METROID PRIME 3: A Climax in Motion | GEEK CRITIQUE

[Music] [Music] when Metroid Prime 3 came out you'd have needed a lot of initiative and a little luck to even get your hands on the console that came out for Nintendo is we which had been out for almost a year was still setting the world on fire despite an exceptionally odd input device that looks more like a remote control than something you'd want to use for video games but this was Nintendo strategy from the outset they let their competitors fight it out in the traditional console wars while they set sail into the vast blue ocean of the uncontested market the Wii was sending trimmers to the industry by becoming not only successful but successful because it was widely sought after by a demographic that had never self-identified as gamers and who knows hopefully some proportion of those millions of people who'd never played a game before would see how something a little more elaborate and realized that games could be more than just bowling simulators but Metroid Prime 3 wasn't supposed to be for them this was for us this was Nintendo's chance to prove that while there was nothing wrong with motion control tennis the we would still have plenty of room for the kind of substantial complex meaningful experiences that we knew this medium could offer and few series had a more positive reputation for all of that than Metroid hopes were high while echoes was overlooked on a console that was a bit of a lame duck by 2004 if sequel will be released on the hottest console the industry have seen in some time and Nintendo did its part by putting a ton of marketing muscle behind it the company launched a campaign called the month of Metroid a free preview channel on the Wii screen new trailers every single week there was this building palpable - anticipation for Metroid Prime 3 that just wasn't there with it goes but while I remember that it's not really what comes to mind first when I think about this game's pre-release period know what left by far the biggest impression on me was this on August 20th 2007 Nintendo released Super Metroid the Virtual Console for a pittance of 800 Wii Points I got to play it for the first time and if you've been following the advice to start of these episodes you know how that went one week later August 27th and what a day that was I could not wait to play the new Metroid game and it was all thanks to an old one I finally understood why I had never heard a bad thing about this series the depth of the gameplay that becomes more and more brilliant as the player uncovers more abilities the isolation of a lone bounty hunter against a cohesive believable world and rich by subtle storytelling the mature blend of ambience aesthetic and yet optimism that set the whole series apart I brought this brand-new Metroid home from Blockbuster I booted it up and I was greeted by a game that featured a seemingly endless cavalcade of immersion breaking motion control puzzles framed by a heavy-handed narrative driven by unskipable cutscenesthat's nice big ax stand best chance to convert me into a fan and again completely blew it but that was 10 years ago it took a little longer but in the course of making this very series I would come to self-identify as a Metroid fan and you know what I was wrong about Metroid Prime 3 let's get critiquing an unknown vessel status report gets a bad case of the beasts odds the anomaly is coming from a storage room full of Faison pods and who should appear but dark stem is survived then Samus Aran opens her eyes this opening is very to the point the game doesn't start with some kind of less time but Metroid cry no it doesn't make it remotely clear what's even happening here and you know what that's ok when I was first playing this super metroids intro head just recently thrown a lot of backstory at me and without the context of the previous games it was pretty baffling but because I have now played prime 1 & 2 and thus have context it raises a lot of questions how did Dark Samus survive where even is this prime 3 will eventually answer those questions but we don't have any time for that it's time for the motion control tutorial samus's power suit has always had this extended Canon coming out of her right arm and say what you will about the Wii Remote there was one thing it was very very good at acting as a pointing device because of that samus's arm cannon now has perfect one-to-one movement with the players right hand and I gotta come clean with you guys in doing this series I wanted the full spectrum of the prime experience to that end I'm still happy I played the previous game with Gamecube pad but honestly I really should have just played prime one with a Wii Remote I had good intentions I was trying to give myself the best possible charge and enjoying the game by playing with mouse and keyboard and it worked surprisingly great for the most part but you remember how much I complained about weapon and visor switching being clunky that's because there's such a big difference between holding down a key and pushing your whole arm forward in order to move a cursor that's not meant to be controlled with a mouse versus just holding down a button and flicking your wrist up Metroid Prime 3 and by extension the other games in the prime trilogy utilize the Wii Remote to achieve Bar None the best FPS control scheme I've ever used on a console its natural precise immersive and tuned to absolute perfection and it better be retro studio spend an entire year of development just to get this right but the original Wii Remote was only really capable of precision like this when used as a pointing device to work around this motion