Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 353: Metroid Prime

Episode Date: January 25, 2021

By patron request, Jeremy Parish sends an emergency broadcast to Nadia Oxford and Mohammed Taher to discuss the Space Pirate activities taking place on Tallon IV and what ace bounty hunter Samus Aran is doing to stop them. Equip your podcast visor! Art by Greg Melo.

Good news. You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. To check out the dozens of other great shows on the network, or to join our growing podcast family, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, more like Retro Yes, Retro Studios, that is. Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode 353, I believe, of, I was going to call it Metroidvania. No, retro Metro, Metroid knots. Yes, that's it. We're Metroid knots now. I am Jeremy Parrish. It's too early in the day for me to form coherent sentences and know what I'm talking about. So it's going to be a wild ride. But fortunately, to kind of reel me in, we have international counterparts, friends from, from abroad. First of all, this is a patron-sponsored episode of Retronauts.

If you go to retronauts or Patreon.com slash Retronauts, you might be able to get in at one of the episode request tiers. They tend to, those slots fill up pretty fast. There's a limited number, but, you know, it's always, always good to keep an eye on and snipe for it. because then you can request a topic that you can participate in, like this one. So please introduce yourself, patron, although people have met you before. So I'm Muhammad Tahr. I'm the director of Brave Wave, and this is my second time coming on Retronauts. My first time was very obscure game, Captain Sabasato,

but now it's one of my favorite games of all time, Metroid Prime, and I'm just so excited to be talking about it with you guys. Yeah, I'm actually kind of surprised as much as we've talked. talked about the Metroid games on this series, on this show. We haven't really touched on Metroid Prime before. So thank you for bringing this, this grave oversight to our attention and forcing us to redress this, this grave omission. I'm glad. But yeah, you mentioned that it's one of your favorite games of all time. So Captain Subasa was also, you know, that's what we talked about before. And that was also one of the most important games to use. So I kind of

since a trend going on here. You're not wanting to talk about games you hate. Exactly. I mean, I enjoy, I enjoy listening to you guys, like shredding games, like especially bad games. I don't want to say Sonic, but I'm just saying. But I just much prefer to talk about stuff that I like. All right. Well, I'm being kinder and gentler to Sega in the year 2021.

So we definitely will be shredding Sonic. Well, maybe some of the Sonic games, but not Sonic in general. I haven't seen the movie yet. Maybe I can shred that. Anyway, speaking of Sonic, actually, I don't know. Are you a Sonic fan? I feel like you probably are. Who is the third person here also from overseas? Well, not overseas internationally. Hello, everybody. I am Nadia Oxford. Not quite overseas. Definitely international, at least to the point that if you fly from Canada to the states, they will not feed you because you're not international but not international enough. That really cheeses me off. But not literally with cheese because they don't feed you. No, they don't give you cheese or anything.

No kind of cheese, not even American cheese or Canadian cheese. I am the second half. Wait, wait, sorry, sorry, sorry. What is Canadian cheese? I've never heard of that. There's no such thing. Oh, is it just Putin? Okay.

But I will tell you that we call American cheese processed cheese up here because we're not going to call American cheese. Anyway, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt all these tangents. Please continue your introduction. So I am the second half of the Acts of the Blood God RPG podcast. And I am a kind of Sonic fan. I don't know how I rank, really. Let's just say, sure. I will say the movie was cute and you'd probably like it.

Okay. All right. It was great. So we are not talking about Sonic. We are talking about Metroid, which is kind of the opposite of Sonic. Although both Samus and Sonic do turn into a little ball to move around. So there is some Pataco there

and even though this is a 3D game where the rules are different you know it's a maverick it's out of control Samma still does turn into a little ball and rolls around and that's actually some of the best game design in Metroid Prime

so we're going to talk about that we're going to talk about the origins of Metroid Prime we're going to talk about where it's cool and neat and also where it's bad so first of all let me ask each of you what was your first encounter with Metroid and Metroid Prime.

That may be two different things. Some people, it's not. So I'm curious, like, you know, kind of how did you come into the series and what is it that makes Metroid Prime so remarkable to you, Muhammad? We had Super Metroid when I was a kid, but I did not make any strong impression on me.

Like, I only got to like it and respect it when I started going online and reading people's impressions about the game, and I went back and played it. So, Metroid Prime was maybe my real introduction with Metroid. I played Zero Mission. I played Fusion. But Metroid Prime was the game that made me... I mean, Super Metroid made me love Metroid Vaneas.

And then Symphony of the Night came after that. And I was sure that this is, like, it was my favorite genre at the time. But Metroid Prime just took my breath away. I still remember... I still remember encountering or, like, opening... the door to Fendran adrift for the first time and just walking around a place with no enemies and just, you know, small critters that just walk on walls and they just don't know that you exist. And it was a completely different experience to everything that was

around back then, especially for a game, for a first person game. So I have a lot of just a lot of good memories playing it on GameCube, especially because I bought a succession of games that I don't know why I chose Maricar Devil Dash when I didn't have a second controller and then I bought Smash and you know games were expensive back then on me so I bought like multiplayer games that I liked them but I felt like you know something is missing like I'm just just not having a lot of fun in the GameCube and then I bought in Troy Brime it just just completely took my breath away and to this day it's just like every time I play it and I did replay it to see It's just a very, very special experience.

And to this day, I'm honestly surprised that there are no games that feel like it. Yeah, it does really kind of stand out even now. Even the sequels don't really capture the kind of vibe and the feel of the original Metroid Prime. And we are just focused on the first game this episode. I didn't want to make this, you know, a full series retrospective. Maybe we can touch on the other ones if they ever get around to making Metroid Prime 4, which they've been saying they're going to do for like five years and still nothing.

So who knows? Keep the faith, as Bon Jovi says. Yeah, well, you know, eventually Nintendo will release another console and they can, you know, continue stringing us along on that one. Yeah.

And then at the heat death of the universe, Samus finally gets her final mission. Anyway, Nadia, how about you? Or did you kind of, I know you're an old-timer with the Metroid series, a long-time fan, kind of like me. So how does Metroid Prime fit into that for you?

Well, actually, I think you're probably an older Metroid a fan than I am because what happened was I got married to... Well, yes, I'm older than everyone, so... You are. You're like the ancient one. But I got married in 2001 and my husband and I combined our game collections

instead of making a real baby. And Metroid Prime, sorry, Metroid Super Metroid was one of those games that he had that I did not have because I spent all my money on JRPGs. And I played Metroid and I loved it. And that was around the time that, yeah, Metroid Prime was coming.

So, of course, I said, well, I have a GameCube, and there's almost nothing to play for it. So I guess I'm looking forward to Metroid Prime now. And I got the game. And not when did they get the game? I'm currently looking at a big stand-up I have of the, of Sammas that advertise the game at Walmart. And my husband happened to bring it home for me one day, and I still got it. He's like, sorry, sorry, Nadia, I brought home another woman. Yes, but I do not mind what's the weather.

I do agree with Muhammad. I think that it is such a uniquely atmosphere to game, especially for a first-person shooter back then, and to this day, I suppose, we still associate first-person shooters with bang, bang, bang, noise, noise. But Metroid Prime is very, not exactly quiet, but kind of a haunting, lonely atmosphere that Metroid Prime really, really captures it perfectly,

like what Metroid is, that essence of Samus being alone against the universe. And as you said, the sequels don't quite capture that, but we won't really get into that. The important thing is that Metroid Prime really encapsulates what a Metroid game should be in that regard. Yeah, I really feel like this was the last time Samus was left to her own devices more or less, to just kind of be out on a mission on her own. That really went away actually simultaneously with this game's release, as it turns out. But that is something that I feel like, I don't know if it's Sakamoto,

the kind of lead designer, the creative lead on the Metroid franchise. If it's something he doesn't, I hate to say

doesn't get about his own creation because that's really arrogant and stupid, but it's just something he, you know, that was a part of the series just because of

design limitations in the eight and 16 bit eras and was never intended. And even though that turned out to be one of the most compelling things about

Metroid, it was never, you know, like the authorial intent. So he's like, eh, that doesn't matter. What I really want is, you know, chatty bitch people talking to Samus and telling her what to do. That was what it was always supposed to be. So I don't know. But definitely Metroid Prime captures that. Prime 2 also captures it to a certain degree in zero mission.

