Mythinks #14

The Last Metroid #7 - Metroid Prime 2: Echoes - The Perfect Sequel

I know it's perhaps a little gauche, a bit of a cliche among Vidja Game Analysts, to begin a review of an all-time favorite by saying it was, in essence, love at first sight. Something that I would give a personal high regard as an all-time favorite is usually a bit of a slow burn. Especially in part because a lot of said all-time faves are from my childhood, and I usually wasn't thinking too hard about this sort of thing when I was ten. It's one thing to love Pikmin, or Kingdom Hearts, or Banjo-Kazooie when they've existed in your life for a relatively small amount of time, versus now, when those games have been in my life more than they haven't, yknow?

Before Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, I wasn't a Metroid fan. Samus to me was just the spacesuit guy from Smash Bros. But something about seeing the game as presented in Nintendo Power piqued my interest to a degree that I can say has only really happened a few times for any franchise I wasn't actively participating with, yet. It was a real treat to finally sit down with the game for the very first time, to this series I've barely been exposed to, only to be greeted with a title sequence and menu theme that's menacing, curious, and alien all at the same time. Definitely a theme befitting this game's more desolate tone, even by Metroid standards.

It's hardly a secret that a lot of the Metroid series' identity is built off of its use of atmosphere, making use of its soundtrack and artistic tone to take you to these dark and foreboding worlds. And I will just say that Metroid Prime 2 is such a big reason I hold so much value in that, with the way that it throws you into this game. From word go, all you know is that a Federation distress signal was caught from a fringe planet known as Aether, and that Samus is being sent to investigate. But the moment Samus enters the planet's atmosphere, the global storm above said atmosphere forces Samus into a crash landing, stranding her here on this planet.

You arrive to a Federation base set up underground, everyone within it dead, with nothing but a hauntingly ominous track backing it as you explore the ruins. That is, until the corpses of the Federation troopers start springing back to life and gunning you down. And I love the way this game starts off not even trying to explain a single thing that's happening. With this happening on top of a dark-suited doppelganger of Samus going through an ominous portal before siccing a horde of spider monsters after you.

GAIL:

It certainly feels like one of the Metroid games that dismantles Samus' power the hardest, shy of maybe just Fusion. A lot of them come up for their own reason why Samus doesn't have all her usual equipment for an adventure, sure, but this one feels like it pointedly throws you to the absolute bottom rung, especially felt when this happens after an already really dark intro sequence. And especially after you kind of just have to move on from it, with no clear goal in mind. You found all the Federation dead, keep finding more dead ones, just kind of hoofing it across the land trying to figure out what the heck is even going on.

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You eventually stumble across the Federation landing site and find a video log at least elaborating on what happened to all the Federation troopers, being that they initially wound up here in pursuit of a Space Pirate ship, only to end up stranded much like you have. Eventually, they encountered dark insectoid creatures much like the ones you saw before, only for them to get easily overrun by them, a first real look at the enemy you're up against.

At long last, you're given some clarity over the situation on this planet. You find a big temple suspended in the air, before encountering more of the mysterious shadow creatures, one of which drops a mysterious piece of technology that integrates into your suit. And then, just upstairs is the first instance of a non-Chozo race of aliens in peril, a friendly moth alien known as U-Mos of the Luminoth species. He explains that some time ago, a meteor struck Aether, hitting it with such force, that it caused it to split between dimensions, creating a Dark Aether to mirror it.

Along with this Dark Aether, the meteor also seemed to have brought creatures the Luminoth called the "Ing", dark dimension creatures that seek to invade and take over Aether, possessing the bodies of Light World denizens to do so, since they cannot exist in the light world itself. Them waging this war because the energy of Aether itself, embodied by the four energy controllers on the planet, also split in two, so it's a battle to maintain the stability of the two planets. The energy from the other three Light World controllers were already stolen, using the Energy Control Module that the Ing stole from the Luminoth, and were just minutes away from using to finish off the Luminoth for good and steal the energy U-Mos was guarding all on his own. A Control Module that you've now stolen back from the Ing as a first step against finally gaining some ground back from them.

JINX:

so, yeah, samus just managed to turn up to this very recent war being fought, intercepting the final attack before the ing were like, five minutes away from being successful in destroying aether itself. because you're just that kind of badass.

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Somewhere past the game's intro sequence is usually when a Metroid game starts to pick up in terms of tone, even Fusion starting to have more energy to it once you enter the SRX sector. Arriving to Agon Wastes, however, greets you with a droned-out tune, as if to really hammer it in that even if you have a better grasp on what's happening, winning the day is going to be a tall order. Especially from how low you really start off in this adventure.

From here, the game's structure becomes a bit more evident. Much like the previous Prime game, it's more about arriving at one specific area, and that becoming the focus for the next few hours, rather than doing much in the way of region-hopping the 2D games tend to do. Each of the major three regions almost having its own extended intro sequence to get you acquainted with the tone of the kind of enemies you'll be up against in the region. The desert region of Agon Wastes feeling more slow, methodical, and plodding than the game has up to this point, but still having its moments where it surprises you, such as it turning out this is the region the Space Pirates are mainly stationed in.

CHIAKI:

I really like this way Prime 2 ups the ante from the last game. It has a lot of obvious analogs to enemies from the previous Prime, but you'll be encountering them much sooner than originally. The Space Pirates, for example, weren't really encountered until around the halfway point of the first adventure, and now here they are, once you've really started the first third of the game, on top of being more deadly than they were in the previous game.

