Metroid Prime 2

Playtime: 17.8 Hours

Finished 31 May 2025.

Played on the Steam Deck using Primehack on a MP Trilogy Wii ROM for a much better control scheme; not really sure if I ended up patching HD textures into the game or not. Played on Veteran difficulty, which is the same as the "Normal" difficulty in the original version of the game - definitely not easy, but not too bad overall. Achieved 100% item completion and probably around 90% scan completion; listed time is IGT, but I don't remember dying very frequently so overall time is likely close to 18 hours as well. I've no shame in admitting I used a map online for the final item collectathon and the Sky Temple Keys; traversal in the Prime games sucks and scanning every room in the game with a Dark Visor is really stupid. Plus, for some reason Prime never actually included any item markers on the map which makes it even worse to play blindly.

Primehack was very stable for the most part; the only issues I had with framerate or stability happened near the beginning of the game during the Dark Splinter encounter at the Great Temple. I crashed after beating it the first time, and had some awful stutters the second time; not sure why they happened, but the rest of the game was very stable. Controls were basically the same as in Prime Remastered so they felt quite familiar, but there is an issue with using Screw Attack where you must hold down L2 while jumping to properly enter Screw Attack mode, otherwise the game will think you're changing directions and knock you out of it. I was stuck in the room with the unlock for about 20 minutes before I finally looked it up; I think this is an issue with the translated controls, as the game does not mention anything about keeping lock-on held.

When Metroid Prime Remastered came out, I kind of wondered why they didn't allude to the other two games in the original Prime trilogy. While I imagine that the main reason is actually that their primary efforts were actually focused on Metroid Prime 4, my little conspiracy theory is that they realized how similar the Prime games all felt, and were worried about diluting interest in the comeback of the series between Prime 1 and its followups. After finishing MP2, I can't fault the decision-making regardless of the reasoning - I think it feels a bit too similar to MP1 to feel truly different, while most of the significant changes were generally for the worse in my opinion.

The central premise of this game unsurprisingly involves yet another collectathon - though this time, the first part of this is much more direct than in Prime 1, asking you to travel to three distinct regions of Aether to "fix" the energy controllers. It feels more focused, yet also loses the feeling of traversing the world a little bit as you're basically cordoned into one sub-section of the world at a time, unlike Prime 1 where you're going between each region regularly as you unlock various upgrades.

The gimmick of this game is that there are two "halves" of Aether; the light half, which is inhabited by the Luminoth and is under siege by the Ing for the Energy Controllers, and the dark half, which you must traverse to take back the captured energy sources and some of your upgrades, which you lost after being attacked in your first encounter with the Ing. Dark Aether is a pain in the ass to navigate for almost the entire game since it slowly drains your health outside of certain "safety zones" provided by Lumonith power crystals. Initially, with just the Varia suit, your health drains so quickly that you can't stay out of the bubbles for more than a few seconds. After finding the Dark suit, you get a bit more freedom, yet still not enough to prevent it being a consistent concern. And while the bubbles will heal you back up, the rate of healing is so slow that I often found myself taking involuntary bathroom breaks while waiting for my ETanks to fill back up. With no other way to accelerate the process, basically anything you do in the dark world is just boring and annoying as hell.

I feel like they also stuck a little bit too closely to the Prime 1 mechanics, namely regarding the beam and visor switching. To complement the light and dark worlds, you also obtain matching light and dark beams early on for various purposes, most significantly to open portals between the realms (outside of a few gates that can be scanned to open instead). That would be fine, if not for the fact that they decided to add a dumbass ammo mechanic to the beams in this game, making it often infeasible to use the special beams extensively in combat. I personally ended up relying on the power beam most of the time, since I wouldn't have to think about running out of ammo; adding yet another resource is a monumentally stupid move on their part, and just made the game feel annoying to play. Adjusting effectiveness of the beams would have been significantly smarter overall. The visors are also really contrived; the dark and echo visors are each only used for a few scenarios each, with the echo visor being almost completely useless outside of a couple fights and a rare few doors, most of which contain optional unlocks anyway. That's not to mention the strange pacing of the unlocks. The Dark Suit and the Light/Dark beams are obtained very early in the game, with no further upgrades before the Light Suit and Annihilator beams right up at the very end. There's a vast swath of the game where most of your combat gear is virtually untouched, which stifles the feeling of progress outside of having some more missiles and tanks. The movement upgrades are very welcome, of course, but those typically have little utility in the middle of a firefight.

Traversal in this game is kind of frustrating, which is basically my opinion of Prime 1 as well. Since all of your combat upgrades are essentially sidegrades (especially in this game, where the ammo mechanic makes them unusable a lot of the time), you don't really feel significantly more powerful when traversing earlygame areas with upgraded gear; they're just as annoying to get through, and end up wasting lots of time and energy when trying to hunt for items or the Sky Temple Keys (the second collectathon, which I didn't mention earlier). I hear that beams finally stack in MP3 which I'm hoping will come as a welcome change, but it was a huge problem here. Some of the other tools are nice; you get Space Jump a bit earlier, and Screw Attack is occasionally useful (if a bit finnicky, mostly because of the way PrimeHack works).

Enemies and fights felt really annoying in this game on average. Lots of bosses had a million phases, which didn't really feel necessary, and ALL of the major bosses in every area had to be fought in the dark world, with decreasing availability of light crystals. This effectively puts them on a timer, which only compounds the irritation of dealing with the often-unintuitive mechanics. In many cases, I feel like I bring it on myself for not thoroughly scanning enemies as I encounter them, but I also didn't really like the fights themselves. The worst was probably the Torvus Bog fight which I really couldn't get down and felt awful with the grappling and random charging/movement that wasted a ton of my super missiles. The Emperor Ing wasn't really much fun to fight either, though still enough of a breeze with 100% items. The worst was probably the Boost Ball guardian, with probably the dumbest fight mechanics in history. A boss fight with such a restricted timer, and with the ability to infinitely stall damage to itself with several moves, can basically kill you for free if it just keeps staying in invincibility. There were a few exceptions - I surprisingly enjoyed Quadraxis, the Sanctuary boss, and the Dark (Dork) Samus fights were all very fun as well, but those kind of felt few and far between.

All in all, I feel like this game feels a bit too similar to Metroid Prime 1, while deviating from it in all of the worst ways possible with the addition of an awful gimmick and clumsy combat. Whereas the overall flow of Prime 1 felt quite natural and close to a traditional Metroid game with incremental beam "upgrades" (though they all still maintain different uses), this one just doesn't feel right, with you getting most of your combat upgrades early on, followed by incremental movement and utility upgrades afterwards. While I feel like Prime 1 was an interesting take on the Metroid formula, with a very competent translation into 3D, I'm not really convinced that Prime 2 fully justifies its existence. It's definitely not horrible overall, but it just feels like more Prime 1... but worse -- I'm not entirely sure why the 3D games just can't get the balance of different-but-familiar right compared to the 2D games, but it's probably much harder to strike than I expect as a layman. I'm really hoping that Prime 3 does a better job than Prime 2, but opinions on that are also mixed.