But, you know, for the most part, people just won't leave Samus alone anymore. They're just like, hey, Samas, I got your number. Now I'm going to call you every five minutes. I did enjoy how in Super Smash Brothers brawl If you get May Ling to talk to Snake about Samus And Snake is like, oh, I'm interested in her And May Ling's just like, she'll break you, don't bother Spot on

We're going to be able to be able to be. And so. So yeah, my own history, my own history with Metroid and Metroid Prime is actually the history of the series. So instead of telling you about how I came to discover Metroid Prime, which is pretty much like I read magazines and it was a Metroid game that I wanted to play, instead, let's go back and recap the kind of give people the story so far with the Metroid franchise. What led up to November of 2002 and Texans saying, let's do Metroid better than Japan? So the original Metroid came out for

the Famicom Disc System in Japan in the summer of 1986. I put 96 in my notes because I am clumsy. Fat-fingered that one, but no, 86, and followed about a year later in the U.S. and roughly the same time in Europe.

And, you know, it was kind of a revolutionary breakout game in a lot of ways. It was you know, pushing, it was making use of the Famicom Disc System hardware and its capabilities to add an element of persistence and exploration and, you know, even kind of like a role-playing sort of underpinnings to basically the action platformer, you know, a game like

ghosting goblins or contras, you know, it was kind of in that same vein, except that there was persistence and you would save your progress and Samus, the protagonist. He would steadily become stronger as he explored and defeated the evil mother brain and then took off his clothes and turns out he was a girl. Yes. Wow. Shocking. Anyway, so I don't think Metroid really made that much of an impression in Japan. Like, it did okay, you know, a moderate success. But it really caught on in the U.S.

Like, it really fired up the imaginations over here. I'm not really sure about Europe, but they generally didn't like Metroid all, or Nintendo consoles all that much during the 80s. So I'm assuming that there were some people who were like, oh, that's nice. And then the rest were like, eh. If it was like a Z-X-Spectrum game, it would have gotten all the accolades. How come she has so many colors? I don't understand.

Why? I don't just fill colors. I don't understand this. So anyway, it did well enough that Nintendo followed up with a sequel in 1991 for Game Boy. A sequel to an NES game goes to Game Boy. Why would that happen? Well, it's because the team behind Metroid was Nintendo R&D1, and they were the leads of product design and software design on Game Boy.

So they were like, yeah, we're going to put our kind of, you know, one of our pillar franchises here on our little system that we're kind of coddling through and making sure it's well suited for success. So Metroid 2, you know, was a pretty big revolution for Game Boy games. It was much bigger and more ambitious than you typically saw. And then three years later, Super Metroid came out and was one of the greatest games of all time? Maybe so. I think so. I'll give you that. And then the N64 came along.

and Sammas didn't. Well, I mean, she was in Smash Bros. And I think she was in like, you know, a cameo in something. But there was no Metroid game in the 64-bit generation. And, you know, those of us who were Metroid fans and saw games like F-Zero get sequels were like, well, what the hell about Metroid? Where's that? And, you know, looking at the games that were being released at the time, things like Super Mario 64, the Zelda, Akrona, F-Time. my assumption was just like

they can't figure out how to make Metroid work in 3D because Samus is so mobile you mean she she has a different way of moving around the world than like Mario but you know Mario they gave him a triple jump and you know a very limited ability to fly

in Mario 64 and that was it whereas Samus like a key part of her persona is that eventually she gains the ability to just fly basically like jump anywhere she wants to And how do you have a, you know, a game where you have a 3D camera behind the character's shoulder or even a first person view game where you have such freedom to jump around? If you played jumping action games with a first person viewpoint on the N64, games like Turok, Dinosaur Hunter, then you quickly came to realize, wow, this is suck. This is bad and it sucks. This is suck.

So as much as I was kind of chapped that Nintendo did not make a 64-bit Metroid game, I also thought maybe this is inevitable and this is just the end of the franchise. But it was not so. No, plot twist. It was not the end. It was almost a new beginning. Right. So at this point, Nintendo was like, we should ask some Texans to make a first-person Metroid game. And that might seem weird. But Keevan mind than the late 90s, Texas was where it was at for shooters.

Id software was based in Dallas. You had, there were a few others. I want to say like 3D realms or someone. You had iguana who did the Turok games, and even though the jumping in that was ass, it was still, you know, as a first person shooter when you weren't jumping around, it was still pretty okay. So, yeah, basically Nintendo was like, these Texans, they really get shooting. Of course they do. It's Texas. They understand shooting.

So they, yeah, they were like, hey, retro studios out of Austin, Texas, could you please make a Metroid game for us? And at the same time, they hedge their bets. They were like, let's also make our own Metroid game. But we're going to stick to our core competency and make it for Game Boy Advance in 2D, kind of in the mold of Super Metroid. But we're going to ask these other guys over here to do it in 3D. But at the same time, it's an external studio. So they probably, know what they're doing in the first-person shooter space. And also, if it turns out bad, we can say, well, you know, it's those Texans. Yeah, what do you expect from them? What do they know about guns and shooting? Right. So I say this as someone who lived in Texas at the time. So

I feel like I'm entitled. But yeah, the studio retro studios was, had been established in 1998. And the founder, Jeff Spengenberg, had been with Aguana Entertainment, who had been responsible for Turok and Turok 2, which were, like I said, decent enough first-person shooters and very technically impressive. I mean, the first Turok had some not-so-great draw distance. It was the foggiest game outside of Superman 64, but, you know, it still looked good within that limited range. And then Turok, too, they, I can't remember that they used the RAM expansion on N-64, but

I do remember that it was a much more technically impressive game. Like, they figured out draw distances and everything just looked really sharp. and it got great reviews. So Nintendo was basically like, do that for us, except with Samus. And include the dinosaurs. Remember to include the dinosaurs?

Yes. There are some dinosaurs. Ridley is the dinosaur. True. The dinosaur named after a movie director. So in the beginning, Retro was developing four different games. But, you know,

looking back through the past 20 years, retro, you know, even now seems to be struggling to get, Metroid Prime 4 off the ground, and there's all kinds of rumors about, you know, like, oh, this person has to part of the company. Oh, they hired this guy. Well, he's gone now.

And as it happens, the four games they were developing, apparently Shigeramiyomoto came to visit their studios and looked at them and said, hmm, time to flip the tea table. These are all bad. But interestingly enough, instead of saying, let's make these games good, they just said, let's cut these games free and stop making them and instead you guys should make a Metroid game. We like these bad games you're working on

and we would love to see you apply this messiness to Metroid. I don't really get the thinking behind this. The company was extremely tumultuous in its early days. They dropped game projects, laid off tons of employees.

Nothing about it seemed good. Nothing about it seemed promising. Everyone who was following this game myself included was was just watching the news come out and thinking like what is nintendo doing this is going to be a disaster this is going to be like you know one of those bubsy 3d type situations where a series tries to make a jump into 3d and it's just terrible so when the game launched in november 2002 it shipped day and date with metro fusion for game boy advance i was definitely like i'm jumping into fusion that is going to be my baby i will also buy this other game just as

a sign of fealty because I don't have a choice, but I'm buying it under protest, and I'm not going to play it for a couple of days. But then it turned out that Metroid Prime was actually the better game. So weird. It shouldn't have happened that way. It was definitely a little bit of a reversal because I, too, recall the hesitation and the non-confidence that surrounded Metroid Prime, not the least reason of which is like everyone was just like, who the hell is retro? Who are these guys? Why are they handling a beloved franchise? like Metroid because, as you said, Metroid was a bit more of a hit in

the United States and everyone there had been waiting for ages for a fall-up to Super Metroid. And everyone just figured, okay, well, I guess we're all going to huddled around Metroid Fusion and we're going to end up pretending that Metroid Prime never happened. It's just going to be a thing that will get

buried. And no, it surprised everyone, including myself, who was generally not a big fan of FPS's. Yeah, I would have loved to just go back as an adult. Like, And as someone who, like, reads just the discourse and magazines and websites and to see or experience how it feels to see news about Metroid, like a 2D game that has nothing to do with like, I mean, you shoot a lot in the 2D games, but you really don't think about it as a game where you shoot. It's just a game about exploration. And at the time, first person to me was just, I mean, first of all, I hated the genre.

