Varia? I 'Ardly Know 'Er!

OK, so I'm a little late to the party on this one, given that Metroid Prime: Echoes came out in 2004, and it's now 2009. Still, the release of Metroid Prime: Trilogy gives me an excuse to revisit the year of the Crazy Frog and the birth of Facebook. Joy.

You have to feel a little sorry for Retro Studios. When they saw the reaction to Metroid Prime they must have known they were doomed with all the inevitability of an oyster seeing an epiglottis for the first time. Amid all the hype and celebration, the knowledge that a sequel would be expected of them could only have compared to the knowledge it wouldn't live up to the original.

There's a certain paradox in requiring 'more of the same' of a game that came to prominence by being revolutionary. However, there's very few people in the gaming industry that will let paradox stand in the way of profit, and so Retro were obliged to recapture the impact of their opus in a follow-up. Of course they couldn't hope to succeed, just as Majora's Mask couldn't hope to recapture the impact of Ocarina of Time, and Half-Life 2 couldn't hope to- Oh, right.

It would be remiss not to acknowledge at this point that in a lot of ways, Retro were not just being asked to work miracles, but to work the same miracle twice, much like if Jesus had somehow stumbled into doing magic at a kids' birthday party. Long before Metroid Prime, the franchise had already created a classic in Super Metroid, a legend of the platformer genre. Now, eight years later, Retro was catching scorn and derision from the fanbase and the gaming press for their belated and unrecognisable sequel. At least, prior to release. Once it was out, it was the very changes that made it unrecognisable that allowed it to achieve the same acclaim and lasting appeal as its predecessor. Prime was a wildly different beast, not least because it had moved the previously 2D series into 3D. But there was no way Echoes would be able to make such radical changes.

Now, I tend to feel that if the human race was put on this planet for a particular reason, that reason was quite probably to create the original Metroid Prime, so I approached Echoes with some trepidation. Indeed, so trepid* was I that I actually avoided buying it for several years. Still, the promise of playing the Prime games with Wii control (FPS being the one of the few things the Wiimote does well) undermined my defences. Well, that and maintaining the delusion that the Wii was more than an electronic desk ornament. How, then, did Echoes stack up, given that playing Metroid Prime is the closest I've come to a religious experience?

Well, actually, once you accept that Echoes is never going to achieve quite the same epiphanic** feeling of the first, it's a pretty worthy successor.

Plotwise the game kicks off with the Space Pirates descending on Aether to harvest it of Phazon, having discovered it in the previous game. A GFC squad pursues them, but loses contact, and Samus arrives to sort things out. The first hour or so of the game then sees you find the remnants of the GFC force and their base, wiped out by unknown forces. Various cryptic and suggestive messages and discoveries are made (at least if you bother to scan for them), culminating in the discovery of their transport and a video log of their last hours. This is by far the most interesting part of the game, because shortly thereafter the real plot starts up and all of this is promptly forgotten.

It's not only jarring, to see the introductory plot thread so suddenly dropped, but rather disappointing, as the plot that carries you through the rest of the game is as typical a gaming plotline as you're likely to see. It's the old light world/dark world chestnut: A giant plot device hit Planet X, creating a dark twin of the same. Race X (Not the Half-Life one) and Dark Race X go to war, and Race X is wiped out, leaving only one survivor to keep watch until you arrive to take up the job. During the war, Race X and Dark Race X build a temple in each of the four themed zones of Planet X and Dark Planet X. Macguffin Y is stolen from each of Race X's temples and hidden in Dark Race X's temples, and you have to go get it back. But you can't get into any of Dark Race X's temples without first finding the Temple Keys hidden around Dark Planet X. That's it. It really is that stale.

Where Echoes makes up for this is in the microscopic details of the world. Prime's Scan Visor has been expanded, such that almost every object has a multi-paragraph description in the logbook. And somebody put a lot of thought into these logs. Little details are mentioned in one scan, then alluded to later in others. And there's some amusing humorous touches, too, such as when it describes the elaborate locking mechanism on those crates you've been blasting open.

