You Make Your Own Story, You See

I’ve finished Metroid Prime Remastered. As I said in the Xenoblade Chronicles post, I feel like it takes me about three remasters/rereleases to finally finish most games. What’s sad is that often buy every version in between 😅. There are exceptions, as I’ve certainly beat Shadow of the Colossus in its PS2, PS3, and PS4/5 incarnations. With Metroid Prime Remastered, I can’t actually recall if I ever finished the GameCube original. I’m pretty sure I missed out on Metroid Prime Trilogy and definitely didn’t get the second game from GameCube or the third for Wii. I’m really hoping to see remasters of the second and third before the release of the Metroid Prime 4: Beyond (shouldn’t it just be Metroid Prime Beyond?), but we shall see. Maybe they’re holding them back as Switch 2 launch titles, though I would imagine either would run well on the original Switch hardware as well.

MPR as a remaster is excellent in nearly every regard, but especially with its price. It launched at $40 and goes on sale for $30, which is fairly priced for this kind of game. While there is a fair amount of work sometimes in remastering aspects of a game, when the game itself is many years old, it does seem to be asking a bit too much of the audience to release it at the full price of $60-70.

Certainly there are elements of the game people may find quaint in the modern era, such as saving at fixed locations as opposed to autosaving. Particularly when released on a modern platform like the Switch, the ability to put the console in standby mostly eliminates any saving concern, unless the console runs out of batteries or the player is playing other games frequently. Since I was playing mostly docked and focused on finishing one game at a time, saving was largely redundant.

I’m also glad to see the twin-stick control scheme supported here. I didn’t quite understand why it wasn’t included in the original version despite the popularity of the control scheme at the time. I would imagine it came down to the fact that the C-stick on the GameCube controller wasn’t really meant to be used in that way, as it didn’t have a hat like the main joystick. I also had the feeling that Nintendo and Retro Studios wanted to make an FPS less challenging from a control perspective for more casual and newer players. They may have considered the twin-stick scheme too advanced for the GameCube audience. New gamers often seem to find controllers a bit of a challenge to operate without the long experience of a seasoned gamer, and the GameCube controller in particular seemed to be designed to be accessible for new players.

One thing that stands out in this playthrough is how much the story disappoints. The game comes from Nintendo’s Silent Era, where the main character never speaks and the story is conveyed by other characters or the world around the player. This game predates Doom 3 by a couple years and introduces the “scan” mechanic, which diegetically communicates background information about the plot to the player, like Doom 3 does, as they use the Scan Visor to interact with computer consoles. This by itself isn’t bad, but the story itself is somewhat lackluster in its handling of the stakes and enemy characters. Ridley is teased at the beginning and shows up at the very end as a precursor to the fight with Metroid Prime. The role of Ridley and any motivation to fight him isn’t really communicated to the player, though seasoned Metroid players will recognize the character. He just shows up for a boss fight at some point, and there’s no real story reason for it. Similarly, while Metroids and their Tallon IV variants are introduced midway through the game, the existence and relevance of Metroid Prime isn’t communicated at all before the creature’s introduction at the very end of the game (unless I missed some flavortext somewhere, but I scanned more than 75% of the objects in the game).

Outside of that though, Metroid Prime Remastered is a great way to experience the original game with updated aspect ratio, graphics, resolution, and control scheme. I don’t know if I would recommend it though. Even in its original iteration, I never really connected with the environment or gameplay it presented. As was the norm for its era, there’s a lot of backtracking and criss-crossing areas to get the next item to unlock the next area, and it gets old pretty quickly as the rooms in each area tend to blend together after awhile. The late-game also doesn’t really evolve its gameplay to a place that feels like I’d mastered the game. Every enemy encounter was more of a chore than anything, and the beam-matched enemies were not interesting after the first couple of encounters. The Fission Metroids were even more tedious to handle. Hopefully the sequels will eventually be remastered as well, and they’ll provide a more interesting experience than the original.