Metroid Prime 2: Echoes
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is a 2004 action-adventure game developed by Retro Studios and published by Nintendo for the GameCube. The sequel to Metroid Prime, Echoes is the sixth main installment in the Metroid franchise. It was released in North America, Europe and Australia in 2004. In Japan, it was released in May 2005 as Metroid Prime 2: Dark Echoes.
The story follows bounty hunter Samus Aran after she is sent to rescue Galactic Federation Marines from a ship near Aether, a planet inhabited by a race known as the Luminoth. She discovers that the troops were slaughtered by the Ing, a hostile race that came from an alternate dimension of Aether. Samus must travel to four temples to ensure the destruction of the evil Ing, while battling them, wild creatures, Space Pirates, and her mysterious doppelgänger, Dark Samus.
Retro sought to differentiate Echoes with a heavier focus on storytelling, new gameplay mechanics, and a multiplayer feature. Nintendo launched a viral marketing campaign that included several websites written as if taking place in the Metroid universe. The single-player mode was acclaimed for its graphics, atmosphere and music, though its steep difficulty and multiplayer mode were criticized.
Echoes received several awards and spots on "top games" lists by Nintendo Power and IGN. More than 1.10 million copies were sold worldwide. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption was released in 2007. In 2009, an enhanced version of Echoes was released for Wii in Japan and as part of Metroid Prime: Trilogy.
Gameplay
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is an adventure game "with heavy action elements and an emphasis on complex puzzle-solving" in which the player controls the Samus Aran from a first-person perspective. It takes place in an open-ended world with interconnected areas. Gameplay involves solving puzzles to uncover secrets, platform jumping, and shooting enemies. Progress requires both dimensions to be explored, using power-ups that Samus acquires over time. Equipment players collect include the Screw Attack, which allows Samus to somersault in midair and off certain surfaces, and new beam weapons that have limited ammunition.The head-up display simulates the inside of Samus' helmet and features a radar, map, missile ammunition meter and health meter. Several visors are available, and each performs a different function. One, also seen in the previous game, is a scanner that searches for enemy weaknesses, interfaces with mechanisms such as force fields and elevators and retrieves text entries from certain sources. The others reveal and highlight interdimensional objects or cloaked enemies, and create a visual representation of sound.
Echoes features the parallel dimensions Light Aether and Dark Aether; changes in either dimension often reflect changes in the other. Although the maps in both dimensions have the same general layout, rooms often vary in their designs, creatures, and objects. Dark Aether's atmosphere is caustic and damages Samus' Power Suit, requiring the player to move between "safe zones" that allow Samus' health to slowly regenerate. Safe zones are either permanent, or need to be activated by firing certain beam weapons at force field generators. Power Suit upgrades can reduce or nullify damage caused by the atmosphere.
Echoes features a multiplayer mode that allows up to four players to engage in combat using a split screen. It has six arenas and two modes: Deathmatch, in which players attempt to kill their opponents as many times as possible within a set amount of time; and Bounty, which focuses on collecting coins that injured characters drop. Multiplayer in Echoes features the same control scheme as the single-player mode, including the lock-on system for circle strafing while targeting.
Synopsis
Setting
Echoes takes place on Aether, a planet inhabited by a race known as the Luminoth. The Luminoth lived peacefully, protecting the planet's natural energy, which they call the "Light of Aether". Five decades before the game's events, a Phazon meteor collides into the planet and leaves a scar, causing environmental damage and splitting the planetary energy. The split creates another world in an alternate dimension, Dark Aether, a mirror version of Aether that is dark, arid, and has a poisonous atmosphere. Dark Aether becomes home to the Ing, cruel shapeshifting creatures who intend to destroy the Luminoth, and are able to possess bodies of the living, the dead, and the artificially intelligent beings. Eventually, the Ing and the Luminoth engage in a war over the planet's energy whichever race controls it is capable of destroying the other, since if one world gains control over all of the planet's energy, the other will perish.Around this time, Space Pirates set up a base on Aether after detecting the mutagenic substance Phazon on the planet. The Pirates had previously tried to weaponize the substance after it contaminated the planet of Tallon IV, but their efforts were thwarted by the bounty hunter Samus Aran. A Galactic Federation Marine Corps patrol ship encounters one of the Pirates' supply ships leaving the planet and an altercation follows. Both ships suffer heavy damage, and after the Federation loses contact with the Marines, they call Samus to investigate.