I only started liking it in the Xbox 360 genre, Xbox 360 generation. And at the time, like, the thought of liking a first person game to this degree was just something I was not ready for. I think I played it maybe before Times Splitters and Red Faction and a bunch of other games, just because I always convince myself that I'm into 2D games, fighting games, and RBGs. And the first person, like, FPS just always felt like something

that is just too hardcore for me. I saw a lot of my friends like play Counter Strike in high school, but it was something that just I never clicked with. But Metroid Prime, it just, it still makes me glad that we got a game like this

because, like I said previously, to this day, don't have a game that's quite like it. The other day, I was playing a game called Journey to the Savage Planet on Xbox Game Pass, and it's kind of trying to be Metroid Prime plus other things, but it's just like nothing is quite there yet. And I can't imagine how the decision to hire Texas Studio and how to have something as important as Metroid just turned into a shooter

because at the time right now if we're going to be making a first person adventure we have the term for it like first person adventure it's going to be a first person game and not going to be like fighting a lot or like fighting is not the core mechanic even though Metroid Prime really just nails it 100% but it's really

not the main thing that you think about when you think about Metroid Prime or your memories of it you just think about you know, exploration and backtracking and unlocking things and, you know, maybe that kind of tedious quest at the end where you have to collect the keys. But you don't think so much about the shooting the same way that you would think about it in Doom 2016 or any of those other games. So I'm just so surprised at how well it turned out and how Miyamoto and everyone in Japan was dealing with the decision to have an American studio making a first-person game of Metroid.

Like just none of it makes sense at all. Yeah, if you look at the direction the first-person shooter was, as a genre was taking at the time, it seems really counterintuitive that Metroid Prime would have worked because, you know, you were looking. at games that were increasingly focused on competitive play at extremely, you know, fast speeds. Quake 3, you know, dropped its single-player component altogether to be just an arena shooter. You had Unreal tournament. And then, you know, in the single-player mold, you also had games like Halo, which kind of bridged the golf between single and multiplayer. Like the multiplayer was a big deal, especially for Halo 2, which came a couple of years later. But even even the single-player

Halo, while it was a more methodically-paced game than, you know, Quake or Unreal, it was still not a game about solitude. You always had a voice talking in your ear. You know, you had Cortana always talking to you, or you had all those Marines running around with you, and it just, there was just no sense of like, hey, I'm out here all alone. And that was, you know, the, the atmosphere of Metroid is just something that really didn't come through in contemporary first-person shooters. And it, you know, in a lot of ways, Metroid Prime actually kind of harkens back more to some of the more ambitious first-person shooters of the mid-90s, back before we called them first-person shooters, when they were just doom clones.

Doom clones, yes. Yep. So things like System Shock, Marathon, like, it's much more along those lines. And, you know, Marathon still had a very popular multiplayer component. that's where Halo comes from. But the single player was very much in line with System Shock where it was about, you know, definitely there were some shootouts, but it tended to be more strategic and it wasn't constantly pushing enemies in your face.

Once you cleared out enemies, then you had kind of the space to explore and you could roam around, you know, same with System Shock. You could read terminals and, you know, kind of fill yourself in in the backstory and get some, you know, vestiges of plot. and that's the cue that Metroid Prime worked off of while at the same time looking you know like a very high end

contemporary first person shooter I think it was a I think it supported progressive scan on GameCube so if you had an EDTV it looked extra good like really really crisp and detailed it's you know full of color it's got all this neon lighting

it's just a great looking game and it just was totally out of keeping with with contemporary trends of the first-person shooter genre. And, you know, I think the great thing that Retro did here, and this was probably something that was mandated by Nintendo, not just by Miyamoto, we've mentioned, but Kinska Tanabe was the kind of the creative lead, the guy from, you know, he works with Retro and like Donkey Kong Country Returns and had worked on Super Mario Brothers 2, the American one, before that.

So, you know, he kind of had a close connection to Miyamoto and, uh, was definitely a guy with a lot of experience making great games but I feel like they came in and said hey retro instead of making a game you know however you feel like making it let's look

at the way we handled Ocarina of time which was to take the design of the 16 bit entry of this series and kind of dissect it and rebuild it in 3D and figure out how we can make all those elements

you know, the gameplay mechanics, the kind of plot beat, the progression, the structure of everything, how can we make that work in three dimensions instead of just two? And, you know, that was a mistake that I think a lot of people made when they were, they were taking, you know, vintage legacy franchises from 2D to 3D was just like, hey, it's 3D, we have to do something totally different. And, you know, occasionally that would work. Like Mega Man Legends, great game, but totally not like a classic Mega Man game. But for the most part, what you saw, was people who were just like, well, it's 3D, so everything's got to be different, and it turned out to be crap. Whereas Nintendo tended to be much more, like even Mario 64 is structured a lot like Super Mario World. But with, you know, different abilities, different limitations. And that was the methodology Nintendo took for its most successful rebuilds of games into the third dimension. And that's what they did here. And it really made a huge difference because, you know, this is the, I think the first. proper exploratory 3D first person shooter, like it feels like this is just a consistent,

contiguous world. It's not like half-life where there's an interesting world, but you've always got this invisible hand at your back. Once you go past a certain point, you're not going to backtrack and return. And even Halo had, you know, like, you backtrack, you backtrack, but that was because the game was kind of a mess and they ran out of content. So they were like, what if you went through the library but backward? What if you went through the silent cartographer, but backward? So, yeah, they basically patted out the game, Bungi did, to kind of flesh out the expectations for the first person or of the single player mode.

Whereas Metroid Prime, it is a wholly contained world, you know, with gating and progression and keys and tools and things like that where you unlock bits and pieces of it. There's even sequence breaking if you get one of the early builds of the game before they patched out some of the exploits. Right. Yeah. So it really does feel like they took Super Metroid

and made it 3D and then they added some stuff to it and it's very satisfying. Yeah. I agree with that. I really do think it feels like Metroid in 3D like genuinely. And one of the reasons for that is because

you really do feel like your entering whole new worlds every time you discover a new level, which is the way it should be with a Metroid game. It's like you enter Bryn Star, which feels very different from the surface of Zebiz and et cetera, et cetera. So you kind of have that going on with Metroid Prime, where one area feels very different from the other. And of course, you backtrack once in a while to get to where you need to go and to find certain things. Kind of to the game's judgment, I'm sure we'll get to that at points it's a little there is a little bit too much padding uh there's a little bit too much backtracking sometimes but for the most part it does feel remarkably like i was playing

super metro just in a 3d environment and that's what i appreciated so much about the game yeah and um like today i started uh like a smallish mitroidsvania called gotto roboto uh it's a 2d black and white cute game about controlling a cat in a mecha suit and you know as different as it is from Metroid Prime just the game is designed well so that whenever you get a power up especially in the early hours or the early hour it just makes you feel so good because you immediately start thinking

of all the places that you missed and I think it's remarkable how well they captured this feeling in a 3D space, which must have been much more difficult to design for. And I think one of the most interesting things about Metroid Prime, and I don't know if this is a limitation that they had to deal with, is just the control scheme, because I think, maybe I'm wrong, but I think the GameCube controller just does not have a really good, you know, second analog stick.

You have the C-stick, but I don't think it's really fun to, touch for 16, 20 hours all the time, the same way that we're doing with FBS games now. And I think maybe that led them to thinking, well, if it's going to be a first person game and you have

to change your perspective, so they let you do that with a button. I think you can hold L and use the same analog stick that you control your character with to change the camera. And because

the basing is much, much slower than a typical first-person game, everything in the game just had to respect that. So enemies are not as aggressive until way later in the game. And a lot of the enemies, you know, are just creatures that exist in that world. And you can kill them and you can get health from them or missiles. But the point is just that the game has a much slower pace. And because of that, especially if you play the game now, it feels so good that it is unlike Dark Souls. Like a lot of games, like, I mean, there are Souls like games, but I think Dark Souls influenced a lot of modern games in general when it comes to difficulty and like needing you to be skilled at the game. And I love that Metroid Prime is not like that.

