Metroid Prime Remastered
Playtime: 16.1 Hours
My playthrough was on the normal difficulty (whatever the default is called) and finished with 100% items and roughly 90% scans. I did try to keep up with scans for the most part throughout the game but didn't obsessively try to pull out the scan visor for everything. I don't really plan on doing another playthrough to clean up the scans either.
Background is an edited version of official MPR artwork, shamelessly stolen from here.
This game was definitely fun to play and polished quite well as a whole - it looks great, especially for a game running on the Switch, and gameplay was quite smooth all the way through. I can't think of any significant gameplay glitches or performance issues during my playthrough. I never played the original game so I can't say anything about the changes to the control scheme, but my impression is that the "standard" FPS feeling in this remaster is very different than the original experience which I should probably be thankful for. In any case, by most basic metrics it's very recognizable as a Metroid game, featuring the same Metroidvania item-collection gameplay as the 2D Metroid games I'm so familiar with, except with an extra 3rd dimension to the world. With all that being said, I feel like the game itself didn't quite strike a chord with me - almost entirely for various mechanical reasons.
To start with, movement in this game generally feels quite slow and sluggish to me, even with the various upgrades that you get. You don't ever get an equivalent to Space Jump or Speed Boost, so you spend the entire game slowly stomping around Tallon. Also as another minor point, beam-coded doors always require a particular beam to be used, so constant switching is required which can be quite annoying. With traversal and exploration taking up the majority of the game (especially when going for item completion), the later parts of this game are just constant tedium, having to constantly redo lengthy traversal with few meaningful shortcuts to speed up your transit. Often times, the shortcuts that are opened up by new upgrades (ex. Power Bombs or Grapple Hook) aren't as useful as I'd like them to be. To me, this is the single biggest pain point preventing me from considering another playthrough of this game again. Speaking of which, as a final insult, the grappling hook mechanic is terribly implemented (not sure if just in the Remaster, or if it was always this bad). With a very slow travel time, it can suddenly disappear mid-hook when trying to latch onto something above you; a certain portion of the Phazon Mines made it very clear how poorly this was designed.
To go even further, the overall feel of combat and "active" gameplay is also very poor, and in my opinion goes against the feeling of 2D Metroid games very significantly. Since the upgrades to your basic weapons don't stack, much of the combat in this game revolves around an irritating system of changing visors & beams, essentially playing rock-paper-scissors with whatever monster spawns in the rooms you're traversing through. This means that you don't really feel any significant increase in your power when visiting initial areas later on in the game from an offensive standpoint, which just amplifies the misery of traversal that I mentioned before. You also get a number of visor upgrades, which usually just make the game even more annoying to play - certain areas require you to switch to thermal or X-Ray mode in order to see otherwise-invisible enemies. In essence, the combat progression system in this game is centered around a concept of making encounters more annoying, where Samus's suit upgrades really just feel like upgrades to enemy capabilities. I feel like this is largely to make up for the fact that the ridiculous lock-on auto-aim in this game makes most encounters come down to simple trigger-mashing once you have your visor and beam set correctly. One final note on the beams - for some reason your arm cannon's viewmodel is enormous and the visual effects take up a giant chunk of the screen, often making it very difficult to tell what you're actually looking at. I don't understand why this level of visual clutter is necessary at all.
So while I can say that MPR probably did much of what it was trying to do in reviving the feel of the original Metroid Prime with a fresh coat of paint, I still think it's not really up to par with the quality of the 2D games and is overall a very mediocre execution of a very cool concept. I'll refrain from judging the entire series too harshly from this, as this game was just the first entry in a trilogy, but the general opinion of this being the best of the Prime games has me very worried for the quality of the sequels. I'm hoping that Prime 2 and 3 may be a better experience when emulated using Primehack and played on KB+M.
