The FATAL FLAW of Metroid Prime | GEEK CRITIQUE

[Music] [Music] what is it that makes Metroid Metroid no really what would you say are those critical elements that make a Metroid game real I think the answer much like the series is more complex than it seems but no matter where you stood the day that Metroid Prime was announced one thing seemed beyond certain this is not my net ride seriously prime was treated with caution at best and blind rage at worst stands were worried and you know what they had every reason to be the Super Metroid came out in 1994 now let's hammer that home this was the newest game of the series for eight years and a lot of changed in eight years Nintendo's rivals were no longer scrappy fellow video game companies they were global corporations with gaming divisions where in 1994 three-dimensional games were sort of swirling in this primordial soup both graphically and mechanically the industry had spent those eight years trying to figure out how to make a game work in 3d and the exploration focused Metroid series like such a natural fit it was almost ridiculous that hadn't taken this long so with so much anticipation and so much riding on this how could Nintendo relinquish samus's long-awaited return to an outside company that had never so much as released a video game all Retro Studios had ever accomplished was canceling titles and laying off its staff how could they hope to possibly capture what made Metroid Metroid definitely not by turning it into one of those filthy casual first-person shooters keep in mind we were less than a decade out from the doom and the FPS genre was still very much dominated by twitchy action games especially on consoles Nintendo could crow all they wanted about how no no guys this is a first-person adventure but nothing they said could shape this car hurry that all of metroid subtleties would be brushed aside for some uninspired formulaic hallways shooter I bet some of you have never heard this part of the story before of metroid primes yeah a troubled announcement but the reason that that became a historical footnote is because well you do know how this story ends Metroid Prime would turn out to be the most critically acclaimed game in the entire franchise it was a killer app for the Gamecube hitting at the perfect time when gamers were super worried that if we seemed to kitty nobody would take us seriously Nintendo when it's stupid toy box console full of stupid cartoon games was being torn apart for not being murderer enough yet here was a title with depth and substance that Nintendo fans could use to silence those critics yeah the industry was kind of going to this edgy adolescent phase so when an edgy adolescent named Josh headed to the old blockbuster video on November 17th 2002 he had seen the hype he had already read the reviews and you better believe that he rented Metroid Prime and also animal crossing look I had already gotten a Gamecube instead of a ps2 I could regularly be seen in public at the time playing a fluorescent pink GBA I was never gonna be cool anyway I still remember how it felt to see that stylized intro got even the menu of this game was electrifying this was my first Metroid game but I had spent pretty much my whole life hearing amazing things about this series those reviews claimed that Metroid Prime seemed as though it was at least a generation ahead of its time as I finally stepped into the role of Samus Aran for the first time I was hyped I III ended up putting more time into Animal Crossing yep but I kept hearing that this was one of the best games ever made so I was sure I was just missing something I got it for Christmas the next year and the same thing happened years later I got the trilogy version on Wii and have these pointer controls that replicated the precision of a mouse and keyboard which is normally the only way I can really get into FPS games and for a while I felt like I was finally into Metroid Prime but no eventually this same thing happened again no matter how many times I try to pick it up over the years I would always just lose interest in and stop playing this puts me into a bit of an awkward position to be honest I'm kind of nervous I know a ton of you guys found me because of Metroid I know you are probably viewed Metroid fans and yet I really didn't care for one of the most beloved games in the series at least when I first played it but that was 14 years ago maybe now that I've become a fan of the 2d games I will find more to appreciate because I did absolutely love that series and to tell you the truth I am even more hyped to play Prime now that I was the first time but I do want to give myself the best possible shot at finding a lot to love about this game and I know what I like so I'll be playing the trilogy version but with mouse and keyboard controls via dolphin it took a little tweaking but the entire game did control just fine like this I will be getting into a few of the differences between this and the Gamecube original but the important thing is for a standard playthrough prime is prime regardless of how you play it this is my ideal and heading in I was nothing but optimistic that I would finally fall in love with the Metroid Prime once more unto the breach let's get critiquing in decades past a deeply spiritual group of chozo swore off the technology their species had become so dependent on and built a natural refuge on a planet called Talyn for and but the chozo hippies were forced out of their sanctuary when a meteor impacted the planet and in the