Metroid Prime 2: Echoes

This game was long and this game was hard. Back when it came out in 2004, I was in the midst (well, at the end, really) of the first Metroid Prime game. But foolishly, I rented Prime 2 from Blockbuster to give it a whirl. I got about a fifth or a fourth into it before returning the game. Then I got it for Christmas. Sadly, my interest had waned and I never played it - or the first Prime game - again until my senior year of college. You may remember that back in early September, I beat the first game. I immediately jumped back into Prime 2, and I guess I've technically been playing this game, off and on, ever since then. Much like its ancestor (but chronological descendant) Super Metroid, this game remained "in progress" for the entirety of my school year. And, well, I'm glad to finally be done with it. The game was almost identical, gameplay-wise, to Prime, but every slight tweak given to Echoes was, in my eyes, one for the worse. First and foremost, it really didn't feel much like a true Metroid game, story-wise; there were very few space pirates, no metroids, no Chozo statues, and no familiar foes like Kraid or Ridley. Though many of the boss fights were very cool and unique, the bosses themselves felt rather uninspired. "Boost guardian." "Spider guardian." "Bomb Guardian." Really, each boss was just a "dark" (we'll get to that shortly) being that possessed whatever ability Samus needed to unlock next. The setting of Echoes is a planet called Aether, split into two dimensions by a colossal meteor impact. The dimensions are "Light Aether" and "Dark Aether," or in other words, "Adventure Game Cliche #1." Yes, just like in A Link to the Past, portals could move you from the light world to the dark one where everything was almost exactly the same - only not quite. Beings from the dark world (the "Ing") were stealing energy from the light world (inhabited by the "Luminoths"). Naturally, your job is to restore the balance and - maybe I'm wrong here - reunite the dimension split. Oh, and there's a Dark Samus. Obviously. The game looked pretty cool and the level design was top-notch, as with any Metroid game, but somehow it all just felt much more limited in scope than the first Prime game. Your ammo, for instance, consists of a light beam and a dark beam and - get this - a combination of the two called the annihilator beam. Where's the ice beam? What about the wave beam and plasma beam? Such staples of Metroid, missing! Light and dark ammunition were also non-infinite, like only missiles and powerbombs were in previous installments from the franchise. Overall, because of the immense focus on "light" and "dark" themes, the game was very limited. Prime gave us caverns of lava, jungles, icy polar realms; Echoes just gives us two dimensions, and each has a wasteland, a swamp, and a fortress. The fortress looked pretty cool, but the whole atmosphere of Echoes couldn't hold a candle to Prime's. Granted, Metroid Prime is widely regarded as one of the greatest games of all time, so the fact that its sequel didn't live up to it was inevitable rather than disappointing, in my eyes. Others disagree. Sweeney, for example, calls Prime 2 his favorite Metroid Prime game of them all. Of course, he played it on the Wii, where, due to complaints about the difficulty of a number of bosses on the original GameCube version, a few such bosses were "dumbed down," so to speak. Whatever. I won't taunt him for it. If anything, I'm jealous. Oh well. All in all, a great game that simply could have been a slightly better game. Next up, I'm moving away from the GameCube and PlayStation 2 for just a little while as I tackle some current-generation games like LittleBigPlanet and Metroid Prime 3. Onward!