Visually, the game shows the same inconsistencies of design. Much of Aether looks just the same as Tallon IV from the previous game, but without the same breathtaking vistas. I get the feeling the areas of huge open space were meant to create a similar effect, but they were let down by the awful matte painting backgrounds. The further you go through the game, the more the design distinguishes itself, although whether it looks the same or different, it rarely looks as memorable as Tallon. Still, it IS very pretty. It's just a shame that the sense of place and atmosphere that defined Prime is gone. There is one moment that gives you pause, and that's your first entrance into the Sanctuary Fortress. It's a pretty jaw-dropping sight. Most of that effect, however, is due to the fact that it's glaringly inconsistent with the world around it. Having spent the game trekking through swamps and desert canyons where nature runs wild, and technology protrudes here and there in the form of hefty, weathered machinery, you find yourself suddenly on the side of some sort of holographic mountain. Suddenly everything is glowing and shiny and huge and neon green is incredibly predominant. It's like turning a corner in Tatooine and finding yourself in the Machine City. And what's the plot explanation for this place? If the Luminoth had this kind of technology, why didn't they deploy it across the rest of their planet? Seriously, what the hell? Why did they limit the killer robots to a single mountain?

The other issue with the visual design is the dark world. It's purple. I mean, really, very purple. I'm not sure there's anything there that isn't purple. Except maybe the things that are red. I get that purple encodes 'dark' really well for communicating things visually to an audience, but I think you can credit them with enough intelligence not to think: 'Woah, some green. Boy was I wrong about this place!' Or maybe not. I never can tell.

So that's all that stuff. But story elements were never what defined Metroid, so how's the gameplay? Well... Inspired. Sort of. When you're on Aether the game is a joy. A lot of thought clearly went into it, and you find yourself moving from one brilliantly crafted set piece to another. Of particular note is pretty much every single morph ball section of the game. These are some of the most sublime platforming in pretty much any game ever made. Whilst there's not quite the same density of brilliant puzzles and plaforms on foot, the game provides some truly inspired enemies to fight. Many of these are found in Sanctuary Fortress, where some of the enemies are as well thought out as other games' minibosses. The prevalent quadruped drone is a decent opponent, one you actually feel the need to deal with, and taking him out requires making good use of your full array of skills. The Ingsmashers are another fantastic enemy who just feel really fun. Perhaps my favourite is the Rezbit, though. These bizarre creatures are little floating clouds of graphic anomalies. They have a huge host of attacks for a standard enemy, and one in particular is inspired. The Rezbit projects an electromagnet pulse that sends Samus' power suit offline, requiring a system reboot. (Squeezing three buttons at once.) Once you do that, your screen and abilities come back online, and systems diagnostic text scrolls across the HUD. It's one of the most immerse and original attacks I've seen in a game.

The bosses continue Prime's trend of being brilliant. Whilst they're perhaps not quite as memorable as the original game's, there are a LOT more – Echoes must have something like 25 bosses, all told – and all are great fights. Highlights include a Shadow of the Collosus-esque fight against an enormous version of the quadruped drones, which comes late in the game and requires you to use a variety of different skills, and multiple fights in morph ball form, which are as inspired as everything else you do in it. Then there's the recurring threat of Dark Samus. Conceptually perhaps not the most ground breaking of creations, but effectively deployed such that her appearance always causes a prickle along the spine. And she has awesome theme music.

Unfortunately this all falls slightly flat when you head through to Dark Aether. The dark world mechanic is already pretty hackneyed, and Echoes use of it shows about as much invention as calling it 'Dark Aether'. The dark world is very nearly an exact mirror of the normal one, except with all the interesting stuff stripped out and replaced by a very small palette of enemies. This leaves the rooms in Dark Aether feeling incredibly cavernous and bare. Whilst this does a lot for the atmosphere of the place (once you get past how purple it is), it does mean there's not a lot there to remember. Still, the upshot of the emptiness is that you tend to blaze through your dark world activities, and they're really not prominent enough to drag you down. Later on, when you return to the dark world hunting the last set of temple keys, you do encounter some slightly more involved areas which at least make up for things a bit.

And that basically sums the game up – It's schizophrenic; bouncing wildly between innovative works of creative genius and by-the-book standards. It leads to a game that has slow moments, and there will probably be times you get tired of it. (For me this happened towards the end of Sanctuary Fortress and again during the scavenger hunt at the end.) But for all that, it maintains a generally good standard, and reaches highs that probably surpass the original for gameplay.

NB. I can't comment on a lot of people's complaints about the irritating boss fights and ammo system, as I understand they were tweaked for Trilogy. I never had any problems, though. Also, the wii control scheme is incredibly fun.

* That is a word.

** So is that.

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Super Bonus Section! - Reasons Samus Aran Lost Her Suit

• Stolen by Space Pirates
• Stolen by parasites
• Destroyed in an explosion
• Stolen by different parasites
• Crying (No, seriously, see the manga.)

I mean, damn, woman, look after your shit.