controls that don't involve the pointer our helding clearly defined sequences that require wide clear movements to open doors or start up generators however well implemented they are though they don't really add much to the experience they don't detract from I either mind you but it's telling them from the tutorial to the very last door these on-screen prompts that make it explicit exactly what you're supposed to be doing with the Wii Remote can never go away Samus eventually stops flailing around and gets her gunship pointed at the Olympus a Galactic Federation ship but the tutorial is just getting started calibrating your weapon to this point in the series the only spoken dialogue was two per Metroid's iconic intro and I guess the power suit system reports the original prime held a similar standards as the 2d games in this regard but Prime 2 introduced a few friendly NPCs and now Prime 3 is chock-full of characters with full voice acting samus heads up to the tips briefing room and is suddenly beside herself no wait that's just a new character named Gendry de she can shape-shift I guess there's also a robot dude named gore and a big bruiser of a guy named Ikeda I mean rundas and look uncanny 2007 human is here too the human's name is Admiral Dave and he activates her aura unit 242 organics supercomputer together they explained them to klaxon Federation's other organic supercomputers have been effective the unknown virus from the space pirates but not to worry they've made a vaccine a ship called the Valhalla went missing side of the space pirate detected so let's say you then use that to have to network now Sanna said whoever these guys are are gonna travel around and upload the vaccine all the AU's before the space pirates take advantage and mount an attack and before you can even process what au stands for the space pirates attack remember what I said about super metroids intro being a little too intricate for players new to the series corruptions prologue is exponentially worse it's also strange that for all the babbling going on around her samus is still a silent protagonist like dialog boxes are one thing but characters actually speaking their lines make these concessions stand out a lot more but hey the voice acting itself is fine and I don't mind a silent protagonist it's just the degree of stuff they're trying to fit into the scene made it impossible to follow and we're super metroids intro was this amazing recap for people who were already familiar with the series prime 3 doesn't even have that excuse playing the previous two games in this trilogy does nothing to provide context for who these people are or what's even happening here literally my only note was that the Federation's Aurora units reminded me a little bit of Mother Brain and that is a cool detail look the plot holds together and makes sense to me now and the scene becomes a lot more endearing but only because I had the whole game to under and what was happening without any context it was just a convoluted exposition dump of an unskipable cutscenesthat's all of uncanny NPCs there's a holographic AI companion and it all serves as a linear tutorial that's pretending to be difficult with flashy explosions come on retro I'm sorry echos got overshadowed by halo 2 but I don't think that meant anyone wanted Metroid to just be halo cry may be overstating how I feel here but by continuing past this point I've already made it further than I did in 2007 the highlight here is one of corruptions most substantial upgrades the grapple lasso it complements the control scheme extremely well your right hand is samus's beam cannon and now you thrust your left hand equip the lasso and while it feels a little gimmicky at first it turns out to have all kinds of utility you can use to open doors or move debris rip enemy fields away and eventually even to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow it's the quintessential Metroid upgrade full of creative potential in both combat and puzzle solving this planet called norian nor Ryan oh yeah voice acting nor Ian isn't a place that you get to explore rather it's the site of a federation outpost the game tells you exactly where to go and arranges explosive set pieces and enemies for you to overcome before you get there it's not very Metroid II but a linear action game is exactly the part of Prime one that I really liked and there were admittedly some awesome moments here I love how something just whooshes overhead without pulling you out of gameplay letting you experience firsthand the moment that Ridley shows up I love this ridiculously over-the-top boss fight as Samus and her greatest enemy plummet down an energy shaft taking shots at each other the whole way I don't know how I feel about how Samus escapes that situation at this point I felt like the game was trying way too hard to make me go wow he skates around on ice and look at cool battle robot it a 50 girl is so aloof like the game wanted me to think these characters were cool and powerful and worth caring about but they're just kind of generic the most important part of conveying what a game is comes in the first 30 minutes I was well over an hour in by this point and based on that Metroid Prime tree scene for all the world to be a linear action game featuring a team of hunters going on a series of missions and like it's just weird innit to see Samus Aran working alongside and getting saved by other characters it's a weird that it's been this long and the game still hasn't remotely felt like Metroid but finally Dark Samus shows up and flips the freaking switch see effortlessly decimates the whole team with a single blast and then just eyes