I went to write today’s update and discovered that nowhere on the entire internet (at least, nowhere Googlehas heard of) has an image of the thing I wanted to write an update about. I, personally, have such an imagine, in a book, but nothing to scan it with, so I went to snap a shot with my digital camera only. A dozen failed shots later I gave up in frustration. Taking a decent snapshot of an image in a book was a lot more difficult than I had anticipated. This kind of diffused the whole update. It doesn’t necessarily require an image, but I tend to get my images collected first and then write, and after hunting for this goddamn image and practically tearing my hair out I was kind of tired of the entire subject. So I’ll save it for another day.
Today’s update is therefore going to be about Metroid Prime 3, which I’ve just– wait! Image!
Ah, that’s better. As I was saying, I just finished this game and I’m quite torn on it. Not in the same way I was on Metroid Fusion, though (how can a game be shitty and a Metroid game? I just don’t get it!), or like I was on Metroid Prime (how can a game be good and an FPS? I… I just don’t get it!). Rather, I have just never before played a game that was this intensely good and bad at the same time. Actually, it was never good and bad at the same time; the good and bad happen at distinctly different times. So distinct, in fact, I’m sure it had to be done that way by design.
A lot of games start out excellent and simmer down to “just plain good” by the endpoint. In fact, most good games you’ve played in the past decade or so have done that, perhaps including several Metroid games. MP3 isn’t just the opposite of that, it’s the opposite so hard you will have to reconsider all previous notions of your concept of the word “opposite”. This game starts out so horrible it’s impossible to understand how anyone even played it past the first two hours, and then gets very, very good in the span of (literally!) one scene. It’s like someone flipped a switch. Imagine trying to rollerskate uphill on a brick road, then seeing the incline get five degrees steeper just about the time you start hating life. Eventually though the road levels out just at the same moment it was very freshly repaved. And they alternate giving out free ice cream and blow jobs every hundred feet thereafter. That’s the MP3 experience.
The game opens with all the talky-talky jibber-jabber nonsense we’ve come to expect from… well, pretty much every video game series outside of Metroid, honestly. Lots of first-time expendable NPCs (who are absent from every other game in the series) talk about the space pirate threat, including three bounty hunters clearly meant to be introduced as Samus’s peers… and even more clearly meant to be boss battles later in the game. I admit at first I wasn’t thrilled about having this much talky-talky in my Metroid, but I quickly realized it didn’t bother me. Except… except one thing. Samus is mute. The people around her are having a five-hour long conversation about the best way to skin-rape a space pirate, and the heroine (who probably had already skin-raped six or seven space pirates that day before breakfast) just stands there as though she has nothing to add to the conversation.
Samus’s bounty hunter companions immediately came off as friendly rivals. Runcas was dutiful and loyal, Gohr was impatient and maybe a little sociopathic, Gandrayda was playful and a flirtacious. By comparison Samus was… standing there in a robot suit. She didn’t have any ideas about how to repel the pirates? She didn’t have any questions or comments about the plan? She didn’t react at all when Gandrayda called her “Sammy”? Really? Maybe they were trying to facilitate Samus’s personality as the stoic, mysterious hunter, a woman of few words. This… this just isn’t the right way to have gone about it.
The prologue chapter then plays out, a series of combat-only setpieces that showcase all of Samus’s starting abilities and hide everyting — absolutely everything — behind a Wiimote gimmick. “Samus! Latch on and throw the nunchuck!” “Samus, pull this lever by tiling the Wiimote up, then down!” “Samus, punch in this password by pointing the Wiimote at the screen and selecting console, then pointing your finger at the little buttons and pushing them individually!” By the third or fourth time I was slowly piloting Samus’s armored finger around the screen my eyes were already rolling so hard I thought they were going to detach from the inside of my face and slide down my throat.
Once the prologue is over Samus escapes the explodiating Federation starship and is sent to Norion, a planet under Space Pirate attack. Surely there’s be Metroid-y things to do on this planet, right? Items to find, rooms to explore…? As it turns out, nope! Just like the previous scene it’s all “Samus! Go here! Flip that switch! Now come back! Fight these monsters! Flip that other switch! Waggle waggle waggle!” I was certain someone had just made a Wii version of Halo and released it with Samus on the cover. And this section is long. I could have played through every 2D Metroid game two or three times back to back in the time it took to complete Norion. Capping it off is a kinda okay gimmick battle against Ridley, so I guess it wasn’t a total waste, but at this point I honestly expected the entire game to be like this. Even moreso after I finally completed Norion and Commander Bumpensniff told me, “Samus! Two more planets are under attack! Hup, hup!”
So now you have the option: you can either go to Bryyo or you can go to Elysia. Except, no, you don’t really have any such option, because two rooms into Elysia is a door you can’t open without the very, very last item you obtain in Bryyo. Why give me the option if you’re not going to give me the option? What’s the point, except to frustrate players who thrive on exploration (like me) and have been damn near starved for however long it took to complete Norion? So with a heavy heart I went to Bryyo instead, fully expecting more Halo nonsense, and got some Metroid nonsense instead.
This is a slight increase in the quality of the nonsense. But it’s still nonsense. See, in a well designed Metroid game you will run to a spot where you see an obstacle, then run the other direction and find the item you need to clear that obstacle. If you know the obstacle is there you can streamline the process simply by just going for the item. The result is: the first time through the game you will constantly be backtracking and doubling over yourself, but on replays you can make a straight shot. Boom, boom, boom. Done.
