In the far reaches of space, a beacon is lit. A message of great power has been received by the Galactic Federation, and all traces lead to the Alimbic System.
Naturally, Samus Aran has been sent to intercept this unknown power, but not before 6 rival bounty hunters pick up the signal. Fight your way through twisting catacombs, abandoned labs, and more as you race to find the elusive Octoliths and uncover the secrets of the ever mysterious power that the Federation wants so bad. To the victor go the spoils in Metroid Prime Hunters for Nintendo DS.
Today in Japan 25 years ago, Nintendo gave the world one of its most influential creations: Super Metroid. Highly regarded by fans, constantly imitated by game developers, Super Metroid has even been called the greatest game of all time. To commemorate the anniversary of this landmark work, I recently stepped back to consider the entirety of the Metroid franchise and rank the games from worst to best.Sure, Super Metroid was the high point of the series back in 1994 — but there have been nearly a dozen other Metroid games since then. Does it still hold that vaunted title? And if not, which Metroid adventure has dethroned it?
Metroid: Other M Nintendo 14. Metroid: Other M (Wii, 2010)Scraping the dead-last barrel-bottom of the Metroid franchise, we have the massively disappointing Metroid: Other M. It’s not actually a bad game, but it’s a devastatingly awful excuse for a Metroid sequel. Had Nintendo shipped this under an unrelated title (something like. “ Robo-Lady’s Surly Shooting Adventure in Space”), it would have been fine. But as an attempt to revitalize a beloved franchise, it demonstrated a shocking failure to capture what actually draws fans to the series.Other M transforms Metroid into a highly linear, fast-paced shooter with few opportunities for real exploration, no sense of freedom, and a painfully contrived character progression gimmick. There’s no looking to the plotline to redeem the game, either.
2020-1-1 One of Samus Aran's most crucial features in her missions has been her ability to create a Map of the current area she is in. The Power Suit maps out rooms as Samus progresses, but Samus can download full-fledged maps from Map Stations she comes across (except in Metroid Prime Hunters.
As an action game built around quick reflexes and evasion, the game has its charms, yet the story is irredeemable. It casually reduces heroine Samus Aran from the stoic, hyper-competent warrior fans love to a bratty, timid girl-child. Other M turned out to be such a massive misfire and a flop with fans that it practically killed the series: Nintendo’s only Metroid output in the decade since has been a single spinoff and a lone remake. Metroid Prime Hunters: First Hunt Nintendo 13.
Metroid Prime Hunters: First Hunt (Nintendo DS, 2004)Once upon a time, video game systems shipped with games packed in. Nintendo DS did not. Instead, it shipped with a tiny demo of a Metroid game that wouldn’t arrive for another year and a half. A pared-down version of Metroid Prime Hunters, First Hunt consists of three tiny, bite-sized scenarios set in environments drawn from the final game.
It’s a tutorial-teaser for Hunters rather than an actual game in its own right. It’s decent enough, but there’s almost no substance to it. Metroid Prime Hunters Nintendo 12. Metroid Prime Hunters (Nintendo DS, 2006)Nintendo made a big deal about Metroid Prime not being a “first-person shooter.” This was partially to assuage the fears of fans who assumed the series was going to transforms into a mindless run-and-gun game, and partially because, well, Prime actually didn’t focus much on shooting. Hunters, on the other hand, was precisely the kind of game that everyone expected the Prime titles to be before they played them. Players take control of Samus in a single-player campaign or play as one of several different bounty hunters in a head-to-head competitive mode, running around claustrophobic alien environments and attempting to gun down as many other rivals as possible.It’s fine for what it is. However, “what it is” turned out to be a generic multiplayer shooter wearing Metroid clothing, running on a woefully underpowered handheld system, centered around the use of a clumsy virtual touch-screen control pad.
Hunters is basically a smartphone spinoff that shipped several years before such things even existed. Points for prescience, then, but none for giving players a proper, classic Metroid game for DS. Metroid Prime: Federation Force Nintendo 11. Metroid Prime: Federation Force (Nintendo 3DS, 2016)Much like Metroid: Other M, Federation Force represents above all else a tremendous failure by Nintendo to read the proverbial room. Metroid fans were desperate for a new game in 2016, having gone six years without a follow-up to rectify the wrongs of Other M.
But Federation Force absolutely wasn’t that redeemer. Rather than further the tale of Samus Aran in a sprawling solo adventure, it instead centered on a team of generic space marines in a mission-based multiplayer shooter. On 3DS, of all systems. It also has a somewhat goofy visual style that speaks to a younger audience than the hardened veterans who love Metroid most.
Nintendo presumably hoped to draw in a younger audience, but the end result was a game that spoke to no one.Yet weird and misguided as its basic pretext for existence may be, Federation Force isn’t bad! It looks great considering the platform, and it offers a variety of mission objectives along with some excellent first-person team-based combat. Its biggest shortcomings come from the fact that its difficulty and design don’t scale based on the number of active players, and from that its big end-game twist revolves around an extraordinarily dopey plot development involving Samus. Flawed but fun, Federation Force feels like it could have led to better things if Nintendo had targeted it a bit more carefully. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes Nintendo 10.
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (GameCube, 2004)Samus’ second outing in 3D abandons much of the cohesion and sense of purpose that drove its predecessor. The original Prime suffered from what were ultimately fairly forgivable issues, but Echoes exacerbated all of those issues and threw in problems of its own making on top.Echoes revolves around a duality-based gimmick that might work on paper but falls flat in practice.
