Metroid Prime 3
Playtime: 14.2 Hours
Finished 17 July 2025.Just like Prime 2, I played this using PrimeHack on the Steam Deck. I played on the Veteran difficulty here as well; unlike MP2, I'm not sure if this is technically the "Normal" difficulty from the original version, but for the most part it didn't feel significantly harder or anything, just annoying at times. As per the usual, I went for 100% item completion and did as much scanning as I could without obsessing over it - seems like I probably achieved around 80-90% of them?
This game finally has a way in-game to locate pickup locations through the Chozo Observatory in SkyTown, so I didn't have to rely on other maps or references quite as much. It still wasn't perfect because the Bryyo Ice map isn't accessible unless you're actually in the area (for some reason), and the Valhalla is too small to be picked up by the Chozo scanners. Either way, completion of this game felt much smoother than the other Prime games.
Prime 3 was a massive step down from the first two games, ending the trilogy with a bit of a whimper. While I found P1 to be a good game with sore spots and P2 to be a mediocre game with high- and lowlights, Prime 3 to me is a poor game with flashes of decency. Especially when judging this game against the fundamental aspects of the other Metroid games, I feel like it does so much wrong in its fundamental design to the point where it doesn't feel much like a Metroid game at all to me.
The number one culprit of this is related to the level design in this game. Unlike the previous Prime games, Prime 3 tries to make the game's world feel bigger by spreading the maps across several different planets. The tradeoff is that each region ends up being much smaller; the further fracturing of each planet's map into multiple (usually disconnected) segments which require the use of the ship to fast travel between them exacerbates the claustrophobic feeling of this game. On top of that, the levels consist almost entirely of straight lines with little to no opportunity for exploration. Although some backtracking is needed to get 100%, the hidden pickups themselves are almost invariably no more than about 5-10 seconds away from the main path.
Another symptom of the poor level design is that the game simply isn't any fun to traverse. Already in Prime 1 & 2, I personally thought the world traversal was kind of a shadow of the 2D games, given that you move so slowly and clumsily through the 3D world. That's even worse in this game - movement feels less dynamic than ever, with fewer options than ever given that there is only one path through any area, and generally only one path through any room. The issue with the Prime games is that you don't get any upgrades that make movement through individual rooms feel any better. At the end of the day, the backtracking for 100% item cleanup felt quite tedious because I didn't feel like I really got to fully exercise my upgrades.
This brings up the issue with upgrades in this game; so many of them are almost entirely useless for mechanical purposes, and are just used in a couple of pre-designated areas. This basically describes everything related to the ship; the ship missiles are this game's replacement for Power Bombs - supposedly, you can use them to bomb enemies in certain rooms but they require open-air ceilings. As it turns out, these are extremely rare, rendering the upgrade and the corresponding ship missile tanks almost completely useless outside of required story progress; I think I used them maybe 3 times in the game (and you hold up to 11 ammo). The ship grapple upgrade is also maybe used 3 times, and is a really finnicky, story-exclusive mechanic that has no dynamic purpose. Finally, the hypergrapple upgrade is also only used 3 times over the course of the game, and its actual mechanical purpose is almost entirely useless. Even beyond these "new" upgrades, plenty of familiar upgrades are hardly utilized in Prime 3. I don't think there are more than 2 or 3 boost ball half-pipes, storm missile doors are rare, etc.
Most of the basic combat gameplay and enemies aren't really too different than before fundamentally, but this game introduces a "Hypermode" mechanic related to the Phazon Corruption that forms the center of this game's plot. Essentially, you can inject energy tanks into a device to temporarily and massively upgrade your firepower and to get temporary invulnerability; but if you allow the activated Phazon to build up too far, Samus will be corrupted and you get a game over screen. Enemies are also able to go into this mode too, where they get enormous damage resistance, do more damage, etc. Basically, I thought this mechanic was awful because it effectively meant than any enemy that decided to go into Hypermode randomly (usually when almost dead) forced me to waste an entire ETank or to waste a ton of time shooting it with normal beams & missiles. Since it's temporary, each room or separate encounter may randomly force you to go into Hypermode again and again, which is super obnoxious when you have a very limited number of ETanks. I frequently found myself just camping behind walls and plugging enemies with 30+ charge shots to get rid of them because I didn't have enough health to waste 2 or 3 ETanks on one room with normal encounters. Just an awful mechanic overall, and would have been enough to turn me away from this game even without any of the other faults.
Finally, the boss fights in this game are a mixed bag. I'll predicate this by saying that I played this on PrimeHack + controller with no gyro aiming, while the game was originally made for the Wii. On that front, some of the fights ended up being way more annoying than they needed to be. Even so, a ton of the bosses are absolute dogshit; Mogador is probably the worst designed enemy encounter in the entire trilogy - tiny and constantly mobile hitboxes, regeneration, and extremely short vulnerability windows made it almost completely unplayable. As the first boss of the game, I almost found it bad enough to just consider MP3 a lost cause at that point. Several other bosses also had some really strange & inconsistent hitboxes, which I assume has something to do with the Wii controls; Ridley 2 has a vanishingly small mouth hitbox for example. Also, Ridley 2 being able to randomly enter a several minute long invincibility phase is terrible design. That's actually indicative of another big issue I have with invincibility phases, which really ruin the feeling of a boss fight in my opinion. When bosses can stall for time in the way that Ridley 2 does,
Thankfully, some of the boss fights were quite fun! The first Ridley fight while falling down the shaft was a really cool moment, and the bounty hunters weren't that bad. Later in the game, Gandrayda was very fun - just a good slugfest in some phases, followed by weaker phases imitating the other bounty hunters. Dark Samus was similarly great as usual; the final encounter was as much a highlight of MP3 as it was in MP2. The final boss itself (corrupted Aurora 313) was very solid as well, outside of some weird (but more forgiving) Wii aiming phases. I don't like the idea of potentially having to restart the entire Phaaze segment if you die (not sure if this is the case; I managed to clinch it out), but the fight itself was very solid.
There's a couple of other somewhat-redemptive changes in MP3 that were positive in my opinion. I liked the observatory in Skytown that gave you exact locations of unlocks later in the game to facilitate item cleanup, and the stacking beams (and lack of ammo) were nice, as I didn't like how that was kind of shoehorned into MP2. Other than that though, I felt like the game was overall pretty awful - the worst Metroid experience I've had so far, especially given that the 3D games were already weaker than the 2D games by quite a long shot. If nothing else, I'm kind of glad that I managed to get through the entire thing before the release of Prime 4, and that I'll not need to give this game a passing thought again.
