Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (2004, GameCube)
“Wait for it to start doing its spin attack. Switch to Morph Ball. Boost Ball into it while it's spinning to stun it. While it's stunned, roll between its legs, and lay a bomb on its flashing weak point. When the body is destroyed, the head flies off and starts attacking. The head will have a light or dark shield; switch to the opposite colored beam to dispel it. Then you can use a Super Missile to destroy the head.”
This is me describing how to kill a Normal Non-Miniboss Enemy in one of the late game areas of Metroid Prime 2. I swear to god every fucking enemy is like this. God forbid you design an FPS enemy where the optimal strategy is “shoot it until it dies”; it always has to be some five step process to make then enemy vulnerable, then you have a half second window to shoot them (from just the right angle, of course) and finally deal Real Actual Damage.
Of course, even with all that, many enemies take three or four Super Missiles to kill. So now every encounter takes a full minute to finish, and often they’ll put three or four of these fuckers in the same room. So of course I run past every single enemy I can, because combat is a miserable ordeal with no reward, and I’ve already been through this room seven times anyway, god fucking dammit.
Don't you dare use anything besides Super Missiles or maybe the occasional charged light/dark/annihilator beam. I can't think of an FPS with a more pathetic default gun. There's almost never a good reason to use any of the non-charged shots against enemies. I counted the number of regular beam shots an extremely piddily enemy took later on — 26 hits! What's even the point of having a beam at that point? Where are the popcorn enemies? Why is everything a painfully involved miniboss? Why do the beam combos cost so many resources when I never found a single practical use case for any of them?!
While I don’t think the combat works at all for the regular enemies, I think there’s a perverse rom hack joy to the bosses. They have all the same problems and jank as the enemies, but multiplied several times over. Every major boss is a 10+ minute encounter, and because the timing to dodge enemy attacks is much stricter here than in Prime 1, they often come down to the wire. The thing is, once you’ve beaten a boss, it’s over. And you’re generally rewarded with a cool power-up! The regular enemies are miserable because the game expects you fight them over and over for no reason. The bosses don’t have that problem.
All my most memorable moments in Prime 2 were barely scraping by at the end of the painfully long boss fights. I beat the Spider Guardian on my first try with 10 total energy to spare. If I'd taken a single additional hit, I would've died and had to start the whole grueling trial over again. The release I felt nailing each of those super-strict bomb jumps and defeating the boss was orgasmic.
The finale is epic. The Ing Emperor’s second phase is the scariest fight in the game outside maybe the Boost Guardian, and after barely scraping by that fight you still have another timed boss fight to deal with, one that’s exceptionally confusing and opaque in its execution even by this game's standards. All without any checkpoints of course. No notes, pristine conclusion.
The best thing you can say about Metroid Prime 2 is that it’s a weird, obnoxiously strict, rom hack-y sequel to Metroid Prime 1. Prime 1 was polished, streamlined, and generally pretty easy. It’s a good game that definitely called for a sequel that’s annoying in the ways Prime 2 is annoying.
Prime 2 is far too long, and the story is contrived videogame bullshit in contrast to Prime 1’s gracefully unfolding mystery. Calling it an FPS feels unfair because it invites comparisons to games where the combat is actually fun. But it has some good tunes, and in spite of (and sometimes because of) its myriad failings, it still takes you on a journey that feels substantial. There’s a catharsis to reaching its hard-won conclusion.
I definitely don’t think Retro is the best to ever do it, and I’m in no rush to revisit Prime 3. But they make games that feel like real adventures, and that’s something I’ll always appreciate.
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky (2009, DS)
Cleared the main game, special episodes, and post-game story.
This was my first Mystery Dungeon game, and it honestly kicked my ass early on. I finished the Groudon fight having exhausted every resource I’d been stockpiling, and I banged my head against the Bidoof’s Wish special episode endboss for over an hour.
After a while though, I figured out what moves worked really well, what items to stockpile for bosses (reviver, totter, and x-eye seeds), and played more tactically. My goals stopped being “get through the dungeon and beat the boss” and started being “try to win without using any reviver seeds.” Nothing gave me real trouble after the first ten hours. This is ultimately still “Baby’s First Mystery Dungeon,” which was great for me, because I’m still very inexperienced with roguelikes, and I was in the mood for a light and breezy number-go-up game.
That said, the Zero Island South dungeon is very intimidating. It’s a 99-floor dungeon that starts you at level 1, with no items, money, or teammates. It basically turns the game into a real capital R Rogue-type dungeon crawl. If I hadn’t been playing for 40 hours already, I’d probably throw myself into learning it. But after a few attempts, I’ve decided I need a break. I suspect for MD veterans, the post-game super-dungeons are the main appeal here, and the rest of the game is essentially an extended tutorial. I hope to get there someday!
Ultimately, the story and presentation were the main draw for me. It’s
not hard to explain why the story is as good as it is. It’s just written
like a real JRPG or VN. The story is free to do what it needs to do,
instead of being incestuously beholden to series tradition like the
mainline Pokémon games. It functions like a good YA novel, so the big moments can have a huge emotional impact. (The amazing soundtrack, perfectly deployed and directed, also helps.)
It’s not just the big moments though. All the incidental character writing too worked great for me too. The game is just cute. I love all the characters, I love living in this tiny adorable world.
The main game lands great, but it doesn’t feel quite complete on its own. I think Special Episode 5 is absolutely required for the story to land the way it needs to. The main game and the last special episode are two halves of one climax, and without either one the story doesn’t feel quite finished. After having played both, I was deeply satisfied. I cried my eyes out through both finales, of course.
The special episodes are only in the Explorers of Sky version of the game, so I strongly recommend playing this version, and not Explorers of Time or Darkness. They’re maybe the most story-essential post-release content I’ve ever seen, even more than Dana’s solo dungeon in Ys VIII, and I’m a little aghast they weren’t in the original game.
The post-game story doesn’t land as well, unfortunately. I think I would’ve ultimately been just as satisfied if I’d stopped after the main game and Ep. 5. There are enough good moments for it not feel like a waste of time, but ultimately introducing three entirely new characters for the eleventh hour climax was a bad call. I just don’t care about them the way I do the established cast, and their story resolves too quickly to have any real impact. That their story comes after slogging through that awful Unown dungeon added insult to injury.
I wanted to voice that criticism, but I still can't overstate how much the main story and special eps resonated with me. I honestly feel a stronger connection to Sky than I can really put into words or justify. There’s a certain spirit to the simple, lovely story and gorgeous presentation that’s hard to pin down, something that makes me feel warm in my heart. I think that essence is why it still has such devoted fans over a decade later.
Sky was a fantastic introduction to Pokémon Mystery Dungeon and Mystery Dungeon in general. I’m excited to play Shiren and other roguelike-adjacent retro games, and for the first time in ten years I’m excited about Pokémon. I can’t wait to play the other PMD games.
(Selected review reposts from my Backloggd.)
No comments:
Post a Comment