away google mysterious Samus is barely able to maintain consciousness long enough to bring Noreen's defenses online then she slips into a month-long coma when she wakes up Samus learns that her doppelgangers phazon beam corrupted her and the rest of the crew their body is now naturally produced Faison energy and without even asking the Federation has fit them all with Faison enhancement devices from a visual sense Samus has a new look the peds suit is designed to enhance samus's abilities using her body's natural phazon it's a fusion at the heel of galactic federation and kozo tech and while I didn't really care for the clashing busy design at first it really grew on me more specifically it grew on me as the corruption grew within Samus and the suit got darker in turn taking on these neon blue highlights and it's a little extravagant but it's neat the other three hunters woke up weeks ago and were dispatched on other missions but Federation's has lost contact with all of them so from a story since Samus is finally on her own and what do you know there's a mystery to solve from a gameplay standpoint is where it makes the biggest difference of all at any time you can hold down the plus button to channel an energy tank in insert hyper mode samus's beam cannon becomes this rapid fire blaster that vaporizes enemies the missiles morph ball and even the grapple lasso also get upgraded throughout the game to do new things in hyper mode the federation things that the peds suits have no consequences but as is so often the case the federation is very wrong staying hyper for too long causes samus's body to start overloading with phazon energy the meter starts automatically rising and taking damage just shoots it up even higher if it maxes out samus's mind is corrupted and loses herself to dark samus's influence there's a lot of love here you can tell how much retro wanted this to stand out how visually distinct the switch is hyper mode feels insanely powerful but that's a double-edged sword the problem comes in how the game has changed around it and how these changes have affected the difficulty curve beam upgrades stack for the first time in the prime series and that's cool but they've also lost their distinction the plasma beam melts tough but it feels just like the Nova beam that shoots through things there also are any super combos and missiles are much weaker as a result outside of hyper mode enemies are insanely spongy requiring a ton of just mastering the fire button to take down this is all to incentivize you to use hyper mode but if you do it's the opposite problem your foes get blasted apart so quickly you don't even really need to come up with a strategy tying it in with your health was probably an attempt to balance this but if you're fast enough you can just exit hyper mode before corruption sets in and maintain the health that you didn't use I see a lot of potential in maintaining it under fire letting yourself take his to stay powering up longer and I imagine that's exactly what you have to do on higher difficulties but I feel like I'm not really overcoming anything and the game is just letting me make progress by putting time into it this really should've just been called easy mode but I'm playing on normal and we're echoes normal difficulty was satisfying for a first playthrough corruptions is just monotonous normal is what most players will play on their first time and the presence of hyper mode forces you to choose between combat that's tedious or combat that's unsatisfying Samus takes orders from well yes a big blue head in a tube actually this is the Olympus's onboard aurora unit i said earlier that samus would be alone but that's not quite the case the Federation's au network will be there to guide her through the rest of the game and when I say guide I mean guide when I arrived on the closest phazon infested planet I knew my mission I had to find out what happened to Christopher's sebast and investigate the meteor the impact of the planet and I would need to adventure through uncharted territory to do it finally it's a Metroid game [Music] or yes I guess an on-screen prompt could just tell me exactly where to go honestly in a game like this I'll take all the help I can get but if you're a Metroid fan more for the discovery this may be a deal breaker on the other hand Metroid Fusion did the same thing and it's largely done the same way you might know where to go but you won't necessarily know how to get there in this case it told me to go to a downed Federation ship but that was the easy part to actually get over there I had to seek out a side path and find the grapple beam but here's the difference Fusion might have been on linear take on a Metroid game but because of that because fusion always knew exactly where you go and what path you would have to take it could be a far more punishing experience with a much sharper difficulty curve in other words it was able to evoke the strengths of a more traditional action game corruption in contrast holds your hand for the same reason hyper mode has no significant consequences for the same reason the default difficulty is so much easier than it wasn't echoes Nintendo is hoping the prime 3-month appeal to people who had only just started to play video games so it's all done in the name of accessibility prime 3 is more directly linear than either of its prequels but some of the changes it makes in that effort turn out to be half-measures as if the game was trying to maintain the illusion of non-linearity why else would you have shortcuts that only work from one side why else would the game rather pointlessly let me get ahead of where I need to be