We did most of Metroid Prime a bit ago, and I had planned for the entire bestiary to be in a single page… but things got long enough that I moved some of the minibosses and bosses here.
I really don’t have much clever things to say about this that I haven’t said in the first part of this review, but I did enjoy my run through Metroid Prime, as different as it was compared to a lot of modern games with how saving works. I love my heavy-narrative games, but I’m also a big fan of games like Metroid where the storytelling and lore takes place via codexes and a lot of inferred contextual clues.
Admittedly, some of the puzzles in Metroid Prime and some of the items are a bit of a ‘guide dang it’ moment, and I had a small notepad with an ever-growing list of rooms to come back to. Getting all of the Chozo symbols and artifacts was also a huge pain, particularly some of them with more oblique clues.
But overall? I really did like my experience through this. It’s a very solid game, a simple but great story that builds up the world of Tallon IV and both the modern Space Pirates and the ancient Chozo well. I don’t think I like it as much as Metroid Prime 3, but it has been a while since I played that game. Not sure when I’ll get the chance or the motivation to eventually play through the entire series (there’s a fourth one, too!) but it’s definitely been a great blast going through this one for sure.
_______________________________________________________
UNIQUE MINIBOSSES:
Hive Mecha
Acting as a miniboss is the Hive Mecha, which is one of the abandoned Chozo machinery in the temples that Samus goes through. You only fight the Hive Mecha once, but it’s not really counted among the big ‘bosses’ below in the codex, so I’ve placed it here. The Hive Mecha has a bunch of bird-beaks pointing outwards, and it keeps a hive of Ram War Wasps within it and unleashes them to attack intruders. It is interesting! This is even its intended use, because they are able to ‘interface with organic units at a higher level’, acting as a shelter for the hive-dwelling wasps and unleashing them on enemies.
Incinerator Drone
Another mecha found in the temples is the Incinerator Drone, which is a little cylinder with two incinerator arms that spins around the room you are trapped in. I don’t think this is a particularly practical way to incinerate trash, but it sure does make for a good boss fight! The Incinerator Drone is malfunctioning and isn’t really meant for combat, but it thinks you are trash, and it aimlessly blasting flame around causes the local Barbed War Wasp population to get enraged and try to attack you. Pretty neat setup, if nothing else.
Elite Pirate
Serving as minibosses in the pirate bases, the Elite Pirate is much larger, taking the basic body layout of the Tallon Space Pirates and exaggerating it a bit. The reptilian head looks a lot more impressive with a Digimon-esque upper-head organic helmet, its upper arms are larger and threatening, and it’s covered head to toe in metallic carapace… though there are some purple organic elements that I can only assume to be the Space Pirate’s skin.
As that model shows, two giant orbs glow on the Elite Pirate’s shoulders and these form the gimmick of its abilities. The giant orbs are energy-siphon systems that absorbs all beam weapon attacks, making them essentially invulnerable and causing you to waste precious missiles and resources if you just try to spam your attacks. It’s one of those ‘find the gap between the attacks’ enemies, and interestingly enough, being adapted to fight Samus’s beam weapons actually renders it vulnerable to the basic concussion ammunition!
Phazon Elite
The Phazon Elite Pirates are the result of another experimentation as the Space Pirates try to inject the world’s plot device energy, Phazon, into their Elite Pirate experimentations. The result is a bigger and scarier monster, and I really like that the metallic armour is swapped with organic-looking carapaces that give the impression of both a skeleton as well as rock. The Phazon Elites unleash shockwaves instead of cannon blasts, which are slightly harder to dodge.
It doesn’t actually translate into gameplay since Samus would need to defeat the Phazon Elites in battles anyway, but the infusion of such a potent form of sci-fi energy into the Space Pirates that would become the Phazon Elites drastically shortens their lifespan. Typical, really, of these biological weapon experiments.
(Technically, the Plated Beetle and the adult Sheegoth also served as minibosses, but they actually appear in the game’s overworld later on as just regular enemies, and I felt like they worked better next to their ‘lesser’ counterparts anyway.)
_______________________________________________________
BOSSES:
Parasite Queen
Our first boss in the prologue is one of those visually-impressive enemies that is just there to make sure you understand the mechanics, and it’s just a matter of dodging her attacks and spamming blasts and missiles to shoot at it. The Parasite Queen is a genetically-enhanced version of the Parasites that the Space Pirates were experimenting upon on the space station, and it has grown into a monstrous, dinosaur-sized proportion that dwarfs Samus. She fights the Parasite Queen as it is held in a giant forcefield-specimen-cylinder. She’s even got a nice little weak point in the center of its mouth, but it can also shoot out energy blasts from its mouth.