Same goes for later on. You encounter this game's equivalent to Sheegoths around the same point as in Prime 1, but the Grenchlers are so much more actively threatening. This game's "Chozo Ghosts" being the Dark Pirate Commandos, also are encountered sooner than previously, and even then have a couple of extra-powerful attacks, and are privy to locking the room's doors to force you into fighting them to move forward. This game is notably a lot more punishing than the first Prime.

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VIXI:

This bump up in difficulty really being emphasized via the introduction of this game's central motif, in having a "Dark Aether" that you occasionally travel into in order to progress. And especially on a first playthrough, this when the game elects to take the gentle handling gloves off. in Dark Aether, the very air is poisonous, and your health will drain alarmingly quickly, your only real reprieve being the crystals left behind by the Luminoth that create safe zones where your health slowly restores over time, but just slow enough that it's not so viable as to just sit inside one of these safe zones unless you're absolutely desperate for energy.

Going into Dark Aether is scary at first, with it being home to extra-tough versions of enemies, and it really is a truly oppressive atmosphere. Enemies here start really strong and hard to kill to, once again, really make you feel like you're fighting an uphill battle against these alien to the point of being extra-dimensional horrors that are insurmountably more powerful than you are.

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LUNA:

It really does hit that classic feeling that's almost in itself a cliche to bring up in a review of a Metroid game at this point, but that feeling of isolation. Not only are you on your lonesome on some far-off alien planet, but now on top of that, you're thrown into an entirely different reality where the air itself is hostile to you.

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This first venture into the Dark World being punctuated with a fight against one of the Darkling Guardians, bosses that are holding onto and using the powers of your items. This isn't new in Metroid, there's plenty of bosses that utilize your own tools against you, but I do feel like in general, this game makes the most creative use of the concept, the previous one before this being a Darkling of one of the worm monsters that lays morph ball bombs in a trail behind it, as well as actively throwing and spraying morph ball bombs all around it. But the point where it's vulnerable is its glowing rear end, so you'll have to brave trailing behind it to deal damage to it.

Jump Guardian here probably isn't the best example, the fight lasts perhaps a smidge longer than it feels like it stays interesting, with not much you can do to make it go faster, but I still think it exists as a point that even more minor boss encounters in this game are gonna be bigger events, and sometimes even pointedly a war of attrition against these otherworldy foes.

You'll also be encountering that dark blue doppelganger we mentioned, who's played up less like an SA-X and more like a rival hunter you bump into, the one goal she seems to have in mind being to collect the Phazon energy that also happens to be on this planet. Scanning her also reveals that she contains your own DNA. Feeling fitting from a game called "Echoes", that you're dealing with not only a dark echo of Aether itself, but also yourself.

Calling her simply "Dark Samus" seems to be a fairly intentional misdirect, trying to make one assume she is a Dark Aether version of Samus running around, though I do think Samus has reasonably clocked that, by the logic of the Ing invaders (Ingvaders), means that this shouldn't be possible, as they're parasites that corrupt a host body. And as such, she's gone and sorted Dark Samus under "Offworld" entries in her logbook. And indeed, if you've gotten the 100% ending of the previous game, you can probably put two and two together that this is, in fact, Metroid Prime inhabiting what was once your Phazon Suit that it stole before blowing up the Impact Crater.

JINX:

this fight always stuck out as one of the coolest in the series, to me. i like the way that it's basically just an even footing one-on-one shootout, even going so far as to happen in neutral territory, being deep inside the space pirate settlement with a highly destructible environment on top of that. really selling dark samus' power by having her attacks cause so much collateral damage on top of that, it being funny to imagine the space pirates themselves watching this battle unfold on security cams or something, where all they can do is watch in horror as you two just wreck their main reactor room.

it's also just cool, how the scans throughout the space pirate base hype this encounter up. you spot dark samus on the way in of course, but the pirate logs in the area talk about how this strange new "dark hunter" has been repeatedly raiding their base in order to steal their phazon reserves, something you catch her in the act of doing.

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CELESTE:

Metroid Prime 2 isn't a narratively deep game, but it does still have a lot of consideration for all of the moving parts and how they interact with one another! You get to see the events on Aether from a bunch of different perspectives, like the Federation that got wiped out, the Space Pirates, which have been barely holding out in the face of the Ing clawing at their forces and resources. Them being so interested in traveling to Dark Aether because for some mysterious reason, it seems to be rich with Phazon.

But you also get the Luminoth, which of course, were the ones that had been fighting against the Ing the longest, losing ground one by one. This war being so recent that you'll constantly be finding Luminoth corpses still lying about in the world, unlike the Chozo before, the only trace of which aside from statues and architecture that we've seen being literal ghosts from Prime 1.

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One of the points of contention I see the most with regard to this game is the way it implements other beam weapons. In the first Prime, you were free to use any of the beam types as much as you'd like, but Plasma Beam almost felt like an outright upgrade from all the other beam types. So much so, that they had to introduce color-coded enemies to force you to switch to the others every once in a while. Prime 2, on the other hand, introduces the Dark and the Light beam, getting both one after the other, with good reason since they remain vital armaments for the rest of the game.

Here, though, the beam weapons in this game operate off of an ammo system, which has led to the game catching a lot of flak for limiting your use of these weapons, but I would say there is good effect to this. Namely, in that with these harder encounters with harder to fell enemies, their weaknesses are only going to nerf them all the harder. On top of that, there's a relatively consistent rule with rare exceptions that Light World enemies are weak to the Dark Beam, while Dark World enemies are weak to the Light Beam. In that way, it makes sense to put a finite resource on your beam weapons so that you'll have to consider when's the best time to pull out your big guns.

