Metroid Prime 2: Echoes

Two years earlier, Metroid Prime was praised for its conversion of the classic 2D Metroid formula to a 3D, first-person format. The world was beautiful and full of wonder, and the items and enemies were more than just nostalgia; they allowed for a resurrection of tried and true gameplay mechanics. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes completes taking Metroid in a new direction.

Where Prime brought familiarity, Prime 2 brings new ideas. Where Prime preserved convention, Prime 2 reinvents. While MP2 bears more than a little resemblance to MP in how it's played and how to get around, it's somewhat further away from the original Metroid, for better or worse.

The plot of Echoes is at first quite compelling. Samus receives a distress call from a Federation craft, downed on a strange planet called Aether. When she goes to investigate, she gets caught in the planet's violent atmospheric storms, and crash-lands in an odd cave near the origin of the distress beacon; investigation tells the story of a stray Space Pirate frigate, the Federation giving chase, and a series of strange incidents involving the local wildlife.

Aether is a world split in two by a cataclysmic meteor impact. Light Aether, damaged by the rock but still fundamentally unchanged, is populated by the Luminoth, a highly advanced and enlightened people. Dark Aether spawned creatures the Luminoth came to call the 'Ing' whose motives were apparently no deeper than to consume and destroy, bringing the Luminoth near extinction. The meteor brought with it phazon, which in turn attracted the attention of the Space Pirates, who of course brought Metroids with them as power generators. The phazon also attracted a strange, new character - Dark Samus (who the Pirates had initially assumed to be Samus but with an odd penchant for the radioactive ore).

So the Luminoth and the Ing are at odds with one another, the Ing also keep attacking the Space Pirates, Dark Samus is attacking the Space Pirates, and the Federation tries to get involved but gets a little messed up. It sounds interesting enough; unfortunately, that's about as far as it gets. The storyline of Metroid Prime revolved around scanning Pirate logs and Chozo lore, and while Prime 2 does the same (replacing Chozo with Luminoth), within the first few hours all the Pirate logs are already done. After that, the only information left to scan is the lore, which does little but reexplain what's printed on the game box. And if you've played the first Prime (especially if you finished with 100% items), you already know what's up with Dark Samus - in fact, that's the only way to find out, as MP2 gives no further explanation of her. It's massively unfortunate that such a promising plot is completely stale for greater than a contiguous 70% of the game.

After exploring the Federation wreckage, and dispatching of some soldier zombies (and other strange locals), the real game begins when Samus finds the last remaining Luminoth, who's watching over the rest of his species in cryogenic stasis. He tells you of the Ing invasion, that the planet's "energy" was split in two, and that though the Luminoth planned to take energy from the Ing to destroy Dark Aether, the darklings reversed this plan and brought the insect-like Light beings to the brink. An enemy Samus destroys shortly before this point happened to be carrying the item the Luminoth devised to steal the Ing's energy (but which the Ing stole and used against them), so guess who gets to travel to Dark Aether and take the energy back?

The game world is split into four main areas: the central temple area (where Samus crash-lands and where the last remaining Luminoth is), and three tertiary temples. Samus must solve puzzles and defeat massive enemies in both light and dark versions of each temple to steal energy from the Ing, and return it to the Luminoth. Travel between the worlds is managed by portals, which are activated in a variety of ways. Retro hired on one of the key designers from the Super NES Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past to help with the light/dark world duality, and it shows, through the sophisticated nature of world-oriented puzzles.

Unchanged from the first Metroid is the concept of gathering suit and armament upgrades throughout the game. Early on, Samus jumps into the middle of an Ing meeting in Dark Aether she wasn't invited to, and the ensuing melee removes from her a portion of her equipment - though she retains more than she did in the beginning of Metroid Prime, she's still missing some vital components. In addition to defeating enemies to get these upgrades back (Guardian enemies will actually use Samus's outfits against her, such as the Grapple Beam Guardian who tries to catch Samus like a fish, or the Boost Ball Guardian who zooms around the battlefield), she'll also find unique Luminoth upgrades to her power suit, including not only Dark and Light Beams for full offensive capacity, but also new suits and innovative outfits, like an underwater triple-jump/jetpack, and a missile upgrade capable of locking on to five targets at once.

