YMMV / Metroid Prime Trilogy

• Americans Hate Tingle: The Texas-developed Prime games had a great deal of critical acclaim in America, but were comparatively poorly received in Japan. This can probably be explained by how Japan doesn't hold the FPS genre in high regard. It should also be noted that the entire series is less popular and iconic in its native land than it is among American audiences, that it's less hatred and more apathy, and the games were still better-received than the Japan-oriented Metroid: Other M. That said, those Japanese fans who do like the Prime games hold them in very high regard.
• Annoying Video Game Helper: If you have hints turned on, expect to see a reminder about where you should go next appear every few minutes if you ding around too much. Fortunately they can be turned off and the hints only show the next point of interest without explicitly telling you how to get there, which is helpful for people that need a hint without having their hand held. Corruption, however, has AU 242 contacting you even more often than the usual suit or ship updates, and it cannot be deactivated.
• Applicability: One of the most common interpretations of the Metroid Prime games is that Phazon is an allegory for the battle with cancer, especially in Corruption where its adverse health effects on Samus are explored in often grotesque detail. Another interpretation says that Phazon is an allegory for highly-addictive dangerous drugs such as crystal meth; the colorful Power Crystals and Power High effects make it easy to see why.
• Best Level Ever: Phendrana Drifts in the first game, Sanctuary Fortress in the second, and Elysia in the third. Their beautiful sceneries and soundtracks, as well as the surprising variety of enemies and lore, are the reasons why most Metroid fans hold these particular places so dearly. The multi-themed planet Bryyo and the Chozo Ruins have their share of fans as well.
• Broken Base: The controls for all of the games have proven divisive as time goes on. For the first two games, fans debate over whether their original control schemes have aged poorly and compare unfavorably the more standard dual-analog controls used by modern console first-person shooters, or if they work just fine for first-person adventure games that emphasize exploration over combat. For the third game and the Wii Updated Re-release of the first two games, fans are divided as to whether their the motion controls are gimmicky, imprecise, and uncomfortable Waggle, or a prime example of how motion controls aren't necessarily Waggle and can truly enhance a game. A lot of this revolves around a hypothetical second Updated Re-release of the games, and whether it should retain the controls of the original 2 games as they are, use the motion control scheme, and/or overhaul them into a dual-analog control scheme. The remastered version of the first game would address this by including all of them, having the dual stick option by default and allowing motion controls and the original controls.
• Complete Monster:
  • Dark Samus, psychopathic yet cunning, is the primary villain of the trilogy, as a recurring boss in the second game and the Big Bad in the third. Starting off as the titular Metroid Prime in the first game, a Metroid vastly mutated by the substance Phazon, it is defeated by Samus and apparently killed, but uses one of her suits and DNA to reconstruct itself in her form with sapience. Now known as Dark Samus, she travels to the planet Aether to consume the Phazon on the planet and physically stabilize herself. She raids a Space Pirate colony on the planet and kills those in her way, and when Samus arrives on the planet, Dark Samus tries to have her killed at every given opportunity. Defeated and left for dead in a collapsing dimension, Dark Samus still survives and reforms in a Space Pirate ship, killing a third of the crew and forcing the rest under her control. She raids the G.F.S. Valhalla, kills its entire crew, and steals Aurora Unit 313 to control Phazon and the planet Phaaze. Dark Samus infects three planets with Phazon and almost infects a fourth, only stopped by Samus and three other bounty hunters. Dark Samus takes the opportunity to plant Phazon seeds inside the four of them, leading to the corruption and deaths of the other three. Samus herself almost succumbs to corruption while trying to defeat Dark Samus.
  • Hunters Gaiden Game: Gorea is a formless, ancient alien that millennia ago crashed on Alinos within the Alimbic Cluster. In the form of a perverse imitation of the Alimbics themselves, Gorea sets about massacring the entire race to drain their life energy and empower itself, scouring entire planets of life, turning the Alimbics' own weaponry against them, and devastating the Cluster. Fully intending on continuing its rampage to the rest of the galaxy for the sole sake of power, Gorea's actions wipe out the Alimbics before it's finally sealed away in the Oubliette. Craving freedom, Gorea initiates the entire plot of the game by tempting bounty hunters into the ruins of the Alimbic Cluster towards its seal—and, upon breaking out, drains the power out of all the other bounty hunters before turning its attention to Samus.
• Contested Sequel: Metroid Prime Hunters. Decent portable game with a great multiplayer or one of the worst entries in the series due to its clunky controls and weak single player campaign?
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Bloggs, if you happen to provoke more than one at once or cannot get directly in front of their charge, and to deal with them, you have stand directly in front of their charge and wait for the right moment, as they cannot be dodged or outran once they set their sights on you.