Because I do mean it that these weapons rock these enemies hard. Space Pirates die to four Dark Beam shots, Dark Bloggs die to a single charged Light Beam shot, Pirate Commandos and Rezbits die to a single charged Dark Beam shot freezing them, and then shooting them with a missile to finish them off. Even Ingsmashers and their Darkling counterparts, probably the sturdiest single regular enemies in the game, get knocked down by a couple charged shots from the beam weapon they're weak to. They do expect you to exploit these weaknesses, and having to survive against these harder-on-average enemies for longer feels like an apt punishment for neglecting to manage resources, let alone be attentive enough to find Ammo Expansions, each adding another 50 ammunition to both ammo types.

And the game is also obscenely generous with supplying you with an adequate amount of beam weapon ammo. A rule stated as soon as you get both beam weapons is that defeating an enemy or destroying a supply box with one beam type will have a much higher chance of dropping the opposite beam ammo type. And if you're low on that ammo type, it'll be even more generous about it. If you're genuinely struggling to keep ammo topped off, take mind of the supply crates and other destructible objects lying around.

The only part about the beam ammo system I feel like isn't well explained, seeing as its only mention in the game itself to my knowledge is their entries in the logbook, is that it does have softlock prevention in the event you are completely out of an ammo type, but still have a door corresponding to that weapon to go through. In the form of being able to still charge a shot on zero ammo, it'll just fire a normal shot instead of a charged shot. A well thought out failsafe that could've been stated in a better place, as you're not likely to find it out by accident.

Plus, another functionality of the beams is that they both affect the safe zones in some way. Notably, the Light Beam turns safe zones into a really safe space where any Darkling enemy that comes in contact with the bubble the crystal or beacon emits will just evaporate on contact. Just like that. All these systems making the various beam weapons feel like there's a lot more strategy to using them, this time around.

One last task you're met with before the end of a major area is finding three keys to open the way to the boss room, and in turn, the Dark Energy Controller, and we're of two minds about this.

IONO:

Given how often you'll just stumble onto the location of one of these keys anyway, their inclusion feels a little needless, what with there only being a couple times you'll get to the point where all there's left to do is the key hunt, but you haven't even caught a glimpse of one of the keys yet. The most obscure one being hidden in the underground portion of Torvus behind a very easy-to-miss Dark Portal.

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LUNA:

On the other hand, much like Prime 1's attempts to let you wander around and get lost, I do appreciate a checkpoint in your adventure where you're forced to explore an area with all of your tools, probably finding a couple extra pickups on the way. Plus, if you are genuinely lost, the game will eventually point at which rooms have the Dark Temple Keys in them, which feels like a fair compromise.

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With the area mid-bosses already being a step up from the mid-bosses of the previous Prime, the end-of-area big final fights are an even bigger step up from Prime 1's. Each of these fights a long, multi-phase battle, and all take place within Dark Aether, making them extra threatening, especially against Amorbis here, where your Varia Suit is still quite vulnerable to the Dark World's atmosphere, and Amorbis being smart enough to try and disable your already very limited safe spaces to stand.

Amorbis is the one of these that's most like a boss fight from Prime 1, but I think it already beats them out, simply by being a lot more deadly than those bosses, especially for this early on in the game. Each phase simply adding another Amorbis worm to the equation, but by the end it becoming a hectic game of whack-a-mole where you have to mind your radar, else a worm might just fall on top of you or dig up from under you, forcing you to scramble into the unsafe air for a moment. By the end of the fight, they're pulling out huge beam attacks, but pick up a weakness to the Light Beam, allowing you to take out each worm with ease.

The Dark Suit, your prize for defeating Amorbis, probably feels like one of, if not the most relieving single upgrade to receive in any Metroid game. You've dealt with a few hours of the Dark World being a daunting place to even visit, forced to make your movements within it both measured and quick. But the Dark Suit significantly lowers the damage Dark Aether's atmosphere does to you, allowing you to breathe much easier when you have to visit this place. Which definitely feels symbolic of you obtaining the first of three planetary energies back from the Ing, your first real meaningful headway into defeating this threat.

CHIAKI:

Something I do sort of wish they did more at the end of these segments is this sort of. Pseudo-escape sequence. Not an escape sequence in the sense that there's a timer to get out before Dark Agon explodes or something, or even any kind of pressure to get out as fast as possible. But I couldn't help but notice the seemingly deliberate narrative showing the Ing throwing everything they can at you as you try to escape Dark Agon to try and stop you. With there being a trio of Warrior Ing that turn up in Amorbis' stead on the way out, another couple now occupying the main junction of Dark Agon, and several Dark Space Pirates attacking you at the portal room. Especially since this could've created real tense situations, seeing how far away you still are from a save point, in here. But alas, this doesn't really happen in the next two major areas, at all.

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It certainly feels deliberate that the next step along the journey is Torvus Bog, a much visibly livelier place than the desert of Agon is. It still being a daunting place with a rather washed-out color palette, signifying there's still a lot to do before your mission is accomplished, but you've already put a significant step forward in restoring this world from the Ing plague. Especially now that the soundtrack is also reflecting your journey by having the backing track for this area be much, much more alive than Agon.

CELESTE:

Something in general I think Metroid, the Prime series especially, and Prime 2 even more especially, does so well is have such a unique musical footprint. It incorporates a lot of alien-sounding synth noises that, by 2004 standards, would probably come off as a bit cheesy, had they not treated said synth with so much genuine gravitas, accompanying these tracks with alien choir vocals, or in Torvus Bog's case, a heavy percussion beat and ethereal-sounding synth to back it up. Still to this day one of my favorite tracks in the whole series.

