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Metroid Prime 2: Echoes

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Metroid Prime 2: Echoes
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes box art
Developer(s)Retro Studios
Publisher(s)Nintendo
EngineHeavily modified Metroid Prime engine
Platform(s)Nintendo GameCube, Wii
Release
  • NA: November 16, 2004

  • EU: November 26, 2004

  • AUS: December 2, 2004

  • JP: May 26, 2005

Wii remake

[1]
Genre(s)First-person action-adventure
Mode(s)Single-player, multiplayer

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is a first-person action-adventure video game developed by Retro Studios and published by Nintendo for the GameCube video game console. It is the seventh game in the Metroid series, a direct sequel to Metroid Prime, and the first game in the series with a multiplayer feature. Echoes was released in North America, Europe, and Australia in 2004, and in Japan in 2005. The game will be re-released for the Wii in 2009 with updated graphics and added Wii controls as part of the Play on the Wii selection.

The events of Echoes take place some time after Metroid Prime. The story follows bounty hunter Samus Aran after the Galactic Federation sends her to rescue Marines from a ship near Aether, a planet inhabited by a race known as the Luminoth. There, she discovers the Marines were slaughtered by the Ing, an evil race that came from an alternate dimension of Aether. Samus must travel to three temples to ensure the destruction of the Ing, while battling Space Pirates and her mysterious doppelgänger called Dark Samus.

Nintendo launched a viral marketing campaign to promote the game that included several websites written as if taking place in the game universe. Echoes' campaign and graphics were praised by critics, while its steep difficulty level and multiplayer components were met less positively. Over 470,000 copies of the game were sold in North America, and it received several video game industry awards, including spots on top games lists by Nintendo Power and IGN.

Gameplay

See also: Gameplay of Metroid Prime
Samus' head-up display shows a radar, map, and remaining missile ammunition.

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is a first-person action-adventure game that takes place in an open-ended world with interconnected regions. Gameplay revolves around solving puzzles to uncover secrets, platform jumping, and shooting enemies. Echoes features two parallel dimensions, Light Aether and Dark Aether, where changes in either dimension often reflect changes in the other. Although the maps in both dimensions have the same general layout, rooms often vary in their designs, creatures, and objects. Progress through the game requires both dimensions to be explored, using power-ups that Samus acquires over time. Equipment players collect include the Screw Attack, which allows Samus to jump in midair and off of certain surfaces; and beam weapons that have limited ammunition.[2][3]

Dark Aether's atmosphere is caustic and damages Samus' Power Suit, requiring the player to move between designated "safe zones" that allow Samus' health to be regained slowly. Safe zones are either permanent, or need to be activated by firing certain beam weapons at force field generators. Power Suit upgrades can reduce or nullify damage caused by the atmosphere.[2]

The game's head-up display simulates the inside of Samus' helmet and features a radar, map, missile ammunition meter, the player's health bar, and statistics on bosses. Several visors are available, and each performs a different function that include searching for enemy weaknesses, interfacing with mechanisms such as force fields and elevators and retrieving text entries from certain sources, highlighting objects that can be scanned, revealing and highlighting interdimensional objects or cloaked enemies, and creating a visual representation of sound.[2]

Echoes also features a multiplayer mode that allows up to four players to engage in combat using a split screen. It has six arenas and two modes: Deathmatch, in which players attempt to kill their opponents as many times as possible within a set amount of time; and Bounty, focusing on collecting coins that injured characters drop. Multiplayer in Echoes features the same control scheme as the single-player mode, including the lock-on system for circle strafing while targeting.[2]

Synopsis

Setting

Echoes takes place on planet Aether, inhabited by a race known as the Luminoth. The Luminoth live peacefully, protecting the planet's pure natural energy, which they call the "Light of Aether". Five decades before the game's events, a Phazon meteor[note 1] collides into the planet and leaves a scar causing environmental damage and splitting the planetary energy. The split creates an alternate dimension, Dark Aether, a mirror version of Aether that is dark, arid, and has a poisonous atmosphere. Dark Aether becomes home to the Ing, cruel shapeshifting creatures that can possess bodies of the living, the dead, and the artificially intelligent, and intend to destroy the Luminoth. Eventually, the Ing and the Luminoth engage in a war over the planet's energy—whichever race controls it is capable of destroying the other.[4]

Around this time, Space Pirates set up a base on Aether after detecting the Phazon on the planet. A Galactic Federation Marine Corps patrol ship encounters one of the Pirates' supply ships leaving the planet and an altercation follows. Both ships suffer heavy damage, and after the Federation loses contact with the Marines, it calls the bounty hunter Samus Aran to investigate.[4]