  • Any enemy in Corruption that goes into Hypermode. You can still fight them normally, but their defense and firepower skyrockets, forcing you to initiate your own Hypermode to match their power, and that is Cast from Hit Points, which means wasted energy tanks for a mook that had gone into Hypermode.
  • Of particular note in Corruption are the Phazon Hoppers, who are not so bad late in the game, but are possible to encounter when you have as few as two energy tanks and take at least seven missiles to kill if they don't enter Hypermode, which they probably will.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Rundas, the ice-based hunter from Corruption. With his cool voice, badass feats, and helpful rescue of Samus, he's very memorable from early on. And he makes a very creative boss fight with an awesome theme.
  • Of the eponymous hunters of Prime Hunters, it is Sylux who gets the most attention, mainly to the lack of gender-specific pronouns while addressing them, as well as their Mysterious Past and ill-will towards the Galactic Federation (and Samus by proxy). The most prevalent theories are that Sylux's ship, the Delano 7, is the one that follows Samus' gunship after the credits of the third game if you get 100% items completion (which has since been confirmed) and that Sylux is a woman just like Ms. Aran.
  • Admiral Dane seems to be gaining popularity, where he is generally considered a more likable commanding officer / employer than Adam. His Large Ham tendencies and being a Cool Old Guy helps. The Memetic Mutation surrounding his arrival on the Pirate homeworld and Memetic Badass that ensued as a result certainly help.
• Evil Is Cool: Dark Samus, thanks to her great design, incredible boss fights and credible threat level, is considered one of the most effective villains in the franchise, with only Ridley and Raven Beak generally being held in the same regard.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Many fans act like the plot of Hunters never happened. However, most are still willing to accept the existence of the cooler bounty hunters such as Sylux, Weavel, and Spire.
• Fandom Rivalry: Had one for a while with the Halo series, due to the Console Wars and the superficial similarity of being sci-fi FPSes whose main characters wore Powered Armor. Both sides accused each other of ripping the other off. Fortunately, it mostly subsided after people realized that the two series are actually really different, so there's little need for conflict.
• First Installment Wins: While Metroid Prime 2 and 3 are not bad at all nor disliked, the original game is much more esteemed and acclaimed.
• Game-Breaker: Hyper Mode in Corruption gives you near-invincibility and a huge firepower increase on demand. It is supposed to be balanced by the fact that each of Samus' attacks drain her own Energy Tanks, and there is a risk of corruption if you get reckless with it. However, there's nothing stopping you from using Hyper Mode only defensively (i.e. no shooting), then turning it off before you get corrupted, giving you about ten seconds of invincibility for free. And you can turn it on again immediately afterwards.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Much of the Japanese series' fanbase is based in America, which might be why the 3D revival of the series was given to an American development studio.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Among many other enemies, the titular entities certainly fall into this category, particularly in their last appearance in Metroid Prime before the final boss.
  • Phaazoids in Corruption. They aren't particularly tough, but they are rather annoying because their attacks can pass through walls and hit you even if you can't see them; they can only be defeated using hypermode, meaning wasting energy tanks every single time you fight them; and they have a tendency to respawn as soon as you enter the next room, whereas most enemies will wait until you're two rooms away before respawning.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Apparently, Retro Studios didn't think players would try to scan the projectiles from the Omega Pirate's cannons.
    This is an Elite Space Pirate
    Elite Space Pirate description 3
  • The Scan Dash, which lets you get the Space Jump as soon as you land on Tallon IV as well as an early Plasma Beam, and, when Meta-Ridley lands while his wings are still functional, a Boost Ball to the chest will ground him. These two were removed from the Player's Choice and Trilogy versions of Prime.
  • Though it's hilariously impractical, Metroid Prime can be damaged while in the "Power" form of its barriers without the Power Beam if you use the Plasma Beam-based Flamethrower on it.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: The brutal difficulty of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes was the source of many complaints.
• Memetic Badass: "Admiral Dane is so tough he can stand in acid rain and not get hurt". Note that he does this by using a spaceship as an umbrella.
• Memetic Mutation: See Memes.Metroid.
• Mis-blamed: Back before the game came out and everyone was bashing it for being an FPS, people laid the blame towards Retro Studios. However, the idea of making the game with a first-person perspective in fact came from Shigeru Miyamoto, of all people. Retro had at first planned to make the game third-person and had put a good amount of work into it before Miyamoto came along and said that it should be in first-person, because the thought that that viewpoint was best for games where your primary weapon is a gun. This forced Retro to scrap most of what they had done and start over, which no doubt contributed to the game's troubled production. Of course, then the game came out and proved to be amazing, so there was really no blame left to give out.
