Honestly, they’re self-contained enough that you can jump in any time to V or Ground Zeroes, and that game’s V times larger than all the others so you may want to chip away at it.
Looking at it in context it’s really interesting how much that game is in conversation with western open-world and sim games while giving off the feeling that they’d been going in that direction since the MSX.
no then it’s just a very elaborate gun game, when before the gun was just another item in the inventory. all those systems are just for shooting people with different small arms
i wish you could have seen the way my face lit up reading this
guided rocket part fuckin owns
MGSIV has the whole sneak through the city while you’re being tailed by three orb drones in a trench coat sequence which counts imo
my internal depressive teenager just wants to smash her fingers with a hammer for old times’ sake but i would love echoes with this lighting
(i dunno about “essential” lol)
Metroid Prime was great in the day, probably greater than it could’ve gotten credit for at the time owing to a whole number of factors (Gamecube image in 2002, slow throwback controls, us not knowing then that even despite it having been 8 years since Super Metroid this was about to be the last best thing they ever did with the franchise), but I’m still a little surprised that there are that many people eager to re-play it in 2023
though I guess I’ve felt that way about a lot of Switch-era nostalgia cycles
I guess if I have only played Super Metroid and Metroid Other M I could stand to give this a shot some day.
despite being marginally younger than the first game I actually played the whole franchise in order as a kid, from 1->2->super->prime without necessarily meaning to do that
echoes killed my interest dead
Metroid Prime was the reason i bought a Gamecube, at all. i had completely ignored it until i played a demo of Prime at an Electronics Boutique (or Gamestop? idr if they had converged, yet). i was amazed at how Metroidy it actually was, and how satisfying it felt to play.
been meaning to pick up this remaster, but currently broke. i never beat Prime because the last boss did too much damage and i didn’t want to find more health tanks/couldn’t figure out how to survive. it was a long battle, too, so it was annoying to restart it.
similarly, Echoes evacuated all interest i had the Prime series as a whole and i haven’t touched it, since.
what was so bad about echoes?
i mean, it’s not really a mystery to me: i was ten when it came out, i didn’t own a snes, and i didn’t have a gamepad to play action games in emulators, so it was metroid to me. metroid… prime
prime 1+2 and fusion+zero mission are by far my favorite nintendo games not counting earthbound
i played echoes over and over (maybe five times?) when i was 13. i probably can’t express to you how perfect it was for puberty depression
now remembering doing the dash-triangle-walljumps in the final boss fight of mega man X2 on a keyboard after installing ZSNES on one of the 3 computers in my grade 7 homeroom
this may have something to do with my never having gotten carpal tunnel or any of the other RSIs that people talk about
there’s no way i’m playing metprime without the wiimote now, they absolutely nailed it on that port
off the bat the comforts of prime’s super metroid retreads are gone, the starting environments are indistinct deserts with lots of load screens breaking things up, having a living alien give you instructions with dialogue is a series taboo, and the difficulty is cranked up with chip damage you can die to.
half of the game is a miyazakian poison swamp and some boss fights are downright sadistic e.g. the spider ball guardian that demands precision double bomb jumps on a tight time crunch
it’s great 
I played Metroid Prime 1 year and half ago and I think it doesn’t hold up.
Maybe an upgrade of the remaster could be if they implemented the Switch sensors to look and aim around, but I am not sure if they did so.
Anyway, review sites giving the game 10/10 in 2023 make me laugh a bit.
my impression now having only played it once in launch window is that it was unapologetically abrasive and miserable, which are the things i love more and more in all art and particularly games as i get older, i’m pretty sure i’m gonna be echoes-pilled whenever i do get around to replaying it
MP2 is great and hated for bucking series trends and being hostile to the player. In a similar way that the alien planets Samus visits are hostile to her.
I think it also has some really inventive enemies and cool visuals although many of those come later in the game.
If the dimension gates were instant loads I think the general opinion might shift
gonna be That Guy: just play primehack
the fact that Prime 1 is as venerated as it is despite the fact the everyone hates the Phazon Mines will always be hilarious to me — “great game, incredible atmosphere, the last third is an interminable slog that made me forget what joy is, 10/10”
(for the record, i loved the phazon mines)
i wish i could love Prime 2’s dark world in the same way