aftermath strange elements poisoned and mutated the flora and fauna years later following their humiliating defeat by a lone warrior on zetas the space pirates happen upon Talyn for they realized the potential of this energy which they called phazon and they set up mining operations and laboratories throughout the planet so the space pirates were intentionally mutating life-forms of a zone some of which ended up in orbit onboard a frigate ship above the planet yeah I've seen solid enough what could go wrong with that oh who could have seen that coming yes the space pirates are once again voiced by their own petard Samus Aran response to a distress signal from the airship oh man this intro god I can only imagine how it felt if you've been waiting for eight years it's only been a couple of months since I finished the 2d series but God has built up no camera cuts that music yeah it's still getting me [Music] retro studios didn't just do horn metroid into an FPS it would have been all too easy to make the player feel like a floating gun but samus is anchored in this world that's a good source sense than ever when you're jumping around in 3d her movement speed is a lot slower which you know disappoints me but a speedy pace wasn't at all what retro set out to do true to Nintendo's promise of a first-person adventure twitchy aiming is never the focus thanks to a simple and accurate lock-on feature that just snaps to enemies the other reason aiming is automatic as to sort of free up the player to focus on maneuvering Santis in 3d space during combat you can dodge around enemies you're locked onto narrowly avoiding a charging attack is always cool but began extinct clunkier than it should be the button you talked with is the same one you jump with I don't know I guess I'd find combat more engaging without the lock-on but more than anything it was there to mitigate the need for Jugal analog aiming see the gamecube original had very now let's say traditional first-person console controls you move forward and backward and turn with the left stick and have to hold r2 aim up and down this hasn't been the standard in a long time but every console FPS I'd ever played before this controlled a whole lot like it the important thing is all of your weapons and abilities are designed with lock-on in mind typical video game firearms especially back then operated them a principle called hip scan that means that as soon as you fire the game performs an instant calculation to check whether or not you hit your target it's simple math easy on the cpu and works well enough for something that flies as fast as a bullet but samus ain't firing bullets her attacks are all projectile based and they all have their own distinct cadence and rhythm may manifest through exceptional sound design and effects the crunchiest among them is that clear consistent timing of a charge shot I've always loved that warping effect and when you release that blast you can almost feel the kickback the interface from the menu on down is just slick in a way that Nintendo games usually aren't all of the HUD elements are justified in universe as part of samus's literal heads-up display this speaks to metroid primes greatest ambition to immerse the player in the role of Samus Aran you see the edges of that helmet in your peripheral vision steam slime and water can coat the visor and electromagnetic enemies interfere directly with your sensors occasionally a blast of light will even illuminate samus's visage against her visor this even extends to her upgrades controlling Samus underwater without the gravity suit was always meant to feel a little frustrating to make the moment you actually got it even sweeter so Prime's underwater seconds feature terrible visibility in addition to the movement constraints at least until you get that gravity suit and things clear up prime is absolutely full of minor details like this but they add up and they speak to just how much thought went into translating Metroid to this perspective well there are a couple of different ways you'll find to see the world the most critical one is the one you start with the scan visor the 2d series communicated a lot of functionality via these game II blocks but those would have kill'd believability in a 3d world so instead you now see these information nodes when you activate the scan visor it's a fantastic tool for assessing out hints when you get stuck and so it changes your relationship with the environment itself hidden items make this low droning noise to clue you in now and there's never a case where you'll need to just aimlessly bomb random walls anymore no instead you'll have to spam your whole arsenal at them because you can't remember the difference between cordite and Vin des iam maybe that's just me I'm not as big a fan of how often the scan visor is used to activate mechanisms or disable force fields like Samus has so many ways to do stuff like that and scanning them is by far the least interesting but for the most part the scan visor was a worthy addition to the formula however I want to make a distinction between the scan visor as it's used for environmental Intel and the logbook that it bills up which allows Samus to gather information on the flora fauna and hazards of talent for my problem is not believability this thing feels right at home in universe even if it sometimes seems like a bit of a stretch that it could Intuit things so relevant to samus's specific situation but no I'm your problem is just help harshly it pulls me out of the gameplay