• My Real Daddy: After Metroid: Other M completely splintered the fanbase, there's a part of the fanbase who consider Retro Studios the better contributor to the series than Yoshio Sakamoto. This became more downplayed after his work producing both Metroid: Samus Returns and Metroid Dread.
• Narm:
  • This line from Corruption:
    GFS Soldier: The crisis is over!
  • During the final fight against Dark Samus in Corruption, one of her attacks includes spinning around with her Dark Echoes... and they are all stuck in a T-pose, which makes it look like a funny glitch where Dark Samus's animations have seemingly broken.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Prime's game over screens are the stuff nightmares are made of.
  • The scan of the Zoomer enemy from Hunters states that the ubiquitous little spiky bug is responsible for several outbreaks of flesh-eating disease across the sector, due to its habit of eating poo. Basically, Cabin Fever on a galactic scale.
• Padding: Aside from the Fetch Quest each game has at the end, the Crashed Pirate Frigate in Prime, which is packed with de-powered doors, each of which requires you to switch on the Thermal Visor and look for targets to shoot with the Wave Beam.
• Paranoia Fuel: On your way to the seeker missiles in Prime 3, you pass through a bunch of stasis tanks containing metroids, knowing full well that they may break free once you get the item.
• Player Punch: In the third game, having to kill the three other bounty hunters after they succumb to corruption.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: The first two games keep most of their lore and storytelling to optional scan logs so many players opt to ignore the fluff and just enjoy the atmosphere and exploration.
• Scrappy Mechanic: One-off scans. These are always irritating when searching for the fabled 100% completion, particularly when they're things you'd never expect or parts of bosses. Echoes improved things a little for bosses by telling you what percentage of the boss' scans you had, but still had a few easily-missed ones like the infamous Ing Webtrap. Corruption and all the Trilogy rereleases carry over scans from one playthrough to the next, alleviating some of the frustration.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: In addition to the series staple of "low item% runs", the games allow the HUD to be turned off, leading some to play the game without it and therefore unable to see their health, ammo, radar, etc.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Corruption was mistaken for this at first, being derided for being much easier than the first two games. It then turned out that this is because Corruption had three difficulty levels compared to the two difficulty levels of the first two games, with the new difficulty being an easier mode. The other two difficulty levels roughly map to the original two difficulty levels, despite the name changes. The Trilogy rerelease added the easy mode to the first two games as well and used a more consistent naming system, making their relative similarity in difficulty more apparent.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Echoes is considered harder than the other two because of the Dark Aether hazards, the difficult bosses, the vast array of puzzles (particularly those that involve the Morph Ball) and the more labyrinthic layout of the areas explored. The quest for the Sky Temple Keys near the end is also the most difficult Fetch Quest in the series, as it requires more backtracking than that of the Chozo Artifacts in the first game and the Energy Cells in the third (not counting the Octoliths in Hunters, whose collection already becomes the main priority since the beginning).
• Sequel Displacement: Due to the gap between the 2D Metroid games, the Metroid Prime series has gradually become the main image of the franchise for the new millennium. This was to the point that people had initially believed that it was a rip-off of the Halo series (despite the fact that the former series started in the Eighties).
• Special Effect Failure:
  • In the original NTSC version of Prime, the Sheegoth boss is introduced in a scene that makes Samus' model invisible so it can walk out into the room impressively. This works right up until the Sheegoth tries to attack the invisible Samus while the cutscene is still going on. Obviously it didn't get the memo.
  • There is a mirror in one of Chozo Ruins's rooms, which has a pixelated "reflection" of Samus. In reality, it's just a barely animated pre-rendered sprite. Then again, it could have been impressive when the GC version came out, but the freedom of movement the arm cannon has in the Trilogy rerelease makes it a bit too noticeable. The remastered version removes the effect entirely.
  • With the X-Ray visor equipped, you can see Samus' skeleton inside the Arm Cannon. However, the developers forgot to account for when the cannon recoils, so the bones clip outside of the cannon when you fire a charge shot.
• Tainted by the Preview: Gamers were, to put it lightly, very skeptical when the first previews of Prime were released. Many believed that Metroid gameplay simply would not work in 3D, especially with a first-person viewpoint, and even more especially with a relatively new, untested developer like Retro Studios putting it together. Almost nobody believed this could possibly turn out well. Once the game was actually released, though, it shot straight up to the top of the ranks in both quality and popularity, and is still very favorably received.
• Tear Jerker: In Corruption, being forced to fight and kill your Phazon-corrupted bounty hunter friends.
• That One Achievement: In Corruption, keeping all your partners alive in the escort mission can be difficult because they tend to die quickly.