Unfortunately, though the sense of power with these outfits is even greater than previous Metroids - the later upgrades make Samus almost godlike - the temple-oriented aspect of the game is depressingly formulaic. The game is paced well, but the core concept of each temple is to gather three keys with no explanation of what they were made for; a sad cliche for Metroid to come to. The final, fourth temple is also very unsurprising, requiring the gathering of ten additional keys, incredibly similar to the ten artifacts from Metroid Prime (in both games, one key/artifact is already at the gathering site).

Despite the unfortunate keys, however, the rest of the game shows great innovation, and that Retro has learned from and built upon what they did in Metroid Prime. Enemies are very well-designed, and have completely new ways of attacking: the Rezbit, for instance, will disrupt Samus's lock-on capability, and even hack her suit software. Bosses are a real life-or-death struggle, whether in the air, in the water, or towering three stories above Samus, almost filling a gigantic room. The level design is even better than before, with distinctly recognizable and fun-to-navigate desert badlands, swamps, sewers, and a mechanical, electric city in the sky.

The game's art direction is a great reflection of the drama inherent in this new, darker world. Cutscenes show Samus discovering strange new things, or raise new questions entirely. While using the morph ball to infiltrate a Space Pirate base, you can observe the Pirates running into a portal; when encountering a Dark Aether cliffside infested with Dark Metroids, you'll see them carry off hapless victims. Encounters with Dark Samus are the best by far - every time the two Hunters meet each other, it's like the rest of the world stops. Their stances go rigid when their sights meet. Both Samuses raise their arm cannons simultaneously. When you think you've dispatched Dark Samus, you'll backtrack through a corridor and notice that some phazon containers are now missing. In this respect, though the Pirates are put aside early on, the story of the struggle with Dark Samus continues to develop.

Metroid Prime 2 is, in no subtle form, more difficult in every way than its predecessor. While Metroid Prime began in a world full of intrigue and excitement, from the moment Samus's ship crash-lands in MP2, the game world seems dangerous and hell-bent on her destruction. Light world enemies are at about the level of Metroid Prime baddies; their Dark World versions are more like Prime's Hard mode. Being in the dark dimension is harmful by itself, too. The atmosphere is corrosive, and damages Samus if she leaves the protective bubbles of light crystals placed by the Luminoth during their war against the Ing. If you enjoyed clearing rooms of all their enemies in MP, you'll probably find yourself running haphazardly through clearings in MP2 to avoid teams of Dark Pirate Commandos.

Metroid Prime 2 is very complex and very suspenseful (despite the lack of plot through most of it). It also has a multiplayer mode which is neither of these. There are two modes of play, four arenas (two more unlockable after beating the game), and a bunch of weird upgrades, but it all really boils down to shooting the crap out of your friends. One wouldn't think that the forced concessions necessary for multiplayer Metroid Prime could be exceptionally good, but somehow it works, and while not deep by any means, it is surprisingly fun. And if that doesn't convince you, you can roll into a morph ball and launch yourself out of a cannon into other players.

Metroid Prime looked and sounded outstanding, and it wouldn't do for the sequel to be anything less. The environments are spectacularly detailed, everything from enemies to weapon effects look wonderful, sound effects are great, and the soundtrack is masterful (revisiting some classic Metroid series music that Metroid Prime didn't get to). There have been some visual tweaks, such as how the scan visor works, and the two new visors, Dark and Echo, look fantastic. The beauty of the game results in occasional loading stutters when leaving the pause menu, but it's a small price to pay.

One extraneous aspect of the game deserves special mention: the menu system. Metroid Prime 2's menus, both at the title and pause screens, are surprisingly impressive. The menus are three-dimensional, each menu option being a node branching out from the center of a web-like structure. The control stick rotates this structure, and the A button selects whichever option node is closest to the front of the screen. The menu actually has a slight learning curve of its own, but it's brilliant and amazing in its own right.

The replay value of Metroid Prime 2 is similar to that of the first game: unlockable image galleries, a hard mode, and different endings depending on percentage of items collected. There are a lot more galleries this time around, though, and the pause menus conveniently alert you to your overall scan percentage (and percentage in each subsection of scans, such as lore, or pirate logs in lore, or pirate logs in lore from a particular time cycle). And of course the multiplayer is fun to come back to long after the game is over. The length of the game is similar to the first's, ranging between 15 and 25 hours on average.

Metroid Prime 2 is an exhilarating game, and very satisfying in terms of gameplay. While the plot and collection stereotypes are disappointing, the core game is still a delight. It's difficult to rank Echoes in terms of what's classic anymore, but you probably won't be thinking of that during the action- and puzzle-packed game that still fills the Metroid shoes.

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