This is the Trivia page for Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. See here for the entire Prime Trilogy's Trivia page.
- Absurdly Short Production Time: The developers took 18 months to fully develop and release the game.
- Christmas Rushed: Caused by having an already set release date and Retro Studios getting too ambitious (for starters, they decided not to recycle any assets from the first game), with 70% of the game being done in just three months.
- Creator Backlash:
- In a 2018 interview, Jack Matthews, Echoes' technical lead, said that the multiplayer was greatly simplified from his original vision, with many planned features cut due to time constraints, and that what was left probably shouldn't have been included with the game at all since it took development time away from the single-player, which he thought was the real point of Metroid.
- Senior designer Mike Wikan said
that he regretted causing the two cases of That One Boss, Boost Guardian and Spider Guardian, at the suggestion of one of the Japanese producers - "Tanabe-san really fought for it, 'we need to make it tighter', and we were like 'no it's already too tight'. We made it tighter and it turned out to be too tight, right?" - and so when it was time to update the games for Prime Trilogy, he made the battles easier, with Kensuke Tanabe agreeing that it was a necessary change.
- Dueling Works: Came out the same month as Halo 2, another sequel to a highly acclaimed shooter that saw the developer choking on ambitions and time constraints. This was definitely a factor in Echoes underperforming (it's the only game in the Prime trilogy that didn't reach a million units sold).
- Dummied Out: Several planned enemies were ultimately scrapped. Among them was a Darkling variant of the Sporbs, which technically appears despite being scrapped as the Power Bomb Guardian.
- Refitted for Sequel: In an interview with audio lead Clark Wen, it was revealed that Dark Samus's voice clips are derived from unused voice recordings for Samus from the first Metroid Prime game.
- Viral Marketing: First, there were two viral promo sites: "Orbis Labs", a weapons-designer creating a "battle sphere" which soldiers could roll up into (which was stated to be unsuitable for male body types), and "Channel 51", a conspiracy-theory site from "Samantha Manus" of "Sumas, WA" investigating alien footage which consisted of blurred-up clips from the game. A third, "Athena Astronautics", which advertised sending women into space, offered job positions for bounty hunters - 25 people who replied to the offer received a copy of Echoes as an "interactive training manual". Those who went to the other three could earn access secreth fourth one, Luminoth Temple.
- What Could Have Been: Due to expanded creative freedom from Nintendo but also harsher time constraints, there is a plethora of unused content and ideas for Echoes.
- Lead technical engineer Jack Mathews claimed the team wanted to better differentiate the Light and Dark Aether versions of each location, but they ran out of time. Because of this, the Sanctuary Fortress and Ing Hive are the only two areas that are really that different.
- Charge Combos were planned to be usable in Morph Ball - they would've used Power Bombs instead of Missiles.
- There was a plan to have both a Dark Luminoth enemy and a boss fight with an incarnation of Ridley called “Dark Ridley”. The former was scrapped because it made no sense In-Universe; a Luminoth would rather self-terminate than allow itself to be controlled by the Ing. As for the latter, Dark Ridley has an unused theme on the disk, which has been uploaded to YouTube. It was possibly only serving as a placeholder, however, because it’s his theme from Metroid Prime slowed to half speed and put through some filters to create an echo effect. Nonetheless, it suggests that a similar tune would have been used had his boss fight made it into the game.
- Text describing a "Morph Ball Racing" multiplayer mode can be found in the game, but Jack Mathews said it was scrapped because it wasn't very exciting.
- Super Metroid was going to be an unlockable extra similar to how the original Metroid was in Prime. It was cut due to time constraints.
- There were some differences in the promotional demo versions of Echoes:
- Aether is shown with a sun and a moon in its sky. In the final game, Aether is a moonless Rogue Planet.
- There is leftover data for the arm of a Space Pirate in the place of Samus' first-person arm cannon model, which was for a scrapped multiplayer mode in which Space Pirates were playable.
- Early plans for Echoes were very different from the final game, initially built on Retro wanting to distance themselves from the horrorshow production of Metroid Prime, creating a less intensive Bottle Episode to be made with fewer assets in a shorter period of time (described as how if Prime was Metroid's Ocarina of Time, this would be its Majora's Mask). An early pitch for the game called Metroid 1.5, written by level designer Tony Giovannini, detailed possible ideas for the game: immediately following the end of the first game, Samus' ship would be sucked up into a massive alien warship that would be the setting for the rest of the game, featuring aliens in cryostasis being bred for war, a malfunctioning AI with split personalities that either sought to help or hurt Samus, a gameplay mechanic where time can flow backwards and/or the gravity of a room can be altered, many different enemy types, plans for an "Ancient Chozo Robot Battle" multiplayer mode (where the players roll up into the chestplate of ancient robots and use them to battle), the appearance of other bounty hunters, and more. Some of these ideas were revisited in later games, such as the sleeping aliens (repurposed as the slumbering Luminoth), other bounty hunters appearing in Metroid Prime: Hunters and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, and using ancient war golems via Morph Ball in Corruption.
- Word of God: Lead Designer Mike Wikan revealed in a September 2021 interview that the Luminoth written language is based off of the bulbous shapes of their hands and fingers and the hand gestures they make to communicate with each other.
