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January 19, 2005
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes
So besides finally trying to polish off Castlevania: Circle of the Moon on GBA, I've been rocking out on the GameCube with the new Metroid game. Or, more precisely, Metroid "Prime" game. It's like they've got two goddamn franchises going simultaneously now, but they share the same continuity. Crazy.
Anyway, the game is solid, it's basically just like the original Prime, only on a different planet. But here's my gruff. My gruff? My beef? Ummm, yeah, here's my problem. My qualm even.
I never thought that I would say this about a Metroid game, but the writing in Echoes is is terrible. The reason I thought I'd never say this is because the writing in every Metroid game up until Prime has always been non-existent. "The last metroid is in captivity, the galaxy is at peace." Awesome, let's kick some ass. A couple hours later, the credits roll. Sweet.
But yeah, like the first Prime game, there's lots of scanning things, and reading log files and whatnot in Echoes. Thing is, in Prime it was cool stuff that you were reading, or at the very least it was boring, but it was written well. Echoes though, not so much. And it's not even that bad per se, it's just that it isn't really very consistant in its tone. Sometimes when you scan things it's all very scientific, and other times it seems like it was written by a 14 year old girl. "This enemy is stinky." "This wall needs a paint job."
Anyway, Echoes will invariably go down in history as the Majora's Mask of the Metroid series. That is to say, it's the second game on the same console, running the same graphics engine, where its predecessor was groundbreaking, and the follow up was more of the same... only with a "gimmick" thrown in. In Majora's Mask the gimmick was the real-time thing, and in Echoes it's the dark/light world thing. This isn't a bad thing, but it's nothing ground-breaking. It's a little Link to the Past with some Archon and Ikaruga thrown in for good measure. Overall, it's pretty solid.
But yeah, the writing sucks balls.
Posted by pat at January 19, 2005 03:58 PM