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Something I like that they do with the Dark World of Torvus Bog in particular is make the water, a normally sloggy but still relatively safe thing to be in, into a poisonous swamp that damages you if you so much as step in it. Making Dark Torvus a bit more deadly, even if you now have the Dark Suit to protect you from the atmosphere. This making the floor effectively lava, in a lot of cases.

One aspect I will admit is a weakness of Metroid Prime 2 is that the cross-world puzzle solving is a bit weak. It almost having to be that out of necessity, given how much of a non-zero commitment traveling to the opposite world can be. Individual portals are just far away enough from one another that plotting a trip to the opposite world often involves an at least small trek. On top of this, going through one involves going through one of Prime's prized disguised loading screens.

Not a terribly long one, compared to the elevators, but still just long enough that they probably sought to minimize mandatory world switches, given if they had puzzles that could genuinely very easily stump a player, it would get annoying to travel back and forth between the worlds just to find which world expects you to move or activate a thing in order to make progress. Quite often, if you're roadblocked from progress in one world, and if there's a portal nearby, chances are progress is simply behind said portal with little ambiguity to it.

A feature that you would think would come up more often is events in one world affecting the other. Usually, a piece of machinery moving in one world causing it to move in the other as well, but they don't appear very often. Just infrequently enough to almost kind of forget that's even a mechanic. Its presence is very easily telegraphed, as well, with there being an otherworldly after-image of an activation device like a bomb slot or boost ball spinner appearing in one world, but again, usually you'll simply happen across these just by making forward progress.

Something I do think they do well with the Dark World is make it very transformative. Many of the rooms are easy to clock, but many are almost unrecognizable between their counterparts. Not that cross-referencing the two is all that necessary, at least for up to this point in the game, but I still think it's cool to not just have a dark mirror world gimmick not simply just be a plain copy-paste job.

Boost Guardian is one of the cooler mid-bosses in the game, if you ask me. Though it certainly does earn its reputation, it being the one boss that actually managed to kill us on our Hard Mode playthrough when collecting screenshots. It's a very frantic fight against an Ing that's stolen your Boost Ball, using it to wildly ricochet around the room, with there being extremely tight time to react to its bounces. But I do like it in how dynamic it is, and also being able to approach it from different angles.

The much safer strategy is to stay in normal Samus form when it starts doing its bounce attack, staying in the air as long as you can and dodging the boost barrage, only going to morph ball form to do damage to its sludge form. But you can also play much riskier, going into your much more vulnerable Morph Ball form, trying to chase it down and lay a bomb next to it as it's revving up, which will knock it out of its bouncing phase much quicker, but naturally you're a lot more liable to getting smacked by it when it does get its boost attack. Which is especially dangerous for the first fight with absolutely no safe zones in it, your only source of energy being the pillars it destroys and the Inglets it spawns.

GAIL:

Speaking of contentious topics in Prime 2, this is also the first point that asks you to backtrack to a previous area in order to make progress in the area you're currently in, just like Prime 1 did a couple times. In this case though, I think it's much nicer, since in this case, it asks you to visit Temple Grounds again, and an area only just barely outside of Torvus' entrance, on top of that. More than anything, I feel like it's a way to clue you in on what will turn out to be the final gateway in the Dark World by showing you the room's Light World equivalent.

Plus, once they do this again in Sanctuary Fortress, yes, it's still a bit of a trek to get back to Torvus for one more visit, but they are exceedingly nice by having a very close-by room to the room you get the Power Bomb from also be an unlockable path to an elevator that takes you right back to Sanctuary. And I'll take that over the awkward Ice Beam-into-Gravity Suit detour from game 1.

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The Seeker Missiles are a cool new weapon idea that I wish got to see more action and were treated a bit less like a key. Though, maybe that is for the best, given this power-up, allowing you to charge your missiles and then lock onto up to five targets, will then release a barrage of missiles, is slightly unreliable, sometimes not quite hitting all of its tiny targets at the same time like it's supposed to. I wish I thought to try its combat applications, more, though Super Missiles, plus Light and Dark Beam, take care of so many enemies in the game just fine, I'm not sure what good it is, other than for the one enemy where it's required to kill them.

The catacombs of Torvus are a definite change in pace, being a lot murkier and darker than the surface area of the bog, and being notably even more submerged in water, where you're forced to suffer water physics until what is effectively the Gravity Suit, now called "Gravity Boost" finally takes your training weights off. Though it does definitely feel like A Decision to place a pretty easy, but nonetheless pretty punishing and easy-to-get-killed-by boss at the end of a very long segment where they keep you from reaching a save station for quite a while. I think the Primes generally have a pretty good balance of save station placement, minding they also serve as checkpoints. But here, I can't say I'd be very enthused if I had to start a segment where you're slowly slogging through water over from the start. Definitely feels like the game's one real dull moment.

Especially since the reward is in fact, the Gravity Boost, which feels strangely underutilized for how much of a big deal it sounds, being a very long and floaty third jump, so long as you're underwater. Except the Torvus Catacombs are the only place in the game that really have all that much water in it, even the Bog proper doesn't have much in the way of fully submerged underwater areas. So you'll basically be using it for this one segment, plus a missile expansion, and then that's it. Very underwhelming.

Chykka is the main boss of Torvus Bog, having a cool setting as a big aquatic larval insect swimming and breaching the toxic lake like a whale to attack you. Its main gimmick being that it has a weak spot on its chest that it doesn't show very often, but is where you can really deal the bulk of your damage. Though it does feel slightly strange that our only chance to really wail on it is if you get caught by its tongue attack and then knock it out of it, leaving a fairly sturdy first phase of a fight that lasts a little too long.