one of my favorite things about the 2d metroids was their approach to storytelling the way they would convey not just important beats but backstory and Laura via nothing but subtext and don't get me wrong prime is still doing some of that but I'm sorry I just don't find it interesting to stop what I'm doing in a video game point my reticle at a node wait for a loading bar to fill up and have the plot explained to me delivered in this way it deals way too much like supplementary material it's the kind of thing I'd rather delve into and I'm not playing the game the log books at its best when you use it to scan enemies to pick up info on their weak points but even then it'd be a lot more fun and immersive if I can use design clues to intuit those strategies instead of just being told ok your scale on this thing so you oughta walk here now situations where you need the scan advisor are always well conveyed thanks to those differently colored nodes but I kind of wish they'd taken it a step further and just use different symbols to convey environmental info without needing a scan I mean sometimes the simpler solution is better just show me a picture of a missile fortunately filling up the log book is optional well for the most part unfortunately I didn't see it that way when I was first playing Prime I've never been a completionist but I didn't really understand that about myself at the time I went into it with this mentality that I might miss something and I'm sure that trying to scan everything was at least partly to blame for why I ran out of steam so early back then but hey if this is what you want out of Metroid I fully acknowledge that the extensive amount of prose in the log book allows the lore to be a lot richer than it ever could have been otherwise I'm just glad it's optional the morph ball has been reimagined so perfectly it feels like becoming small and round was made for 3d it's intuitive just the way you move it unlike the 2d games it holds momentum and reacts to slopes now you know I feel like there's some other series that like shied away from realistic pinball physics when it made the jump to 3d weird oh whenever I'm thinking of it's probably because back in this era pre-made physics engines weren't really a thing yet which makes it all the more impressive that retro made it work I always got a kick out of the fact that these technology of first chozo were apparently big Tony Hawk fans the abundance of halfpipe says the most 2002 thing about unlike Super Metroid Samus is armed cannon upgrades no longer stack instead they're held as separate modes this could have gone horribly wrong if you still had to screw around in the menu to swap weapons but this was a new era and we developed a little something called real time weapon change each beam has a much more distinct set of characteristics and abilities and so if one is integrated into combat strategy and puzzle solving alike but since the Wemo lacks a few buttons compared to the Gamecube pad your real time weapon advisor changes aren't nearly as snappy in the trilogy version instead of just flicking the c-stick you have to select an icon I can't fault the game for that and it still works but it made what might have been a nitpick on the GameCube and do a genuine frustrating issue for me the Metroid series has always had these missile tours and so does prime but prime also features a bunch of doors that can only be open with a specific beam that's fine I really wish they'd made them more like those missile doors and let you open them with any weapon once you blast them open once the space pirate station serves as a tutorial area I have always loved how capable and varied your arsenal is right from the start it's a linear shot toward the heart of the station and the moment-to-moment gameplay beets feel like something kind of half light polished and orchestrated with the player in mind now prime takes a lot of cues from Super Metroid especially early on a space colony a Ridley encounter an explosive escape followed by a rain-soaked arrival on a planet an unsettling plant boss but when I eventually got a little frazzled by the 2d series repeating itself the very advent of 3d invigorates these sequences and retro took great pains to use those advances to make those nostalgic elements pop like in this escape you're not just traversing the same rooms you already did you're winding your way through the inner workings of the colony and the rooms you do revisit show structural changes it's frantic and exciting and immersive to a degree that a 2d game never could be then this happens yes right after so expertly introducing all those cool abilities to you a minor explosion somehow butcher samus's power suit lady with no morph ball no charge beam nothing except this spammy pea shooter how retro of you retro this is the point where prime stops so directly guiding the player strips away most of your power Maroons you on a nonlinear world and starts you know being a Metroid game and this this right here is when I stopped playing Metroid Prime in 2002 I finally understand why the prologue made such a perfect first impression it's linear and exciting full of awesome set pieces and fun abilities then all of a sudden the game takes all of that away plucks you out of that gripping sci-fi setting and expects you to wander around these boring Brown ruins with no particular objective it went from being an action game to the metroid game and it was a hundred percent intentional the contrast of all this action with the somber ruins