Somewhat surprisingly, Nintendo didn't produce Metroid Prime internally. While not quite perfect, it nevertheless presented a convincing Metroid experience from an immersive first-person perspective. Prime immediately catapulted Metroid to the rarified ranks of legacy franchises to successfully navigate the transition from 2D to 3D. This meant nothing of true narrative consequence could happen during the course of Prime to move the franchise's plot line forward but, on the other hand, it also meant Nintendo could quietly slide the game over to the dustbin of obscurity if the whole thing turned out to be a disaster. Rather than following on from Super Metroid (that task fell to the visually regressive Metroid Fusion for Game Boy Advance), Prime instead rewound the saga to an indeterminate point in the past, presumed to fall somewhere between the first and second games. Prime took the series' action into 3D, but it pushed the storyline backward. Of the two Metroid games to arrive in November 2002, Metroid Prime for GameCube felt the most ambitious and progressive. Even when their answer finally arrived, the company hedged its bets by delivering two completely separate Metroid games on different hardware, each with its own distinct style, each with its own independent developer. No, the question of what to do with Metroid would stump Nintendo for an entire console cycle. Metroid had tried in-close action with its second entry, cramped by the Game Boy's screen resolution, and the result was the least convincing portion of the trilogy. The action in Zelda and Mario on N64 mostly focused on in-close scenarios: One-on-one combat, solving puzzles, making a jump to the next platform. With its long-range combat and infinite jumps, Metroid made use of space in a way that would be challenging to convert into 3D. Nintendo found natural extensions for Mario and Zelda into 3D space, but Metroid worked differently than those games. The move into 3D precipitated by PlayStation, N64, and SEGA Saturn created a dilemma for Metroid. The Super NES still had a couple of years of life in it, but the arrival of Donkey Kong Country would make it de rigueur for 2D games to try to disguise their nature by adopting pre-rendered computer-generated graphics. Super Metroid arrived right at the absolute tail end of the age of hand-drawn bitmap sprites a few months later, the PlayStation would launch in Japan. Metroid's absence most likely reflected the reality of an additional factor: Polygons. Yet Metroid remained missing in action for a whopping eight years, the only hint that it hadn't been forgotten altogether by its creators coming in the form of heroine Samus Aran's presence in all-star brawler Super Smash Bros. Nintendo revolutionized their core franchises during the Nintendo 64's lifetime, and with those franchises, the medium as a whole: Super Mario, Zelda, Mario Kart, and even Pilotwings and F-Zero. ![]() Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the Metroid franchise sat out a generation. By the end of Super Metroid, Mother Brain had been thoroughly annihilated, and the metroid species itself had become extinct thanks to the player's own efforts. There also wasn't much of anywhere left to take the narrative. There simply wasn't much that could be done to improve on the game's design without radically overhauling it, or else disrupting its careful balance of elements. ![]() Super Metroid had nearly flawless structure and flow: A lean adventure that embellished its mechanical efficiency with immersive atmosphere. The series' 16-bit entry had essentially closed a circle of creative inspiration, revisiting its 1986 NES predecessor while amplifying everything good about it. How do you top perfection? That question loomed over the creators of Super Metroid. This review of Metroid Prime originally ran in September, but we are re-promoting it in celebration of the game's 15th Anniversary.
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