Its adult form, a cross between a dragonfly and a wasp, may not have the same spectacle, but it's at least a much more active fight keeping you moving, grappling around the area, looking for the best angle to hit the vulnerable spots on its wings from. It's clearly weak to Dark Beam, though it's very skittish and jitters around a lot, making Dark Beam's slow projectile not likely to hit, so it's not always the easy option, unless you do manage to get close to it.

Plus, it throws the curveball of turning into its Darkling form mid-fight, becoming more aggressive and birthing underlings right in front of you, but also switching up its weakness to the Light Beam.

The Dark Visor doesn't feel as impactful of a prize as the Dark Suit, especially at first, given it just seems to be rethemed Thermal Visor. And in large part, it is, but it does give you a decent edge over Dark Pirate Commandos, you being able to see through their invisibility now, as well as allowing you to lock onto the previously untargetable darkness sludge forms of the Ing.

VIXI:

The final main area is Sanctuary Fortress, the technological height of the Luminoth, and their final hold-out before the Ing got to their near-victory that you halted at the beginning of the game. And this is straight up, one of my favorite locales in all of video games. From the more unique tech aesthetic, the cityscape down below the Fortress, and the upwards-flowing, what the developers referred to as "digital rain", that really works to make this place have a lot of energy, but still overall have a melancholic atmosphere to it.

This extending to the color palette as well, with this finally being a location with plenty of colors that haven't been desaturated, signifying you're this close to bringing the light back to this drowned-out, weary world, but it still holds onto a lot of its muted colors and greys, not just for contrast, but also almost as if a statement for how tackling the Fortress and its dark counterpart, the Ing Hive, won't be easy.

This energetic, exciting, yet melancholic feeling only being further emphasized with the area's main track, which again, I would go so far as to say is one of my favorite pieces of music in the entire medium of video games. It being an even better example of the corny retro-sci-fi synths being elevated to feeling as grand as an orchestra thanks to the choir.

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Something really cool that we already talked about in the review for the first Prime, is the way the first-person perspective from behind Samus' visor is used to create some really convincing diegetic effects, like raindrops hitting the visor, or sludge sliding down it when you blow up the guts of an enemy. But I think one of the coolest uses of using the fact that Samus has a power armor suit as an actual gameplay element is when there's an enemy that, in essence, transmits malware into your suit's computer systems, scrambling your visor feed with static and a tanked frame rate, forcing you to basically ctrl+alt+delete to try and reboot the suit's computer, which is such an amazing touch.

Something else I think is really cool about this game is that it actually makes, I would argue, the best use of the Morph Ball through the whole series. In most cases, Morph Ball being a means to get through small tunnels. But here, they actually have a couple of entire boss fights that you fight entirely while in Morph Ball form. Spider Guardian is far from flawlessly executed, especially since it can be a long fight, again, a far ways away from the previous save point, but I appreciate that it even tries to do a fight like this and still even just mostly sticks the landing, minding that stunning it while the bomb slots are active is a way to make this fight significantly easier.

On top of this, you also have Power Bomb Guardian, which forces you to make effective use of Spider Ball tracks and strategize which bomb slots are the easiest to hit first, making for another really sick and unique boss fight.

In addition to that, they even added the functionality for Morph Ball form that, if you're traveling along a Spider Ball track and then charge and use Boost Ball, it will send you flying off the Spider track, and they make you do some really awesome ball parkour with this functionality alone, making you shoot across gaps to go from spider track to spider track, and this in and of itself is so sick, I didn't even realize they didn't even add any new Morph Ball-based abilities to the game until someone pointed it out to me. This is kinda just rad enough to cover it, really.

They just triple-whammy these Morph Ball bosses almost in sequence like they were going on sale, and each one just gets cooler than the last. I keep forgetting Caretaker Drone, of all things, is actually kind of one of the more outright fun-fun fights in the game, it's just that satisfying to use the spider-boost to slam into its weak points.

Deep into Sanctuary is also where you'll encounter Dark Samus for a second battle, with her pulling out all the stops with an expanded arsenal like yours has also gotten expanded. With her utilizing a Boost Ball attack so much more hectic and devastating that it makes Boost Guardian jealous, her own super missiles, a cool beam attack. Plus the fight takes place on a giant elevator, which is like, cheating. Cause that's just a x5 multiplier to how cool a fight is no matter what.

The Echo Visor you get after beating her is, sadly, one more case of a cool idea not seen to its full potential, being a visor that allows you to see soundwaves and sonic emitters, but the main way this is used is simply opening doors that have their locks only visible with said Echo Visor. Plus a sound-memory game that you can do once you unlock the final beam weapon in conjunction with it, but there's only a handful of these. When I was younger, I had always hoped a future Prime game would give the Echo Visor a second chance, cause I think even young-me knew they were cooking a really cool idea here. Perhaps if an enemy type used a sonic projectile, and thus was invisible to the normal eye. But hey, at least it looks really cool.

They also bring in an old classic in the Screw Attack, making its Prime debut by almost essentially acting as a really extended long jump, mostly used for crossing long gaps the same way you would with Space Jump. Original Space Jump, not Prime Space Jump. Its combat applications have their very specific moments; they can plow through enemies like the Rezbits, and a well-placed Screw Attack jump can blow the head unit clean off a Quad's shoulders, though an inability to use it while locked on hampers it, a bit. Maybe because they knew even the Screw Attack would be one step too far if you used it for much more than gap-jumping and maybe ramming through a Metroid every now and then, which feels fair enough.

