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Железный комиссар
United States
Madison
Wisconsin
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Author's Note: I rate Super Metroid a 10/10 and consider it one of the best and most enduring videogames ever made. In brief, its winning qualities include unparalleled atmosphere, perfect controls, a wondrous sense of exploration, an exhilarating stream of upgrades, a steady increase in mobility, and a complex, interconnected world that encourages sophisticated route-planning and alternative approaches. I consider all of that to be synonymous with the Metroid name. In my view, Super Metroid set a high bar to which all subsequent entries have aspired, which is why I mention it here.
As for the Prime series, I'm the proud owner of Metroid Prime Trilogy, the announcement of which brought me off the fence as a prospective Wii owner (the Trilogy disc is now a collector's item). All of my experience with the series has been on Wii. The first game ranks among my favorite titles on the system, and was among the first I completed. I only got about half-way into Metroid Prime 2: Echoes before losing interest in the dark-world/light-world premise, and I don't remember it very well. Rather than start over nearly two years later, I skipped ahead to the trilogy's final chapter.
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Overview
The ironically titled Metroid Prime 3: Corruption finds the series profoundly adrift, yet proud and resilient. This is one step forward and two steps back from the intoxicating promise of Metroid Prime - a fall from grace. Prime 3 delivers a curious mix of disappointment and defiance, ultimately standing as a game that's impossible to decry as "bad" yet hopelessly inadequate when placed alongside its predecessors.
One Step Forward
Corruption's crowning achievement is its sublime control scheme - a perfect fit for the series. Interacting with the environment feels natural and intuitive. For example, the player may attach the grappling-beam to some steel plating blocking the way, and then physically pull back on the nunchuck to send the obstacle flying. The wii-mote and nunchuck setup provides the same fluid control as a mouse and keyboard, closing a gap that often hinders first-person play on consoles. I cannot say enough good things about the control scheme in Metroid Prime Trilogy, pioneered in the third game and then applied retrospectively to the Nintendo GameCube titles.
The second feather in Corruption's hat is, surprisingly, the combat. Battling foes always took a back seat to exploring desolate, forgotten worlds during the 2D Metroid era, and the first two Prime games came uncomfortably close to disrupting that balance. Corruption solves this problem with the addition of the phazon-based "Hypermode." Following the game's 1-hour introduction (more on that in a moment), the player can enter hypermode with the press of a button. Beam damage goes up by a factor of four or five, and the charged hyper-blast is the most powerful weapon in Samus's arsenal for the entirety of the game - as useful against the first boss as the last. While in Hypermode, each blast drains your energy level, turning energy tanks into a form of ammunition and adding some interesting survivability choices to the earlier portions of the game. However, if you stay in hypermode for 10 seconds, you enter a "corruption" period, in which your energy begins replenishing itself (free ammunition). If you fail to exit hypermode by the 25 second mark, the full energy tank is instantly "vented," but what this all amounts to is a convenient '$%^&-off button' by which pests are quickly exterminated. Boss battles aside, you will find no tedious and protracted fights in Prime 3.
Two Steps Back
Unfortunately, Corruption's biggest flaw can also be attributed to hypermode, which renders missiles obsolete. In doing so, it merely swaps one problem - tedious combat - for another: useless upgrades. Ultimately it's a losing bargain. Half of all secrets in Corruption are missile packs, and they are really, truly, totally useless. I suspect developer Retro Studios knew this, and implemented a technology that uses several missiles at a time clear specific locks. This is weak indeed, as you'd never need more than 20 missiles (four packs) to be comfortably stocked. Only one boss is weak to missiles, and only 20 are needed to take him down optimally - lets say 40 for a player making lots of mistakes (I should mention, they make you fight this one particular boss three times). Even if we're being generous, that means over 40% of the secrets in Metroid Prime 3 fall into the "useless junk" category. That's mind-boggling to me. Compare to Super Metroid, in which every single upgrade feels meaningful, and Corruption seems to have lost its way.
I hate to pile on, but it gets worse. In Prime 3, Samus can upgrade her ship, first so that it can perform air-strikes, and later so it can lift large objects. Bafflingly, there are no fewer than 8 "ship missile" expansions. I never found a use for these. Not once. I mean, wow - maybe an experienced player can fill me in? That's another 8 upgrades that are totally useless. The central joy of the series has always been exploring every nook and cranny, looking for exotic and empowering upgrades. How much more demotivating can it get than having over half of them be for show? I reached a point where I realized that almost all of the worthwhile stuff is either un-missable or accessible during the first pass through an area. Every beam and suit upgrade comes as the reward for defeating a boss - not one of them can be uncovered in some cleverly hidden crevice. Nearly every energy tank can be obtained during a player's initial foray into a region (no additional upgrades necessary), and most are in plain sight.
