The recent remaster/remake/whatever inconsistent definition you want to apply was an excuse to revisit it, and now I've mostly solidified my understanding that I don't like
Metroid Prime much at all. It's not really a great turn from my prior relationship with the game, but given the degree of near-universal praise the game has maintained for the past two decades, there's always the nagging feeling of "shouldn't I like this? Everyone else seems to" which can foster self-doubt or alternatively, motivation to examine the work further for oneself. I wouldn't call
Remastered's wider reception a "resurgence" for the game with that history in mind, as it remains one of the most celebrated games ever, but it did prod me to also rediscover the game because in my mind and memory that reputation does not reflect how I've ever experienced or the impression I've had of it. Given that much of the positive commentary goes toward "a perfect video game" superlatives to characterize how people perceive
Prime, a description of a host of issues that arose upon this replay can serve to provide a counterpoint.
Probably the takeaway that affects my time with the game most is that I don't enjoy its sense of level design, progression structure and movement feel in concert almost at all. Individually, all of those aspects are sound, with plenty of novel or insightful ideas on how to adapt a previously 2D experience to a 3D world, clearly indicated by the game's heavy reliance on
Super as a guiding template as is commonly known. The issues that manifest are then the chafing of all these elements together in practice that necessarily couldn't be predicted since the overarching and long-term goal was to convey and preserve a known formula, and it's in the details where the foundation starts to crack under pressure. The backtracking synonymous with the series in the context of
Prime's design conceits turns into a plodding chore almost explicitly because of the world design's sense of intricacy; you must engage with the environmental clutter and spatial density on repeat passthroughs simply because those are the fundamentals of its navigational texture that don't evaporate and can't be greatly mitigated by future player states and levels of power. It always feels like you're caught in Rube Goldbergian machine, going through the motions of pre-packaged progression beats, even after having "solved" them the first time around.
Much of this could be addressed with a mounting sense of mobility and capability that's usually characterized the series's design sensibilities, but again the limitations of the new medium or individual design priorities prevent it: no matter how far into the game you get, Samus's capabilities, whether in mobility or in her armament, aren't set up to provide an iterative sense of newfound strength that builds up on top of the starting state; what you get are more in line with lateral options meant as answers for specific situations that are more or less "balanced" for relative parity. Instead of an incrementally growing mega-beam, you get a swap between distinct tools meant for distinct use-cases, none of which are outmoded by the game's internal language and demands as time goes on. This seems a great feature for its environmental puzzle emphasis, but in practice of navigating the world especially upon revisits, you're constantly stopping short to reorient your approach and prep to threats that should no longer realistically be a concern or something that warranted your play attention at that stage of the game. Prior games gave you the tools needed to completely ignore such residue later on through tools like the Space Jump, Screw Attack and the aforementioned beam progression, allowing expedient traversal in exploring one's gradually ballooning boundaries, but here it's simply not possible, with the modest double jump amounting to perhaps the only kinetically game-changing moment in the entire catalogue of the accrued arsenal, and it does not do much to abbreviate the same rhythms and paths taken through the environments from beginning to end. The end result is that for a series and character whose primary driving force in game mechanics has often been the sensation of gradually building power,
Prime is unwilling to let Samus "outpace" its game design and leaves her and the player feeling oddly disempowered despite going through many of the same rituals and conventions along the way.
The elemental beams meant as specific counters to distinct enemy types reaches probably the nadir of the entire game in the extended Phazon Mines sequence, an environment composed of nothing but industrial fight-boxes littered with colour-coded Space Pirates to blast and engage in extended shootouts with. The clunker contextualization of incentivizing varied beam use is one thing in how uninterestingly it's applied (which does not end here, as the Fission Metroids and the Metroid Prime itself are built upon the mechanic), but it leans on the game design elements that are individually the weakest of the game, in its action-based twitch elements, and somehow bases an entire area on a linear sequence of militaristic shooting in aesthetically drab environments while the world's worst action BGM plays repeatedly and on every pass through previously cleared rooms, all enemies having respawned. It's these kinds of moments that effectively self-sabotage the game's own desire and mandated call for the player to trek previously trodden paths to seek new tangents of its world, as the plodding nature of its 3D navigation is additionally literally interrupted by fight scenes that weren't interesting or enjoyable the first time they occurred, and the emphasis only grows as the game moves into its most backtracking-focused period at the end--the Chozo Ghosts alone are yet another case of the game conjuring up situations in which interaction with it is fashioned to the dullest point imaginable.
I cannot emphasize enough that for a game built so fundamentally on the concept of exploring an environment, the interacting design aspects in
Prime usually render even the thought of rolling through the same Morph Ball antfarm cross-sections to reach an area where one must scale the same half-a-dozen platforms while being pestered by enemies that are more trouble to dispatch than they're worth, completely devoid of the excitement of potential new discoveries and instead leave one dreading the environmental chaff required to make the journey. As it is, exploration of optional tangents is only made palatable at the very end of the game, when it can be ensured that no early walls are erected to forbid passage to the game's remaining secrets, rendering the long diversions fruitless should you not have the necessary equipment at hand. In games where navigation is more expedient and better integrated into the surrounding play rhythms and concepts, I would usually relish in making the early, partial testing of external boundaries, but here the process never feels worthwhile to pursue.