in fusion you could occasionally do this to see something samus wasn't supposed to know about yet something that broke the fourth wall in prime 3 he had just hit a brick wall and look I appreciate a lot of the quality of life changes like being able to hop the morph ball with a flick of the wii remote corruption also no longer waste your time by artificially cutting you off from save points now when you die you'll just restart from a checkpoint point is there's nothing wrong with making a game more accessible and it could have been a lot worse it's not like the a you plop soap it reminds you samus running into fire will hurt but even if you disabled a hint system the game will still prompt you where to go the only difference is that doesn't leave markers on the map like I said I'm bad enough at navigation that I kind of need the hint so it doesn't affect me but it is a ridiculous choice that there's no way to disable these on-screen prompts you've got to give the player a choice to that end here's an example of accessibility done right at about the midpoint of the game I found an observatory that wanted satellites and collects data on other planets launching these satellites will literally show you exactly where every single upgrade is located and even denotes which ones you found from those you haven't for many people I'm sure this is counter to what they enjoy about Metroid for me it's a tremendous incentive to actually bother with upgrades what's fun for me is not finding where they are on a map it's figuring out how to get them and Prime 3 does have some fantastically intricate upgrade puzzles but in spite of how I feel about it how is something so disrupted to the Metroid formula an example of accessibility done right because it's totally optional you have to power up the observatory you have to send out satellites and you have every opportunity to ignore it and find everything yourself if that's what you want to do and seriously it was 2007 it would have been simple to just hop on game facts and find everything anyway putting it in the game as a convenience cuts out the middleman so hyper mode disrupted to combat the Observatory disrupted the adventure the third piece of what makes corruption such a disruptive take on the Metroid formula is in the cohesiveness of its world or to be more exact the fact that it doesn't focus on a single cohesive world peste games were largely set on a single map a single planet brimming with environments that wove in and out of each other Prime 3 on the other hand takes place across four planets and rather than leaving between ecosystems Samus is free to fly between them as the adventure progresses Brio is the most traditionally Metroid II planet featuring an unfamiliar race the Blasted itself back to the Stone Age after a civil war despite the remnants of civilization it's the most naturalistic world but Samus using the flora and fauna to her advantage but it also features the greatest environmental variety spanning across cavernous fuel guild mines to a snowy area that was so out of left field my god dropped when I got here Brio is also where I found out that Samus can pull herself up on ledges in this game see look in the menu nope a Power Grip isn't here well I guess that cinches it the prime games really aren't part of the canon wait these Ledger's are supposed to be magnetic mmm you win this time retro seriously there's a reason the game finally clicked with me when I got here the other three planets all allow retro to expand on the franchise's more familiar elements I've already mentioned Orion despite my misgivings about the prologue it's still need to learn more about the Galactic Federation that's been hiring Samus for all these missions the next planet is one of those come out stop playing that song I mean I love it but it's too much of a good thing this awesome little rift has been used throughout the series when Santa's first appears on screen both at the beginning of the game and when you first load a savefile it's consistent to the point that you get sort of conditioned you hear this and you know here we go it's Metroid time but the reason it works this way is because it starts each session Prime three misunderstands its meaning and plays in every single time Samus steps off her ship it's no longer the kickoff of the adventure it's just marking the end of a loading screen and it loses a lot of charm in its repetition that loading screen by the way lasts way longer than any of the earlier games elevator scenes ever did in those earlier games you would occasionally have to wait a second or two for a room to load but it was barely a hiccup in corruption even when I'm taking my time I found myself staring at a door [Music] staring at a door ah finally chalk up another win for minidiscs this is only exacerbated by the way that you move between areas samus's gunship has been an iconic part of the series since the second game and on the one hand it's great to see it with so much more functionality this time around it even gets its own upgrades but like a lot of things in prime 3 in taking so many steps forward retro makes a few stumbles the process for moving between worlds lacks polish as you always have to get in the fifth select this button and choose your landing site you cannot navigate from the identical map in your interface and you can't back out once you hit one of those icons that teams can't be skipped until you've seen once and even when it's done loading these flybys of the ship count is cutscenes so if you need to fly somewhere new and you have to summon your gunship this process takes nearly two minutes and you're just setting the first-person