In short, the player is given almost no incentive to revisit old areas, instead uncovering one worthless missile pack after another. A slight exception would be the game's nine Energy Cells, which are required periodically to provide power to various devices. Essentially, these are ordinary keys - whatever happened to allowing Samus's wide range of technology to determine access? The problem with energy cells is that, unlike traditional upgrades, they have a single, one-time purpose. That makes them unexciting to find; on the one hand, they are required to progress, but on the other hand, finding an energy cell is tantamount to pressing a switch.
For those keeping score, we have 50 upgrades that will literally be of no use to the player, and nine more that cannot accurately be described as upgrades. That's an extraordinary percentage of the total - nearly 60% - that offers no reward to the player, no opportunity to play.
Sadly, even setting aside the secrets themselves, the structure of Prime 3 is antithetical to exploration. Samus's adventure is neatly compartmentalized into three planets, and the sequencing between them is rigid. Objectives are constantly provided (and marked on your map) that tell you exactly what to do and when to do it. I wouldn't mind this constant leading if the player still had the ability to go off the beaten path, but Corruption simply doesn't offer that. Forget wondrous, complex interconnections. Forget alternative approaches like Super Metroid's wall jump or shine spark. There are moments in Prime 3 when Samus will disembark from her ship, head in one direction for about 10 minutes, reach her objective, and promptly be told to backtrack to the ship and fly to another planet. This is no better than a failed irrelevancy like Monster Tale. This entire genre of games has never functioned this way, and for good reason. All of the fan-panic around Prime 1 - that it would devolve into just another linear FPS - very nearly comes true in Prime 3. When you're deep in the heart of any one planet, that fear thankfully recedes, as each world claims a rich identity for substantial period of time. I'm grateful for that, but excessive linearity casts a very real and discouraging shadow over the whole experience.
To recap, the upgrade system is a mess, and even if it weren't, rigid sequencing would prevent the player from reveling in it, or from simply enjoying genuine exploration of the unknown. To me, that sense of a vast and lonely universe - prowling the ruins of extinct civilizations - is fundamental to the Metroid experience, yet that, too, seems threatened in Corruption. To quote Edge magazine:
Edge wrote: Corruption sees Retro lost for a while, like Samus, down some mystifying and convoluted dead-end of its own making, populating a universe that should have stayed desolate and dead.
In particular, the first hour of the game slavishly panders to a more mainstream "space opera" sensibility, with federation troopers at every turn who greet the great Samus Aran, and an fleet admiral who looks like M. Bison. Suddenly Samus is a hero of the people, a cog in the military wheel, rather than a bounty hunter and explorer alone in the depths of space, heir to the technology of an the ancient Chozo race. There are cutscenes in this game reminiscent of battles from Return of the Jedi, and a cast of rival bounty hunters who feel custom-made for future spin-offs, including, of all things, a Silver Surfer clone. If Retro wants to go this route, they should make Marvel Vs. Capcom Vs. Nintendo, and leave the hallowed Metroid aesthetic alone.
Final criticism: the boss fights. Retro Studios just isn't good at this. Protracted, tedious, and generally lame boss fights were practically the lone blemish on the original Metroid Prime, and they were still a liability when the studio moved on to Donkey Kong Country Returns. For the most part, Corruption is no exception - the boss fights establish themselves as dreaded lows. There's an element of unintentional comedy, too, as Retro telegraphs incoming bosses with incredibly obvious gladatorial arenas. Without fail, you can predict when crossing a threshold will trigger a cutscene that traps Samus against a foe who takes far too long to whittle down and defeat. Prime 3 is even guilty of the boss-gauntlet sin, rehashing a whole host of lame battles all at once late in the game. Each fight is largely the same: figure out how to damage the boss, figure out how to replenish your own health (since hypermode depletes it), rinse and repeat. Some are better than others, but most simply go on and on.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, Retro should have known better. Yes, the controls are brilliant. Yes, hypermode is an excellent addition that minimizes combat and adds some tension. Yes, each planet ultimately offers an attenuated but appreciable sense of immersion. And yet, the flaws are far from subtle. Over half of the upgrade system is dead weight, the series trademark exploration is put in a straightjacket, bosses far outstay their welcome, and Samus's solitude gives way to hero status in a generic space opera (cynics might even mention Halo). Does all this add up to a bad game? No. That can largely be explained, however, by the fact that the Metroid games compete only with themselves - no other non-portable series has even tried to create this type of experience in the last decade. To me that means Retro had free reign to reach for the skies, yet backpeddled from their initial achievement. Prime 3 chronicles the end of the Phazon threat, yet, in the context of the series, it fails to excise the growing corruption. That task would be left to Metroid: Other M, which simply gave up, going gently into that good night.
  
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Posted Fri Jan 13, 2012 4:33 am