Like even when you're at the final, final fight in the game, you have a lot of room to just be messy and just experiment and scan a lot and just read. And I also like that when you scan something, whether it's just a mundane object in the environment or you're scanning a boss, the whole game just pauses and you can read and you can think. And I like this methodical approach to a first person game. And that's something that we just don't see. like even the game that I just mentioned Journey to the Savage Planet, like when you scan, it feels like a collectible because the game doesn't pose and

like the AI is talking to you and there's some text on the screen about your scan, but like it just does not give you the same satisfaction of posing and scanning something and reading like just a short paragraph and just moving on. And I love this way of storytelling. So everything is slow, including the storytelling,

because you're not reading like an email from someone. It's not something that's just long or has like a narrative to it. It's just one piece of information they give to you in a scan. And then you continue exploring, but that, like that kernel of information is stuck in your head. So as you walk around and as you kill enemies and just try to find where to go, you're kind of thinking about some of those law entries. Sometimes it's just, you know, just mundane information.

that's just war building and it's fun to read about but other times you read about the Kozo or Chozo Yeah the Chazzo Yeah and some of their entries are really profound because they're just

They're no longer here This is their planet and they're no longer here So you're just reading their diaries And it has like the way that it tells its story It's different from similar games That you mentioned, System Shock and it is the kind of storytelling that maybe you can only do in games because if this was a movie or a TV show or even a book

once Samus reads about how the Chozo like let's say died or were wiped out or how their powers were taken from them you would have like an inner monologue from the character just talking about that or like you would see like a shot on the character's face but in here like it's just you it's all about you and about the way that you feel about what you just read as you're exploring. And I really, really love that kind of storytelling. And I feel like whether by chance or design,

they lucked out on a very interesting way to explore a story, which I think maybe we're seeing a lot of games that do this now, just in a different way that. Definitely. It's more common now than it was back then. Back when Metroid Prime was new, is a very novel way of storytelling that I actually also enjoyed very much. and especially on consoles.

You didn't see that method of storytelling very often in console games, low alone shooter games. So, yeah, that was, not only was it a new idea, it was a very, as you say, profound way of telling the story and filling in a little bit of Sammons' backstory as well with the Chazzo. And, of course, the space pirates, they got up into all kinds of mischief, and some of their logs added a lot of fun

and even a little bit of culture to their weird-ass race. Yeah, so I was going to talk about the Yeah, so I was going to talk about the scan-visor later in this episode. but we can talk about it now because we already have. It is kind of the big, unique mechanic for Metroid Prime. There's a lot that sets Metroid Prime apart from other games, but the scan visor really does add a lot to the experience. It makes it much more of an exploratory type game.

And again, this is another component that they've sort of built out from something that appeared in Super Metroid, where you had the X-ray visor. And that was really limited just to, you know, you would get someplace and be like, where do I go from here? I'm in a dead end. So you could switch over to the x-ray visor and Samus would be able to kind of look at different areas of the screen. And she would see, you know, if this seemingly innocuous wall was actually, you know, destructible with missiles or something. But they took it so much further with the scan visor.

And there's multiple scan visors actually that you collect over the course of the game. But fundamentally, the scanvisor just gives you a way to interact with the environment that turns the, you know, the spaces you're navigating into something more than just, you know, boxes, like 3D boxes with textures. You know, when you are working your way through a pirate base or laboratory, you're scanning computers and doors and things like that. and you're scanning for structural weak points and walls, hidden passages, you can scan enemies and not only will it give you a little quick, you know, here's an explanation of the botany behind this plant or, you know, the habitat of this little spiky animal, but it also tells you like, what's it weak to?

And that's really helpful when you're fighting against space pirates who have special armor that has, you know, specific weaknesses and defenses. But the, you know, it really builds a lot with a story when you are scanning computers and kind of building through, you know, like Muhammad said, you know, you have little pieces of information that stick in your head. And as you're assembling all these parts together, you start to get a clear picture of like, what are the space pirates up to, you know? And in Super Metroid, the space pirates are just these like zappy bug guys who jump around. And they're just kind of there. Yeah. Like, who are they? They're just like these guys. And apparently they're the big bad guys, even though this is the first time we've heard about them in the Metroid series. We didn't see them in the original Metroid at all. But now these zappy bug guys actually have a story behind them. And they're not just like dumb dudes running around shooting curly cue lasers at you. They're also like scientists and doctors. And, you know, they're constantly trying to experiment and explore and find. you know, new ways to do things, to weaponize things, basically, and take over the galaxy.

And, you know, you really start to get a picture of them as you poke through their computer files and, you know, rifle through their data and everything. And, you know, there's log entries, which are really great because they also helped to find Samus in a way that hadn't been done before. Like, the more you read about the space pirates' reactions and thoughts on Samus, you realize, like, this woman is terrifying. She is an absolute badass who just basically makes the space pirates wet their pants,

the mere thought of her. And it really does a lot to kind of build up the legend of Samus in a way that you know, Metroid Other M really did its best to just dismantle immediately. But here in this game, you know, even though you are just like, you basically see Samus in cutscenes

or like quick little flashes when you activate a door or something, or, you know, an elevator. But, you know, other than that, the only thing you really see of Samus is her eyes reflected in her visor, the interior of her visor when there's like an explosion or lightning or something. Yeah, the first time I saw that, I nearly crapped my pants. It terrified me.

I didn't know what I was looking at. But when I realized what it was, I was like, that is amazing. And not only did I discover that, but I discovered that if you move in a direction while she does that, her eyes will move with your movement. I just thought that was an incredible bit of detail. But the space pirates, one other thing I have to say for them is, I don't want to say they became likable, but they certainly became a lot more charismatic through those log entries for things like, number one, the infamous log entry about how they tried to emulate Samus's morph ball and ended up with a lot of broken horrible, prefigured test subjects because of that. And number two, apparently they couldn't stop keeping Metroid as pets and feeding them.

And they kept being like log entries about these are Metroit are not pets. Please stop keeping them. Please stop them. And finally had to get to the point where it's like, if you don't stop this, you're all getting written up. So knock it off. Yeah. So, you know, I will say that in a sense, the log entries aren't really necessary. Like they didn't have to be added to this game.

You know, Super Metroid did a great job of really kind of painting the same sort of story without any dialogue. You know, you go into the lab. And there's these, like, weird-looking not-quite metroids, these things that are almost Metroids, but not really. And they die so much more easily than Metroid. And, you know, you end up kind of discovering the Metroid, you know, capsule in that same space. And you're, you can put two and two together and realize, like, they're doing stuff.

And then, you know, that kind of leads up to the reveal of the super Metroid. Or, you know, when you find the crash ship on the surface of Meridia, there's little computer monitors that kind of burst into static and you can see like oh there's an image of a Metroid here and you get the idea that you know this was a space pirate ship where they had Metroid captured maybe and they got out of control and everyone died so that was very evocative but this just kind of makes it a little more literal but as Mohammed said you know it does kind of draw the line at being too literal it doesn't it doesn't like jam it in your face the option the logs are pretty much optional like there are things you have to scan in order to progress

but the computer logs you really don't have to read they are there just kind of for your edification and to add some texture to the world so you know in contemporary games it would definitely be you know even contemporary metric games there would always be someone bugging you to say like oh that's amazing or you know like this seems really important and this doesn't do that you're kind have left to your own devices to say, like, well, this is just fun, you know, wallpaper information. I don't really need this. It's just decoration. But this, on the other hand, this is critical. I need to know this. And, you know, I mentioned the game, Marathon earlier. And I really feel like that was one of the few games to really have done this in advance with the computer terminals

because there were like, hey, here's a mission objective. You need to go here type messages. But then there were lots of messages about like, well, you know, here's what we were up to. here's info on the like the natural habitat of this planet um here's some mysterious information about the space colony blah blah blah um so it's a i think it takes a certain amount of self-control and restraint not to get carried away with that sort of thing and metroid prime does a good job of of not getting carried away and it's not because of technical limitations they could have gotten carried away like by this point you know we had half life we had halo uh we had you know lots of games where there was always someone with a voice in your ear,

but they just decided to go, you know, Samus as the solitary loner, and it worked really well for them. I also think one of the things that make the scans, like really add to the ward and the world building is because when you switch this to the scan visor, everything is color-coded and the important stuff like that you actually need to progress, I think are either orange or red.

