NWR writes: "After the critical and financial success of Metroid Prime, Nintendo asked Retro Studios to craft a sequel. With far more freedom in creating the game, Retro's vision is more present than Nintendo's. Although Echoes had a two year development cycle, many ideas had to be scrapped in order to make the publisher's strict holiday 2004 release date. Among the deleted content was an unlockable port of Super Metroid."
One of the biggest TV and movie tropes in the last decade has been the multiverse, the idea of exploring multiple dimensions to uncover alternate versions of existing ideas. From both a business and creative perspective, it makes sense why established franchises are shaking things up in this way.
However, there aren't many video games latching on to this trend, as rendering multiple worlds in real-time is a difficult feat and the medium is relatively young in comparison to its contemporaries, making crossover opportunities more difficult. Still, there are a few great titles that manage enough to overcome these challenges, and here are some of the best examples.
While I love someone mentioning Planescape, not really multiverse. Planes and dimensions, yes. But, they are typically their own locations and are very rarely tied to another 'verse' let alone another plane. The only things that are directly tied are the ethereal and material planes. Otherwise, they are dimensions created of their own design and goals by the creator/owner and not comprised of 'their own version of another dimension'.
Metroid Prime is a detective game at heart, and the Scan Visor is Samus' trusty magnifying glass.
It's been two decades since Metroid Prime first launched and it still holds up fantastically well.
I can’t believe it’s been 20 years since I bought this for my GameCube! My best friend and I ordered pizza for delivery, it was snowing outside and we stayed in all weekend playing it. Still one of my all time favorite games and I really hope the Switch ports being rumored is true. Fantastic game, one for the ages🙂
"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.
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'.