[Review] Metroid Prime: Hunters · 3:26am Mar 4th, 2017
You there!
Is your wallet burdened by the weight of money? Do you just walk around the city and heave a giant bag of cash everywhere because you have to buy a few groceries? Ever wanted to just waste it all? Well fear not! Introducing Metroid Prime: Hunters, the DS experience that is sure to have you saying: "By god, I wasted my money..."! For just a measly TEN FUCKING DOLLARS you can get the experience too! So get on the Wii-U E-Shop and purchase Metroid Prime: Hunters today!
...So let's talk about this game.
Let's start off by saying that I actually paid money for this game.
Let me repeat that to jam it into your brains: I ACTUALLY PAID FUCKING MONEY FOR THIS GAME. And it wasn't even six dollars or even eight, it was TEN. And that doesn't sound like a lot, but considering you can get amazing games like Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones and, ironically, Metroid Fusion for cheaper prices, I honest to god feel ripped off. I earned that money too, man! I could have used it to buy Earthbound and try that again, but NOPE! I was just too big of a Metroid fan and just too curious on what the game had to offer.
"Well, it can't be as bad as people say!" said a younger, naive Kamek.
Biggest mistake of my life.
BUT! Is Metroid Prime: Hunters the worst game I have ever played? Well I don't want to give that away just yet until this review is over. But I promise you'll have a somewhat concrete answer or at least a clue of one before this thing wraps up. So let's just cut the bullshit and get into why I feel like I wasted my money on this game.
The story is pretty simple, but I don't really expect mind-bending plots to be in a Metroid game. Take notes, Other M. You, once again, play as Samus Aran on a mission from the Galactic Federation to seek out a distress call coming from the Alimbic Cluster, a small solar system on the outskirts of the galaxy. The distress call details promise of some kind of ultimate power, but that is all anyone can really decipher. The GF wants Samus to either secure this power for federation use or destroy it if it cannot be contained. However, several other bounty hunters have picked up the signal as well and are headed for the cluster as well. More on them later.
So yeah, the story is alright. Again, not expecting too much from Metroid. However, I do want to point out something important: how the game handles its lore. As per... yeah, just about every single Metroid Prime game, most of the game's story is told through what I like to call "Lore Outlets" where you can scan a certain something and you'll get a piece of the story. But in Hunters, things are a little different, and not in the nice way. Lore Outlets still exist but unlike previous titles there is normally no clear signal where these outlets are. To pour salt on the wound, all these outlets are invisible unless you use the scan visor which absolutely sucks in this game. And just to slap you across your disjointed arm, all these outlets have very little information and are all out of order on how you find them. For example, I found Gorea Lore 4 next to Gorea Lore 6 with 5 nowhere to be seen.
And this is just a nitpick, but I honestly couldn't care less about the lore in this game. As mentioned before, all the lore is told through extremely short snippets to pad the game out, and because of this I could hardly care about the Alimbic race wiped out so long ago. In Prime, you saw the struggles of the Chozo living on Tallon IV. In Prime 2, you discovered the tragedy and desperation of the Luminoth fighting the Ing, which is my personal favorite. And in Prime 3, you experienced not one, not two but three different species all detailing the effects of Phazon and the madness they had to endure. The Alimbics just talk about Gorea and how bad he was to them, never once going into the detail of their history or anything like that.
But okay, let's just talk about the scanning for a moment, shall we? In other Prime titles, scanning is as easy as pressing a button. There are many things to scan in the trilogy, but not everything has to be scanned for a 100% completion rate. Not in Hunters though! In Hunters, you have to stop, pull out your stylus and HOLD the scan button to enter scan mode. While this is tedious by itself, in order to get a 100% completion rate, everything, and I DO mean everything, must be scanned. See that wall? Yeah, gotta scan it. See that light? Gotta scan that too. See that tiny, insignificant crack on the floor that you've glossed over several times without thinking about taking a shit on it? Buckle my dick and call me Joseph, you have to scan it. This means you have to stop what you're doing in every room and search around for every last thing before moving on, completely disengaging yourself from the adventure.
It's not like the adventure is anything to write home about though. The game takes a Metroid Prime 3 approach and makes different locations on different planets. I wouldn't have such a big issue with this, if any issue at all, if the areas weren't smaller than my friend AA's dick. On every planet, you'll be met with linear pathways and straight lines, completely disregarding the whole "exploration" factor of the Metroid franchise. Prime 3 was linear, sure, but at least it had diverging pathways to explore! This has nothing. Oh sorry, wait, it has ONE thing right at the very end to try and make up for all that, and it isn't even all that good! Want an example of how small the maps are? This is the Vesper Defense Outpost.