So even if you're someone who, who, from their first time playing the game, thinking I don't care about all this text, I just want to play the game, even though I would argue that scanning and reading is an important part of the game. But even if you don't want to do that, you can just switch the scan visor, look for the red thing to scan, to activate an elevator or something like that. And that's it. So even though, or because most of the scans are not really important, but they're there for you. they add a lot to the experience.

You're not, you know, you're not watching expository dialogue, and you're also not reading like three, four, five paragraphs. It's just usually, usually just a few lines. Most of the time it's just one very short paragraph about something. And also the way they're presented is just very matter-of-factly. There's no, like, nothing, I mean, sometimes the pirate entries are funny. But that aside, like the writing itself is just feels like, like very scientific, not

to the point where it's annoying that you're not getting anything, but it just, it really stands the test of time, and when you play it now, you don't feel like, you know, the sense of humor robs the experience, robs you from the experience. It's just all makes sense in the context

of who you're controlling. And they just add a lot to a word that maybe we previously never thought about wanting to explore a Metroid board and just scanning everything and reading everything about the creatures and the platforms. But now I feel like it really feels good to just read past thoughts of our own civilization that's no longer here.

And it's much more fulfilling than reading like walls of text that you would usually see like in a Western RPG or something like that. Yeah, and the idea of switching to an alternate viewpoint mode where everything important is color coded was so good that everyone basically ripped it off. Like immediately, you know, well, like five years later, you had Assassin's Creed, where you had the Assassin Vision. And then, you know, like a year or two after that, you had Arkham Asylum, where Batman had Detective Mode, where he could switch and like important things

would be color-coded yellow because that's how the world greatest detective sees things. So, you know, like that has just become a video game mechanic. and, you know, Metroid Prime gave that to the world, so you're welcome. Video Death Loop is a podcast where we watch a short video clip on Loop until we just can't take it anymore. Along the way, we'll try our best to make each other laugh and to hold out longer than the other guys. You can jump in on any episode, no need to worry about continuity. Check out Video Deathloop on the Greenlit Podcast Network with new episodes every Friday.

Hi, we're Ellen, Stephen, and Mark. Hosts of Nice Games Club, the show where Nice Game Deves talk gaming and game development. Topics include programming, design, tools, and more. We also do interviews and one of our game jams. Listen to Nice Games Club, wherever you get to your podcast, you get there, or at nicegames.com. With a purposeful grimace and a terrible smile, join Nikki and Wyatt as we stomp our way through the history of Toho's Dai Kaiju films in Discuss All Monsters. Are you telling me we're going to discuss all monsters? We won't stop until there isn't a monster left to discuss.

Smash that play button like Godzilla and King Kong smash an 18th century Japanese pagoda. Only on the Greenlit Podcast Network. I'm thirsty, but water just won't cut it. right now. Hey, catch. Whoa. Is this a can of cola? It is, because here at Podford University, our cafeteria has soda. Available on iTunes, Spotify, and everywhere you get podcasts. And also one thing I wanted to mention about the enemies and bosses, I think because of the very slow nature of the game and you don't have a second analog to control the camera, the bosses.

maybe, like I assume, needed to be designed more like an easy puzzle instead of just being a difficult boss that you have to overcome. And I think anyone, like hopefully when Nintendo eventually releases the trilogy on the Switch, and I really hope they do that. People, especially now, like people are getting accustomed to like the Dark Souls kind of bosses, like bosses that you go in and like within a few seconds you're dead and like you have to just keep thinking, like, what do I need to do? And with Troy Brime, like any boss from the beginning of the game till the very end, like the last two bosses are extremely intimidating. Like, the music and the way

they look and their scans, like they just, like my heart just beats hard when I fight them. But it's not an experience, like a Dark Souls experience where you have to time every shot and move. Otherwise, it's going to be dead. because just like a few hours into the game, you realize that you have tons of health. And it's not something that you get to like consciously look at and think about a lot. And that's something I really miss.

I think if they had a second analog stick, they could have made the bosses harder. But because of that, I think we ended up with fun bosses that feel like small puzzles, nothing super hard to figure out. Most of the time, You just get it immediately after you scan them. And even if you don't scan them, we have a lock-on mechanic, which also probably they came up with it because, you know, you don't have a second analog to precisely aim.

And how are we going to solve that? Well, you can just lock on to enemies. And that feels good. That, like, emphasizes that Metroid Prime, even though the shooting is really fun and fighting bosses is really fun, the point is not. the point is not to be super skilled the way that you are in a game like Dark Souls it's just about you having just a good time exploring the world and dealing with the bosses and enemies and I really really love that design we really don't see that a lot now especially with the Dark Souls influence and I that's maybe my number one wish for Metroid Prime

4 to kind of give us the same kind of experience like very chill very calming experience everyone you fight bosses. And I, I want that so bad now, especially after finishing the games this year. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely possible for them to take the puzzle boss idea too far. I think we saw that with Metroid Prime 2. A couple of the bosses, especially that Spider were just super frustrating, not really fun to play at all. But, you know, that's a different conversation altogether. But, you know, I think a big part of what makes Metroid Prime unique is that it was a rare first-person shooter action game designed with a Japanese audience in mind. You don't, you know, like Japan just kind of collectively, very famously, is not into first-person

games. That's not maybe quite so much true now as it was at the time, but the, the format and the style never really caught on over there. And there's lots of theories about why that is, but the fact is it just wasn't something you saw. Like, first person games just didn't do that well over there. And, you know, this being a Nintendo first party game, it definitely was developed with, you know, the idea of like, hey, we've got to make this appeal to the domestic audience also. We've got to make it appeal to our core Japanese audience because that's, that's where Nintendo focuses first and foremost. So instead of, you know, making a super twitchy, super skill-based first person shooter, it is more like, hey, take your time, soak it in, and then you have to, you know,

fight bosses and stuff. And it's going to be a little challenging at times. But, you know, you still have, you still have some latitude to kind of poke around, make mistakes. And, you know, the first person shooter had already become extraordinarily unforgiving by this point. I'm thinking things like, you know, the half-life, some of the half-life encounter sets where you had like the helicopter that was constantly harassing you, launching missiles at you. There was just no room for failure there on anything except like the easiest level of difficulty. Whereas Metroid Prime only has one difficulty level. It has the default difficulty level.

And there are some combat encounters you have to deal with. But yeah, the game is really more about like, hey, let's explore the world and let's, you know, see what Samus is all about. And I think the game does a great job of taking a like just totally swiping an idea from Castlevania Symphony of the Night and start. starting Samus in the prolog as, you know, kind of like, here's Samus's potential. Like, this is what powered up Samus after the original Metroid was like, she's cool, she's tough, she's got all these other weapons and so many capabilities. And then taking that away at the end of the prolog, setting you back to zero, and then

letting you recuperate that power. Because it lets you know, like, hey, you know, when I first land on Planet Talon 4, Samus is kind of weak. She's not really able to do that much. It's it's kind of slow to get around. She can't really destroy that much. And there's places she can't go. But I know, I know I've seen what she can do and what she can be.

You tasted the power. Right. And so. So I intuitively understand that at some point, I will get that back and I will power Sammas up again. And actually, you end up giving her, like, even more powers and taking her skills in all new directions that are kind of unique to this game. And it's a really great hook to kind of pull people in if they're kind of skeptical, like, I don't. know about this. Like, you know, at some point, Samus is going to have the ability to just blow the be jesus out of everything. And it's going to be great. You just got to get there

first. So please, go explore this beautiful world and find how to make her powerful again. I actually really appreciate the way that they demonstrated some of those weaknesses. One of the most clever things I think I've ever seen in a video game is how when you enter a body of water with anything except the gravity suit, her visor immediately becomes fog. up. And not only can you not move properly, you can't see very well either, but the instant you get the gravity suit and you're underwater when that happens, as I recall, your vision just clears up and suddenly you can see everything underwater. So not only can you move like a champion again, but you can see everything you were meant to see. And I think just that fog, which was

extremely realistic for, you know, when you go underwater and your goggles fog up, I just really appreciated that touch. I thought that was really clever. We're going to be able to be. So, yeah, the game does make use of a lot of kind of traditional concepts in Metroid power-ups, but it puts them to new use. One of the things that it does is that Super Metroid, actually, you know, the original Metroid gave Samus a couple of different power upgrades to her arm cannon. You could get the ice beam or the wave cannon, but you couldn't have both at the same time.