The Parasite Queen is a pretty fun exaggeration of the regular parasite. And while it has changed by quite a significant margin, you can still see most of the creature’s original anatomy there — a body that’s mostly serpentine (even if it’s engorged to look more like a lizard or a dinosaur), a massively fanged head, and insectoid claws. The Parasite Queen’s grown a bunch of like centipede-like legs on its ‘abdomen’, and it’s got a secondary pair of giant insect claws that allows it to suspend itself on the giant cylinder. It’s also got a giant tail with a grabby claw-fang thing going on.
The whole point of this thing is to show what the Space Pirates have been doing with a mysterious potent mutagen (Phazon), which explains the size and the energy projectile attacks. Plus, you’ve been going through the space station seeing evidence of the pirates experimenting on local Tallon IV wildlife and fast-growing mutations before the creatures broke out and slaughtered the local Space Pirates.
I actually wished that we saw more of this bioengineering of creatures we’ve already seen. I think there were more of it in Metroid Prime 3, though I might be misremembering. But we really only see it with the Phazon-mutated Space Pirates and Metroids, and maybe one or two more of the bosses here.
Flaahgra
Flaahgra is the boss of the forest ruins, being the source of the toxic water that Samus couldn’t walk through. The codex doesn’t actually point it out, but looking at the base of Flaahgra and comparing it to the rest of the game’s bestiary shows that it’s actually a mutated Bloodflower — which isn’t the most prolific enemy in the game, but it’s nice that I kind of ‘got’ what the creature was before the mutation! I also am always a fan of these bosses whose presence warps the nature so much around them — which in these ‘Metroidvania’ games tends to translate to certain hazards disappearing after the boss is destroyed.
But Flaahgra is a very cool creature. Rising up from its flower, this supposedly plant monster has a viney trunk that resembles a centipede, and two giant arms that end in surprisingly metal-looking scythes (so does it also have Eye Reaper vines? Are the two plant types related)? Its head blossoms into a mass of green plant matter that has two bright-red orbs that resembles an insect’s eyes, but where the ‘mouth’ would be for a fly is a ‘real’ head that resembles a skeletal hound or something.
The end result looks very impressive, and Flaahgra is fought in the center of an amphitheater-like location where Samus needs to break the solar panels around it (which only go down temporarily) to deny Flaahgra some exposure to solar energy. It’s kind of an interesting way to handle a ‘plant kaiju’ that moves around a lot. Being a Phazon-mutated plant, Flaahgra isn’t normally a creature that does this! But it manages to be so mobile because it’s got constant exposure to light to constantly photosynthesize, which allows for its movement.
Essentially, the boss fight involves Samus stunning Flaahgra, then knocking out enough of the solar panels (which Flaahgra is smart enough to knock back up) to expose the root systems that are more vulnerable. Probably my favourite and most impressive boss in this game, if we’re being honest!
Thardus
Thardus is faced in the Pheldrana Drifts, being a mass of stones that are animated by Phazon and takes on the form of a vaguely-defined humanoid shape. I like that the look is so… haphazard. One leg is a clump of rocks while the other has more defined toes. The ‘abdomen’ is almost snake-like, and the chest-head is just a mass of rocks. This is just a pile of rocks animated by Phazon! Thardus is quite durable and will sometimes transform into a giant ball of rocks to bowl over you. It’s also icy rocks, so it can use ice attacks and freeze Samus.
You need to use the Thermal Visor to pinpoint where the highest and most unstable concentration of Phazon energy is, which moves around the different rocks in Thardus’s body. It really is a fun — if somewhat long — fight, with some pretty great animation for the rocks. Particularly impressive for the original release of this game.
I don’t really otherwise have much to say about Thardus. It sure is a cool rock monster, and particularly in the context of this game that mostly has more organic-looking enemies.
Omega Pirate
After the Elite Pirates, one of the final bosses for the game is the foreshadowed ‘Omega Pirate’, and the game leads up to the reveal of this thing quite well by showing how scared shitless other Space Pirates are even of the ‘Omega’.
The Omega Pirate is essentially an even more upgraded version of the Phazon Elite, with nicer-looking armour and the Phazon Cores looking a bit more integrated into its body. Its monstrous ‘bug alien monster’ head is encased in an organic helmet that looks like a beetle’s horn, and it’s got two quasi-organic-looking cannons jutting out of the shoulders.