Plot

While looking for the Marines near Aether, Samus learns that severe lightning storms from the planet have caused electromagnetic interference that prevented the Marines from communicating with the Federation. Samus finds the troops dead and surrounded by hive creatures called Splinters. Deceased Marines suddenly rise and attack her, apparently possessed, and she fights them off. Samus then notices her evil doppelgänger, Dark Samus, and decides to follow her into Dark Aether, where Samus is attacked by a group of Ing. Upon returning to Aether, Samus learns that the Marines were attacked by Ing-possessed Splinters. Samus enters a nearby alien temple structure to look for clues. When she reaches the structure, she meets U-Mos, the last remaining Luminoth. He tells Samus that the Ing have taken the Light of Aether and begs her to retrieve it.[4]

Samus goes to three regions—the Agon Wastes, a parched, rocky, desert wasteland region; Torvus Bog, a drenched swamp area that houses a partially-submerged hydrosubstation; and the Sanctuary Sector, a cliffside fortress filled with haywire robots that serves as the Ing hive in Dark Aether—to retrieve the Light of Aether and return it to the Luminoth temples. Samus fights Space Pirates, Dark Samus, and monstrous Ing guardians on her mission.[4]

After Samus has retrieved three pieces of the Light of Aether, she enters the Ing's Sky Temple and faces the Emperor Ing, the strongest Ing who feeds off the power of the remaining Light of Aether shard in the Dark Aether. Samus defeats the creature and retrieves the last remaining piece as Dark Aether collapses; however, her path out of the temple is blocked by Dark Samus. After defeating her foe, Samus escapes as the world disappears around her. Returning to U-Mos, she finds that the Luminoth were in a frozen state but have now awakened. After a brief celebration Samus leaves Aether in her repaired gunship. If the player has collected 100% of the power-ups, a post-credits scene shows Dark Samus reforming herself.[4]

Development

File:RetroStudios Exterior 07.JPG
Retro Studios, based in Austin, Texas, developed Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, along with three other Metroid Prime video games.

After the critical and commercial success of Metroid Prime, Nintendo asked Retro Studios to produce a sequel. The developers decided to go in a different direction from the original game and used new sound models, weapon effects, and art designs. They also went for a more immersive storyline that focused less on the Space Pirates and Metroids that permeate the rest of the series.[5] Retro decided that the game would follow a theme of light and dark, which originated from "something that everyone understands, the conflict between good and evil".[6] Mike Wikan, the game's senior designer, elaborated on the theme: "We wanted a push and pull, the whole game is pushing and pulling you back and forth between the dark and the light. It ended up being that we wanted something that would feed into that dichotomy, that conflict between the two, and how the player's basic abilities reflect that."[6] The developers asked the producers of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, another Nintendo game, for advice because the game also used the theme of parallel worlds. The multiplayer component was meant to be included in Metroid Prime, but Retro "just didn’t have time for it", so it was implemented into Echoes.[7]

While developing Dark Samus, Retro wanted to create a character that was similar to Samus and be the same size, as opposed to the enormous monsters of Metroid Prime. One of the inspirations for the character was a boss battle in Metroid: Zero Mission, where Samus fights a mirror image of herself. The developers considered Dark Samus a "natural choice" for the game because it fit in well with the "dramatic feel of dark and light".[8]

Retro decided to make the game more challenging than Metroid Prime because they considered the original game was made to familiarize players with the control scheme, and felt that "with the second Prime, we had the ability or the freedom" to do so.[8] They wanted Echoes to be focused towards a hardcore audience by making the player "always worried about his health",[7] and more mini-bosses were added to provide unique boss fights.[8] After the game's release, the developers admitted that it was more difficult to develop than they first imagined, and Michael Kelbaugh, Retro Studios' president, commented: "We wanted to expand and add to the title, and not just slam out a sequel. Nintendo doesn’t do things that way."[7]

The music for Metroid Prime 2: Echoes was composed by Kenji Yamamoto. The themes used for areas on Dark Aether are dark variations of the themes used for areas on Light Aether. Some remixes of music from the previous Metroid games were also used, with the escape theme being a remix of Metroid's "Escape" theme, the "Hunters" multiplayer theme taking on Super Metroid's "Upper Brinstar" theme, and the theme for the underwater Torvus region, the "Lower Brinstar" theme from the same game.[9]

Release

Marketing

Nintendo launched several websites to kick off a viral marketing campaign for Echoes,[10], with inspiration drawn from Halo 2's alternate reality game I Love Bees.[11] The websites included Luminoth Temple, an internet forum; Channel 51, a conspiracy theory website that featured grainy QuickTime videos of Metroid Prime 2 dubbed "The Rossler Transmission";[10] Orbis Labs, which sold a "self-contained armored machine" called "Battle Sphere", similar to the Morph Ball;[10] and Athena Astronautics, which advertised sending women into space, featured a blog,[12] and offered job positions for bounty hunters on Monster.com. Athena Astronautics gave a random selection of 25 people who replied the offer an "interactive training manual", which was in fact a free copy of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes.[11] A Metroid-related spoof of "I Love Bees" appeared online in October 2004, to which Nintendo reacted by stating that it was not involved with it. The campaign featured similarly named domain names such as ilovebeams.com, which each had an image of Samus with the caption: "All your bees are belong to us. Never send a man to do a woman's job."[12]