Excluding boss rooms, this area has... everyone count with me... 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 rooms. EIGHT FUCKING ROOMS?! You call this a complete area, Nintendo?! Every minute I continued through the game I kept saying to myself: "There's no way this place is that small!", but oh how wrong I was. And fine; I know that this game was developed for the DS and there was only so much space on one little card meaning you had to keep some areas smaller. In that case, make an effort and put every single area together, boss rooms included! It'll look like a proper Metroid map and give you a chance to make some cool ways of progressing too.
Speaking of, progression in this game is horrid. Every puzzle is solved through either shooting something or rolling into a morph ball and navigating through small areas. Most of this game is morph ball puzzles, so expect to be pressing that morphing button often. You have all of your abilities from the start of the game, meaning all pickups for upgrades are beam-based which means more shooting puzzles and ARGH! The monotonous repetitiveness of it all makes me want to pull my hair out and scream.
And I did few times, although mostly to the game's combat. You see, unlike other Prime titles there is no lock-on system in Hunters. In the trilogy, locking on to enemies gave you clear shots and a way to easily dispose of enemies in your path as well as give you fighting chances against some of the harder bosses in the games. That's not even mentioning how easy it is to keep track of where your foe is moving and how to dodge various attacks. Without the lock-on system, you're forced to freehand your shooting, meaning you have to constantly shift your view to get a good shot of whatever you're fighting. This is most apparent in boss fights where tiny weak points are your targets.
But by far the worst case of this is when you're fighting these fuckers:
This is a Guardian. Guardians in Metroid Prime: Hunters are the worst goddamn thing since ET the Video Game. How, you may be asking? Because they show up in every single goddamn room! As a means of padding the game out, you are forced to fight these bastards until they're defeated or else the door to the next room won't open. And sometimes the Guardians come packing with different weapons with different weaknesses, and this wouldn't be so bad if every Guardian scan was exactly the same! For a game that likes to have you scan a whole bunch of things for completion it sure doesn't like you scanning enemy variants.
Guardians are fast and they hit hard if they're in a pack. I groan every time I hear their battle theme start up and I yell, kick and scream every time they back me into a corner I can't get my sorry ass out of. My fear of them got so bad that I actually paused the game and got myself a coffee when I entered the area in the Vesper Defense Outpost where they're manufactured. And just to add insult to injury, when you complete the game the develops had the GALL to include a counter for how many Guardians you defeated, almost as if they knew you would have to be fighting them over and over again in every single room.
I'm surprised they didn't include the time it took for players to players to blow their brains out while playing this game. Now THERE'S a timer I'd like to see!
"Oh, it seems little Johnny killed himself from playing Metroid Prime: Hunters, but he didn't nearly get to the time when Gerald decided to end it all so I suppose second place will have to do!"
Okay, I've held it off for last because this is my least favorite part about Hunters: how the game handles its boss fights. Unlike literally every other Metroid game, you don't just explore the world and solve a fun puzzle to walk through the boss door, you have to scavenge rooms to find three keys to open a boss portal and fight the boss. You must do this eight times for every boss, adding to the redundant nature of the game. The game is clearly centered around defeating these bosses, which would've been fine had it not been for the fact there are literally only two major bosses recycled four times each. And I'll give credit where credit is due, the themes for the bosses aren't bad, but I'd be lying if I got tired of them pretty quickly from how long and drawn out every repetitive fight is.
UGH.
The bounty hunters are probably what most of you wanted me to talk about. These bosses do have some variety in their attacks and battle strategies, but all are almost exactly the same in how they run around and try to shoot you while you run around and try to shoot them, just like the main boss battles. Save for one, however.
Of the hunters, we have, in order, Kanden the green bug guy who is some kind of lab escapist and looks like a cross between the Pyro and Darth Vader, Spire the lava rock dude who is the last of his kind and looks the most generic of the bunch, Weavel the space pirate who looks nothing like a space pirate but has a rocking ponytail, Noxus the purple one who's part of the police force on his planet or something and is also purple, Trace the red bug guy who works as a bounty hunter for his species and is also a sniper so fuck him...
...And Sylux.
Sylux is the best thing to come from this game because he's the most interesting of the bunch. He has a cool design, a kickass weapon, an interesting backstory and the most complete boss battle in the entire goddamn game. For some reason he absolutely hates the Galactic Federation, so he stole illegal weaponry from GF forces, customized them ever so slightly and is now a badass bounty hunter with enough firepower to go against Samus herself. And Metroid Prime producer Kensuke Tanabe confirmed that he is interested in making a Metroid game with Sylux as the main antagonist. This is further proved by this:
Sorry, I know I went off on a tangent about Sylux there for a second, but he honestly is that cool. And he really is the best thing to come out of this game because the rest of the game is complete horse garbage.
