[contains minor spoilers]
I couldn't never put my finger on why Metroid Prime 3: Corruption was so... odd to me. I don't think it's because of the shift to Wii-pointer controls, since I think the new control scheme suits the series better than the restrictive Gamecube setup (don't get me wrong—it was great for the time, but it wasn't really satisfying). I don't believe it was the greater emphasis on plot nor the focus on bounty hunters besides Samus either. Something about Corruption just didn't... capture me, despite the game being fairly engrossing and fun, maintaining the longstanding tradition of excellent art, music, and design that the series is known for. Whatever reason there was for Corruption sticking out like a sore thumb eluded me...
... but now, I think I understand why.
The Metroid franchise has always been about exploring strange alien worlds, but nothing feels quite so foreign as the start to Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Listen to how crazy this is: your ship drops you off on a sci-fi military cruiser and you're greeted by two guards that tell you the captain wants to see you! Was the tutorial guest-designed by Bungie? Not only does the opening to the game feel strange due to the amount of dialogue and friendly NPCs you encounter, but there's a whole second half to the tutorial that's completely linear and profusely combat heavy. Suddenly, Metroid's penchant for loneliness and exploration has vanished, leaving behind an FPS shell that pretends combat and plot are core pillars of the series. In trying to appeal to newcomers, Metroid Prime 3 had succumbed to what fans feared most.
... But then you arrive on Bryyo, and suddenly everything feels normal again. Before you lies a bizarre landscape riddled with ancient machinery and aggressive fauna—distinctly Metroidian traits! Prime 3 only goes up from here, offering the player the jaw-dropping wonder of SkyTown, and later the gloomy Pirate Homeworld. The former is one of the most gorgeous areas in the entire series (rivaling Sanctuary Fortress), and the latter has this oppressive infiltration feeling to it, similar to exploring the Phazon Mines—except this time you're delving into a mechanized alien hell. Both areas have a really distinct feel to them whereas Bryyo is just kinda... there? It has some cool lore and differently themed zones, but everything kinda feels like a "been there, done that", while the worlds toward the end of the game—especially the final level in particular—really flex the creative muscles of the art team.
Metroid Prime 3 undoubtedly maintains the great enemy design and architecture of the series—so how the combat hold up? The most accurate way to surmise it is that the actions shifts from combat depth to combat proficiency. No longer are you equipped with multiple beams and missile combos; the brunt of the action is knowing when and where to activate Phazon Mode in order to salvage your energy tanks—even at their partial cost. Instead of having to decide between your ammo and your health like in Prime 2, here your ammo is your health, and I feel it's a step forward as you no longer feel powerless against the bigger foes in the game. This keeps the action at a brisk pace, even on the hardest difficulty.
Unfortunately, this comes at a great cost: triggering Phazon Mode is often the best combat decision to make in almost every encounter. Missiles continue to do pitiful damage, and the Seeker Missile is a poor replacement for the missile combo attacks, due to its long charge time. Combine this with the fact that enemies have the ability to go into a hypermode (and do so often on hard), and the simplest solution becomes pumping them full of phazon, especially since you can reap health from their defeat. This isn't a categorical step down however; there's plenty of smaller enemies to blast with your standard beam cannon, and your foes are far more nimble and engaging than in the previous Prime entries, thanks to being designed for the Wii controls. The bosses provide excellent battles by and large—my only qualm being that Mogenar's shielded weakpoints make the fight an abominable chore.
Okay, so the worlds are great, the combat has its pros and cons, and I'll mention now that the sound, music, and lore roughly retain the same quality. So why would Metroid Prime 3 leave me with such ambivalent feelings the first two times I played through it? The answer to this, as I've discovered, is deceptively simple—so much so, that it feels unfair to fault the game for this one addition.
It's because of Samus's ship.
And it's not because it's often used to justify the backtracking (though that does bother me), nor is it because there are a lot of "Wii gimmicks" in the cockpit (which I actually don't mind). Where the ship and I part ways is that's it's used to ferry you from place to place, thereby breaking up the world into quarantined parts. Bryyo is the worst offender of this, having three distinct areas that are mostly inaccessible from one another, forcing you to return to your vessel and hop around. The ship doubling as a warp-point causes the design to be far more linear too; Bryyo is chock full of straight paths that only serve to connect two rooms, rarely giving you alternate options when you go to backtrack through the game. Elevator loading times were also a necessary evil in the previous entries, but they're nearly tripled here thanks to the amount of traveling you'll do.