Metroid 2 gave you also like the spacer, and I think something else, plasma, beam, but you couldn't have two of those at the same time. It was always like, hey, go find the power up you want and stick with it and be sure not to get the wrong icon right before you face a boss. Whereas, you know, Super Metroid did give you the ability to have multiple upgrades to your skills and you could mix and match them. You could go into the menu and select like what power do I want to use here. Metroid Prime takes it a step even further. It gives you all of these powers you can have like four different uh augments for your your arm cannon eventually but instead of you know having to go to a menu you basically just have a is it the thumb pad or

the c stick i can't remember it's been a while it was c stick okay yeah so the the c stick um allows you to press in one direction or the other and you'll immediately switch to an alternate weapon and so you have like that full arsenal of beams here but instead of it being like, you know, I'm going to just switch to the one that's most powerful and stick with my favorite. Instead, it's like, you know, they're able to make puzzles out of the entire game, out of combat, and to force you to recognize, like, which weapon type is most effective here, not just, you know, which enemy is weak to this weapon, but also what works best in this environment, what works best in this situation. Like, all the weapons have different behaviors.

So it kind of behoves you to recognize how these different weapons work. and to make use of them tactically in a different situation. And then, you know, each of them can be upgraded even further to have, like, you know, secondary skills. Like there's the flamethrower or there's the ability to fire the ice spreader, which is basically like a shotgun effect, kind of like the ice missiles in Metroid Fusion, but with your arm cannon rather than missiles. So it's, yeah, there's a lot of variety to just the shooting in the game. And it doesn't always work.

but, you know, for the most part, I think it's very clever and well integrated. I think it makes, like, one thing I hope they maybe change or fix in possible re-release or remaster is. So even when you have all the beams, you still need to switch to the appropriate beam when you need to open the door. And that gets old really quick. Yeah, that is tedious a bit. Like when I had to, like, replay the game and I was backtracking. a lot because I wanted to get as much of the, just wanted to cover

as much of the map as I can without relying on a guide. It was just so tedious, continuously just changing. And I do think that at the end of the game, like the Faison mines when you deal with a lot of color-coded space pirates, the game

just changes gears and it becomes like, I want to say, it becomes a skill heavy game where you're dealing with a lot of pirates and a lot of them are just have different required different beams to deal with

and it's just becomes such it becomes an FBS basically in there and that is my least favorite part of the game and every time I replay it I think you know I'm having such a good time and do I really hate the phase of minds maybe it's not that bad and then I reach there and I feel like ah like

if only like they die quickly easier or just not a lot of them there or I wish at least if they don't respond as quickly because in a game with a lot of backtracking it's fine if the little guys respond a lot but

these pirates it just becomes so annoying so like maybe implementing something where only when you save kind of like that souls only when you save we respond them. That would have made the phase of minds challenging but kind of fair but when you're trying to like

cover a lot of ground there and trying to get all the barrobs and you constantly have to fight it's just so annoying. Blood Moon is rising over Talon 4. Yeah, I agree. This is something I put in the notes that I shared. To me, that's the part where I kind of lose interest in the game. You suddenly are forced to constantly fight these enemies to advance.

And it's really annoying because you have to say, well, it's that color enemy. So I got to switch over. Okay. And it just drags on. And, you know, it doesn't help that that tends to happen around the same time. as the artifact hunt. So you're doing all this tracking across the planet, going back to places you've been before,

and now there's all these space pirates and you just have to stop, look at their color, switch to the right weapon, shoot them down, avoid the other ones who are attacking you because you can't hurt the other ones while you're switched to the gun that, you know, the beam that is specific to the enemy you're currently trying to take out.

It just, yeah, it really bogs down the game And it's, I feel like every Metroid Prime game has some kind of fatal design flaw. Like, that's not fatal, but notable design flaw where it's like, oh, this could be perfect, except here we are. Yeah. And the artifact hunt, you know, is very much a product of the GameCube era of Nintendo game design, where they were, you know, putting more resources and effort and money into building great-looking games with great mechanics and content. but because they took place in these elaborate 3D spaces, they just had to get a lot of mileage out of what they created.

So you have like the Triforce Hunt in the Wind Waker, which is, you know, you're not really doing that much. You're just sailing around looking for stuff with, you know, with a map. But it just takes so much time and pads out the game. And it doesn't add much to the game. It just makes it annoying. And the artifact hunt is the same way where you have to find, what is it, 12 chozo artifacts spread, you know, all throughout the game.

And some of them you can actually collect earlier in the game than when the hunt technically begins. But there's some that you can't really get until toward the end of the game. So it just kind of sucks the momentum out of the game. Yeah. And it also kind of defies the point of what makes the weapons system in Super Metroid so much fun. Like mixing and matching in Super Metroid is it's a lot of fun, whereas it's not necessarily, It's not really a necessity. It's just kind of a, well, what's your preference?

What do you want to do? Do you absolutely, do you want the ice beam? Do you want the spasor? Do you want the whatever? But you won't find too many enemies that are immune to certain weapons. Whereas in Metroid Prime, it's all about, well, not a matter of, well, do you want to have fun with the weapons? It's more a matter. Well, it's all about function and no fun at all.

And that kind of hit me when I play the game for the first time. Yeah. And one of the problems of hunting for the artifacts, is that you get to go back to two places that I hate, which are the face of minds, and also the chozo ruins after the chozo ghosts have appeared. So sometimes it would take rooms. Yeah, that's stupid music as to flashbacks.

It's like tense music, and they are, like, sometimes you would be in a room with like three of them. And only after you get the x-ray visor, do you actually get to see them all the time? But even then, like, it's just so tedious. And maybe one way to kind of deal with this is if they had like getting to the artifact takes a lot of time and then like going back is also boring. And I think if they had like added like shortcuts or like just a quick way, a quicker way to backtrack because the game is like it's a very wide game like horizontally wide and it gets really tedious by the end when you're just like. all you're doing is just going for those artifacts. Like even if you have a guide and everything, it's just still,

it feels like you're collecting something. And I feel like Metroid Prime 2 kind of for me, like I've heard complaints about that as well. But for me, when you finally get the suit in Detroit Prime 2 and you get to go to the dark world and you take no damage, but you also have the powerful beam and like nothing is intimidating anymore, you feel kind of powerful to just go there, grab whatever you need and just feel empowered.

Whereas with Mishroyd Prime 1, it's just so tedious. And just like you say, once you get to the phase of minds, like your other monologue is just telling you, like, do you really want to keep playing? Like, the word is beautiful. The music is just unmatched to this day. But like, it's just, it gets just so tedious. I will say, though, to the game's credit, they do a really great job of making Sammas's arsenal work in 3D.

Beyond just the beams, you know, her morph ball is still there. She still turns into a little sphere and roll. around and you know it it adds a lot like it allows them to create different spaces and different connections and conduits between rooms than you normally find in in first person shooters like it's just a different kind of interaction with the environment and not only that but they they bring back the the spider ball from Metroid 2 yes it works a little differently but you know it's kind of like saying hey we recognize like these are you know all part of the Sammas Aaron Cannon. And, you know, it's a really great, I don't know, kind of a recognition of

everything that it had come before in a way to make the game feel consistent with its predecessors, even though it does still stand apart. And, you know, I was really impressed, most of all, with the way her space jump works. You know, in Metroid 2 and Metroid, or Metroid, super Metroid, sorry, the space jump is basically an infinite spin jump. And you start jumping and you get the rhythm going and you can basically go anywhere in the world. That's obviously not possible in a 3D space. Like that's just not feasible because at that point, you know, you can go out of bounds and it's just harder to contain a player in a 3D space. So instead of giving her infinite spin, space jump is more like a triple jump.

