Comments on: Thoughts: Darksiders.

By: Josher

Josher — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 14:26:52 +0000

If there was one game a year that had the narrative balls of Eternal Darkness games would be a healthier industry.

I think you’re being hard on MP2′s palate – it majored in purple, which I suppose is at the dark end of the spectrum but not uncolourful, and its palate on the whole varied widely by area – as I uppose you should expect from a Metroid game. What it was not, however, was sunny. It had a glummer ambience than the other games in the series, which is fair enough, but if you’re giving Eternal Darkness a pass for that then it seems uncharitable not to extend MP2 the same courtesy

By: hentzau

hentzau — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 13:21:57 +0000

Again, I only made it halfway into echoes so I won’t have fought most of the bosses, but Meta-Ridley took me two *hours* to beat. And I don’t regret that at all, it was very fun and I think he was very well pitched for an end boss, it was just the first time the game really stepped up and challenged me as a player.

By: hentzau

hentzau — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 13:19:12 +0000

I’ll be honest with you, Echoes has a similar problem to Darksiders for me, in that I found the art design of the light and shadow worlds deeply uninteresting. Give me colour. Give me vibrancy. Don’t give me a gloomy twilight greyness the whole time.
I mean shit, Eternal Darkness was a miserable game about Lovecraftian horrors trying to take over the world, but even that found plenty of time for colours other than grey. Even if it did have a few too many desert levels in it.

(That’s miserable in terms of seeing the player characters get fucked over by the bad guys repeatedly, not miserable in terms of quality.)

By: Josher

Josher — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 13:02:24 +0000

For my money, MP2 was a masterpiece of level design, let down badly by poor pacing and overall structure. Some of its locations are amongst the most memorable in the series, but as you say, Zau, there’s too much backtracking and a lot of the item progression is paced just slightly wrong – too many items get collected and never used, and the joyful sense of exploration from MP1 is undermined by poor signposting and constant back-and-forthing.

I still think Corruption is the weakest of the three, but not by much – the trilogy ranks as one of my favourite game series of the last decade, so I’m very happy with the way the formula performed overall.

By: Darren

Darren — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 17:36:19 +0000

Hmm; I don’t recall Ridley being as bad as most of the bosses in MP2. The boost sphere monster? Christ. It’s telling that for the Metroid Prime Trilogy collection (the Wii port/upgrade of the first two games with MP3 thrown in for completeness) they dialed back the difficulty of monsters and bosses in MP2.

Weirdly, I didn’t understand the scavenger hunt in MP; I beat the game thanks to a walkthrough, but even then I didn’t understand how the guide writer connected the clue to the location of the item (I know, it’s obvious in retrospect). Yet, somehow, I understood the scavenger hunt in MP2, which is far more complex: each key is located in the same room as the clue-holding alien corpse (the clues are stored in your log, thankfully) but in the Dark World version, which is often more difficult to get to than it might seem.

By: hentzau

hentzau — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 17:25:07 +0000

Here’s the thing: I did the entirety of Metroid Prime on Hard, 100% all the items and scanning and everything, that is how much I loved it. (And it had more of a difficulty wall right at the end when you fight Meta Ridley). About six months later I bought Echoes and didn’t even make it halfway. The level design in that one is just way too exasperating; it’s fun to backtrack with new items to see what you missed, but Echoes strongarmed you into doing it again and again and again as a compulsory part of the game structure. Corruption was something of a return to form, at least, even if it didn’t quite reach the dizzying heights of Prime.

By: Darren

Darren — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 17:18:25 +0000

The real flaw of Metroid Prime 2 is that every single element is insanely difficult. The first game didn’t have much of a difficulty curve; I don’t recall any area being more difficult than another, and the items you picked up made backtracking increasingly easy.

Metroid Prime 2, on the other hand, was packed with obscenely tough bosses and frequently overpowering enemies while featuring an actively hostile secondary world (necessary for theme but a bit heavy-handed in implementation) that made each area an Escher-esque labyrinth of portals and puzzles. I spent longer on the swamps than just about any video game level ever (barring, perhaps, the rarely-discussed but maddening Turtle Cave from Link’s Awakening).

By: hentzau

hentzau — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 16:10:09 +0000

“Thinking about it, the (comparatively) weakest parts of that trilogy were the points where the graphic design, level planning and world-building fell down.”

So in other words the entirety of the second game, then. ¬_¬

By: Josher

Josher — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 11:13:06 +0000

This review makes me want to play the Metroid Prime trilogy again.

Thinking about it, the (comparatively) weakest parts of that trilogy were the points where the graphic design, level planning and world-building fell down. Formulaic end bosses is and remains the albatross around the neck of Nintendo’s design philosophy.