Here, players have to navigate a world divided into dark and light zones, a concept that defines every last inch of the game. Venturing into the dark world drains Samus’ energy, and certain creatures within each realm can only be destroyed with specific expendable ammunition. Things do become less punishing toward the end of the game, as Samus finds tools to help mitigate the effects of shifting universes, but the journey to reaching that point is so exhausting most players never get there. It doesn’t help that Echoes is probably the single most challenging Metroid game ever made even without the reality-shifting elements, with some of the trickiest bosses in the entire franchise to conquer.
Taxing, tiring, and tedious throughout most of its running length, Echoes is one of those sequels that demonstrates the “difficult second album” phenomenon in action. Metroid II: Return of Samus Nintendo 8. Metroid II: Return of Samus (Game Boy, 1992)Metroid’s first sequel immediately took the series in an unexpected direction: Onto a handheld platform with less horsepower than the system that hosted the original.
Still, no one knew the Game Boy’s strengths and weaknesses like Nintendo’s R&D1 division — the creators of both the Metroid series and the Game Boy hardware — so the pairing turned out to be a forward step for Samus Aran regardless.Metroid II did a great deal to flesh out the series’ universe, exploring the origins and evolution of the eponymous space monsters, and its minimalist narrative set the stage for the magnificent Super Metroid. That said, Return of Samus does suffer from a few notable issues. Samus looks great, but she’s huge on the tiny Game Boy screen, and the chunky proportions of the graphics crowd the action and hamper exploration. Planet SR-388 also isn’t nearly as thoughtfully structured as other settings that have appeared throughout the Metroid franchise, and the monochrome graphics make the corridors both confusing and repetitive. It’s a remarkable feat of a Game Boy game, but it nevertheless stands as the weakest of the core Metroid titles. Metroid Prime 3 Nintendo 7.
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (Wii, 2007)The finale of the initial Metroid Prime trilogy wrapped on a slightly less frustrating note than Echoes. Corruption took a dramatically different approach to the classic Metroid structure, breaking Samus’ adventure into a series of discrete environments spread across multiple planets — similar to Fusion’s standalone space station sectors, but without that game’s opportunities for unexpected intersections and the satisfying discovery of secret passageways connecting the different areas.Corruption’s approach mostly works, though spreading the quest across so many disparate settings does strain the plausibility of the numerous navigation puzzles. Thankfully, Corruption manages to maintain a brisk enough pace that you rarely have time to sit down and contemplate its more inane moments.
Samus finds herself constantly racing against (and often battling) some of her rival bounty hunters and even teaming up with the Galactic Federation to deal with a steady stream of sci-fi threats. It’s the franchise’s first proper attempt to combine the trademark Metroid style with the fast-paced action of other sci-fi shooter franchises, and the effort pans out a lot better here than it does a few years later in Other M. Metroid Nintendo 6. Metroid (Famicom Disk System/NES, 1986/1987)At launch, the original Metroid was Nintendo’s biggest, boldest take on the newly-forged platform shooter genre. By modern standards, it’s far from a perfect experience.
But it nevertheless holds up to the ravages of time thanks to the enormous care with which its tiny team constructed the whole thing. Certainly Metroid suffers from opaque objectives and critical paths that tend to be hidden a little too efficiently within its secretive walls and floors. The limited visuals and stark backgrounds can make it tough to keep track of Samus’s precise whereabouts at any given time. You need to spend a little too much grinding on enemies to top off Samus’ health. The fussy password system turns the process of recording data into a grade school handwriting text. Minor frustrations abound here.To balance out these complaints, the original Metroid presents you with a sprawling, open-ended world and the incredible abilities you need to conquer it. Here we see one of Nintendo’s greatest achievements: Samus’ tools double as weapons, so that as she grows more powerful she also gains the ability to traverse more of the world.
This creates a brilliant, addictive gameplay loop. Oh, and the big plot twist at the end, the one where legendary top-tier armored bounty hunter Samus Aran turns out to be a lady? That holds up pretty well these days, too. Metroid: Samus Returns Nintendo 5. Metroid: Samus Returns (Nintendo 3DS, 2017)The second remake in the Metroid line, this one for a game that genuinely needed revisiting to bring it more into line with the series’ standards and vision. Samus Returns reworks Metroid II into a post- Metroid Fusion adventure, maintaining the original game’s plotline, the general layout of SR-388, and the need to face off against rapidly evolving metroids on their turf. But the overall flow of the adventure is radically changed here, with repetitive caverns taking on a denser, more puzzle-oriented feel with an emphasis on acquiring weapons and gear in order to delve deeper into the planet.
Likewise, the formerly monotonous metroid battles now play out as challenging, tactical battles emphasizing counterattacks and evasion — something that even carries over into basic play.While this is undoubtedly a more involved game than the original, it errs on the side of over-complicating things. Unlike the best Metroid entries, Samus Returns is all complex corridor-crawling and monster-battling, and its reliance on counterattack-based combat renders our heroine strangely passive while bogging down the action as you wait for enemies to strike first so you can parry them. There’s never an opportunity to breathe easy, and the rhythm of the game fails to convey a sensation that Samus has grown powerful only to move along to face even greater threats.
It’s a good and interesting take on a flawed Game Boy creation, but it introduces its own vexing quirks in the process of bringing things up to code.