Reception

The critical reception for Echoes was mostly positive.[21] When comparing it to its predecessor, Metroid Prime, GameSpot's Brad Shoemaker said that Echoes "stands shoulder to shoulder with its predecessor, delivering absolutely everything you'd want from a new 3D Metroid adventure".[17] IGN's Matt Casamassina called the gameplay "superb" and "nearly flawless",[19] and Vicious Sid of GamePro praised Echoes as "an extraordinary return to form".[15] Echoes was considered one of the best single-player experiences on the GameCube by Kristan Reed of Eurogamer, who also considered the story to be "intricately designed and elaborately constructed into a coherent environment".[14] GameSpot and IGN praised the campaign as a lengthy and rewarding adventure and appreciated the minimum 20 hours required to complete the game.[17][19] The game was considered suitable for players of any age by Computer and Video Games, which called Echoes an essential purchase for anyone with a GameCube.[13] The theme's dynamics between dark and light was lauded by GamePro, along with the "simple, quirky, and ridiculously addictive" multiplayer mode.[15]

Echoes's graphics and design received significant praise; GameSpot considered it some of the best on the GameCube,[17] and IGN called it "gorgeous" and "one of the prettiest GameCube titles".[19] The Guardian's Nick Gillett found the game entertaining and stated that its "vast maps, intricately layered terrain and bestiary replete with life forms" made the game an "epic space adventure",[23] and Bryn Williams from GameSpy complimented on the tight controls and "amazing" level design, commenting that the game was challenging but fair.[18]

A major criticism of Echoes focused on the game's high difficulty, with Game Informer declaring that "not only are the boss fights unforgiving, the environment is sometimes difficult to follow". [16] Some reviews found it difficult to search for the Sky Temple keys. GameSpot criticized and called it "a scavenger hunt much tougher than the rest of the game",[17] and 1UP.com said that it serves "no purpose other than to artificially extend the game's length".[24] The game's multiplayer mode was also considered unsatisfying. GameSpy called it a "secondary feature"[18] and Eurogamer said that the single-player features did not translate well to that mode.[14]

IGN was critical of Echoes' graphics and noted that the textures sometimes blurred when viewed up close, and the frame rate occasionally decreased. They also considered the game to have too little voice work. Publications including IGN and The Independent considered the gameplay too similar to Metroid Prime.[19][25][26] GamePro was unhappy that the game did not have a customizable control scheme.[15] Computer and Video Games was disappointed that Echoes was not as innovative in terms of gameplay as Metroid Prime, and called the multiplayer mode a "half-hearted" feature.[13] The Age's Jason Hill was disappointed by the lack of innovation in Echoes, calling the new multiplayer mode "bland and dull". He also found the control scheme "unwieldy" and the difficulty "unforgiving".[27] Game Informer criticized the multiplayer mode because of its inclusion of lock-on, also present in the single-player mode, and considered it a feature that made multiplayer too simple.[16] Serge Pennings of The Observer noted there were too few opportunities to save the game while playing, [28] an aspect X-Play also criticized by saying that it made the game "difficult because the save system is poorly implemented and downright cheap".[20]

Echoes sold 470,000 copies in North America in 2004,[29] and a total of 40,000 copies in Japan.[30] Echoes won an award in almost every category it was nominated for at the 2004 Nintendo Power Awards,[31] and won awards for Best GameCube Game of 2004 from IGN,[32] Electronic Gaming Monthly[33] and GameSpy.[34] It was rated the 174th best game made on a Nintendo system in Nintendo Power's Top 200 Games list,[35] the 74th best game chosen by GameFAQs users,[36] the 15th best GameCube game by IGN,[37] and the 13th best by GameSpy.[38]

Notes

  1. ^ Retro Studios (2007). Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Nintendo. Galactic Federation Data Anhur Incident: "Planet Aether, home of the Luminoth, was struck by a "Phazon Meteor" five decades ago. The impact had catastrophic effects on the already unstable planet."

