For a game that has a lot of backtracking, and a lot of rooms you will be going through four or five times or more, things can get a bit predictable over time. There will occasionally be triggered events that change things, but nine times out of ten when you travel through a room that you have already been to it has the same enemies spawning in the exact same locations as before. Meanwhile, most every room that you travel through in the Metroid Prime trilogy is fairly static. We have seen the rise of procedurally generated gameplay over the last ten years or so, and even games that don’t use it still try to make their moment to moment interactions feel more varied and dynamic. Metroid Prime is an amazing game, but it does feel a little bit dated in some ways in 2020. Sometimes franchises change for the better, and it’s not bad to mix things up, but in this case I really feel like the first Metroid Prime had not just the best world of the three, but the one that was most true to the definitive Metroid experience II would love to see Metroid Prime 4 go back to this deep and interconnected way of exploring. And Metroid Prime 3 almost completely moved away from the interconnectedness by taking place on many different planets, with the only way to travel between them being Samus’ ship. Metroid Prime 2 had a single planet location with connections between the areas, but the connections were limited, and outside of connections to a hub section, usually not related to the way you progressed through the game itself, but existed more as an optional way to quickly travel back to previous locations to look for more missile and health upgrades. Unfortunately, the sequels fell further and further away from this ideal. This, for me, is the ideal Metroid experience. Heck, the Magmoor Caverns basically have connections to every other area. But by the time I had the required upgrades needed to get into the crashed frigate, I was arriving at it from a completely different direction, using an elevator I found hiding behind a save station in the Chozo Ruins that brought me to a clifftop near the frigate. For example, early in the game you find the wreckage of the intro section frigate in the Tallon Overworld area. I would often leave an area only to arrive back in it in a completely different place, opening up a lot more of the map than I originally suspected existed in the process. Aside from the space frigate intro segment, which worked well to get players accustomed to the controls and general gameplay mechanics, the rest of the game played out on a single planet, where each of the areas had several connections to the others, and in the natural progression of the game you never quite knew where you would end up next. The original Metroid Prime nailed the world design.
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