Okay, it has taken a little longer than the others since I have been playing The Witcher 3, Splatoon, and other distractions, but I just finished Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. I managed to get a completion percentage of 78%, and the time was 26 hours and 24 minutes, yeah it took quite a while. I will credit some of the time it took to that you really are going back through a lot of the areas a lot, including that you have a dark version and basically your map becomes a big part and I honestly could not keep track of where it wanted me to go next before it gave the hint about where the next objective was, something I would say a negative compared to others in the franchise. The dark world especially must have added time by the fact that you constantly take damage, which might make you move fast, but it makes you stick to areas that slowly replenish health.
I would give props to Prime 2 for taking the alternate beams in an interesting way so that they require ammo, which encourages using the weaker standard beam type, which the first Prime pretty much made it something you would rarely use once you had other. It also encouraged to use light and dark beams in that you could gain ammo by using the other type so one was encouraged to sometimes ration their uses against certain enemies, although perhaps they could have explained when best to use them. Also, perhaps it is because I got sometimes impatient or by getting used to the rhythm of these games, but I did find myself also using missiles a lot also, although I still tend to horde them they did feel encouraged too. Seeker missiles seemed to be one of the more interesting ones I did not actually realise till later had some uses. And there was also the screw attack, which added a very interesting flare similar to what I think was in 2 and Super as movement and a weapon. The whole echo thing which seemed to be the major focus did seem a tad underused, unless it was all the stuff I missed, and generally the echo vision was incredibly uncomfortable to use. Some of the bosses had some interesting traits in how they mimic what you get when you beat them, but just dark versions were not too fun, and Dark Samus was pretty easy, well except for kind of panic in a timed boss battle, which now that I think about it was also done in Fusion. Don't give me a timed boss fight because some of these really could suck up time in figuring out a weakness and movement.
I expect myself to have Zero Mission as the next Metroid game to go after before going for the last Prime game, still no idea how to get Other M. But I might just play more of the more recent non Metroid games.
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Through dream I travel, at lantern's call
To consume the flames of a kingdom's fall
30 May 2015, 1:47 pm