While certainly not the WORST game I've ever played, I was still utterly frustrated by it. Few games can actually make me lose my cool and force me to scream to let out my anger, and this is one of those games if you couldn't tell. While it isn't the worst, what this game is to me is disappointing, which is probably even worse that worst, if that makes any sense. I paid ten bucks for a fun experience because I was and I still am a big Metroid fan and I wanted something new. Instead all I got was a mediocre experience.
So heed this warning when I say: don't buy this game unless you actually want to torture yourself. You have been warned. But if you need further proof, I present to you a rating:
Metroid Prime: Hunters earns...
5/10
This has been SuperKamek saying thank you, have a great night, and I killed exactly 84 Guardians on my first and only playthrough of this game. If that number isn't enough to blatantly tell you to never look at this game sideways because it will fuck your ass harder than Dark Souls, then sorry to say you're pretty much boned.
Nitpicks
- The final boss battle is way too long and monotonous.
- The areas are bland and uninteresting.
- Every escape sequence can bite my ass.
- The Lava Spawn and Ice Spawn are the only redeemable bosses easily killed by missiles.
- Those roller enemies can burn in hell.
- Why are there enemy spawners in my fucking Metroid game?!
- The music is either dull or blandly reused from other Metroid games.
- I don't give a shit about Alimbic lore.
- There are hardly any secrets to be found.
- And in case anyone was wondering, there are absolutely no Metroids in this Metroid game.
So in other words, this was the start of what Metroid fans have been dealing with post Prime 3?
Sorry to hear you wasted 10 bucks on this one my friend.
4443099
Actually this game came out before Prime 3, I was just using Prime 3 as an example. You want an example of a Metroid game breaking the hearts of many a fan? Look no further than Other M.
While I did waste ten dollars on this, it did teach me the lesson to heed warnings before acting like a dunce.
Huh, you know I forgot that Sylux was a thing when I watched that ending. Be a good sequel mission for the Federation Force. Oh, and at the risk of starting a war, I actually enjoyed Other M, thank you very much.
Though that may be because I can headcanon why Samus acts that way in the game.
4443160
I did the same just last year... and stopped playing after not even an hour. I even learned the same lesson out of it.
4443235
You'd be starting a war, fam! You headcanon that Samus is a whiny little bitch who doesn't shut her goddamn mouth? One of the strongest female protagonists in video games?
I get she has PTSD, but the Ridley cutscene in Other M is just dumb. She's gone against the fucker dozens of times up to that point and hasn't once been stricken with fear of him. And sure, you can give the argument Other M is based on the comics, but none of the other games are based on the comics so where exactly does this game fit in?
Any objections, lady?
4443298
Which game was that?
4443538 Other M
I wanted to give this game a fair chance. I tried my best, but couldn't.
4443542
People often complain about the story of Other M. While I myself am not a fan of it myself, I TRY to focus on other aspects of the game as well. When people are warring against me with how Other M is a psychological thriller that delves deep into the mind of Samus and her feelings on the Galactic Federation, I'm bitching about the lack of a nunchuk and the authorization.
4443537 Here's my think. She doesn't have PTSD. She's having a straight up mental breakdown. As in, literally losing her mind. Folks act differently when they break, and for Samus, during a mental break mind you, she's looking at the face of her childhood nightmare. Not saying it's the best, but that's my explanation.
4443548
Exactly.
Though her monolgues are insufferable.
4443551
I'd agree with you if she hadn't already been looking at her childhood nightmare... chronologically five times already. Why have a mental breakdown on the sixth time? You've already gotten used to it.
HOWEVER. Before you type back, I do want to bring something up because I feel as if you should know this. In Super Metroid, Ridley canonically dies when Zebes is destroyed. Samus could be having this breakdown because she believed her arch enemy to be dead when he's right in front of her.
But not only is Other M's Ridley a CLONE of the original, but chronologically Samus fights another Ridley in Metroid Fusion which is a clone of the clone. And she has no problems taking it down.
I really hate arguing with you...
4443555
I second that, they're pretty unbearable at times.
4443633 Don't look at it as an argument. Look at it as the civil discussion about a video game that it is.
Personally, I'm enjoying having someone point out the holes so I can fill them in.
Now then, I am aware of Super being Ridley's canonical death, but think about this. Ever since she beat him during her zero mission (the original Metroid/Metroid Zero Mission), he's never looked the same. He always had cybernetic enhancements, or just flat-out looked different. But suddenly, the bastard rises from the dead wearing the face that's burned into her memory.
I wish you had told me that years ago. Before I got my wrist sore from moving the stylus around all the F&^%ing time in that game.
4444040
Actually, I find that using the buttons is actually easier than the stylus. That's probably why I didn't harp on the controls that much in my review, if at all.
4444052
Oh, well I wound up using the stylus :(