A few years ago, Retro Studios faced the daunting prospect of
reinventing Metroid in 3D.  Metroid was a series that perfected the 2D
platformer so thoroughly that it came to be defined by its
perspective, and it worked in deep and mysterious ways that are hard
enough to capture in a 2D sequel.  Retro succeeded by sticking to the
series's roots as best and as often as they could to make Metroid
Prime, but in making a sequel they faced the challenge of making a
Metroid game that does everything new while still feeling like a
Metroid game.  They succeeded in a lot of ways, and failed in others
that are both understandable and educational.

You've got your two basic factors that make a Metroid game Metroidy:
one is the atmosphere, that feeling of exploring empty ruins while at
the same time confronting something very active and threatening. The
other is the gameplay, an experience that grows deeper as you gain
abilities and learn to explore the environment that has existed around
you for the whole game in new ways at every turn.

The thing that impressed me the most about the first Metroid Prime is
how well it translated the atmosphere into 3D. Creatures,
environments, data logs, and machinery that you nurse back to health
part by part made the game come alive in ways that were both
traditional and genuinely new. The scan visor was a mechanic of
felicitous perfection, communicating the player's role in the
experience and allowing that extra interaction with the environment
that made it feel alive without slowing down the action one whit.

While all of the same elements are present in Metroid Prime 2, the
game fails to use any of them well. The atmosphere that is so
delicately and endearingly fleshed out this time around is that of a
race of moth-man Chozo fanboys and a dark parallel universe version of
their world. Parts of it, like the giant Luminoth Sanctuary with its
Tron stylings and giant machinery, really work. Other parts, like
uh... everywhere else, just feel generic and useless. That you are
dispatched to these areas by some arbitrary stranger who keeps doors
locked like the computer in Metroid Fusion does not help keep the
Metroid feeling alive.

And this light/dark world nonsense... it was really cool in A Link to
the Past, and absolutely brilliant in Soul Reaver, but it was exactly
the same in both of those games and it is exactly the same here.
However well implemented it is, some annoying aspects of these systems
are beginning to come to the forefront of the experience. For example,
they're usually just ways to make an adjacent room really obnoxious to
get to. Even the introduction of a limited teleport feature late in
the game does little to reduce how absolutely infuriating it is to
travel in this game, and a much-derided late-game fetch quest's
misguidedness is intensified by this problem.

So we have a game with an uninteresting environment and a game
mechanic that makes exploration difficult in a series that's all about
exploration of an interesting environment. It sounds like it's pretty
much doomed, but it really does have a lot going for it. While the
light beam/dark beam system is a little annoying and completely
unimaginative (not only are the beams stupid on principle, they're
actually just the plasma beam and the ice beam all over again), it
does give the game a little of that old Ikaruga feeling in places.
That said, in Ikaruga switching colors was fast and responsive, but in
Metroid Prime 2 switching beams is just as slow and obnoxious as it
was in Metroid Prime, feeling more like an obstacle than a tool.

The thing that's done really, really, REALLY well here is the boss
fights. They're sometimes frustratingly difficult (like the Boost
Guardian, where the trick to winning is simply learning to survive on
very little life in a SUPREMELY hostile encounter), but some of them
are works of great genius, using the game's existing mechanics to
engineer puzzles that feel natural and don't abstract too much from
the game's atmosphere. The Spider Guardian and Quadraxis are perfect
examples of this, and they should actually go down in history as some
of the best boss battles ever in video games. Game director Mark
Pacini mentions how much time and effort went into these battles, and
how much input they got from the Nintendo home office about them. The
effort shows, as I honestly haven't seen anything as great as
Quadraxis since the grapple-beam kill of Draygon in Super Metroid.

One other thing worth mentioning is a regular enemy called the Rezbit.
Like Quadraxis, going into too much detail would spoil the moment, so
I'll just say that you'll know it when you see it and oh my God is it
cool. It's one of those moments where Retro uses both Metroid elements
and the first-person perspective to their fullest, like when you see
Samus's face reflected in her visor.

So how does it stand with Metroid? How does the game do at achieving
those two qualities I mentioned earlier?  Well, the atmosphere is
inconsistent, but it has enough moments of greatness to be worthwhile.
Music is used well and there are some brilliant moments, but the drab
color schemes and trite level design often hold it back from really
hitting a level of detail that I consider a hallmark of the series, so
it's okay but not great on that point. The gameplay is drowned in
contrivance and arbitrary restriction, surfacing only once in a while
to let the player have his or her own experience with it. This is what
hurts the game the most, although it should be said that it remains
quite fun the whole time.

I really like the game, and there are details that I really enjoy
lauding. But I don't want the next Metroid game to be like this.
Actually, I'd rather a lot of things be different in another Metroid
game. Certain elements aren't as necessary as people might think
(Samus, Metroids, the power suit, space pirates, etc.), and the same
gameplay experience can be offered in different contexts within the
same universe and timeline. And as long as they get someone to make a
really interesting world and atmosphere, and if they really learn what
it is that made Super Metroid one of the best games in existence to
this day, I can't wait to see what they come up with. Metroid Prime 2
isn't there at all, but you can tell the whole time that the people
who made it are the ones for the job.

Final Score: 4/5 - Well-made, worth playing.