Christi Junior on Nostr: As for Metroid Prime 1 the game, it’s probably only surpassed by Zelda: Ocarina of ...
As for Metroid Prime 1 the game, it’s probably only surpassed by Zelda: Ocarina of Time when it comes to 3D debuts. Metroid Prime manages to be both traditional and groundbreaking, an almost shockingly faithful 3D rendition of Metroid that boldly goes in new directions. Opting for a first-person view was an extremely inspired move, letting the game get the absolute most out of the additional immersion that the new 3D perspective provided. Placing you behind Samus’s visor not only meant you would see exactly what she sees, but that your view of the world is affected or obscured by all sorts of environmental features and hazards, whether it be raindrops, steam, monster gunk splattering on your screen, or electric interference obscuring your view. Platforming still works fine with the first-person perspective, especially with the way this game is designed, and overall this perspective ended up proving absolutely perfect for a 3D Metroid game.
Note that despite Metroid going first-person and Samus’s main weapon being her arm cannon, Metroid Prime is decidedly *not* a First-person Shooter. Nintendo will sometimes act like their games are more special and unique than they really are, or avoid conventional characterizations just for the hell of it, but in the case of Metroid Prime it was 100% justified, the First-person Adventure designation captures the game’s essence perfectly. Even an exploration-heavy FPS with lots of platforming, like Turok 1, feels fundamentally very different to Metroid Prime. Maybe it’s the fact that only Samus’s missiles and power bombs face ammo restrictions, maybe it’s the fact that many creatures and monsters aren’t really that aggressive and are almost just part of the background, maybe it’s the fact that the exploration is emphasized over the shooting, but Metroid Prime is definitely no FPS.
The game *is* however very much a 3D Metroidvania, and a near-perfect one at that. Exploring the mysterious and perilous alien planet that is Tallon IV, finding power-ups, fighting bosses and gaining upgrades that let you access more the world, it’s all here, and everything comes together and flows beautifully, save for maybe a few too many instances of backtracking. The bosses, while not quite as amazing as those in Metroid Dread or the final 3 bosses of Samus Returns, are still great, and easily better than what something like Super Metroid had on offer. Prime is also meticulously designed (notice how many little shortcuts you’ll find around the Chozo Ruins once you acquire the double jump ability) and dripping with atmosphere, helped along by what I consider the best Metroid soundtrack ever composed. Take notes Metroid Dread; here’s a game that manages to combine thoroughly atmospheric tracks (more atmospheric than anything in Dread) with extremely distinct and memorable songs, both of the gloriously bombastic and the achingly beautiful kind.
Your selection of weapons and abilities in Prime is also great, but it’s the Morph Ball, or rather its many uses, that really takes the game and its exploration to the next level for me. The ability of Samus to roll up into this tiny ball and access all sorts of hard-to-reach places has lowkey always been one of the coolest things about Metroid, and Retro Studios had a seemingly endless number of ideas for how it could be used. Now, I have long viewed Metroid Prime 3 as the game with the best and most inventive uses of the Morph Ball in the series, but replaying Prime 1 I can’t help but wonder if I mixed those two up a bit with regards to which game did what. Because Prime 1 is RIDICULOUSLY creative when it comes to using the Morph Ball, the game boasting tons of cool puzzles and nutty obstacle courses that really put your Morph Ball navigation skills to the test.
Worth noting is the fact that whenever Samus rolls up into a ball, you go into a third-person view, which obviously works way better for the Morph Ball than the first-person view would have. This is just one of the ways in which Metroid Prime takes a page out of Ocarina of Time’s book, that game being a third-person game, where Link would nonetheless go into first-person mode whenever using weapons like the slingshot or the bow. Other OoT-inspired features include the lock-on feature (the new Z-targeting), and the way hidden power-ups give off a certain noise whenever you’re in a room with them (like the Gold Skulltulas did). Hell, a number of Prime’s puzzles, involving stuff like returning power to machinery or uncovering and activating various switches remind me of the torch- and switch-puzzles in OoT. Given how Zelda and Metroid already share a number of similarities, and considering how Ocarina of Time represents the perfect 3D transition for a well-established gaming series, this makes a lot of sense, and Prime definitely benefits from following OoT’s lead.