of the chozo is fantastic but I had no context for him back then I didn't know who the chozo were I didn't care who Ridley was I didn't know that by the end of that very first section you'd regain almost every one of those abilities this prologue gives so much praise and most of it is well earned but here's my critique the intro failed to convey to me what a metroid game was or how it worked so in prime flip the switch on me and ask me to explore I didn't just get lost I lost interest I got bored and I decided to go collect NES games instead what I missed out on was a game full of contrasting elements the daunting pressure of the magma caverns and the crisp tundra of the fin grana drifts the natural beauty of the overworld and the mechanical precision of the space pirate labs the spectacle of the boss battles and the tragedy of talent for one of the scan nodes and those labs notes that Faison will kill all life on tell him for within 25 years and that somber ambience of a world hanging on by a thread is exactly how it feels Metroid Prime quite frankly realizes and articulates its world better than any game ever had before and finally getting to play through it now there has been so much more that I missed out on it there have been times throughout this adventure when I have adored Metroid Prime when it's all felt like exactly what I expect and want out of a 3d Metroid but there have been way too many times when it hasn't well let me see if I can show you what I mean I discovered this awesome underwater section in the talent overworld only to be told that I had to turn around go all the way across the map back to the finger honor drifts go through its water section to get the gravity suit and then do I get to keep going do these two areas maybe linked together nope I just had to go all the way back again this is not an isolated incident the entire game is set up like this you'll be in the drifts and you'll find the speed ball in the game we'll be like hey there's a halfpipe you could use way back here is there an elevator directly connecting to that place nope you just have to push through magn or get back to the overworld get the space jump traverse back to the ruins back to Matt Moore back to the drifts and now now you can jump up here and see something new the 2d games kept this to a minimum for the most part you'd find the gravity suit then you'd proceed if you chose to into a larger water section even when they did want you to zigzag between areas to get power-ups there was often a way around it even when there wasn't it certainly never took this long to get where you were going unless of course you chose to take that time to explore but prime makes you me and are back and forth through the world so much it has to be an intentional design choice where Prime has an unprecedented amount of cohesion in its setting and themes its approach to progression lacks cohesion wildlife on talon for is way more aggressive than the 2d games and while in universe we can testify that as an effect at a phase on the game also needs to delay a player long enough for the next room to load on the one hand it's really impressive that the game never cuts to a loading screen but getting ambushed yet again on your doesn't time through the same hallway makes me wonder if it was worth it eventually I just started ignoring fights tanking hits and waiting for the doors to load when the player is incentivized to just ignore aggressive enemies like this something's gone wrong by the time prime sent me on a half-hour romp down the phazon mines with no safe points what should have been a tense exciting difficulty spike only highlighted how repetitive and quite frankly boring the combat had become now let me be clear the puzzles were wonderful excellent use of mechanisms in 3d space the upgrades for fun - I had no idea this game even had power bombs but I'd done it so much that the combat had become a chore oh look it's another group of space pirates the glow purple Wow the wave being killed him how bout that when I finally reach the bottom of those mines I found an Omega pirate who was finally like a proper challenge with a cool gimmick I had to figure out to blast his armor off and then use audio cues for the xray visor to suss out where he was cloaked so when he finally went down it actually felt like I'd accomplished something he collapses on Samus and her suit gets corrupted with Faison it warps the very air around it and we're gonna take it down into that impact crater and finally find out what went wrong on Talyn for this is the climax this is the end this is what it's all been building toward no it's not instead the game is like hey go wander around some more and like pick up all 12 of these symbols and then we'll lay you in yes you have to pick up all of the chozo artifacts now you can scan these statues outside the crater to get pretty obvious hints as to where they're hidden but they're scattered throughout the entire map now you might say ah but you could scan those hints right near the start of the game and then look for them as you go well okay but most of them require items that you don't even get into the late game there's usually nothing even special about the way they're hidden either not any more than the standard missile upgrades they don't even make sense within the war if the chozo sealed away whatever is down here with these twelve keys before they left then how did they hide them side of the minds of the space pirates built make no mistake padding is all this is and it patted