Metroid Prime Hunters — Dreadful Anticipation
I remember the hunt…
Despite First Hunt’s general shelf life, I remember far less of getting the proper Metroid Prime Hunters. Again, bits and pieces pop into mind: many other hunter-types finally showing their face, proving Samus wasn’t the only one out there; multiple weapon types unfamiliar to any iteration of Metroid (including a sniper laser, which I loved in theory, but wasn’t great with in practice); an endgame puzzle, rather than a full-blown collectathon…snippets. Bits and pieces. And they brought scanning back in! And I do love scanning everything.
What I do remember is getting super-excited to play multiplayer online with a friend from the Nintendo Forums. All those times my parents told me to not make friends over the internet, and what could I do but ignore them? And my friend and I would get together, at least a few times, from across the United States, to play a few rounds of Hunters together. It was not a long-lasting friendship, nor a particularly deep one, but the foggy memories of setting up my DS’s internet connection so I could play games with my yet-faceless friend, of actually playing with them, talking with them over the DS’s microphones…those were some of life’s simple joys. Just playing games with friends, trusting that they were, even for that time, your friends.
Of course, I would also get matched up and demolished by a bunch of much better players than I, but that’s just how all multiplayer games tend to go for me. I am, as I always have been, much more of a single-player experience kind of player.
Trophies best left on the shelf
Props where props are due, the intro movie that showcases all the new hunters absolutely slaps. It got me so excited to meet and fight them all, even after all this time away. Hunters kicks off the story with that good old sense of mystery and foreboding that are expected in a Metroid game. The controls are still intuitive, both from my revisit to First Hunt and in general. For its first act, it feels like a proper Metroid experience again.
But from then on, from the first escape onward, Hunters tries to be two very disparate things at once: it tries to be a Metroid game in the vein of Prime, full of mystery and intrigue; and it tries to be an action shooter, filled to the brim with things to kill and things trying to kill you. Neither side ever complements the other, nor does either side truly excel as a result.
At its best, Hunters is a combat-heavy action game. Players defeat bad guys to progress, defeat rival hunters to progress, shoot the boss until it’s good and dead, and run back to their ship ASAP. The variety of unlockable and myriad weapons keep the combat fresh, and the novelty of controlling Samus with a stylus and touch screen is intuitive. But the novelty wears pretty thin after playing a while.
The maps are more succinct and streamlined than other Prime-style maps, with very little backtracking of labyrinthine routes. In fact, all the maps are designed for two runs: one in one direction, and another in the second direction. The Scan function (my dear, sweet, beautiful Scan function) feels similarly neutered; most entries barely clock out at a sentence, and the lore is so vague and nebulous that it’s hard to get the same attachment to the vanished Alimbic aliens as it is the Luminoth or Chozo.
The boss battles (not the rival hunters) are unfortunately a weak point. Save for the final boss, players will fight two unique bosses, but those two bosses will be recycled and powered-up three times each before the end of the game. Not to mention, their mechanics of fighting don’t change throughout the game. Weak points will stay vulnerable for too short a time, or the weak point will weave and dance around the room faster than players can track it. At a certain point, they stop being fun and they feel more like tedium, a chore to progress.
Even once players beat those bosses, the timed elements become a slog, too: while other Metroid games throw a timer on-screen and tell players “you need to leave fast,” Hunters demands players do the same thing, but saddle players with enemies. Not just enemies who harangue players, but enemies who will lock the door until they’re defeated. And not just enemies who lock the door, but enemies who seemingly try to avoid and dodge you, instead of fight and allow progression.
And when players finally escape back to their ship, safe and sound, they lift off, go to another area, and do it all over again. Video games tend to operate on a gameplay loop, but Hunters’s gameplay loop is literally the same thing, eight times in a row, and then a final boss: arrive in area, fight bad guys, fight hunters, find artifacts, fight boss, escape, repeat. Despite the fact that other Metroid games have been operating on a similar style of gameplay since its inception, Hunters was the first time the gameplay loop felt so glaring. It was the first time I noticed it, because I realized I was just doing the same thing again and again, change of scenery be damned.
I stopped playing about 60% through Hunters, short of fully outfitting Samus’s arm cannon, and well short of the final boss. It just wasn’t fun anymore. Is it a good enough game on its own? Yeah, of course. The setting is interesting, the gameplay elements are top-notch, and it makes good on the potential and power of this newfangled dual screen system. I may not be able to lean as heavily on the rose-tinted memories of online multiplayer, but after having gone through so many other Metroid games, so many better Metroid games, Hunters felt more and more like an out-of-place addition to the series. Best intentions might have been there for its design, but the hunt need not be reminisced about or dwelled upon. Besides, greater adventures (and a return to the main series chronology) lie just around the corner…