At the end of the day however, it’s the prior Metroid games that most of all inspire Prime, but while the game always honors the spirit of Metroid 1-3, it does so in new and inventive ways. Like those games Metroid Prime is light on story, but heavy on lore, but the way it conveys its lore is through your new scanner ability (“Samus, what does the scanner say about Ridley’s power level?”), which allows you not only to scan and gain information about enemies (again, like Navi did in OoT), but also lets you scan the various runes and data logs that you come across throughout your adventure. The runes were left by the noble Chozo race that used to live on Tallon IV until disaster struck, and the data logs are recorded by the greedy Space Pirates that have recently begun colonizing Tallon IV. Through these runes and log entries you learn about Phazon, an incredibly dangerous radioactive substance brought to Tallon IV with a meteor, how the Chozo sacrificed everything to contain it, and how the Space Pirates are now working to weaponize it, which of course Samus must put an end to.
While completely optional, this lore taken together tells a very compelling tale that’s strikingly different from what you usually see from Nintendo. It’s in many ways a remarkably mature and sophisticated sci fi story, especially for a first party GameCube game, with the Space Pirates casually writing about terraforming and bioforms, and their horrible Phazon experiments being described in a very manner-of-fact way. Having so much of the lore be provided from the villains of the game is itself very interesting, as is the fact that the developers resisted making the Space Pirates come across as cartoonishly evil monsters that have to constantly remind you that they’re Bad, while still making it quite clear that they’re dangerous sociopaths driven by greed and with dreams of violent galactic conquest. And again, all of this is completely optional lore, meaning it doesn’t get in the way of the regular Metroid gameplay unless you want it to.
Another thing differentiating Prime from past Metroid games is its length: It’s like a 15-20 hour game, which is absolutely huge by Metroid standards, and while there is a late-game fetch quest of sorts, it’s 1) foreshadowed from early on, so it doesn’t feel gratuitous or tacked-on, and 2) it gels so well with the regular exploration you’ll be doing that it could easily just amount to a quick, late-game cleanup, rather than a long slog. Basically, to reach the final area you’ll eventually have to collect 12 Chozo Artifacts in total, and just from playing normally I had already gotten 10 of them by the time I actually needed the artifacts to advance the campaign, while the remaining 2 took less than half an hour to track down. So in the end you have a game that’s much bigger than past Metroid titles (as well as later 2D ones like Dread), and this being overwhelmingly due to simply having lots of high quality content and gameplay, as opposed to filler.
Note that despite Metroid going first-person and Samus’s main weapon being her arm cannon, Metroid Prime is decidedly *not* a First-person Shooter. Nintendo will sometimes act like their games are more special and unique than they really are, or avoid conventional characterizations just for the hell of it, but in the case of Metroid Prime it was 100% justified, the First-person Adventure designation captures the game’s essence perfectly. Even an exploration-heavy FPS with lots of platforming, like Turok 1, feels fundamentally very different to Metroid Prime. Maybe it’s the fact that only Samus’s missiles and power bombs face ammo restrictions, maybe it’s the fact that many creatures and monsters aren’t really that aggressive and are almost just part of the background, maybe it’s the fact that the exploration is emphasized over the shooting, but Metroid Prime is definitely no FPS.
The game *is* however very much a 3D Metroidvania, and a near-perfect one at that. Exploring the mysterious and perilous alien planet that is Tallon IV, finding power-ups, fighting bosses and gaining upgrades that let you access more the world, it’s all here, and everything comes together and flows beautifully, save for maybe a few too many instances of backtracking. The bosses, while not quite as amazing as those in Metroid Dread or the final 3 bosses of Samus Returns, are still great, and easily better than what something like Super Metroid had on offer. Prime is also meticulously designed (notice how many little shortcuts you’ll find around the Chozo Ruins once you acquire the double jump ability) and dripping with atmosphere, helped along by what I consider the best Metroid soundtrack ever composed. Take notes Metroid Dread; here’s a game that manages to combine thoroughly atmospheric tracks (more atmospheric than anything in Dread) with extremely distinct and memorable songs, both of the gloriously bombastic and the achingly beautiful kind.
