NWR: Metroid Prime Retrospective

EvilTwin - 116 days 15 hours ago

"After Echoes was released, producer Kensuke Tanabe revealed that the game was only thirty percent complete three months before the release date."

That. Is. Amazing.

I knew Retro was a helluva studio...but wrapping up almost three-quarters of a AAA-level game in 90 days? Yowzah.

(A good chunk of the first phase of development HAD to be art development and direction, though, so that makes it a bit more understandable.)

Anywho, Echoes never got the love it deserved...but it's to be expected. It followed up the first 3D Metroid, after all. But it's the "Empire Strikes Back" of the Prime series, IMO.

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Mahr - 116 days 6 hours ago

It's a shame that Echoes is often so unfairly maligned. Its boss battles alone are enough for me to regard it as the best of the trilogy.

"Your only real hint as to the location of a particular key was a faint outline of the key’s container when using the Dark Visor in the light world, at which point you would find the nearest portal and shoot down the container in the dark world."

Er, no. Aside from the Dark Visor outline, all of the rooms holding keys had a deceased Luminoth Warrior with a scannable Lore entry in the light version. And what's more, these entries always highlighted the name of the room where the key was in a different color in ALLCAPS font for emphasis.

And if that's not enough, as in the first Prime, the room where all the keys eventually had to be gathered had scannable Lore entries *detailing the locations of those bodies anyway*.

In my mind, the only difference in the final collect-quest between the first and second game was that the first game called them 'artifacts' and the second game was more honest and called them 'keys'.

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