#Metroid prime echoes how to
Metroid Prime is still a brilliant video game - fittingly accompanying both Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in how to translate a series’ conventions and appeal to 3D space…late to that particular party the Metroid series might have been. That’s not to dismiss, or for whatever reason, pose a “controversial” viewpoint for the pure sake of one. Long have I considered Metroid Prime 2: Echoes to be the best of the Prime sub-series (yes, better than the original Metroid Prime) and the reasons for this are many. To declare the game, for whatever reason, isn’t deserving of the same deep, analytical delving-into its finer mechanical, structural and artistic merits, however, would be foolish. While that prediction at the time is understandable, it’s important - whether that’s in hindsight or simply at the time of release - to recognize Echoes was (and still is) a continuation of the Prime philosophy. Perhaps it’s the lofty heights of the series’ past (both Super Metroid and Metroid Prime remain two of the most highly-rated video games of all time) and maybe the over-inflated expectations that 2002’s Prime garnered that caused people to think Echoes would somehow be a unassailable leap for the series. You couldn’t be further from the truth it kept what was so critical, so captivating about Prime’s delivery and if anything, gave developers Retro Studios the springboard to flex their artistic muscles. It’s not that Echoes, the 2004 follow-up to Prime, and the second Metroid entrant on the Gamecube, was a bad game. Heck, even the less-than-lauded Fusion - with its last-in-the-timeline placement and slight deviations into horror at points - and those that spark little more than frustration a la Other M, are spoken of in grander breath, positively or not. The original’s foundation for exploration and of its anti-melodic interpretation of sound design Super’s unequivocal brilliance in tone, aided by its on-point musical scoring the original Prime’s perfectly-executed rendering of formerly 2D world-building and environmental story-telling, into 3D space. The impressive heights of the other titles dotting the series’ chronology could very well be an unfortunate benefactor.
Like 1991’s Metroid II more than two decades before it, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes has become something of a less spoken-of entrant in the long, winding, seldom-present, but well-beloved, Metroid IP.
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