- Pronouns
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Thank you for the detailed response! I really appreciate it!
Yeah, I definitely think what hurt me more was going into the game with the mentality that it has not aged at all (although I was lead to believe that by the reviews and wom) when it does have limitations or points that meed improvements that are inherent to the time it came out. I'm pretty good at approaching a game with the mindset of the time it came out and I'm always discovering retro games I love, but I didn't do that with this one, in my head it was like a new release. The core of the game is extremely solid and like you said, its incredible they came out with this as their first tackle into the franchise when all the framework they had was Metroid 1-3. In a fundamental level, the game really works, but imo for a completely newcomer 20 years later it gets more obvious that it needs some fine tuning to reach full potential.
For example, I agree when you say it's supposed to be slower paced and contemplative, and believe me, Super is still my favorite entry so I know what you're talking about. Despite loving Dread, I complained that it never gave the player time or enough room amplitude to stop and take in the atmosphere, the game's areas felt very narrow and funneled. Prime definitely isn't like that, its large rooms do remind me of Super and I loved exploring them for the first time and definitely think that was the right approach for the game. Key words here are "for the first time", because I think where the game differs from Super is that it keeps being slow even at the sixth or seventh time you're backtracking through a room you already explored, while in Super Samus gradually turns into a killing machine that steamrolls everything in front of her and makes backtracking not only a breeze but also part of that sense of "damn I'm get badass with all these upgrades". Prime isn't like that because you never get substantially stronger, you get more health and more missiles, but your weapons aren't incrementally stronger, they're just meant for different purposes. You also never get unlimited jumping like the Space Jump, and like I said, the map isn't very well interconnected like Super, so backtracking is always very slow, and there is a lot of it. The design is also a bit mean sometimes, without the hint system a lot of the next steps I was supposed to take felt really random, and that wouldn't be much of a problem if revisiting every area to check for new paths was faster, but like I said, it's really slow.
As for the area variety, I still think Prime is a bit lacking compared to other games, but it might be because I'm a bit tired of going through the same areas over and over again so they're the ones that are burned into my brain. Like, when I think of my experience as I whole, what I remember the most is transversing the same rooms in Magmoor and Tallon Overworld. Super had the same amount of major areas but in general you're traveling through different paths each time, and also each area was more varied. Like, Brinstar has the classic forest environments but it also has red soil brinstar, it has rooms with a fungi theme, Norfair has fire areas but also those rooms with weird alien bubbles etc. As I type this I realize it would be exponentially more expensive to make a 3D game that varied visually than it was for a 2D game, so I understand this limitation, but it's still a thing to me.
Anyway, I think your comparison with OoT made me more excited for Prime 2 and 3 now. I think as someone who doesn't have nostalgia for any of these games, I could potentially like 2 and 3 more than I liked 1 of they address some of these things. I'm also very excited for Prime 4 because, like you said, it's coming out after 20 years of improvements to the Metroid formula.
You just know they'd do an incredible job with the lore, level design, boss fights, and so on.