• That One Boss:
  • The Shadow Drone miniboss in Prime is a Troll of the highest degree. It's invisible so it can't be locked onto, has quite a bit more health than the regular Sentry Drones, and comes at the end of a rather large and arduous Checkpoint Starvation gauntlet, fought just before the Save Point. It also can't be scanned, which is a bit harsher than it sounds since many new players would draw the fight out trying to scan it, only to die and restart all the way back at the start of the Phazon Mines. Mercifully however, if you did a certain puzzle for the Wavebuster before tackling the Mines, then the Shadow Drone (and all of the annoying Wave Pirates beforehand) becomes a complete joke.
  • Hilariously enough, the Pirate Commander is one of the easiest bosses on lower difficulties and one of the hardest bosses on Hypermode difficulty. Worse yet, if you lose you have to do the Escort Mission over again.
• That One Level:
  • Phendrana Drifts in Prime and Torvus Bog in Echoes count for some. The lowest level in Phazon Mines in Prime may count as well; it depends on the player's skill and how quickly it occurs to them to turn on the Thermal Visor, though it also depends if they're playing the EU version where it's impossible to avoid being damaged by the security drones. Metroid Prime Trilogy making the first two games a bit easier fixes the problem all around.
  • The Crashed Frigate in Prime has irritating enemies, numerous 'door energizing' puzzles, a massive water area with no warning that you need the Gravity Suit until after you fall down the Reactor Core, necessitating a very long platforming sequence with clumsy controls just to get out.
  • New Arrival Registration and Tetra Vista sections of Celestial Archives in Metroid Prime Hunters. You have to cross it at least twice, is full of falls that only leads to certain death (what did you expect?! It's SPACE) and know what else is worse? The second time you will cross it is when you return from the boss fight, with a countdown to haunt you. Good luck for you.
  • The first trip through the Phazon Mines in Prime 1 is commonly called "The Gauntlet", due to the fact that it is a LONG stretch of level with no save points, filled with the new Beam Pirates. The Wave Pirates, in particular, are strong and take way too many shots to kill, and the doors lock when you face them. Compounding this are not one but TWO minibosses that must be fought, the Phazon Elite Pirate and the Shadow Drone, the latter being a VERY annoying boss that can't be locked-onto. A very hard section, that takes nearly an hour to complete, with no Save Stations. Gauntlet, indeed.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • What every fan's reaction was when Metroid Prime was shown to be a FPS type game. Nowadays, only a Vocal Minority will still shout the trope name.
  • Including multiplayer for Metroid Prime 2 and making Metroid Prime Hunters focus more on multiplayer had many fans up in arms.
  • When Trilogy was released, it was shown that the particle effects when you charged your beam before firing was removed from the game. Word of God states that it was too buggy to make it work correctly due to the new control scheme allowing players to move the arm cannon in many angles (Primes 1 and 2 had the arm cannon move very little, which was what the particle effects were coded on). Of course, fans complained about the change. It didn't help that similar effects for the Light and Dark Beams in Echoes remained in the Trilogy re-release, making people wonder why they were able to keep those in but not the ones from Prime.
  • The PAL version of Metroid Prime fixed several glitches that allowed players to exploit them for Sequence Breaking and it also nerfed the Wavebuster on Meta Ridley, which was overpowered in the NSTC version. Many people didn't like the changes due to said changes making speed running more difficult and the Trilogy re-release was based on the PAL version as well. The producer behind the trilogy apparently requested Retro Studios to squash sequence breaking.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The eponymous hunters from Metroid Prime Hunters would have been a lot more memorable if their backstories actually had any impact on the main plot.
• Tough Act to Follow: Along with Super Metroid, the Prime trilogy served as this to Metroid: Other M, which was compared negatively to both of its predecessors.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: Gandrayda is a pink alien who looks unsettling due to her creepy humanoid appearance.
• Win Back the Crowd:
  • The announcement of Metroid Prime 4 for the Nintendo Switch at Nintendo's 2017 E3 presentation. After the disappointment and backlash the Metroid fanbase unleashed at Federation Force, along with the backlash at Other M, a lot of people were convinced Metroid was done for as a franchise. But the Metroid Prime 4 teaser (along with the 3DS remake of Metroid II: Return of Samus) restored a lot of people's hope in the franchise.
  • The release of Metroid Prime 4 was however restarted in 2019, with very little updates provided to fans about its development. During a Nintendo Direct at E3 2021, the game was mentioned in passing, before revealing the long-rumored and fabled Metroid Dread, signaling newfound hope for the series. A few years later during the February 2023 Nintendo Direct, Nintendo shadowdropped a remastered version of the first Prime game, which was also rumored for years, and was praised for being more than just a simple graphical overhaul. This release is believed to help tie the game closer to the eventual release of Metroid Prime 4.

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