References

  1. ^ "Pikmin And Donkey Kong Return To Wii". Official Nintendo Magazine. 2008-10-02. Retrieved 2008-10-02.
  2. ^ a b c d Metroid Prime 2: Echoes Instruction Booklet. Nintendo. 2004.
  3. ^ "E3 2004: Metroid Prime 2: Echoes First-Look". IGN. 2004-05-11. Retrieved 2008-11-03.
  4. ^ a b c d e Nintendo Power (November 2004). Official Nintendo Metroid Prime 2: Echoes Player's Guide. Nintendo of America. ISBN 978-1930206526.
  5. ^ "Metroid Prime 2 Echoes Interview". IGN. 2004-10-12. Retrieved 2008-10-18.
  6. ^ a b Castro, Juan (2004-12-03). "Echoes: Darkness and Light". IGN. Retrieved 2008-11-03.
  7. ^ a b c Kumar, Mathew (2008-11-03). "MIGS 2007: Retro Studios On The Journey Of Metroid Prime". Gamasutra. Retrieved 2007-12-03. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  8. ^ a b c "Metroid Prime 2 EGM Afterthoughts". 1UP.com. 2004-11-30. Retrieved 2008-02-11.
  9. ^ "Music 4 Games - The Future of Rock n' Roll & Interactive Entertainment. Est. 1999". Music4games. Retrieved 2008-10-18.
  10. ^ a b c "Nintendo launches fake Metroid sites". GameSpot. 2004-10-21. Retrieved 2008-11-15.
  11. ^ a b "'Bounty Hunter' Job Posting Generates Surprising Response". GameDaily. 2004-12-17. Archived from the original on 2005-02-25. Retrieved 2008-11-15.
  12. ^ a b "Nintendo doesn't much care for bees". Eurogamer. 2004-10-26. Retrieved 2008-11-15.
  13. ^ a b c Boxer, Steve (2004-12-08). "Metroid Prime 2: Echoes". Computer and Video Games. Retrieved 2008-11-24.
  14. ^ a b c Reed, Kristan (2004-12-09). "Metroid Prime review". Eurogamer. Retrieved 2008-11-16.
  15. ^ a b c d Sid, Vicious (2004-11-12). "Metroid Prime 2: Echoes". GamePro. Retrieved 2008-11-24.
  16. ^ a b c McNamara, Andy. "Metroid Prime 2: Echoes review". Game Informer. Retrieved 2008-11-16.
  17. ^ a b c d e Shoemaker, Brad (2004-11-12). "Metroid Prime 2: Echoes review". GameSpot. Retrieved 2008-11-16.
  18. ^ a b c Williams, Bryn (2004-11-26). "Metroid Prime 2: Echoes review". GameSpy. Retrieved 2008-11-16.
  19. ^ a b c d e Casamassina, Matt (2004-11-11). "Metroid Prime 2: Echoes review". IGN. Retrieved 2008-11-16.
  20. ^ a b "Metroid Prime 2". X-Play. Retrieved 2008-11-29.
  21. ^ a b "Metroid Prime 2: Echoes Reviews". Game Rankings. Retrieved 2008-10-18.
  22. ^ "Metroid Prime 2: Echoes reviews". Metacritic. Retrieved 2006-09-08.
  23. ^ Gillett, Nick (2004-11-27). "Metroid Prime 2: Echoes". The Guardian. p. 30.
  24. ^ Pfister, Andrew (2005-12-01). "Metroid Prime 2: Echoes review". 1UP.com. Retrieved 2008-11-16.
  25. ^ Armstrong, Rebecca (2004-12-18). "Computer Games". The Independent. p. 98.
  26. ^ Herold, Charles (2004-11-25). "Game Theory; A Big Sequel That's Worthy Of Its Lineage". The New York Times. p. G5.
  27. ^ Hill, Jason (2004-12-09). "Metroid Prime 2: Echoes". The Age. p. 5.
  28. ^ Pennings, Serge (2005-04-10). "It's Prime Time". The Observer. p. 68.
  29. ^ Casamassina, Matt (2005-01-13). "Prime Outperforms Echoes". IGN. Retrieved 2008-11-03.
  30. ^ "Japan GameCube charts". Famitsu. 2007-05-06.
  31. ^ "2004 Nintendo Power Awards". Nintendo Power. 191. May 2005.
  32. ^ "IGNcube's Best of 2004 Awards: GameCube Game of the Year". IGN. Retrieved 2008-11-15.
  33. ^ "Electronic Gaming Monthly and Computer Gaming World Announce the Best Games of 2004". Ziff Davis Media. 2005-02-08. Retrieved 2008-11-16.
  34. ^ "GameCube Game of the Year". GameSpy. Retrieved 2008-11-16.
  35. ^ "NP Top 200". Nintendo Power. 200: 58–66. February 2006.
  36. ^ "The 10 Best Games Ever". GameFAQs. Retrieved 2006-10-04.
  37. ^ "The Top 25 GameCube Games of All Time". IGN. 2007-03-16. Retrieved 2008-11-16.
  38. ^ "#13: Metroid Prime 2: Echoes". GameSpy. 2005-08-11. Retrieved 2008-11-16.
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