Your selection of weapons and abilities in Prime is also great, but it’s the Morph Ball, or rather its many uses, that really takes the game and its exploration to the next level for me. The ability of Samus to roll up into this tiny ball and access all sorts of hard-to-reach places has lowkey always been one of the coolest things about Metroid, and Retro Studios had a seemingly endless number of ideas for how it could be used. Now, I have long viewed Metroid Prime 3 as the game with the best and most inventive uses of the Morph Ball in the series, but replaying Prime 1 I can’t help but wonder if I mixed those two up a bit with regards to which game did what. Because Prime 1 is RIDICULOUSLY creative when it comes to using the Morph Ball, the game boasting tons of cool puzzles and nutty obstacle courses that really put your Morph Ball navigation skills to the test.
Worth noting is the fact that whenever Samus rolls up into a ball, you go into a third-person view, which obviously works way better for the Morph Ball than the first-person view would have. This is just one of the ways in which Metroid Prime takes a page out of Ocarina of Time’s book, that game being a third-person game, where Link would nonetheless go into first-person mode whenever using weapons like the slingshot or the bow. Other OoT-inspired features include the lock-on feature (the new Z-targeting), and the way hidden power-ups give off a certain noise whenever you’re in a room with them (like the Gold Skulltulas did). Hell, a number of Prime’s puzzles, involving stuff like returning power to machinery or uncovering and activating various switches remind me of the torch- and switch-puzzles in OoT. Given how Zelda and Metroid already share a number of similarities, and considering how Ocarina of Time represents the perfect 3D transition for a well-established gaming series, this makes a lot of sense, and Prime definitely benefits from following OoT’s lead.
At the end of the day however, it’s the prior Metroid games that most of all inspire Prime, but while the game always honors the spirit of Metroid 1-3, it does so in new and inventive ways. Like those games Metroid Prime is light on story, but heavy on lore, but the way it conveys its lore is through your new scanner ability (“Samus, what does the scanner say about Ridley’s power level?”), which allows you not only to scan and gain information about enemies (again, like Navi did in OoT), but also lets you scan the various runes and data logs that you come across throughout your adventure. The runes were left by the noble Chozo race that used to live on Tallon IV until disaster struck, and the data logs are recorded by the greedy Space Pirates that have recently begun colonizing Tallon IV. Through these runes and log entries you learn about Phazon, an incredibly dangerous radioactive substance brought to Tallon IV with a meteor, how the Chozo sacrificed everything to contain it, and how the Space Pirates are now working to weaponize it, which of course Samus must put an end to.
While completely optional, this lore taken together tells a very compelling tale that’s strikingly different from what you usually see from Nintendo. It’s in many ways a remarkably mature and sophisticated sci fi story, especially for a first party GameCube game, with the Space Pirates casually writing about terraforming and bioforms, and their horrible Phazon experiments being described in a very manner-of-fact way. Having so much of the lore be provided from the villains of the game is itself very interesting, as is the fact that the developers resisted making the Space Pirates come across as cartoonishly evil monsters that have to constantly remind you that they’re Bad, while still making it quite clear that they’re dangerous sociopaths driven by greed and with dreams of violent galactic conquest. And again, all of this is completely optional lore, meaning it doesn’t get in the way of the regular Metroid gameplay unless you want it to.
Another thing differentiating Prime from past Metroid games is its length: It’s like a 15-20 hour game, which is absolutely huge by Metroid standards, and while there is a late-game fetch quest of sorts, it’s 1) foreshadowed from early on, so it doesn’t feel gratuitous or tacked-on, and 2) it gels so well with the regular exploration you’ll be doing that it could easily just amount to a quick, late-game cleanup, rather than a long slog. Basically, to reach the final area you’ll eventually have to collect 12 Chozo Artifacts in total, and just from playing normally I had already gotten 10 of them by the time I actually needed the artifacts to advance the campaign, while the remaining 2 took less than half an hour to track down. So in the end you have a game that’s much bigger than past Metroid titles (as well as later 2D ones like Dread), and this being overwhelmingly due to simply having lots of high quality content and gameplay, as opposed to filler.