perspective of the ship doesn't even have any useful functionality outside of the tutorial there's all kinds of gizmos and buttons to hit here like triggering a Red Alert and raising defenses even that the game kept forcing me to be here I figured it would eventually pay off with samus actually fighting from the ship but it never happens it's cool for the sake of immersion that you get to set here but the game could have streamlined things by letting you just pick a destination from this menu with all that out of the way hopefully I can finally talk about the planet Alicia is the song gone Alicia is a lost chozo outpost though it's not an ancient ruin it's just a recently been lost the chozo built a self-aware robotic race to maintain sky town an absolutely gorgeous floating city yeah BioShock Infinite eat your heart out I found the ScrewAttack here coming much earlier than it did in echos and so it gets a lot more chance to shine if the we was often derided as being 2 GameCubes duct-taped together the interruption is a testament to just how powerful duct tape can be sky town has a scale and a scope the Gamecube couldn't pulled off and the graphical fidelity on display throughout the game shows a level of detail and polish that still holds up today especially when you run dolfin in high-definition there's a sequence in sky town where you build a nuke and drop it on the seed shield and it all runs in real time samus barely makes it out on escape pod oh come on the final planet or at least the final planet that's not alive is the space pirate homeworld after two decades of battling these guys samus finally gets to take the fight to their front door and it's cool to finally see how they operate the pirate homeworld was a jumbled chaotic mess of hallways steeped in a torrential downpour of acid rain I found these doors that I didn't have any way to open and then I found the xray visor see the space fire - the Galactic equivalent who people who keep their passwords on sticky notes attached to their monitors splitting the game into different planets comes with pros and cons but I think fight row does a good job extenuating the positives every planet has its own themes gimmicks and backstories that said none of them are as cohesive or as complete as what's come before but that's an acceptable trade-off given this games greater narrative scope this is a story that needs to be told across multiple planets why because each of these planets has been impacted by the same sort of meteor that narrowly avoided hitting Mauryan the same sort of phazon based meteor that caused catastrophe on aether and Talyn for hmm SAMHSA's goal is to make her way into the seat of the meteor the same way she did in prime one's climax and ripped the phazon out of the planet and what stands in her way well remember those other hunters dispatched by the Federation the whole point of showing us how powerful these guys were in the prologue the whole reason the game had to establish them as being samus's peers of being people that she cared about was because they all become corrupted by dark samus they're not generic buddies who spend the game fighting alongside their corrupted comrades you spend it fighting against and if our hero and doesn't get to the bottom of this soon the same thing is going to happen to her this gives the adventure of personal pavements and given how little I cared about them before it was surprising how much it tugged at my heartstrings to see them like this again rundas got the worst of us after a brutal dynamic fight he appears for a second to regain his composure only for Dark Samus to force him to commit suicide that's the most ruthless death I've ever seen in a t rated game corruption is thematically way less grounded what's come before it's a little more sci-fi a lot more vibrant but nothing is more surreal than these scenes where Samus has to take down a monstrous abomination and phazon but as much as I was loving the scale of these bosses only the first one was really a fight after that I had enough energy that I could just tank its and blast him with hyper mode and again it got a bit dull each time Samus takes down a seed she absorbs the corruption and so it spreads within her the first time this happens he pukes out liquid phase on same as Metroid Prime itself did to see Samus Aran show vulnerability like this to see how badly it's getting to her is both unsettling and effective you see her face in the scan visor now and while at first I thought that was just a cool detail late in the game her eyes are changing color and her blood vessels are coursing with corruption at first I was worried that it would be over and heavy-handed but then the story of backed off and became more personal and because these elements stayed out of the game for so long by the time Admiral daemon the GF soldiers meet up with Samus and storm the space pirate homeworld together it's a climactic moment of the game set up and earned but in contrast here's something indicative of Prime 3 strange balance of strengths and weaknesses about halfway through the game and a you tells Samus that they've discovered the remains of this federation battleship that was ransacked by the space pirates when I got that message I headed there immediately and discovered that I would need to use these big battery like energy cells to progress further scanning gave hints for where I might find more and I assumed this was where I needed to be to progress so I spent a rather long time trying to find more batteries only to run into more brick walls why because this is not the next part of the adventure this is prime threes game ending fetch quest retro