Opinion: A Short Walk In Metroid Prime That's More Fun Than Most Whole Games
On 6th August, the original Famicom Disk System Metroid turned 40. To celebrate this milestone, we're publishing various Metroid articles this week discussing Samus' past, present, and future.
Today, Omar goes for a stroll...
Metroid Prime is one of the best games ever and Tallon Overworld is one of my favourite biomes ever, and that's mainly because of the orange seed pods, glowing tungsten in that raindrop hush of Tallon IV’s surface, laced together with glowing filaments like beads on string and bursting apart with screen shake and that squelch of honeyed abundance.
They are the fun-est things to shoot in Prime (except perhaps the ice-encrusted back of a baby Sheegoth, but that bursts, too) and feel like gaming bubble wrap, like bladderwrack biology you prod and test with an arm cannon shot. I had doubts about Prime 4 when the early trailers in Fury Green showed pods that splatted too weakly like a throat-clear cough.
But let’s go for a walk, because Metroid Prime has some of my favourite in gaming, with Samus’s heavy, steady pace and routes I revisit like favourite tracks, mostly starting in Tallon.
My Prime Remastered 100% save file (of items, 96% on scans) is always left at the ship, the centre of two key spokes outward into the rest of the planet. Just that opening area has that mist as thick as concept art and you can lose minutes to the pleasing ripple effect when you fire into the waterfall pool.
But also it has that late-game second Tallon Overworld theme with its haunting flute synth and one of the best music drops in gaming (we'll get to another in a bit), and I never tire of doing a dose of 10,000 digital steps on one of the trails that start there, west towards Chozo or east towards the crashed space Frigate.
Let's go east.
There's a downslope into a cavern and already we're having a good time, enjoying that assured gamefeel and the constant punctuation of things that move and react and respond, like the shiver-quiver of the first cave's mushrooms when you get too close (these burst, too). And then the organic satisfaction of a main route being accessed with a morph ball roll beneath a rain-slicked rock.
I don't want to get too distracted too early (though what are good walks for?), but I often think about the effect of Link's first first-person crawl towards a Kokiri Sword, or this belly-level view as Samus rolls around the vasculature of the planet's morph ball routes, some carved, some created. As well as adding some welcome Marble Madness momentum fun, it also means we’re not just on Tallon IV, we're in it.
Anyway! The next door to the Frigate crash site you can open and charge up your shots to sort the first space pirate before even going through. The second pirate quickly follows across the lake with those squealing firework rockets and a corkscrewing death plunge - or just freeze him mid-air, suspended with video game logic and shattered with a missile.
Now you're probably wondering if the rain here outside the totemic carcass of the frigate is heavier than before at the waterfall, and I can confirm it is (I took videos to compare). So moody and evocative that just being present is the present here, and like every place in Prime, the area is completely unique in its shape and geography: I could recognise these rooms in braille.
And as with all of Prime, it is alive with attention, small considerations of navigation like the earlier-than-you-think second grapple to swing across the lake, or the shock of the splash beneath if you miss before navigating the stepwise jumps and small tunnel to get back out. Either way is a treat.
Would it be crazy to talk about the L-shaped turn as you then enter the frigate? That surprisingly narrow and sharp left path at the end of the corridor that gives a sense of jagged asymmetry in the wreckage, of real routes not smoothly player-centric but emergent and organic and engaging to navigate?...
Too late, I just did! But I think it’s important, and you can feel the difference to Prime 4’s tastefully even, boringly balanced areas (I’ll try to stop ragging on it, now).
Anyway, we're nearly at that second music drop of a sort. You walk through the downed ship’s corridors, with the sputter of sparks from dying panels and the scuttle of crabs around the tunnels. And there's an alien warble in the music, shrill and eerie as you go deeper inside, then underwater and further still.
Then, the release. That hint of pale blue through a doorway that opens into the stretching central chamber of the reactor core, and the catch-your-breath pause before the sudden lushness of piano chords with their shimmering arpeggio tail. Music and wonder and beauty you don't just look at, but move through - these are the things I play games for.
I love this moment and this area, with its plunging verticality (and the way your relationship to it changes when you've got the Gravity Suit). Nowadays there's a lot of emphasis on open worlds but also open-top and open-plan areas as a presumed shorthand for bigness and freedom. But the enclosure of Prime's modular world feels to me less like restriction so much as framing and composition, giving shape and form and pacing. And in this case, a stretching cavern with edges that only highlight the size of it. And we're not even at my favourite bit of the walk!
Two underwater space pirates, very high-resolution bubble streams and then the recognition of the two door sequence at the bottom as the ginormous ones from the opening escape sequence (did you know you can shoot the passing asteroid rocks in that intro by the way?). They're probably in the Top 3 Prime Doors, which I'm saying unironically in a game full of doors all made gloriously Extra with hissing hydraulics and pneumatic whooshes.
I often think about Link's first first-person crawl towards a Kokiri Sword, or this belly-level view as Samus rolls around the vasculature of the planet's morph ball routes
Now, I think I've written before about the feeling of right-on pleasure inherent in U-Turn moves. That small sense of balanced motion and the micro-drama of a direction changed. So indulge me in my praise of the next area, already a fantastic rubble-staircase of happenstance platforms that go up a sloping corridor like mushroom steps up a tree, then enlivened massively by having you twice pivot and jump backwards and forwards up the debris like a deconstructed wall jump.
Then you emerge from the water into a Dutch-angle diagonal and the last submerged rooms of the frigate, with glowing blue algae tended by luminescent moths and those clamshell creatures with their energy cores that fill the visor with static fizzle, before a final exit back into the drizzle of Tallon proper.
And with it that sense of multiplication - of stumbling across a whole new wing of an area you thought you'd fully excavated. Prime's is a world full of backrooms, side-ness, and edge-bits, small interlude rooms and in-betweens that feel realistically in relief of the main, ancient structures.
(Also, are those couple of bubble pods at the end of the Frigate the only ones in the game? Prime is full of these generosities.)
But back to the walk and the home stretch, the fitting grand finale of Great Tree Hall, bejewelled with the gold blebs of my beloved seed pods and built around a tree so big it’s split into two storeys; the upper one has those scarlet flowers that singe to nothing like burning paper when shot with a charged-up plasma blast.
I normally stop just past at the Life Grove — the temple area that reminds me of the Lost Valley in Tomb Raider — partly because it's a cul-de-sac anyway, but also because the phantom pirates come and spoil my lo-fi vibe with their abrasive soundtrack (though if I stay, I'll remember to switch back to normal visor from X-Ray for that slow motion fall and fade out). Or I might dip into Chozo just to be gobbled by a couple of those stone toad things.
Anyway, it's normally enough, now happily replete with everything gaming is good for. But we could have gone west at the start, to lightning flashes and a stony halfpipe before the sun on stone of Chozo Ruins, or taken a leap down the Root Cave to Magmoor and through to the crystalline beauty of Phendrana.
More than 20 years old and a world that I still love to stroll through, hang out in, no NPCs but instead a silent collaboration with a vibe unmatched, transforming the Switch into a digital doorstep, a threshold to somewhere brilliant.
What gaming walks do you come back to?