my plate I'm by more than two hours it is such a blatant fetch quest tacked on and incredibly tedious if they were that committed to doing this okay but don't require it maybe instead of unlocking the impact crater collecting the artifacts could have made the final boss easier or given you an extra upgrade the point is it's important to give the player that choice between progression and exploration but that fantastic Omega pirate fight followed immediately by that awful artifact quest it's kind of a microcosm of how I felt the whole game like I didn't get a choice a really fun and interesting new area would be revealed and I'd press in there and find an awesome new powerup only to be told that I need to once again trucks across the entire world in order to actually put it to use something as simple as making all the elevators connect to a central hub could have saved a lot of this and look I recognized the backtracking as part of the formula and I don't mind it when it's done well like when it's been half the game since you've been through an area and you've got tons of new abilities to put to use but the way Prime does it is just overbearing if they cut down all the for sig zagging the slower pace of the gameplay wouldn't have had the chance to wear on me so bad but after a while every time I'd shut the game off I just felt drained like I'd been playing it for hours when less than one it really passed I didn't really understand why until I went back and played a 2d Metroid game there defeating enemies came down to your reflexes you as a player grew more skillful alongside SAMHSA's own powers and abilities in prime instead of becoming stronger you get more options it's more about strategy knowing which weapon advisor to equip but it's not freaking interesting because you fight the same spongy enemies with the same obvious solutions over and over aside from super I had never beaten any of the 2d games but none of them took me more than about 4 hours on my first playthrough in prime it took me half that time just to find all the artifacts I hate feeling like this I wanted real bad to love it and I want to emphasize I did find please love about it I love the music which strikes this great almost david wise like balance between ambience and melody i love all those little details in the design the world-building the confidence with which retro took this franchise and brought it seemingly into the future i love how much more developed and animated the space pirates are by the way those idiots are growing Metroid's and injecting them of phazon what could possibly go wrong I love how crime takes place after the original Metroid but before its sequel and the whole trilogy fits here and it's such a bold move that could potentially link so much more context to the entire series I love how much more integrated into the world the puzzles are and how fantastically they take advantage of 3d space I especially love the hint system I need it in a game like this but I can't help but think that our more sensible approach to progression wouldn't have needed one and the previous game in this very series is evidence of it I love what happens when you finally return all those artifacts and really ambitious Samus just seeing him just hearing that beam got my adrenaline pumping he started breaking all the stupid artifacts tattoos and instantly becomes my new favorite character Wheatley for Smash Brothers a lot of fight is fantastic too just full of awesome attacks and dodging and timing our heads and yes even then like most things in prime it overstays its welcome look if a player has figured out how to effectively counter a boss's attack pattern it's time for a new one stop testing me on these same things over and over I love the game's namesake the final boss Metroid Prime this is what has been producing all that day's on the first part of the fight is about using the bean combo it's week two but it's a lot more dynamic than the static enemies since plan can switch between them for rising you with so many different attacks I pursued it deeper and deeper underground Tintin built and might finally busted its exoskeleton the core was revealed now instead of swapping beams I was swapping advisors to find it the corrupted power suit can change into a hyper mode from Samus tans and pure phase on which invites a final comparison to Super Metroid giving you an ultra powerful weapon in the final boss fight but as usual Prime takes the idea from the series past but uses player expectations to surprise you my jaw dropped or I saw just how little damage I was doing his Metroid Prime and I whittled away at each other self it was intense and I really thought on I lose this one but I didn't Metroid Prime was taken down I literally fist pumped when I saw those words epic escape scene here we go or uh I'll just appear back outside and watch the ending that that's fine there is a game within Metroid Prime that I really enjoyed but for every interesting new area I got to explore for every exciting new enemy for every powerup I found for every solitary second that I got to enjoy playing it I had to navigate dozens of rooms I've already seen and blow away the same boring enemies hundreds of times I don't want to understate this the backtracking the lack of cohesion to player progression ruined Metroid Prime for me I enjoyed every single 2d Metroid even the first one substantially more than I enjoyed this one I had hoped that being a fan of those 2d games would make a difference and it did but instead of