to their credit took the criticism that the previous two games received two hearts the menu makes it clear which batteries you still need to find and most of them are easy enough to come by naturally I had quite a few even the first time I came here to find the ones that or hidden I was going back to planets I hadn't been on in ages and pushing into brand-new completely unexplored territory where Prime two's world weirdly stayed the same regardless of how much light you brought back to aether samus's actions are actually having an effect on crime freeze planets with GF soldiers making repairs on Orion or standing guard at the pirate homeworld to get these batteries I had to have a rematch with a few mini bosses but because Samus has so much more powerful weapons now the techniques to defeat them are completely different and really satisfying to put it mildly I was surprised at how much I was enjoying myself if you're gonna do a game-ending fetch quest this is how to do it right it was with a lot of confidence and excitement that I set up for that vital energy so but what I didn't know is that in order to pick it up I would have to do one of the most hideous things I've ever done in a video game thanks to the fact that I had already wasted a bunch of time earlier in the game I knew I'd eventually need to pick up this big Power Cell with the gunship tractor beam I did so then I got to rotate one half of a bridge into place to connect these two areas so far so good right but in order to actually get on the ship and go to the area where I needed that cargo I had to drop the cargo so I went to the other side I found it's a giant golem I didn't know what to do it turns out I needed to push into yet another area and use my ship to pick up a giant golem head and drop it down to open up this place now I could finally rotate the other half of the bridge into place and connect the two sides of the map but wait with that giant Power Cell backwards started I could no longer get out of this underground tunnel so I had to Trek all the way back to my ship go back where I started get back to the Power Cell tractor beam it up cross the brick head to the generator I needed the power and finally drop the Power Cell in so I could get the final battery the other cells were actually fun and interesting to get but in the time it took me to pick up this last one I could have beaten metroid zero mission I said as much on Twitter went to bed and the next day I woke up to this there are a total of nine cells I only needed five but the fall hawa has so many extra places to put cells that lead to incidental upgrades you can't pick them up once they're placed and so there's no way to know where to go without experimenting and don't get me wrong this is still way better than the previous games fetch quests but it could have been perfect with just a little more conveyance even after all that unnecessary effort I was still pretty hyped to see this payoff on the other side of a wormhole I discovered a planet called phase it's a sentient world where these enormous meteors called leviathans are harvested within what are literally called wounds when they reach maturity they're sent out to impact with other planets this is the source of all Faison the source of all the Cataclysm that's afflicted the worlds in the prime trilogy is the corruption spreads the local life-forms are used as hosts to protect the seed and eventually the doomed planet becomes a clone of phase it's unexpected imaginative surreal and really uncomfortable as soon as Samus steps foot on phase her corruption surges by venting her energy tanks she's able to temporarily stave off its thanks there's no way to return to the tip from here not because the game has created an artificial barrier but because the gunship no longer recognizes her as Samus that's how close she is to losing herself here she's trapped in hyper mode Samus has gotten a super-powered weapon in the finale before but typical of the prime series this is an innovative threatening take on a familiar concept Samus makes her way into an inner chamber tears the biological walls off of a phazon womb and performs an abortion on the infant Leviathan inside I told you this was gonna be uncomfortable only then does Dark Samus finally make an appearance the bite here is way better designed and more dynamic than any of Dark Samus battles and echoes owing partly to how much more very cortex are but mostly to the same advantage that corrupt he was enjoyed throughout pure and simple superior FPS aiming controls eventually Dark Samus merges with the corrupted a you that was stolen from the wrecked ship and so the Metroid Prime trilogy ends the same way the first game in this series did two decades before Samus Aran beats up a giant brain title of this Dark Samus the personification of Metroid Prime finally kicks the bucket and planet phase dies with her with that every bit of phazon in samus's body dries up curing her corruption the planet is on the brink it's time for an epic escape scene no no it's not we just cut to Admiral freakin Dayne listening to a casualty report he seems unfazed by how much of the fleet's been lost he just wants to know if samus is okay seriously is he supposed to be her dad or something but of course samus has gotten herself out she gives a triumphant thumbs up directly toward the player and transmits two simple words myth and complete but you know what I kind of glossed over that last section and I guess it's because it just didn't leave much of an impression on me this final boss fight this was what it was all building toward and I've got to be honest it was kind of anticlimactic like sure if