Outside of traversal and exploration punctuated by combat, what do you spend the most time doing in
Prime? One of the game's pillars is unquestionably its scanning emphasis of anything and everything in the environment for contextual data. The best aspect of the feature is casting Samus's player role as something of a roving zoologist, entomologist, and biologist, compiling and archiving relevant notes on whatever she encounters on her travels... but it's more of a conceptual, theoretical attraction to the premise, as the practical application differs.
Prime highly emphasizes being a textually written game, and given that focus, it should endeavor to make the resulting text interesting and worthwhile to read, and in almost all cases it is not. You either have clinical bestiary entries that mostly focus on ways to kill the opposition (since that's what a player is supposed to care about mechanically), colourless Space Pirate security logs or research reports, and maybe the worst of all, Chozo lore that to my knowledge are the first point in the series in which they are starting to be characterized on some kind of attempted cultural basis, and the identity they're given is an incredibly tired pastiche of all the enlightened, "noble" (still colonial though) native tribespeople stock theming that could be mustered for the act, which ended up becoming defining in tone and aesthetic. Their writings are also littered with referrals to Samus herself as a literally prophesised saviour figure and species champion, a sort of mythologized space bird Jesus upon whose existence and arrival their eventual redemption is supposed to be based.
Prime's writing doesn't exist in isolation as codex logs to be perused on their own or to be ignored altogether; it mingles and intertwines with all its other primary verbs during play, so if one is predisposed to viewing other design elements of it as rupturing its delicate play balance, the writing is also equally as intrusive in how it's integrated into play, regardless of one's opinions on the material itself.
Another mainstay in series context are boss encounters, for as long as the original
Metroid's been around since the earlier days of the concept's definition.
Prime does not leave one wanting to apply oneself to its main event bouts, as they are of a school of design that is as the rest of the game: static encounters of going through the motions, often literally waiting for a chance to interact happen. I think there's a perception that the way
Metroid bosses were for the first four games or so exemplified some kind of ignorant era for Good Video Game Design before people simply awakened to acceptable values in how to put things together. The things that characterize those battles are their effective "sloppiness", in that you're expected to take hits while delivering your own, and from a conventional modern perspective that reads as a design flaw to some--for me, it's always been an attractive quality as most things faced in the games are animals and other instinctually driven creatures that are characterized by their single-minded drive to negate threats to themselves, and even if not, the resulting scarring during battle on the player end can be just as memorable and effective as an unscathed, perfectly executed fight in other games.
Prime does not do this kind of relentless rushdown; it's instead a heavily pattern-based, iterative lock-and-key kind of game with the same emphases as all the rest of it possesses, which in the case of what could and should be exciting messes of action turn into a literal waiting game as a boss renders itself invulnerable, opens itself for a moment of burst damage, and the process simply repeats until the health bar is depleted. It renders all of the major encounters artifically robotic and devoid of any kind of hurried tension, as the only anxiety involved is of waiting for Thardus to complete its rolling around the arena, or the Omega Pirate to lower its beam barrier to get a shot in. There's no intermediate phase to any of the fights, simply a binary state of waiting for nothing and responding for the second or two allowed inbetween. Combined with the dearth of interesting patterns or concepts (get ready for a lot of ground pound shockwaves), I'm actually bewildered that there's as much of an emphasis on these major encounters as there is. The game would likely improve with their simple removal from its structure, such an immaterial factor or active detriment to overall enjoyment that they are.
That's where I am with
Metroid Prime, one of the "truly perfect" video games of our time in which I find dissatisfaction with its formula to an extent that I can't claim to enjoy the whole despite individual parts of it tracking as admirable or appealing. The strengths of this game are to me found in its atmospheric minutiae, of inhabiting the internal POV of Samus's vision and all the presentational factors that go toward realizing that specificity, but they are ultimately just details caught in a web of non-intrigue. The reputation the game holds in that light continues to fascinate and puzzle me, as upon release I perceived the glowing reception to be at least partly motivated by a sense of relief that it was not the envisioned and feared total disaster. In the times since, said reputation seems to have only grown, to an extent that this revival of it has dug up so many fawning assessments that treat it as unassailable simply because of its pedigree that I was motivated to compose some thoughts to contrast with that to begin with. The GameCube generationally is hitting its nascent and most heightened nostalgia period, which might play a factor in all of it... but it still seems like somewhere in the middle, criticality towards the game has largely evaporated. As such, these aren't just contrarian viewpoints but impressions I've held ever since I first played the game long ago, but which I'm now likely better equipped to put into words.