The Omega Pirate is a fight of endurance, and it can really only be properly injured by slowly breaking apart its armour chunks (with your very limited missiles, so hopefully you have been picking up the missile upgrades!) and eventually causing it to temporarily go invisible and try and regenerate itself. This leads to a very cool moment where you need to swap quickly to your thermal/X-ray visors and figure out which of the Phazon pools the Omega Pirate is reforming from, and unleash hell while it’s in a vulnerable state.
…all the while, the Omega Pirate summons a bunch of the annoying smaller Space Pirates to bugger you.
Meta Ridley
It’s Ridley! Samus Aran’s nemesis, the Ganondorf to her Link, the Bowser to her Mario, Ridley is a giant pterodactyl-dragon alien. Or in this case, a giant cyborg pterodactyl-dragon alien. This is one of the times where Ridley is in the process of being resurrected, being reconstructed by the local Space Pirates as a giant cyborg monster. Samus sees Ridley — or Meta Ridley, rather — break out of his cage and escape the space station, and the game implies that one of the main reasons that Samus even bothers to go down to Tallon IV is to hunt down this giant monster.
The design of Ridley has became quite iconic and its impressive look throughout the three 3D Prime games have only helped it, but as otherwise a simple concept as Ridley is, I really do enjoy him. The giant pteranodon mouth filled with sharp teeth, the giant bat-wings with hard-light technology, and those gangly arms and feet are pretty cool!
Ridley is probably the most difficult boss for me to take down in this game, even with full upgrades, due to how long the fight with him is. It alternates between him flying around and bombarding Samus around the arena that they are fighting in, and eventually Ridley’s holo-wings giving out and a phase two where he’s just charging and slashing and unleashing shockwaves and missiles on the cramped arena. The sheer size is quite cool, and as much as I didn’t enjoy how long the fight attempts took, I felt like the awesomeness of Ridley’s design mitigates this quite a bit.
Metroid Prime
After going through the entire map of Tallon IV, killing local Phazon-corrupted wildlife and dismantling Space Pirate bases, restoring the Chozo Temple and killing Meta Ridley, Samus descends into the deepest part of the impact crater, infested with the Phazon-corrupted Metroids that were introduced by the Space Pirates into the ecosystem.
And at the end of it is the titular Metroid Prime. I don’t think the game ever makes it clear whether the Metroid Prime started off life as a Metroid? It does have some anatomical forms that kind of resemble a highly mutated one, and its second phase does have it summon Phazon Metroids, but it does feel more like a ‘Phazon monster’. But we have seen elsewhere in the franchise these Metroids mutating and transforming into much more extreme variations, so whatever the case.
I really like the Metroid Prime (Exo), with its full exoskeleton. It’s shaped like a giant crab, but with such interestingly proportioned legs as it scuttles around. It’s a bit hard to see when looking at a still image, but Metroid Prime’s also got a pair of manipulator claws, and a mouth that it opens and closes to unleash energy beams. Metroid Prime alternates between the four energy types and gains vulnerabilities to it for brief periods of time, and there’s only a specific part of its head that is vulnerable to blasts.
It’s very cool looking, extremely impressive in graphics, and feels like a great culmination of a giant alien space monster that Samus Aran is here to slay. I really like that the fight progresses as the Metroid Prime actually keeps trying to scuttle away from Samus, going deeper and deeper into the core of Tallon IV and Samus just keeps not giving a shit and chasing the giant crab-monster down the layers.
Any self-respecting final boss has at least a couple of phases, and after Samus deals enough damage to the exo form, the shell breaks apart and Metroid Prime (Core) appears and this one looks a bit more like a Phazon-Metroid monster… although a much more cephalopod-like look, with six trailing tentacles connected to a central orb that resembles a mouthless humanoid head with an oversized forehead. In like the transparency showing veins floating in the bright blue body.
Where Metroid Prime (Exo) is a bit of a fight of endurance similar to Ridley, the Core fight is a lot more chaotic. Core Metroid Prime is utterly invulnerable to anything but Phazon attacks, and you need to run around and look for the Phazon pools that it spawns, use it to charge your Phazon suit, and blast Metroid Prime with it. It also does the same invisibility trick that the Omega Pirate does, and it also spawns extra metroids to help it.
I think having either of these forms individually would be cool enough, but nowhere ‘worthy’ of a final boss, if that makes sense, but having them as a set does work pretty well!
No comments:
Post a Comment