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There is just so much cool in this game, it is oozing from every possible orifice. What amazes me most is how it continues to better itself at every opportunity. This is a design tactic that Retro has excelled at in the previousPrimes as well, but Corruption starts with such a high bar, and ramps up so sharply, that it has yet to cease impressing me.
After putting Rundas to rest and taking care of some other legwork, I was able to enter the phazon meteor - or 'Leviathan,' also often referred to as a 'seed' due to its ability to spawn a planetwide corruption of phazon - that landed on Bryya, which looks a little like, and has the same creepy music as, the impact crater from the first Prime. In the center was a highly corrupted mogenar war golem, one of the machines the Bryyans used in their magic-technology war. Epic boss fight ensued!
Once the golem was thoroughly defeated, the massive amount of phazon it had been containing was unleashed, directly into Samus (who prior to this, had a 10% corruption level of phazon, according to the in-ship bioscanner; after this event, the meter shot up to 25%). This overwhelming charge of phazon came in handy when the core of the Leviathan descended, its protective barriers finally weakened, and Samus levitated in a manner somewhat reminiscent of her Dark counterpart, then projected the pure energy directly into the core, utterly destroying it. She proceeded to fall to the ground, and staggered forward, then deactivated her helmet and vomited phazon onto the plagued ground beneath her.
It's worth mentioning at this point that the visor reflection is more evident in Prime 3 than it was in the other two, such that her eyes and the bridge of her nose are fairly apparent just by bringing up the scan visor. After this event, the reflection also began to include what looks like a slight bleed from her forehead, but the blood is a distinct phazon-blue.
The next planet, Elysia, isn't quite a gas giant but is coated in eternal stormclouds; it is basically uninhabitable. Enter the Chozo, who in millenia past, constructed a floating city out of jet-suspended platforms: Skytown. The whole place is Steampunk-inspired, with holograms and jet propulsion intermingled with big brass gears and morph ball cannons and grapple-beam ziplines. It's a very cool city.
According to lore, the Chozo built this city to act as a staging point for probing the farthest reaches of space in their ongoing quest for knowledge. But since the Chozo are like the rich white folks of the galaxy, they got lazy and built a sentient robotic race to run and maintain the city for them. Throughout the city are little rolling and flying robots just welding things together and generally keeping things tidy. There are also a few guard-type robots that are really fun to fight, including some that I got a Friend Voucher for when I bowled into them with my new boost ball upgrade.
Lore reveals that the Chozo were able to learn of the existence of a living planet, but thus far had been unable to locate it, and though their helper robots continued the search after the Chozo moved on from Skytown, they, too were unsuccessful. However, once they learned of the tragedy that befell Tallon IV (the first phazon meteor impact), it was clear to them that the Leviathans were part of this living planet - and that the planet is hostile by its very nature, attempting to overtake the entire galaxy with its phazon plague.
Ghor, the cyborg, was of course the hunter sent to Elysia to try and take out the seed. So he went nuts and screwed up the local Aurora Unit's network connections when I tried to inoculate it against the corruption virus. Then he went and started beating up on my ship! So I kicked his ass, and the Dark Samus avatar appeared again to do its menacing thing. I stole his plasma beam, and went on to, under the guidance of the Skytown AU, construct a thermonuclear explosive to drop on the shield of the Leviathan.
Inside, I beat up a corrupted flying robot sentry, and its powers corrupted Samus (now at 50% phazon corruption, and with more phazon visible in the visor reflection). But this time, she didn't really falter at all. In fact her body language even seemed a big smug as she defeated the seed core and marched off. I think she may be starting to like it.
The plasma beam, in addition to being the already-awesome plasma beam, is used in MP3 for welding puzzles. Sometimes you'll come across an external circuit panel that's been wrecked up by some weaponry or another, and you can use the plasma beam to weld it back together, by pointing the Wii remote at the breaks. There's really no difficulty here at all, but it is pretty cool.
After stopping the spread of corruption on Elysia, the news is that a GFed communication capsule has just been recovered, with a message from Gandrayda: she's found the Space Pirate homeworld. Furthermore, a Leviathan has crashed onto this planet as well, and is by all reports turning the planet into phazon. This + space pirates = not good.
There's a lot more I haven't mentioned; like I said, there is so much cool in this game, I couldn't possibly cover it all. And I've still got a good portion of the game to go yet, somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 based on my pickup and rooms-visited percentages.