of bugs. Wasps, worms, whatever. Then some robots, some fish, more bugs, and human zombies, and then the final boss is just a big ball you crawl over and blow holes into. Pretty stupid, but as a whole the game is an excellent mess.

It's meandering, angering and confusing. You know something is going to be up when the first puzzle has you break a cable to progress, and the second has you blowing up a random yellow container to get missiles to blow open doors. It's technically smaller than the other Metroid Prime games, I think, but takes much longer to complete because of the frustrating alternate world you must traverse. I never knew what to do. Halfway through I gave up because the game eventually tells you anyway. I would leave it on, go get a sandwich, come back and check for the next clue.

Graphically and stylistically, this is my favorite of the three. The whole thing feels appropriately dark and menacing, the world feels withered and complex, and everything inside it seems dead or on the verge of it. You need files to open doors. You get these by talking to aliens basically. You need to scan panels to unlock doors and elevators, but the game hides the panels in an evil manner, obscuring them from view in the cheapest way like putting them in the wall on the opposite side of where you're searching. The game world is already convoluted but the game becomes profoundly frustrating when you factor in dark and light worlds to traverse to solve environmental puzzles and find upgrades. It's not the hardest game ever, but it's frustrating. You'd better be paying attention if you want to complete it, because it's an ordeal. I think my first playthrough took me five days where the other games took me one or two. It starts out easy enough, but once you get to the bogs the game literally becomes a bog of convoluted passageways and alternate dimensions. It is appropriate, considering these are barren wastelands. This game comes the closest to a water world but I would've liked one of these games to have had a big water world, like Meridia from Super Metroid.

So you can gather the gameplay is cruel in many ways, but is it fun? Well, yes. Navigating the maps in this game is a pain, but if you get past that, you're shooting bugs, scanning platforms, observing clues and making sure you leave no stone unturned because trust me, that stone will come back later. The game does that jerk thing of making you lose most of your powerups at the start, except shooting for whatever reason. Other than that, it's similar to prime but it swaps weapons and visors and adds a few more powerups. The morph ball is identical to prime, I think, not adding much, but Prime already had a boost, bombs and the spiderball so there's not much to add. The boost lets you boost, the bombs let you blow things up and the spiderball is the coolest as you can climb walls on a special track. Once again, you must observe that "talloric" alloy can be destroyed with only a specific weapon along with others to progress. Rolling around as a morph ball is always fun, and the game adds cannons that launch you about because I guess somebody built those for some reason. Your character is so fortunate that she has all these game worlds specifically designed for her suit. I'd like to see her try this on earth. She'd probably roll down one manhole and drown to death.

Then again, the whole game makes no sense. Why does rolling into a morph ball turn you into white karmic light inside? You can visibly observe that in this game, and it's disturbing. You can select different visors like in the other games, but this game has a stupid visor which detects echoes or something. It took me over an hour to figure out how it works, with a guide open, and it's stupid. The guns are cool, black and white, I just consider them chocolate and vanilla. You destroy blocks in one world, then come back, et cetera, go through portals. In the dark world, everything wants to kill you. You slowly take damage like that painful water in the gameboy games. Metroid 2: The Return of Samus had something similar. I remember being like five years old, trying to get through that stupid water. Oh god, and those Metroids terrified me. In that game, you needed to lower the water level constantly, but never go through it. As a kid this wasn't clear to me so I always tried to run through it to see if I could reach a safe zone. Here, you must run through it to reach safe zones. It's frustrating but it doesn't break the game, just makes it a painful migraine at times. There are some control issues too. The game that follows this one got the screw attack and wall jump correct, but here it's very frustrating to get it working. Your timing has to be spot on. There's also a tron-like world that doesn't really fit with the rest of the game, but beyond that, I have no complaints. It's tough as hell, but fun. The other too games are too easy, this one is frustrating due to navigation issues, but the combat is of a good difficulty. I died three or four times which wouldn't be an issue except every time you reload you have no idea what you've done since your last save point. My best tip: don't die. Just take your time and progress slowly, and you'll solve everything with ease. If you make it to the end, which at times seems insurmountable, it's the most satisfying of the three simply because it's a real challenge. I adore this game along with the other too and while it's not as good as the first it's about as good as the third and all three are required playing for any shooter/adventure game fan and fans of Metroid as well, naturally. I've completed every single Metroid game and aside from the first, this one's the hardest.

Both the Wii and Gamecube versions of this game have multiplayer. I never got to play it because, I don't know, somehow people gravitate toward Halo 3 or something when we want to play a video game. Not sure, though. On the Wii you can play it online but you need a friend code or something, it's a whole ordeal.