This aspect doesn't make or break the game though—all it really does is make Metroid Prime 3 feel... different. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how any developer would go about making a Metroid title feel cohesive when it's spread over half a dozen different planets. I suspect a single terrestrial setting is something that's core to Metroid's DNA in the same way that wildly diverse lands are core to Mario's. But in any case, it makes the experience feel more artificially segregated, thereby dealing a huge blow to the "isolated immersion" that I love the franchise for. It's easy to become numb to it after a while, but you still spend roughly half the game playing something that just feels... uncomfortably weird. It's almost like Metroid: Streamlined Edition.
The last thing I need to cover is something absolutely worthy of praise: the endgame fetch-quest is optional! Well... not really—you still need to collect 5 of the 9 energy cells to reach the final level, but the fact that you don't need to gather them all is fantastic. Additionally, you can pick all five up without doing any backtracking, which is a huge boon for replays of the game. The GFS Valhalla is also really cool: it's an eerie wreckage infested with phazon monstrosities, where the majority of things to scan are chilling descriptions of how its crewmates died. It was an impressive level when I first played the game, and my adoration for it has only grown since then.
No matter how many times I tried to analyze what Metroid Prime 3 had done "wrong", there was little I could criticize that wasn't also present in other entries. There are exceptions of course—the atypical opening leaves a terrible first impression on Metroid vets, and missiles are not only useless but you can stumble upon their upgrades without looking—but nothing sticks out to me more than the physically separated worlds. It's a complaint I admit holds little weight if one doesn't care for it (I feel the intrusive plot could probably be more nettlesome to certain players), but it deprived Metroid Prime 3 of one of Metroid's cornerstones. Besides that, Prime 3 is a rather fitting closer to the trilogy, offering up a decent challenge along with some of the coolest worlds seen yet (did I mention how much I love the final level?) Retro not only handled the franchise with respect and admiration, but built further upon its foundation and style, leaving an proud, enduring mark that many now see as inextricably tied to the series—including myself.
Well done folks!
I couldn't never put my finger on why Metroid Prime 3: Corruption was so... odd to me. I don't think it's because of the shift to Wii-pointer controls, since I think the new control scheme suits the series better than the restrictive Gamecube setup (don't get me wrong—it was great for the time, but it wasn't really satisfying). I don't believe it was the greater emphasis on plot nor the focus on bounty hunters besides Samus either. Something about Corruption just didn't... capture me, despite the game being fairly engrossing and fun, maintaining the longstanding tradition of excellent art, music, and design that the series is known for. Whatever reason there was for Corruption sticking out like a sore thumb eluded me...
... but now, I think I understand why.
The Metroid franchise has always been about exploring strange alien worlds, but nothing feels quite so foreign as the start to Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Listen to how crazy this is: your ship drops you off on a sci-fi military cruiser and you're greeted by two guards that tell you the captain wants to see you! Was the tutorial guest-designed by Bungie? Not only does the opening to the game feel strange due to the amount of dialogue and friendly NPCs you encounter, but there's a whole second half to the tutorial that's completely linear and profusely combat heavy. Suddenly, Metroid's penchant for loneliness and exploration has vanished, leaving behind an FPS shell that pretends combat and plot are core pillars of the series. In trying to appeal to newcomers, Metroid Prime 3 had succumbed to what fans feared most.
... But then you arrive on Bryyo, and suddenly everything feels normal again. Before you lies a bizarre landscape riddled with ancient machinery and aggressive fauna—distinctly Metroidian traits! Prime 3 only goes up from here, offering the player the jaw-dropping wonder of SkyTown, and later the gloomy Pirate Homeworld. The former is one of the most gorgeous areas in the entire series (rivaling Sanctuary Fortress), and the latter has this oppressive infiltration feeling to it, similar to exploring the Phazon Mines—except this time you're delving into a mechanized alien hell. Both areas have a really distinct feel to them whereas Bryyo is just kinda... there? It has some cool lore and differently themed zones, but everything kinda feels like a "been there, done that", while the worlds toward the end of the game—especially the final level in particular—really flex the creative muscles of the art team.