letting me enjoy it more it gave me something similar that I like too better to compare to for the first time the ending you get is not dependent on how quickly you beat the game no it's dependent on how many items you found and how much of that logbook you filled up and that kind of says it all when the trilogy version came out they bumped the default difficulty way down without being clear that they even did that the original game's difficulty was bizarrely called a veteran instead of I don't know original what really kills it is that trilogy fixes a lot of the sequence breaking tricks that have been discovered on the Gamecube they didn't want you to think outside the box and accidentally do something dangerous outside the boundaries of the developers intent the world feels more real short but your progression through it is so much more structured decisions like this are antithetical to what I've come to love about Metroid for all these reasons Metroid Prime was the worst possible introduction I could have had to this series it avoided our obfuscated the very elements that could have and eventually did make me a fan of Metroid so did retro studios fail are all the people who adore this game just blinded by nostalgia is Metroid Prime nothing more than an overrated insult to game design in general and to me personally is this as it turns out just not a real metroid game know what Metroid Prime is is a Metroid game it's not from me and aside from that artifact quest retro studios miraculously made the right call in nearly every single decision they made also calling a game overrated as stupid and stopped the 2d metroids were made at the pinnacle of an era before immersion as a goal of design was technically feasible storytelling could only be done via text boxes our subtext so unless it was like an RPG or a visual novel some kind of skill based gameplay was almost always the core focus of the design because it had to be I've often heard it said that Metroid Prime is and I quote basically Super Metroid but in 3d now more than ever I just have to say what no it isn't it takes a lot of inspiration from super certainly but the focus on what it sets out to achieve is very different I'm sure some people enjoy both games for similar reasons but well that kind of brings us full circle what is Metroid the truth is that's a real subjective question with no right answer whatever you say what you're really answering is a different question why are you a fan of this series and your answer to that may reveal a whole lot about why you're a gamer in the first place and I answered that one for myself a long time ago video games are about gameplay first and foremost thus you can choose to become more skilful you're skilled will be rewarded for me a video game can certainly be about storytelling world building and immersion and I appreciated all of those elements in 2d metroids but i only got to appreciate them because the moment-to-moment gameplay stayed engaging the industry had evolved in eight years by 2002 games could be more than just games they could be experiences if you do get immersed in the world of talent for you'll revel in the chance to uncover everything that you can if it were designed and paced more like Super Metroid than all the work that went into this world would have had less chance to shine more significantly the game would have been a lot shorter where replayability was often the focus in 1994 the Metroid Prime that only took four hours to beat would have been raked over the coals by 2002 what I see is padding I understand that Prime's fans as more of an opportunity to spend time here and worst in the role of samus this commitment to immersion is exactly what set Metroid Prime apart from other games of the time and since that apart even now from the gameplay centrism that Nintendo often prioritizes it had its finger on the pulse of where triple-eight game development was going you know it's funny things might have been a lot different if I played Metroid Fusion first aside from all the unskipable story scenes it went to the opposite direction of crime and I think it did so on purpose we're prime cater toward adventurers and completionists Fusion was a much more linear challenging action focused game but got to be that way because it dialed back on the esoteric stuff there's an alternate universe out there where I spent the last 15 years as a fan of the series instead of just the last few months but in this timeline I spent all those years thinking that I wouldn't be a fan of Metroid judging the series based on what I gleaned here when in truth and I just wanted to be a fan of Metroid Prime but I can still respect it the cohesion the continuity the tone that set the Metroid franchise apart from other games in previous generations were so spectacularly realized it deserves every accolade it's ever gotten for brazenly reimagining the formula without losing the soul of Metroid so many people doubted them but if the true ending is anything to go by retro studios never doubted themselves the return of Samus was made manifest and the explosive success of Metroid Prime would catapult the franchise into its a golden age the geek critique for that game Metroid Prime 2 is available right now for anyone who supports this channel on patreon and it'll be up on YouTube next week I've also got a patreon exclusive bonus episode for the game that ended that golden AIDS Metroid Other M thanks for watching see you next week and until then you keep Deccan I'll keep fatigue [Music] you