Plot
While looking for the Marines near Aether, Samus' ship is damaged by severe lightning storms from the planet. Said storms have caused electromagnetic interference that prevented the Marines from communicating with the Federation. Samus finds the troops dead and surrounded by hive creatures called Splinters. The deceased Marines suddenly rise and attack her, apparently possessed, and she fights them off. Samus then encounters her evil doppelgänger, Dark Samus, for the first time, and after a small skirmish Dark Samus jumps through a portal. Samus decides to follow her through it and ends up on Dark Aether, a vile trans-dimensional duplicate of Aether, where she is attacked by a group of dark creatures called Ing, who capture Samus and after stealing the weapons from her suit, throw her back through the portal.Upon returning to Aether, Samus learns that the Marines were attacked and killed by Ing-possessed Splinters, and decides to enter a nearby alien temple structure to look for clues. When she reaches the structure, she meets U-Mos, the last remaining sentinel of the Luminoth, an alien race that have fought against the Ing for decades and are now on the verge of defeat. He tells Samus that after a meteor struck Aether, it created "Dark Aether", from which the Ing spawned. He also tells Samus that the Ing have taken virtually all of the 'Light of Aether', the entire collective planetary energy for Aether that keeps the planet stable, and begs her to retrieve it, for if either world gains control over all of this energy, the other will perish. To reclaim the parts of Aether's energy taken by the Ing, she makes use of an energy transfer module, which the Ing that possessed the Alpha Splinter she fought just before the structure just so happened to have.
Samus goes to three regionsthe Agon Wastes, a parched, rocky, desert wasteland region; Torvus Bog, a drenched swamp area that houses a partially submerged hydrosubstation; and the Sanctuary Fortress, a high-technology cliffside fortress built by the Luminoth filled with corrupted robots that serves as the Ing hive in Dark Aetherto retrieve the Light of Aether and return it to the Luminoth temples. Samus fights Space Pirates, Dark Samus, and monstrous Ing guardians on her mission. After Samus retrieves three pieces of the Light of Aether, she enters the Ing's Sky Temple and faces the Emperor Ing, the strongest Ing who guards the remaining Light of Aether. Samus defeats the creature and retrieves the last remaining energy, causing Dark Aether to become critically unstable and begin to collapse, but her path out of the temple's gateway is blocked by a horribly altered and unstable Dark Samus. After defeating her foe in the final battle, Samus is surrounded by a group of Warrior Ing desperate to save their world and their lives; she escapes to Aether through a newly revealed portal just before Dark Aether and the Ing disappear forever.
Returning to U-Mos, Samus finds that the Luminoth were in a state of hibernation but have now awakened. After a brief celebration, Samus leaves Aether in her repaired gunship. If the player completes the game with all of the items obtained, Dark Samus is shown reforming herself above Aether.
Development
After the success of Metroid Prime, Nintendo asked Retro Studios to produce a sequel. They decided against recycling the features of the first game, and instead used new sound models, weapon effects, and art designs. They also implemented the Screw Attack and wall jumping features seen in previous Metroid games, which were not incorporated in the first Prime due to time constraints. Another element considered for the previous game was the multiplayer component. Since the game was a first-person adventure and its deathmatch mode could not easily replicate other shooting games, Retro just tried to "make a multiplayer experience that fans of Metroid games would instantly know and recognise".The staff opted for a more immersive storyline, with more cut scenes and a plot that focused less on the Space Pirates and Metroids of other Metroid games. The theme of light and dark originated from "something that everyone understands: the conflict between good and evil". Senior designer Mike Wikan said: "We wanted a push and pull, the whole game is pushing and pulling you back and forth between the dark and the light. It ended up being that we wanted something that would feed into that dichotomy, that conflict between the two, and how the player's basic abilities reflect that". The developers sought advice from the producers of the Nintendo game The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, which also used the theme of parallel worlds.
For Dark Samus, Retro wanted to create a character that was similar to Samus and be the same size, as opposed to the enormous monsters of Metroid Prime. One inspiration was a boss battle in Metroid: Zero Mission, in which Samus fights a mirror image of herself. The developers considered Dark Samus a "natural choice" because it fit in well with the "dramatic feel of dark and light".
Whereas Metroid Prime was intended to familiarize players with the control scheme, Retro made Echoes more challenging. They targeted a more hardcore audience, making the player always worry about their health, and added more unique boss fights. Two bosses were made more difficult in the final days of development following a request by producer Kensuke Tanabe to "make it tighter". Wikan regretted this decision, and when adapting the game for compilation Metroid Prime: Trilogy took the opportunity to make those battles easier. Development was more difficult than the team had expected, and Retro president Michael Kelbaugh said: "We wanted to expand and add to the title, and not just slam out a sequel. Nintendo doesn't do things that way." Some features, such as a hidden version of Super Metroid, were canceled for lack of time. Tanabe later said that Echoes was only about thirty percent complete three months before the deadline Nintendo had set for a 2004 holiday release.
The music was composed by Kenji Yamamoto. The themes used for areas on Dark Aether are dark variations of the themes used for the same areas on Light Aether. Some remixes of music from the previous Metroid games were also used, with the escape theme being a remix of Metroids "Escape" theme, the "Hunters" multiplayer theme taking on Super Metroids "Upper Brinstar" theme, and the theme for the underwater Torvus region, the "Lower Brinstar" theme from the same game.