It's, you know, it gives you the ability to spend more time in the air. but not infinitely. So it's kind of like how in Mario 64, they limited the wing hat to just a like a 60 second power up as opposed to the feather or the raccoon tail in Mario World or Mario 3. Like you can get around, you can be very mobile in a way that you couldn't be for, but you know,

you still got to be chained to the ground. But they make jumping and then multi-jumping in a first-person game, in a first-person viewpoint, work in a way that you just, just didn't see outside of one other game that came before it, which was Jumping Flash for PlayStation. The very launch of PlayStation, exact, figured it out. They were like, hey, what if when you jump and you go up really high, the camera automatically tilts down a little bit, like your character is kind of, you know, keeping an eye on what's below. And no one else did that. It was seven, it's so weird. Seven years between Jumping Flash and Metroid Prime, where people were

just like, duh, how do we make jumping fun? It's everywhere now. It's so weird how like people sees onto trends

in video games and they're like, oh, this big idea, we've got to, everyone's got to do that. But then like a good idea that is,

you know, there for the taking in a, you know, like a game that isn't necessarily a smash hit, but it's still a great idea.

Sometimes people just leave it laying around. They don't, they don't care. Like, use the collective memory more, folks.

Come on. yeah and in mitchroy prime too like they did the screw attack where you can cover like horizontal ground so you can jump forward so sometimes you would like get these massive gaps and the only way to cross them is to use your screw attack which is just jumping and jumping and basically the camera changes from first person to third person and someone just becomes like a electrically charged ball and you can just jump as far as you want but I think with Metroid Prime 1. They were dealing with a lot. Like, this is the first time they're taking Metroid to 3D. And I think the way they just designed the game, designed the spaces that you need to cover and just

restricted you to the space jump. I think it was just brilliant and they nailed it. And it's a lot of fun to just traverse and just to explore. I've laid it for 17 hours, the first game. And aside from the artifact hunt, I really just playing the game, like shooting and jumping and just the whole thing, like the whole

gameplay loop is just so satisfying and just so fun. Yeah, the level design does a really good job of drawing your eye to things that are critical that you'll need, but you can't necessarily do right away, that you can't necessarily access. Like in the, you know, the landing area, you can see little guys crawling around on high ledges. And Samus, you know, unless you use an exploit in the early builds of the game, she can't get up there yet. So you're like, you know, there's, there's something going on up there because there's little dudes crawling around.

And so I know that's like a space where I can move, but how do I get up there? And so, you know, it's not until hours later where you have the ability to use the space jump or whatever or the high jump that you can go back to those spaces. And the whole game really kind of works like that. And, you know, I really like the structure of the game where it's kind of a hub and spocus approach where you have the overworld, where it's, it's not, there's not really that much to do in the overworld itself. It's more just kind of like a passageway to get to a few critical areas, including the wrecked ship. Uh, but, you know, then you have the magmore caverns, which are also really highly connected to other spaces. And then a lot of other areas that are just kind of like dead in zones where you can't,

like you go in there and you do what you need to do and then you go back. But, um, there's just enough of a sense of interconnectedness and of, you know, like a flow through. that it does feel like, hey, this is a world that Samus is kind of inhabiting and where I'm able to, you know, spend some time and kind of learn the lay of the land and really get a sense of where I've been and what I need to do. And it's a rare trick in 3D game, 3D game world design. And they really pulled it off really well here. Did you know that you could shoot the birds and tell on four on the surface? That was something that surprised me a bit. And Talon 4, I look up, and there's birds flying high, high, high ahead.

And I thought, just, you know, hang, you probably can't do anything. But, you know, just to see if you can. And I shot my beam way up into the sky and you hear this very faint. And this bird just spirals down to the surface. I'm like, oh, okay. This is one of those games. See, with Turok, they didn't let you blow up the monkeys. You could even use the cheat code to get the nuke.

And you could, like, launch a nuke at the little monkeys just skittering around. the monkeys would just, like, survive the nuke. They're, there's some tough monkeys. Yeah. I think also one of my favorite things about level designs is that since you have the scan visor, sometimes you would get lost. And I remember there's one room in Magmour Caverns

where it's just, just lava everywhere. And you can see that at the end, like there is some ground, but obviously you cannot reach it. And probably the first thought, that's going to come into your head is like let me switch this cam visor and you're going to see something in the middle of the room and like up there and you'll scan it and it tells

you you need the gravel beam to cross this and because you, I think when you start the game like the kind of like the tutorial section and the what is it? The spaceship? Yeah, the Orpians?

The spaceship? Yeah, yeah. And I think there's a section there where you use the gravel beam and so you kind of like you you know what they mean when they tell you that and I think just because they have such a massive board that you're going to be like spending 15 to 20 hours playing in just having something like this cam visor where it's not telling you what to do right now

but it's at least telling you that this specific place you cannot cross this yet and like even when you like first see some kind of like a breakable wall and you scan it and it tells you you need the bomb and you don't have the bomb like in the morph ball yet and stuff like that just make make it feel like the game is like trying to

like it's not trying to trick you or like confuse you like everything is there to help you and it makes for a pleasant like Metroidvania experience especially in a 3D space where it was kind of like novel and we weren't used to that kind of design. All right. So I feel like we've covered most of the game. But since Nadia is here. And so I feel like we've covered most of the game, but since Nadia is here and she's, uh, the story guru. I do want to ask, Nadia, what are your feelings on the story of Metroid Prime and where it fits into the larger timeline? Let's go to you for the story

analysis. Oh, God. You're asking me where it fits on the timeline? Because when it comes to timeline wizardry, I am not your one. Oh, no, it's pretty clearly established that it's after Metroid and before Metroid 2. Right. I guess my question is just like, you know, with the, I know you're a big fan of like the Metroid comics, the manga, and things like that. So I don't know. I just, I'm curious to hear your take on the narrative and how it fits into everything, not necessarily like chronologically, but thematically and so on and so forth. I think that it's one of my favorite Metroid stories and that I really think it's one of the first games that,

first Metroid games that really gave Samus a personality. And again, that's not through her like endless monologing. that's just through a lot of the logs that you read about the Chozo. Like the Chozo will talk about a little bit about Samus as a girl and how she's traumatized by her past where her home colony was attacked. And it'll talk about, as you said, the space pirates. You get to see Samus through the eyes of someone else, several someone else's. And seeing her through the eyes of the space pirates, as you said,

was pretty fantastic because to them, She's kind of like this horrible murderous phantom, and I thought that was, that kind of gave her an even more empowering feeling and look and that I appreciated very much. And I think it is certainly preferable to what came later with Metroid, other M, sadly. And even Metroid fusion, which came out around the same time as we discussed, was another attempt at kind of building up Samus's personality. and it was a chatted little game. It wasn't as bad as Metroid OtherM in which she kind of had that really off her relationship with her father figure. And even though, let's face it, it was kind of problematic and abusive, the game tried to pass it off as just, like, loving or tough love. And, like, no, it's actually extremely disturbing, but thanks for asking.

I feel like another game, the only other game that got it quite as good as Metroid Prime was Zero Mission. And that was another game which had minimal text. But it did give you moments, like those little cinemas, like, where you see Samus as a kid amongst the Chozo. And I liked those, even though they were few and far between. I just like how the ending shot in that game is that little doodle that she scribbled on, this holy temple that the Chosos have. But it's a really cute picture of herself and the two Chosos that raised her. So that and Metroid Prime have a certain quiet story. storytelling that I appreciate very much and honestly that I'm hoping for more of in

Metroid Prime for whether or not Nintendo learned a lesson with other M. I don't know. I've heard that Sakamoto was pushed back and said, no, that game has a good story actually. So we will see. We will definitely see. So to wrap, are there any final thoughts we have on the game? Things that we haven't mentioned that it does extremely well. Things we haven't mentioned that it does extremely poorly. And, you know, what would we like to see from Metroid Prime 4 if it ever actually happens? I just want to say that Bob Mackey the other day tweeted, let me just read the tweet. It's been nearly 20 years, so next Christmas season we need to replace one hockey old holiday

song with Fedrona drifts. And I completely agree with Bob Mackey. Because the music in this game, I mean, all of it is really good. and I think they did a really good job with bringing some classic Metroid tracks in the game because if you're like if you're a Metroid fan and you're playing this game like and you're like

ambivalent and you don't really know what to feel and you hear some Metroid remixes and like right now you can go to OCE remix or YouTube and just hear a million remix of any track that you like but back then it must have felt great to hear some Metroid tracks

but I think my favorite thing about the game or its music is that most of the time you would encounter like new genres in video games like new to you maybe famously right now we're seeing a lot of people who are discovering jazz through persona 5

which is funny and sometimes annoying but so like if you play a game and like you encounter like interesting music style that's new to you you can actually go and pursue it and even though like

Metroid has, like, it's very difficult to nail down what genre it is. Like, it's, it's not a specific genre. It has, like, a mix of synth-heavy ambient with techno and a lot of industrial elements. But if you finish Metroid Prime and you think yourself, like, the music is really great. I want more of it. There is nothing like it except Metroid Prime 2 and some tracks from Metroid Prime 3. And the fact that Kenji Amamoto went out of his way to make music that even now, like you just cannot find something like it.