Metroid Prime 3 undoubtedly maintains the great enemy design and architecture of the series—so how the combat hold up? The most accurate way to surmise it is that the actions shifts from combat depth to combat proficiency. No longer are you equipped with multiple beams and missile combos; the brunt of the action is knowing when and where to activate Phazon Mode in order to salvage your energy tanks—even at their partial cost. Instead of having to decide between your ammo and your health like in Prime 2, here your ammo is your health, and I feel it's a step forward as you no longer feel powerless against the bigger foes in the game. This keeps the action at a brisk pace, even on the hardest difficulty.
Unfortunately, this comes at a great cost: triggering Phazon Mode is often the best combat decision to make in almost every encounter. Missiles continue to do pitiful damage, and the Seeker Missile is a poor replacement for the missile combo attacks, due to its long charge time. Combine this with the fact that enemies have the ability to go into a hypermode (and do so often on hard), and the simplest solution becomes pumping them full of phazon, especially since you can reap health from their defeat. This isn't a categorical step down however; there's plenty of smaller enemies to blast with your standard beam cannon, and your foes are far more nimble and engaging than in the previous Prime entries, thanks to being designed for the Wii controls. The bosses provide excellent battles by and large—my only qualm being that Mogenar's shielded weakpoints make the fight an abominable chore.
Okay, so the worlds are great, the combat has its pros and cons, and I'll mention now that the sound, music, and lore roughly retain the same quality. So why would Metroid Prime 3 leave me with such ambivalent feelings the first two times I played through it? The answer to this, as I've discovered, is deceptively simple—so much so, that it feels unfair to fault the game for this one addition.
It's because of Samus's ship.
And it's not because it's often used to justify the backtracking (though that does bother me), nor is it because there are a lot of "Wii gimmicks" in the cockpit (which I actually don't mind). Where the ship and I part ways is that's it's used to ferry you from place to place, thereby breaking up the world into quarantined parts. Bryyo is the worst offender of this, having three distinct areas that are mostly inaccessible from one another, forcing you to return to your vessel and hop around. The ship doubling as a warp-point causes the design to be far more linear too; Bryyo is chock full of straight paths that only serve to connect two rooms, rarely giving you alternate options when you go to backtrack through the game. Elevator loading times were also a necessary evil in the previous entries, but they're nearly tripled here thanks to the amount of traveling you'll do.
This aspect doesn't make or break the game though—all it really does is make Metroid Prime 3 feel... different. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how any developer would go about making a Metroid title feel cohesive when it's spread over half a dozen different planets. I suspect a single terrestrial setting is something that's core to Metroid's DNA in the same way that wildly diverse lands are core to Mario's. But in any case, it makes the experience feel more artificially segregated, thereby dealing a huge blow to the "isolated immersion" that I love the franchise for. It's easy to become numb to it after a while, but you still spend roughly half the game playing something that just feels... uncomfortably weird. It's almost like Metroid: Streamlined Edition.
The last thing I need to cover is something absolutely worthy of praise: the endgame fetch-quest is optional! Well... not really—you still need to collect 5 of the 9 energy cells to reach the final level, but the fact that you don't need to gather them all is fantastic. Additionally, you can pick all five up without doing any backtracking, which is a huge boon for replays of the game. The GFS Valhalla is also really cool: it's an eerie wreckage infested with phazon monstrosities, where the majority of things to scan are chilling descriptions of how its crewmates died. It was an impressive level when I first played the game, and my adoration for it has only grown since then.
No matter how many times I tried to analyze what Metroid Prime 3 had done "wrong", there was little I could criticize that wasn't also present in other entries. There are exceptions of course—the atypical opening leaves a terrible first impression on Metroid vets, and missiles are not only useless but you can stumble upon their upgrades without looking—but nothing sticks out to me more than the physically separated worlds. It's a complaint I admit holds little weight if one doesn't care for it (I feel the intrusive plot could probably be more nettlesome to certain players), but it deprived Metroid Prime 3 of one of Metroid's cornerstones. Besides that, Prime 3 is a rather fitting closer to the trilogy, offering up a decent challenge along with some of the coolest worlds seen yet (did I mention how much I love the final level?) Retro not only handled the franchise with respect and admiration, but built further upon its foundation and style, leaving an proud, enduring mark that many now see as inextricably tied to the series—including myself.
Well done folks!
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Images obtained from: metroid.retropixel.net
Images obtained from: metroid.retropixel.net
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