that meter filled up I'd lose but since I was always in hyper mode and since it rose so slowly there wasn't any real tension it was flashy and impressive but it was style over substance that meant the ending in turn lacked any real triumph it felt unearned yet keep in mind this is a game full of climactic moments there were a plenty of times throughout this adventure when metroid prime 3 surprised me when it all came together where it just clicked but there were just as many times the game seemed to stumble on its own ambitions seemed like it didn't have a handle on what kind of metroid game it wanted to be and failed to play to the strengths of what it was doing there are a lot of trade-offs to this one and of all the games I've covered on this channel I don't think that one has ever made me feel such a juxtaposition of thrilling highs and frustrating lows but if the game really did frustrate me to this degree why was it that is the credits rolled all I could think about was how much I wanted to play it again the first Metroid Prime was the core of a game I'd have loved marred by flaws that irrevocably ruined the experience for me knowing where to go when in a fixed all the convoluted progression and playing on a higher difficulty would have only made the combat more spammy Metroid Prime 3 on the other hand is a game that I often loved marred by flaws that I now know how to overcome I didn't even hesitate I started a new game this time I'd be able to skip all those cutscenes at the start and I'd be able to skip every single repetitive scene where the ship takes off and lands and takes off and lands the version on the Wii U eShop drastically improves the loading times and a dolphin emulator can be set to load even faster with these two changes alone the game wouldn't so constantly start and stop yet when it lose flow between areas and I could just play the game this time I won't have to go on that convoluted quest for a single energy so I can if I choose to only pick up the cells I need I'll know how to avoid all those progressional brick walls and most critically I'm playing on the hardest difficulty which has a very appropriate name I can finally find out just how essential hyper mode can be now look just because a player can learn to avoid pitfalls doesn't excuse them but I'll put it like this Super Metroid is my favorite game in this series to play through once but zero mission has proven to be my favorite game to replay in a similar manner while I adored going through crime - it's gonna be a while before I'm inclined to pick it up again whereas with corruption it's been a bit of a struggle to stay away from it long enough to complete this episode when I get here again when I see that thumbs up again it will be triumphant because all of them earned it after everything I've experienced in this series it's a bit of a shame that the first prime tends to be the only one culturally considered a masterpiece because this is not the Metroid Prime collection and this is not the Metroid Prime compilation this is the Metroid Prime trilogy these three games released across two generations over a five-year period they will be the pinnacle of premeditated cohesive series of video games each game individually sets itself apart built on its own themes it excels at unique aspects of game design and storytelling yet each game also enriches the experience of the other two these 5 years for the Golden Age of the Metroid franchise when the series achieved an unprecedented level of importance and consistency and the core of all that was this prime trilogy all these years later I want to thank you all for giving me the opportunity to finally experience that being said playing them all and critiquing them all over the course of a few months hasn't been easy and that's why this season took so long to produce I don't usually play these sort of games that focus more on a lengthy campaign than a replayable one and I'm admittedly a little burnt out but I'm sure that how I feel doesn't remotely compared to how retros development team must have felt from the time Prime was conceived they have done nothing but work on Metroid for 7 years there's a reason corruption has so much finality to it he knew this would be the end and so it was prime to came out on a console that was dead in the water Prime 3 was released on the hottest console in the world with a ton of emotion behind it and yet it barely managed to outsell its predecessor it seems that the first game in the trilogy perhaps because it was so ahead of its time was the only one to really capture a mainstream audience but by 2007 the very elements that made it such a groundbreaking title had become the standards of triple-a gaming and Metroid had returned to cult status given that and given that retro is moving on maybe it was time to go in a different direction maybe it was time to make a 3d Metroid game that reintegrated some of the efficacy of the 2d series or maybe decisions would be made that would stall the franchise for nearly a decade as for Nintendo they would spend the next few years diving deep into the blue ocean but when Nintendo was finally ready to stir the hearts of the hardcore they would once again call on retro studios to revive a fallen franchise please don't feel obligated to but if you're in a position to support this channel on patreon then for just $1 you can seem to keep critique for Donkey Kong Country Returns right now a week early for three bucks you can binge the entire completed season where my milestone bonus this time will be for a game that nearly killed a franchise metroid other end thanks for watching you keep gluten I'll keep critique

