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Metroid Prime made me a believer.
It was the summer of 2004. I had just purchased my first video game console since I had owned an NES, and I was on the prowl for something to play on my shiny new platinum Gamecube. At this point, I had no special attachment to Nintendo. I had merely played Smash Bros. at a friend's place and loved it, but besides fond memories of games like Super Mario Bros. 3 and weird stuff like Air Fortress, I wasn't particularly attached to Nintendo as a games developer. (This was also a real low point in my gaming life, considering that my favourite games at the time were probably like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 and NHL 1999).
I had heard about how amazing Metroid Prime was from a number of internet sources, but I hadn't even played a Metroid game once in my life. A friend of mine had purchased Prime for $15, but decided to give it to me for a number of reasons; namely, that he hated the HUD system in the game, and he found the controls to be super clunky. He couldn't even get past the first half hour of the game.
I trusted my friend's opinion, so I thought to myself, are all of these people on the internet out to lunch?
Nope. They weren't.
Metroid Prime is both an extremely brave experiment and an encapsulation of the Metroid experience, wrapped up some of the best game design in action gaming. It's a game that sets a tone, creates an atmosphere and a world, and follows through on all of its implicit and explicit promises. I might prefer to play Zelda games because of the whimsy and the affectiveness of those games, but bar-none, the Metroid Prime series is better designed. Don't let the "Metroid Prime is the Citizen Kane of videogames" nutjobs scare you off – this is about as good as videogaming gets.
A quick note on those aforementioned nutjobs – see, Metroid Prime is a spectacular game, but there's no way that it deals with complex themes in any sort of meaningful way. I'm a fan of its sci-fi storytelling, and the biological warfare subtext is wondrously fleshed out in the Prime series, but it's nowhere near the level of Citizen Kane – I mean, it is a game about SPACE PIRATES, for chrissake.
Anyways, with that out of the way, what Metroid Prime excels at is world building. Tallon IV is gloriously well-realized, creating disparate locales that all feel like part of the whole. It's a world that can have the Magmoor Caverns, filled with lava and exploding bugs, as well as Phendrana Drifts, an ethereal snowpeak, and have both places feel like they belong together. It's a huge, interconnected world, and the amount of detail and planning in this aspect really shows. It almost makes the fact that Samus never appeared on the N64 bearable (well, besides her Smash Bros. model), because the game's environments would have almost certainly suffered on that system.
The environments serve both a functional purpose and a theme-building, aesthetic purpose. This is a game about fallen civilizations, destroyed by the threat of Phazon, and the architecture (which never seems to meet at a right-angle) is overrun with the alien flora and fauna that would naturally inhabit an abandoned, mutated area. It's spectacular in that the environments themselves tell a story, just by looking at them. That's an impressive feat for a videogame, much less any piece of media. And in terms of its functional purpose, the environment (like in all of the best Nintendo games) serves as an organic system for figuring out what you're supposed to do. Nowhere in the Metroid series is this better done than in this game. The game is so masterful at creating an environment where you can simply look at something, realize that, "oh, this is what I need to get here; I'd better make a mental note of that," and progress through the game.
People complain about backtracking in this game (and in most Metroid games, to be honest), but backtracking is done so well here that it makes you feel like a bloody genius when you figure out the gigantic puzzelbox that is the game's labyrinthine layout. The new powerups and abilities that Samus acquires throughout the game really recontextualizes previously visited areas in interesting ways. In a game all about exploring, it absolutely highlights this aspect of the game in an intensely satisfying way.
Metroid Prime certainly doesn't play like a lot of FPSes, mainly due to its pacing, which is langorous and, as already stated, emphasizes exploration. What's perhaps most incredible about this game is the fact that it's basically Super Metroid in 3D. That's not a criticism, mind you – placing the disparate elements of a nine-year-old SNES game into the conventions of an FPS and making it not only work for this game, but show a better approach to FPSes in general, is mindboggling. The amount of planning that this game must have required… it must have been just ridiculous. It certainly makes for some odd situations – in the original Gamecube version, for example, the control scheme could charitably be considered "clunky" – but it all works in the context of the game remarkably well.
As for those controls: I've played both the Gamecube version and the Wii re-release as part of the Metroid Prime Trilogy, and I think the Wii version is the superior one. The Gamecube version has its merits in terms of highlighting the pacing of the game, but Metroid games have always had pretty slick controls, and these games have the most refined and fun FPS controls on the Wii. It's a breeze to shoot, jump, scan…
Oh yeah! Scanning! Scanning is perhaps the greatest element (besides the gameplay itself) in this game. It's an absolute design masterstroke, allowing the player to contribute to the creation of meaning in the game. See, there's no overt "storytelling," per se. Rather, the player can control exactly how much or how little story they want to discover, to explore in actuality. Should the player wish to play the game as a straight-ahead FPS, that option is there for them. However, for people who want to discover the rich tapestry of tales of a civilization's downfall, it's all there in well-written, occasionally ominous, occasionally downright frightening text. It creates a sense of player agency that is all but absent in far too many action game plots.
Scanning plays into a central theme of the game, the theme of perspective. Not just that the game is interested in presenting a Metroid world from the singular perspective of Samus Aran, but also the aspect of shifting perspective that the game plays up so much. You can look at an area and see it one way, and then scan it, or look through the X-Ray visor, and see it a different way. This was Shigeru Miyamoto's main contribution to the game (in a series that he had previously had almost nothing to do with), and it's brilliant. It, like so many of the other elements of this game, allow for recontextualization of your surroundings, and it all fits into the amazing design MO of the game.
The gameplay in this game is so good. It's not just a neckbeard-ish exercise in design supremacy – all that design creates an amazingly fun game, in that, like so many other Metroid games, it demands a cerebral approach in tandem with the run-and-gun. Your job is to progress by any means necessary, meaning that you need to power-up and figure out the entirety of the game using your intellect. All of the elements – scanning, shooting, exploring – come together beautifully into a symphony of terrific gameplay. This is easily the best FPS I've ever played, and one of the best bits of gameplay to ever come out of Nintendo; that's saying a lot.
I said at the beginning of this review that Metroid Prime made me a believer. It made me a believer in the effectiveness of near-perfect game design. It made me a believer in backtracking, in exploration, in player agency. It made me into a believer in Nintendo (and to a lesser extent, Retro Studios) as the greatest game developers on the goddamn planet. Heck, it even made me into a believer in the FPS as a means of delivering an unbelievable experience, if only more developers would take the time that Retro Studios clearly did.
Most of all, though, it made me a believer in Metroid, a series of nigh-untouchably great games that consistently deliver the best gameplay in the business. Nintendo may be the house of Mario and Zelda, but Metroid is their greatest asset – a cerebral, intelligent series that resolutely stands tall in the face of some of the less-forward thinking "changes" in the videogame landscape. Metroid Prime is one of the best games ever made, and it's my privilege to play it about once a year. This is the very definition of a great videogame.