Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (2004)

I've never felt more conflicted about a game. I absolutely adored Metroid Prime 1 - it's a masterpiece that stayed with me for years. Prime 2: Echoes, on the other hand leaves me with mixed feelings. While the fundamentals I loved about Prime are still intact, some of the design changes, although intriguing in concept, ultimately felt more frustrating than rewarding.

• Dark World: Introduces interesting new monsters and environments, but navigating between worlds quickly became tedious rather than fun. Managing two separate world maps felt cumbersome, especially given how sparsely portals were placed. The repeated loading animation between worlds also quickly lost their charm. If we ever get a Switch 2 remaster, improved loading times could hopefully eliminate these interruptions.

• Backtracking: Usually, I enjoy Metroid’s exploration and discovering where to go next, but in Echoes, the backtracking was too much. I often found myself stuck and tempted to use a walkthrough. The game at times, genuinely felt like it didn't respect my time. Clearer or more frequent direction could have significantly improved this.

• Sky Temple Keys: Everyone mentions the Sky Temple Keys, and for good reason: they really disrupt the pacing toward the end. Hunting for keys felt unnecessary and ultimately uninteresting. By the time you reach this point, the game already feels complete and satisfying; having an extra fetch quest like this adds little value and instead just dragged the experience down. Should a remaster happen, I hope the developers streamline or simplify this.

Despite these criticisms, I still felt compelled to finish the game, which is more than I can say for many others. Echoes might even be one of those rare games that’s actually better the second time around, now that I've done it once before, know roughly where I'm going and can just enjoy the gameplay loop that makes Metroid so addictive .

Ultimately, while it wasn't my favourite Metroid experience, Echoes still has its charms, and I can definitely see myself revisiting it in the future.

The difficulty level is frustrating and arbitrary. The world and enemies are bland to the point of blurring together. The dark world gimmick feels a lot less rewarding than it did in Soul Reaver. The story does not earn any of its uncharacteristically clumsy exposition. The exploration, puzzles and unlockables feel like "echoes" of the original.

I adore the first Metroid Prime, which is why I've tried playing this twice... once via the Trilogy, and again using PrimeHack with cheats to reduce some of my frustrations. But as badly as Echoes wants to be Empire Strikes Back, it lands much closer to RoboCop 2. Moving on!

This is a good game. It's not a great game, but it is a good game. Never before have I played a game and felt "middle child syndrome" more strongly. The plot is entirely irrelevant to the things set up in MP1. The gameplay is largely the same only with less interesting places to visit and less interesting (and less consistently thought out) lore.

Like is there any explanation to why the Luminoth have Chozo artifacts? Why couldn't Samus just be forced to use Luminoth Artifacts? The darkworld feels like padding in a game that already feels like filler. It has the worst conveyance in any metroid game I have ever played. The Luminoth are one note, the Ing are cartoonishly dull, and the space pirates are literally irrelevant to the plot. Dark Samus feels creatively bankrupt from the super interesting Metroid Prime she came from, and compared to the SA-X lacks any narrative or gameplay heft (but dang if her final form doesn't look cool). So plot wise this game is 110% skipable and as a stand alone story it doesn't have much of anything special about it that can't be found in Prime 1 (Sans the cliffs which are AMAZING). In short is has all of the flaws of Prime 1 and almost no unique benefits.

So why does it still get a 4/5? Because the base on which it is built (Prime 1) is SO GOOD that even inferior copy is a DANG fun game to play. If you enjoyed Prime 1 you are likely to enjoy this (even if not as much) but if you didn't like Prime 1 I sincerely doubt this will be the game to change your mind.

Edit: After reflection i think the quality of the ending over-hyped my score....the overall experience is really a 3/5.