Finally, the last boss of the Sanctuary is a giant mechanical quad-walker, Quadraxis, which is very easily the most memorable boss in the game, and for good reason. It's big, probably easily the biggest single enemy Samus has faced in the series, even to this day, and if the spectacle for Amorbis and Chykka were already pretty strong, this is when it goes off the hinges. It's another fight with no safe zones, and with still just the Dark Suit equipped, there's a ticking clock counting down over the course of a very long fight. Not that you're completely defenseless, because at least in the first phase, you can bomb or boost into the energy in its feet to cause it to explode into pickups, but past this point, there's no more renewable sources for energy.

The knees being the weakness, but only specifically when they're glowing blue, seems slightly arbitrary, but it's not too hard to rain Super Missiles into, though you will have to watch for the colossus' range of attacks, between stomps, the head firing down on you from above, and a big tornado spin attack that sucks you in if you're too slow to stop it.

With its head severed and its body disabled, it's still transmitting a signal from its neck, so you then have to shoot the antenna to disable the head, leaving its own three antennae vulnerable. This phase being a little less daunting, but nonetheless with a lot going on, having to focus on one target with a visor that leaves you otherwise pretty blind equipped as the head floats around harassing you. Meanwhile, it also summons Dark Quads to pester you, making for a fight that can chip damage onto you if you're simply trying to beat it as quickly as possible, ignoring all the damage being slung at you.

IONO:

And as if fighting a cool giant robot wasn't enough. As if slowly dismantling it, bit by bit, wasn't cool enough. As if leaving it to nothing but just a floating head wasn't awesome enough. That's right, you idiot. This was another Morph Ball boss, too. With the glass covering its head and legs broken, it now leaves the bomb slots in its head exposed, but how the heck are you supposed to get the Morph Ball up there, even? I think when I first got to this fight, I did put two and two together fairly quickly, since it JUST exposed some spider ball track, and its head was also itself covered in spider ball track. It just took me a bit before I really grasped that this is genuinely what they wanted me to do. I doubted it was possible, but here it is. Radically finishing a giant robot spider by just slam-dunking the Morph Ball into it. Again, they knew what they were cooking, here.

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At last, the final beam weapon is the Annihilator Beam, a sonic weapon that combines the powers of both Light and Darkness to create a rapid-fire homing weapon that tears through most of the basic enemies, and can even super-charge light crystals and beacons into lights that lure Darklings in with their dark energy, but will instantly slay them when they touch the bubble. Yeah, it does a lot, and it probably should, given it chews through both your Light and Dark ammo, and pretty quickly, too.

Now that all three alternate Beam Weapons are accounted for, it feels like a good enough time as any to go over the three Beam-Missile combos in this game, and sadly these are fairly middling. The Annihilator Beam's Sonic Boom will devastate just about anything it hits, and it has a very wide range on top of a big blast radius, but it does absolutely devour your beam ammo, using up 30 for both ammo types per use, so it's a pretty pocket emergency sort of weapon.

Dark Burst is decent, though I can't help but find using 30 ammo is a little overkill, when most enemies in this game that you would use the Dark Beam on are killed in either a charge shot and a missile, or a charged shot and a couple extra Dark Beam hits. There's probably some very specific instances if you have a boatload of enemies grouped up on one spot, since it's a projectile that explodes, and said explosion manifests as a dark portal that lingers and fairly quickly atomizes anything near it. The Pirate Commando battle on the bridge entering Sanctuary comes to mind, but other than that, yeah.

Sun Burst is the Light Beam's weapon, and it's very funny that they force you to fight some Dark Pirate Commandos, almost as if to highlight how strangely underwhelming this weapon is. Sun Burst moves very slowly, doesn't feel like it does that much more damage than a charged Light Beam shot, with its only plus side seeming to be that it is guaranteed to leave whatever it hits burning. Which, it's easy enough to do that without eating 30 light ammo in one go. If it were up to me, I feel like it should've been more of a Wave Buster analog, where it'll drain your ammo, but fires a continuous laser with a long range that sears whatever it touches. But oh well.

Beam weapon combos feel like they make more sense in a game that would eat through your missiles as a resource, like in Prime's case. With the beam weapon system, I'm sure they still have their use, but I find Light and Dark beams so reliable even without them, and you'll save on ammo, that way. I honestly forget to grab them until I take on what's next.

With the three planet energies returned to their controllers in the major regions, the final task at hand is to raid the temple floating in the sky in the Dark Temple Grounds and reclaim the fourth and final planetary energy, which would destabilize Dark Aether and finally restore Aether to its normal state, free of the Ing clutches. But using the energies collected, U-Mos gives you one final tool to use when exploring the Dark World for the keys to get into the Sky Temple; the Light Suit.

The Light Suit is another huge suit upgrade, completely negating all would-be damage from Dark Aether's atmosphere, as well as immunity to Ingclaw poison, Ingstorm damage, and even the poisonous water that appears on occasion. On top of that, it also unlocks an additional mode of fast travel, with you being able to teleport from temple to temple by riding the beam of light, this also being something you do in smaller instances. A very huge upgrade, really solidifying this as almost feeling like the strongest state Samus gets to be in, at least compared to how low she started at the beginning of this mission.

Thus begins another one of this game's bigger sticking points. Remember the Chozo Artifact scavenger hunt at the very end of the first game? It's back, and understandably causing a bit more friction, as it is worse in at least one way. The thing about the Chozo Artifacts is that you could collect them almost basically whenever. Very much well before you absolutely had to start collecting them. Here, though, for one thing, the Flying Ing Caches that hide the Sky Temple Keys are invisible, only being visible to the Dark Visor. Basically meaning you have to be 2/3rds of the way through the game to even find one. And if that's, indeed, if you could even find any, because they tend to be in much more obscure locations than the artifacts were. Especially since they're all tucked away in Dark Aether, here in there.