Bryyo is nothing like that at all. Oftentimes you have to examine the obstacle. The game world simply will not facilitate any other course of action. After fighting all the way through an entire section of Bryyo and fighting probably the only half-decent boss in the area, you find a shield you can’t destroy. So you double back and go through the remaining section of Bryyo, fighting a miserable bug/horse thing in the process, only to find an identical shield. Only at this point does your ship’s computer chime in and offer a suggestion: if your ship had missiles, I could destroy the shield for you! So you backtrack again to that new location — which is unreachable without items you’ve obtained from the first two — and your ship learns to fire missiles. Now you can go destroy the first shield, which means you’ve been through every room in that area a total of four times now. Upon reaching the second shield, the computer voice informs you that the ship can’t get close enough. Can you please destroy these two gun turrets? So you destroy the gun turrets (the doors leading there were locked before this moment) in more annoying Halo-style “we’re going to just spawn an infinite amount of bad guys while you try and puzzle out what to do” setpieces. Then and only then can you destroy the second shield. And then, of course, walk all the way back to your ship. So now you’ve been through that section of Bryyo a total of four times as well.
Hilariously you can continue to collect ship missile upgrades throughout the entire game, which is funny because you literally never need the feature again.
So now the path to the Bryyo Big Boss is open, and this boss… Jesus. I cannot remember a boss this annoying. First of all, the fight is overlong, just like every boss up to this point had been. However, its attacks are pretty easy to dodge and it constantly drops life for you. If you can’t figure out how to damage the boss, like I couldn’t, you can literally stalemate against this boss until the heat death of the universe. He’s got a trio of obvious weak points which open and close at warp speed. If you’re lucky one of these targets might stay open for upwards of a full second. They regenerate while they’re closed and rotate position, so you have to work on them one at a time. If you fire at a single position all three targets will take minor damage that will be immediately regenerated. So you follow the targets around his chest, getting in a shot or two while they’re open, and after a couple minutes you’ve destroyed all three. Now the boss has three giant, gaping holes in his chest.
While you’re doing this, the boss has a move where he can grab a couple of fresh red orbs off the walls of his chamber and use them to regenerate his own orbs, even a completely destroyed one, to full health. This means he’s literally regenerating along two different axes. You can stop him from doing this if you’re well-positioned to shoot both orbs (which are on opposite sides of the room) and have perfect aim, but you have to destroy both. Sometimes I simply wasn’t able to.
You could be locked in that phase of the boss’s attack forever, if you didn’t notice he’s got a fourth orb on his back. Getting around behind the boss is a total crapshoot since he moves and turns so quickly. Once I was able to freeze him in place by shoving an ice missile down his throat, but I’m assuming that was some sort of game bug because I was never able to duplicate the effort no matter how many ice missiles I hit him with or what attack he was using at the time.
After an excruciating battle of side-sliding in efforts to get a shot at the orb on his back (which is usually closed off, and regenerates like the first three) you have four weak points to fire at. Note that, at this point in the battle, the boss still has 100% health. After all that work you have yet to actually damage it.
Samus only has one weapon that will harm the weak spots: her hyper beam. She uses the hyper beam by going into hyper mode, which consumes 100 health. In hypermode Samus deals extra damage, but she can only take a limited number of shots. Once shes made, say, twenty shots she reverts to normal. If she spends too long in hyper mode she starts to overheat. Overheating can give you some extra shots (since the meter is filling back up), but if you overheat completely you die. Instantly. Game over.
So you go into hyper mode and wait for the weak points to open so you can shoot them. Except… don’t wait too long or you’ll die. And if you switch to hyper mode and miss, or don’t do an appreciable amount of damage, it’s not likely you can try again because each try consumes 100 of your 399 total health. The boss does drop health, but not terribly often, and having the perfect shot but being unable to take it because your own weapon consumes your health is unimaginably frustrating.
Here you are, then, you’ve finally made it! One of the weak points is destroyed, and the boss finally takes some damage! Now he enters a new phase of attack: he puts on ice skates and starts charging you. Then he jumps, sending a shockwave through the room. He repeats those two moves, over and over. None of his weak points are open and, even if they were, you can’t use hypermode anymore because the risk is too great. The only way to destroy the ice skates and get him back into his normal mode of attack is to morph into a ball and lay bombs. But, wait! Don’t do this while he’s charging, or he’ll slam into you! And don’t do it while he’s stomping because you can’t avoid the shock! I couldn’t figure out how to blow up the ice skates without sustaining damage, and I was at super-low health because it took so much hypermode just to get the boss to this point, so this was my first death. I had been fighting for about 30-45 minutes and was ready to give up on this shitty game right there and then.
I came back in a week and powered through a couple more tries, sometimes dying (again) at the 20+ minute mark. Eventually I won and moved on. And the rest of the game was good! Not magnificent, I’ll grant you, but really good! The second world has its own backtracking issues, but I had more fun with it overall. You get much cooler items to play with, the level design is much more unique (the first world was jungle/fire/ice… hmm… what Metroid game have I seen that in, before?), and the bosses were a blast. You finally get a gun upgrade so monsters no longer take a thousand hits to kill, and you get enough energy to make hypermode a viable boss strategy rather than an insurmountable obstacle. Even the macguffin-hunting subquest, which was one of the biggest setback sin the first two Prime games, was well-integrated and worth doing. It provided several tangible upgrades as you went, so the more you put into it, the more you got out of it. By the end of the game I was breezing through everything in a near-permanent state of hypermode and having a blast taking breaks between objectives to scour previously-explored ground for goodies.
So that’s it: Metroid Prime 3 is worth playing if you can con someone into clearing everything up through Bryyo for you. I did have some more general comments about the game, but I think I’ll apply them to an article about the Metroid series in its entirety sometime in the future.
Thanks to my man Calorie Mate who sent MP3 by air across our great nation so I had the opportunity to play it. I’ll see what I can do about salvaging the original post that was supposed to go here for later in the week.
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