It just blows my mind. It is, to me, it feels like he created a genre by himself. And you only get an album like every, I don't know, 10 years. I mean, we got Detroit Prime 2 and 3, like kind of close to each other's, but now just hung dry. And that is the thing that amazes me. the most. Like, you can trace, like, the first-person adventure, but we can seize elements of Metroid Prime appearing in other games, even if they're not really exactly like Metroid

Prime. But the music is maybe the only aspect that you just cannot find anything else that sounds like it. And that is the thing that I hope they nail well with Metroid Prime 4, because two, I think, did a really good job, but two, like, most of the... not most of the game, but a lot of the game is just spent in dark places. And because of that, the music is more moody and just not as melodic as the first game. And Metroid Prime 3 is just for the most partially disappointing music-wise, like only two tracks that I really like. And also, like the intro theme, like, like, what the hell?

Like, that's one of the best music themes I've ever heard. I'm sure that's one of the things that, like, um, I, think about a lot and it must have made a big impression on me at the time when I just standing on the title screen just hearing the music and one of my favorite things about the credits theme is that

it's funny. The intro theme has a loop and you only get to hear the full intro theme like the chorus and the bridge and all of that when you finish the game and you sit at the credits theme and you hear the intro theme and then instead of looping back the way

that it would do in the title screen, it would just continue going. And that is a really great feeling especially if you like the track and you feel like, I want more of it. I want more of this very specific kind of track because the intro theme, the only

tracks that sound like it are entry theme of Metroid Prime 2, Entro theme of Metroid Prime 3, and also the new theme that they made for the Metroid Prime trilogy. And I'm just upset that there's not any music that sounds like Metroid Prime. And the only

way to do it is to make it yourself, which is something that we're actually experimenting with. But yeah, that's maybe the thing that I spend most of my time thinking about when it comes to Metroid Prime, just how unique, so unique the music is compared to everything else. And to this day, we don't have anything that sounds like it. Yeah, it's, you know, a surprising soundtrack coming from a Nintendo dev. Like, you don't really associate this kind of music with Nintendo. Their music tends to be a lot more carnival type. And you've had them kind of lean into big band and swing and so forth, some of the Mario games.

But clearly, Yamamoto's work made an impression because he went from being like a guy who contributed some stuff occasionally to basically the guy who does all, like, oversees all their music, all their first party music. not all of it, but, you know, he worked on Breath of the Wild. He's been involved in all kinds of Mario games, Pokemon spinoffs. He was the sound director for Street Pass Me Plaza. So, yeah, he's really become critical to Nintendo's sound quality and their music efforts. So obviously, you know, you weren't the only person the soundtrack made an impression on. it's just sad that we don't have him make more of it no it made an impression on me too

because one of my most distinct memories of playing that game is going through the opening area and the Brinstar theme is just remix into this really soft and soothing tune that goes really well with the kind of the rainy environment that you travel through so yeah I very much appreciated that but at the same time you got the remix of Norfair for the magma area

which the name is escaping me right now but that was kind of a more hard driving theme that I thought really suited the area and so I would like to see more of that atmospheric music and now that I know that he did Breath of the Wild as well

that makes a lot of sense because that's another soundtrack that's extremely atmospheric some people didn't like it I personally love Breath of the Wild soundtrack my only real wish list for Metroid Prime for

besides, hey, maybe less padding, hey, maybe nothing like the phazon minds ever again, is the one thing that's disappointed me about Metroid Prime is how the evolved meteroids were not the ones that we knew from Metroid 2. So you didn't really have the Omega Metroids, didn't really have the Alpha Zeta Beta Metroids. You kind of had just like more complicated looking jellyfish Metroid, which they were fine, but they weren't interesting. So I kind of want to just have those like 3D Omega Metroid ring around everywhere. maybe not everywhere, but places.

All right. So, Metroid Prime, pretty great game. We'd love to see a compilation, kind of like the new play style or whatever it was called on Wii, but on Switch so people can play it again without having to, you know, hack a GameCube or something. The games are getting kind of expensive in the collector's market at this point. So there's, you know, it behooves Nintendo to get people excited for Metroid Prime

for. give us the trilogy and then we will not be so upset about the delay of Prime 4. That's my recommendation. I have only one fear and I think anyone who followed me long enough on Twitter maybe is familiar with my constant rants about Open World Games because one thing that is especially clear when I replayed the Metroid Prime Games this year is just how well-designed every single room is like everything is made with purpose there is no like empty large spaces where you just walk around and um i enjoyed playing breath of the wild but i don't want

mitroyd prime four to have that kind of like very very spacious area i really like how tightly controlled and designed the rooms are and the world is and i think for the game to still retain the mitraudvenia aspect of it it needs to have that same kind of design and focus in mind, because quantity, as we've known, like, this past generation with open world games, quantity is just not quality. Most of the time, you just, like, when you play your first open world game, like, it feels life-changing, and then you play the second game, and you feel like, oh, I played this before. And I really hope, like, they don't make the same mistake that we've seen many other games.

I don't want to say Zelda, because Zelda was definitely very interesting. I think they applied a lot of they changed a lot of things when it comes to open world. It's still maybe not I love the word. I just hope they focus on what makes Metroid Prime

but I'm still going to keep an open mind the same way that I think I mean I did not keep an or I would not keep an open mind if you transport me as an adult to the time of Metroid Prime release and you tell me a studio from Texas

is making a first-person game that's supposed to be Metroid. So I'm still going to keep an open mind just because, you know, they surprise us once and maybe even if they do something that's drastically different, maybe it's going to click the same way

Metroid Prime clicked. So I have a lot of high expectations even if I really shouldn't. All right. So I think that wraps it up for this look back at Metroid Prime. Thank you, Muhammad, for requesting and sitting in on this episode.

Nadia, thank you for joining us to share your Metroid expertise. Metroidtees, I don't know. Yeah, so like I said, I'm looking forward to being able to see the continuation of this series. At some point, I really hope Retro can get it all together again. But anyway, thanks everyone for listening. This has been an episode of Retronauts. And as always, you can find more episodes of Retronauts on the Internet. Net, places like Retronauts.com on the Greenlit Podcast Network, places like that.

And also, you can go to patreon.com slash Retronauts, and you can support the show for a few bucks a month, get every episode at a higher bitrate quality with no advertisements or promotions a week early, or you pay a few dollars more, get bonus content every other week, actually every week with exclusive podcasts and columns by Diamond Fight. And, you know, you can always keep an eye out for the patron request here, see if there's an opening so that you, like Mohamed, can say, retronauts, you must talk about my favorite game. And we'll do it. That's our promise to you. So, yes, that's the spiel. So please, Muhammad, where can we find you and your work online? I'm at Robocic, R-O-K-O-K-K-I-C-K on Twitter and Instagram, and you can find our Brave Wave albums at BraveWave.net. Nadia.

You can find me on Twitter at Nadia Oxford, and at the time of this recording, we are currently putting together the Patreon as our Acts of the Blood God RPG podcast goes independent, so please Google that, and you should probably find it. we would love to have your support because we have a lot of exciting stuff going on. All right. And finally, you can find me here at Retronauts at Limited Run Games doing stuff,

sometimes online, sometimes inside the games, sometimes in the records that Braveway publishes in partnership with Limited Run. It's all a tiny little world here. You can also find my videos on YouTube. Just look for my name, Jeremy Parrish. And, of course, you can find me on Twitter doing things in that madhouse under the alias game spite. Yeah, that's it.

So we're done. We talked about Metroid, and I think, you know, see you next mission. We're going to be able to be able to be able to be. We're going to be. I'm going to be able to be.