Some you can find before you have no choice but to hunt for them, but you're probably not travelling back to Agon Wastes for a while with the Dark Visor to go find the one hiding in the dark side of the Pirate base entrance. And even then, the other on in Agon is under the purple water, meaning the Light Suit is required to get it. A lot of them require the Light Suit, in fact; a couple are hidden under poisonous water, one requires riding a beam of light upwards to get to it, and another is hidden very deep in an area that has the Ingstorm in it, a small Ing type that floats around and burns at your HP very very quickly, even faster than the Dark World on the Varia suit, even with the Dark suit. You could, probably in theory, sprint to the room to get it, and sprint back out, but this is so dangerous, you'd very much be best to wait until you have Light Suit to even try it.

VIXI:

This means that these Sky Temple Keys do not have the benefit of having most of them be collected by the time you actually have to start looking for them, just doing a little clean-up here and there. In fact, you're not likely to find a single one until you reach this point unless you're just very, very insistent on getting everthing you can the moment you can get it, so that means you have to make nine detours to find them all. And in that sense, yeah, I do agree that this is a worse version of the Chozo Artifact hunt.

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LUNA:

On the other hand though, following this whole game-wide personal journey narrative, starting out so far on the bottom of the food chain, it does feel good to have an excuse to make Dark Aether your stomping ground at long last. The air no longer hurts you, you have the Annihilator Beam to just make Ing throw themselves in an incinerator, and traveling around the world is even easier that it already was. This place that was once an oppressive hell is now so comically inconsequential to you. Finally, the Ing are on the back foot.

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CHIAKI:

Besides, it's a good chance to clean up the items you've missed, since you have to do one more lap around the world, anyways.

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At long last, the final fight is here. Deep in the dark version of the Great Temple, the leader of the Ing Horde, the Emperor Ing, lives. Again, pulling out as many stops as it feels like they could've gotten away with, between this being a long, multi-phase fight that really came down to the wire, especially on Hard Mode. The first phase features Emperor PalpatIng almost as a big, giant eyeball sitting atop a "throne", with an array of tentacles emerging from its iris. One of its coolest attacks being that it opens up a bunch of light portals in order to make the tentacles appear right next to you. Which almost makes me wonder if U-Mos can see what's going on, on the other side.

And because they just keep getting away with it, of course they made one of the final boss phases a Morph Ball boss, too. Though you can make pretty short work of it with even a decent stockpile of Power Bombs and the smarts on luring its tentacles out only to get vaporized. This fight really does pull out all the cool stops, doing yet another thing I love about what I think are some of the best final bosses, being that this fight really makes at least a bit of use out of as many of your tools as it can get away with.

And now, this is finally it. After all the hell, hardship, and high water the Ing have put you through, this is finally your chance to take them down once and for all. Emperor Ing taking on one final Phazon-mutated form. The backing track to this phase only being probably one of the coolest final boss themes ever. Almost feeling like a triumphant theme to celebrate that this is your final obstacle after such a dire journey of saving the Luminoth from the brink of extinction, though still holding onto plenty of menace and gravity, because Emperor Ing does not go down easy.

Emperor Ing is relentlessly aggressive, and after such a long fight to get to this point, dying is very punishing. It's constantly charging and pouncing on you, switching the color of the core in its mouth to change what weapon type it's vulnerable to, a supercharged version of that Warrior Ing laser attack, and even a big beam attack that stuns you if you don't dodge it in time, wasting precious time while it's in a vulnerable phase.

Its attacks so wide and sweeping, and the arena always surrounded by Phazon, it can make a large boss room somehow feel claustrophobic at times. Especially with how in-your-face Emperor Ing is. Though this also feels like the perfect opportunity to pull out all your stops, and thus, the Annihilator Beam can deal damage to it very quickly, provided you still have the ammo for it, this late into the fight.

But with the Emperor felled, you finally collect the final bit of Dark Aether's energy, which is now causing the entire dark reality to collapse, thus beginning this game's own proper end-of-game escape sequence. Though this one does come with one more twist in the knife. Emperor Ing is a pretty tough battle, but there's still a bit of unfinished business.

Dark Samus makes one final encounter, this time, you having to defeat her in a fight where it almost certainly feels like she's attempting to run down your timer. It starts off normal enough, aside from going invisible, this time only visible to the Echo Visor, but then her final phase starts, where she'll become super-charged with Phazon and fire a volley of little Phazon pellets at you, the game asking you to catch set pellets with your charge beam and firing them back at her to deal more substantial damage in an otherwise invulnerable phase. It's very tough, and a bad miss-step can cause Samus to flinch and drop her charge, wasting precious time. They really really wanted this final boss sequence to be a nail-biter. I have beaten her with minutes to spare on Normal mode, but on Hard mode? Twelve seconds. Hoo boy.

With Dark Samus knocked down again, 3-0, Samus makes her escape away from the collapsing Dark Aether, and returns the remainder of Aether's energy, plus the Light Suit, to the Luminoth. The rest of what little was left of U-Mos' species finally awakened from their stasis sleep to hide from the Ing. And with that, Samus simply leaves, giving them one last wave. Such a simple gesture, despite this impossible feat she just pulled off, single-handedly turning around a war that was already as good as lost. That's just Tuesday, to Samus Aran.

