Despite purchasing most Nintendo games on the Gamecube, I did skip Metroid Prime 2 because I thought the first game was a little overrated, and the whole dark/light world idea in this game just seemed cliche to me. Now I’ve finally played it via the Metroid Prime Trilogy, and I’m so glad I skipped it back when it was released.
The story is a typical set-up: Samus follows a distress signal on Planet Aether to find Galactic Federation Marines dead, killed by the Ing. There’s also “Dark Samus” and evidence of Phazon found in the first game. She goes through a portal and you lose your abilities again.
She meets Umos, the last of the Luminoth race who tells you how the world is split into parallel worlds. You need to travel between these worlds via the portals. Sometimes your path is blocked in one world, and maybe you need to use a switch in one world to open a door in the other. In general, you need to locate the Dark Temples, find a few keys, then return to the Light Temple to restore the area; repeat 3 times.
In the dark world, your health depletes unless you are inside a light area where it slowly regenerates. You later find a Dark Suit which reduces the rate your health depletes. Usually there are sequences of light areas that you need to move between. Some of these are permanent, some you shoot to activate, and others are moving creatures. Initially, navigation is very slow as you survey the area before moving (with the aim of conserving health), but once you get more health and the Dark Suit, you can generally not care about it too much.
It can be quite hard to see in these areas. You are fighting dark enemies in a dark coloured world, then there’s loads of lighting effects like the light domes which distort your vision slightly. The original game had a bland colour palette, and now this is probably just as dull in the light world and duller in the dark world.
You have your normal unlimited energy beam, but will often need to rely on the new weapons Light and Dark Beam. The special weapons from the first game don’t return, so the White doors don’t open with the Ice Beam; it is now Light Beam. These weapons have limited ammo though, although if you run out of ammo, then you can still open doors and portals via a weak shot. I think the game tells you that killing enemies with one gun always drops the opposite ammo; but it doesn't seem guaranteed. I thought it would be better to change the doors to standard doors once you have opened them; requiring you to switch guns to open them again is annoying especially when you travel through some areas multiple times.
I found myself spending a lot of time switching weapons. Hit a light door, switch to normal gun to conserve ammo if you need to shoot enemies, now you need the dark beam (or maybe light beam again).
Dark enemies are annoying because they keep dashing, disappearing into goo-form, then reappearing. Most enemies seem to have way too much health, and are only defeated quickly if you use the correct weapon against them, but that involves using limited ammo. I mainly avoided enemies when I could, because they were a chore to defeat. They respawn when you return to rooms, so there is no incentive to stay and fight unless the game locks the doors until you do dispatch them. This is normally for space pirates in a one-time battle.
The bosses are even more bullet-spongy and you really do need to use the correct weapon at the correct time to take them down. However, there were some boss battles where I went in with low ammo and there didn’t seem much scope for recovering ammo until you progressed in the battle. Ammo stations do exist in the game, they are just scarce and should have been placed outside the boss room along with a Save Station. I thought it was an absolute abomination that there was no Ammo station near the final boss.
The save points seem a bit spaced out - I often played for 30 mins before finding one. This is annoying because you have to go out of your way periodically to save, then have to backtrack again to get back on course. It’s possible to miss Save rooms because sometimes they are slightly hidden. Dying on a boss and having to trawl through several rooms is incredibly frustrating, as is battling a boss on low ammo.
It’s not obvious where to go, and even more confusing that you have to go through portals to navigate some sections. You will spend a lot of time on the map. Constantly going to the map and having to pan and zoom every time is a chore, and sometimes it’s hard to pan when there are multi-level rooms and it then focuses on the room above. After you venture through some rooms, you will often be disorientated and will have to go back to the map.
I think a good design in these Metroidvania games is to have a clear landmark which is blocked off, in addition to some optional areas that have the same blockage. Then when you acquire the new power-up, you know exactly where to go to progress the story, but can also venture off the path to claim some rewards for exploration.
In this game, I found that even if I could open a door and maybe venture to another room, I would then be blocked by some other required power-up, so I was then frustrated and had to tediously backtrack out of the rooms. Eventually, I just didn’t bother exploring - I thought I would only do that once I had every single power-up in the game. It’s actually a good idea to do that since the game includes another “key hunt” at the end, which was a much maligned inclusion in the first game. I wouldn’t have minded this if the clues were easily accessible and it was clear which keys you had, but you have to go through one of the worst menus you will ever experience. There’s these moving, connected nodes that you pan round, and it’s difficult to know which node is going to be highlighted. Then you will have to go through multiple levels of this. I just looked up a guide online.
Sometimes when you acquire a new power-up, you are supposed to return to an area on the other side of the world. There may be a partial short-cut but it’s not a strong indicator that it is the way forward. A great example is when you get the Spider Ball, there’s rails in the current area, and there’s some rails that I remembered in an area really early in the game, but you are actually interested in returning to an area you were in a few hours ago - and furthermore it could be a room that some players didn’t even see. How would they know to return there at that point in the game? There is a Hint system where it points to the room it expects you to be in, but it seems to only kick in if you linger in the wrong area for 30 mins or something- and some players may have turned it off.
There’s lots of scanning like the first game. Sometimes this gives you clues on how to defeat enemies, particularly useful against bosses.
As far as this Wii port goes, it is generally fine but I felt I had to point the remote slightly downwards so my wrist was in an uncomfortable position for long periods.
The Metroid series is generally held in high regard, and people do seem to like this game. Personally, I disliked it. It just seems cumbersome, unclear where to go, and frustrating to navigate. There were too many sections where I felt it was too tedious and felt like giving up. It’s just constantly showing annoying game design which you just don’t expect from a Nintendo game.