There is so much more that can be said of Metroid Prime: Echoes, yet now that the video is complete I find myself with a cavernous cranium. Thoughts and words have fled, and I am unable to grasp onto them.

There have been hardships which I shall cover in the next RambleLog, but on the whole this project has honestly been a great one despite the stress. I’ve found a new appreciation for the Metroid franchise as a whole and have learned quite a bit about its creation. It has only made the series that much more fascinating to me.

At the same time, it gives me some level of trepidation. I did not speak much of the Dark World in the video, and that is because it makes a bit of an anomaly. Without the Dark World, Echoes is a much smaller and shorter game. With the Dark World, its map design is complicated. A neat concept that makes back-tracking all the worse. There are theories that Metroid Prime 4 is going to implement time “travel”, thus being a sort of revisit to the Echoes design but with differing age states rather than a mere dark reflection.

This sort of reflective world had mixed results in Echoes. If you wish to achieve 100% item collection, you have to comb through each zone twice. I’d argue that it could be more, but I trust at this stage Nintendo will implement Samus Returns’ completion percentage per zone. This way it wouldn’t be as bad in Prime 4 as it can be in Echoes. Mirror-worlds can offer a lot in terms of engaging puzzle designs, but the constantly looping nature of Metroid could simply cause it to be tedious overall.

On the whole, though, I look forward to playing Echoes again sometime in the future. Just… not too soon in the future.