Channel: The Geek Critique

Views: 421,607

Keywords: The Geek Critique, TGC, Geek Critique, Josh Wallen, Metroid, Metroid Prime, Metroid Prime 3, Corruption, Metroid Prime 3 Corruption, Wii, Nintendo, Nintendo Wii, 2007, analysis, review, prime 3

Id: 3pNgOKRKHJA

Length: 36min 15sec (2175 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 30 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/IAmBLD]

I more or less agree with him on this. I love replaying Prime 3. I do have 2 counterpoints I want to bring up though.

1) The energy cell he complained was tedious, I think he was doing something wrong there. I'm pretty sure there's a faster way. Not positive on this.

2) He says that Metroid Fusion streamlined things in a way that allowed the devs to integrate action-oriented elements, but that Prime 3 was streamlined in a more casualized way. I disagree. There are a LOT of cool moments in Prime 3, a lot of little changes in the environment, that only happen because of how this game is structured more linearly.

This goes beyond just the big setpieces. One small yet satisfying example comes from a tight corridor on Bryyo, just before a boss fight (or mini-boss, maybe, It's been a while). The hallway has you going up diagonally, fighting off a few enemies at the top. But when you later go back through that same hall, now the enemies are at the bottom - and there's some sort of explosive you can roll down at them IIRC, now that you have the high ground.

More generally, the enemies you face in the same areas throughout Prime 3 will completely change as the plot progresses. The world feels like it evolves around you, the ecosystems change as the effects that the phazon, the space pirates, and Samus herself are inflicting upon the planets unfold. Not that the other 2 prime games didn't do this to some degree, but it always felt way better-done in Prime 3, because the designers had more knowledge of where the player would be at what time, and thus they could pace these environmental changes more accurately.

[u/Naranek42]

His biggest complaint with the game being that it was too breezy is really telling. Nobody should play this on normal mode, I feel like that's a big reason why people don't enjoy it -- they pin the blame on the disconnection between areas, the voice acting, the epic story, which are all very non-Metroid, but at the end of the day if the game just defaulted to veteran or even just hypermode, I think it would get a lot more recognition from Metroid fans as being "different, but still great" like a lot of people say about Fusion.

[u/ArkhamKnight1954]

He still has Other M and Federation Force to do, I reckon we won't see his Samus Returns episode for a while.

[u/Goober-Goob]

Pretty much sums up how I feel. I do think, however, that lots of people skim over the missed opportunity that the combat in Prime 3 was.

With the new motion aiming, it allowed for quick precision. Prime 3 was already going for a more mainstream FPS approach, and one of the things it should have taken from games like Halo was the headshot. It didn't necessarily need to be the head, but some weakpoint in particular.

They even do this near the end of the game, with the Nova Beam and the X-Ray Visor. You turn on the visor, and on certain enemies it zooms in and shows a highlighted spot. You shoot that with the Nova Beam and it kills enemies much faster.

If they had done this, not only would it have sped up battle, but made it more interesting. He mentions that enemies tend to feel like sponges, and it's totally true. If you had a weakpoint to aim for, it would reward skilled play with faster kills.

Then beam stacking comes in. That was also a major reason combat felt repetitive and bland. In Prime 1, enemies were color coded. Even if it was blatantly obvious which beam you needed to use, it still spiced up battle because each beam was different. Ice beam was slow, but also slowed enemies. Wave beam had minor homing abilities. They do this kinda in Prime 3 by having certain pirates be resistant to beams, or missiles, but it simply doesn't work. Pretty much because beams and missiles weren't really diverse enough, but also because Hypermode undermines everything.

I just really think that even if Hypermode was kept, some weakpoints to aim for and beam diversity could really have made the new aiming really shine.

^{AlsoRundasissocoolwhydidhehavetodie?}

[u/MySonsdram]

Pretty sure I'm the only one who thinks this, but Prime 3 is actually my favorite of the trilogy. Granted, it's not a perfect game but there's so many things to love about it, a lot of which is touched on in this video. While it does force the game to be linear for quite a while, I always love playing through the big Norion action intro and that Ridley fight is maybe one of the coolest boss fights in this series.

And the world building is the best in the trilogy. Sure, it doesn't focus on just one like the other two, but Bryyo may not be quite as good, but Elysia, Urtraghus (Pirate Homeworld), and Phaze are all fantastic, and would make for fascinating games all on their own. You also get to do a lot of neat missions that you rarely see in Metroid, things like protect the demolition troops or build and activate an atom bomb.

The lore is also great from front to back. Each planet allows for different stories to be told, but each one has a way of really making you care about the planet your exploring, and even some of the enemies. Bryyo is the homeworld of an intelligent reptilian race not unlike the Chozo who's people fell to religious zealotry and environmental degradation. Elysia is a lost world inhabited by sentient robots given life by the Chozo, who are carrying on the work they know hoping their masters return. And then there's the Urtraghus which gives us the full Phazon/Datk Samus backstory, which is incredibly eerie.

The game is far from perfect, but I love it for the things it does right. He also mentions in the video, it's a game that grows stronger with replays. You notice little things the second or third time that are easy to miss.