Channel: The Geek Critique

Views: 538,679

Keywords: The Geek Critique, TGC, Geek Critique, Josh Wallen, metroid, metroid prime, samus, samus aran, gamecube, nintendo gamecube, GCN, 2002 games, video games, metroid series, metroid season, retro studios, retro, backtracking, progression

Id: -CsWlocKa7E

Length: 32min 40sec (1960 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 16 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Luxy_24]

After watching the video I think I have the same problem... not with Prime but with the 2D games. Even tho I absolutely ADORE watching someone play them (seriously I watched his videos about all the 2D games probably more than 5 times) I personally can't really play them for long. I think I'm just not the type of person for those games. Prime is more linear and I pretty much never get lost. In the 2D games I'm constantly wandering around, not knowing where to go, what to do. Plus I LOVE the scan visor. I love to stop my journey, read all the stuff and just learn more about a planet or creature. This isn't for everyone, but I love it. I really hope I can finish my first 2D Metroid with Samus Returns.

[u/[deleted]]

He pretty much nailed it.

[u/amilcarbarka]

I have a ton of nostalgia for Metroid Prime. It's among my favorite childhood games along with Melee, Sunshine, and Fusion. But TGC hit the nail right on the head with all his points. Metroid Prime is in fact overrated by its fans; the vibes we have for it cloud our judgement. Gosh the memories with that game! Still, Super Metroid is leagues better than it IMO. Metroid Prime 4's development team needs to have some serous talent to nail it, and I hope they're aware of Metroid Prime 1-3's faults and improve upon them!

[u/PrimeCedars]

First off, I want to say TGC really outdid himself with this video. You can tell he put a lot of work into making it! I'm glad to have him a part of the community. With that said, let's get right to what I feel about his critique:

He honestly covered every single problem I had with the game too! I'm so glad I'm not the only one who thinks this! The people who think Metroid Prime is a "masterpiece" are overrating it. I'd still give Metroid Prime an 8.9/10, though.

All of Metroid Prime's faults are worse in its sequels, and I imagine TGC will have similar problems with those games as well. I'd give Echoes a 7.2/10 and Corruption an 7.0/10. I'm literally afraid the Prime enthusiasts would eat me up for having this opinion, but I must speak my mind. And yes, I'm "one of those" that think Super Metroid is the perfect game. It deserves its praise, and in fact, it doesn't get enough of it in this subreddit. And no, I'm not nostalgia-blinded because I played it for the first time three years ago as an adult. You don't have to be nostalgia-blinded to know that Super Metroid is one of the greatest games ever.