The 100% ending of Prime 1 felt decently insightful for what the next game might entail, again hinting that Metroid Prime itself managed to survive and occupy your Phazon Suit. The 100% ending for Prime 2, sadly, isn't much. Hey, that lady that blew up and then reformed elsewhere already? She did it again. Which, sure, that's hinting enough that the end of this trilogy is going to feature the titular Metroid Prime one last time, but I feel like they could've been a little more insightful to what is actually going to happen in the next Metroid Prime game. But it doesn't have the same punch to imply that something that's died a few times already has come back to life yet again. Personally, my idea for what could've been a 100% ending being that they simply pan down on the impact crater on Aether where the object from space that caused all this fell, showing the dead husk of. Well, we'll get to that.

Like we said, Metroid Prime 2 isn't one of the more story-driven Metroids, but I do think it has a strong narrative thru-line, simply by being able to make the Ing an imposing, credible force, and being willing to be brutal to make you feel almost powerless in certain situations. This was definitely a game that walled us a few times as a kid.

It's hard not to be in love with this game, it being the whole reason I fell in love with this franchise to begin with. Even when I was a youth, that was kind of abandoning slower experiences in favor of quicker action games, it always struck out as a masterwork of atmospheric storytelling, each area suiting the mood for each step of the mission, it being dreary and desaturated, but still not so visually tasteless as to be comparable to a lot of the gray-and-brown-fests that really started to plague mid-to-late 2000s games.

VIXI:

Every vibe immaculate, there being so many unique rooms with rarely any repeated elements between them. For the longest time, I did almost feel a bit like my taste must be shallow, with how many people site their favorite game of all time as these games with narratives that push gaming itself as a medium, experimenting with what it even means to be an interactive medium, yet here I am, in love with a game with not much story going on, and an on-the-surface, very simple Light vs Darkness theme. But I think it does go to show that a game can be "art" in even just a much more literal sense.

A video game being art, simply in that it is almost like a moving, playable painting at times. Not that it's a game with a painterly art style at all, but certainly a game that looks like straight from the mind of an inspired vision, virtually unfiltered by outside forces among a corporate landscape like a mainstream Nintendo franchise, this alien planet almost dream-like in how, well, alien it looks. Almost showing a beauty in absolute desolation, at times. Not to romanticize destruction, but as if to show even a world that is on the brink of apocalypse can still look gorgeous. It is art simply because I saw it, and it made me want to create, too.

And as much as we would love to be that extra little bit in-depth and cover the multiplayer versus mode, it's sadly not that feasible, simply by the means through which I have to play this game, the effort it would take to get multiplayer running with a group of friends probably surpasses the effort of the multiplayer mode itself. Not to say there's nothing there, but it definitely does feel like the part of the game that DID have corporate meddling in it. The charts say Halo is really popular, so let's give our "Halo" multiplayer, too. And from what I remember playing it with a friend as a child, it definitely feels like the one part of the game that is an afterthought. So instead...

I'd like to just make a quick mention of the art gallery. Simply because I did just talk about how it's the capital-A Art about this game that really enamored me, even as a kid. I was already in love with the aesthetic of the game, I was drawing pictures of the Ing and their ilk all the time, but it floored me to look at the art gallery mode, which was my literal first-ever exposure to concept art.

I think even as a kid, at least in the abstract, I understood that video games were made by people. All those names in the credits of productions had to mean something. But I think this was the first time that it truly clicked that these things were made by people. Like, people-people. People that just liked drawing weird as hell animals as much as I did. I was utterly enamored with these drawings, and this was one of the first-ever times I really thought about the creative process of video games themselves.

I think these more pencil-y sketches also really got me, in the way that I saw these really rough, what seemed to be spitballs of what a Warrior Ing might look like, and it sort of clicked that this is something I could do. Not that Metroid Prime 2 was what inspired me to draw in the first place, I feel like I can firmly pin Pokemon to blame for that. But up to this point, I definitely just redrew a lot of what I just saw. Not really making my own stuff. This is what started my trend into making my own designs. Go through the whole creation process of making iterations of things, changing this and that, tweaking details about a creature or character design until it looked perfect in my eyes. It definitely started with making my own Metroid or Metroid-adjacent creatures, but it branched out into making Fakemon, my own Heartless, and OCs there, sonas here. Maybe that was simply a matter of time, just as a natural step on the child-artist-to-proper-creator pipeline. But I'd still like to thank Metroid Prime 2, not just for being my favorite video game ever, but also being that spark that inspired creativity in me.

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VIXI SCORE: 10/10

I mean, that entire last bit was me. So. Yeah.

LUNA SCORE: 10/10

Super fun! Super beautiful! It really is just the coolest Metroid game, yeah.

JINX SCORE: 10/10

it's relentless, maybe not always fair, but i think games would be boring if they were fair all the time. one of, if not the hardest metroid game. it hits just the right spot, on top of just being a damn good exploration game, with hardly any faults other than an idea or two that feel like they got left behind a little.

IONO SCORE: 10/10

It kicks ass, yeah. I call some shenanigans on Spider Guardian, but one boss hardly ruins something like this for me. It just kicks ass!!!

CELESTE SCORE: 10/10

One of the best soundtracks in games, one of the best art directions, it's just endlessly creative and cool!!!

CHIAKI SCORE: 10/10

Not personally my perfection, but it's pretty damn close to it. It improves almost every aspect of the first Prime, and feels so much more in its own element, rather than just doing what Super Metroid did. Prime was safe, perhaps needing to be, with it being the first 3D Metroid. But Prime 2 is definitely peak Metroid.

GAIL SCORE: 10/10

Crazy pretty at all times, a lot of cool a-ha moments, and it gets so creative with the very setting of Metroid. It's cool to get away from the Chozo for a bit!! How much we wish we could experience it for the first time again...

OVERALL SCORE: 70/70

Coming up next on The Last Metroid: countering the new longest review for this blog with what is more than likely gonna be the shortest.