Video Game / Metroid Prime Trilogy

Please note that this page and links to it are meant to cover the sub-series as a whole. The link titled Metroid Prime is only for the first game.

"The Hunter has made planet-fall."

"Evil must be destroyed. But first, it must be found."

— Tagline for Metroid Prime

An offshoot of the main Metroid series, Metroid Prime is the name given to installments of the franchise that mix its traditional Metroidvania gameplay with First-Person Shooter elements, with Nintendo billing the combination as "First-Person Adventure" due to combat being downplayed in favor of the franchise's usual puzzle-solving and exploration. The subseries consists of three (eventually four) main games and several sidestories that together serve as an expanded Interquel between the events of Metroid and Metroid II: Return of Samus.

Games in the Metroid Prime series

• Metroid Prime (GameCube, 2002)
  • Metroid Prime Pinball (Nintendo DS, 2005; pinball adaptation)
  • Metroid Prime Remastered (Nintendo Switch, 2023; Updated Re-release)
• Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (GameCube, 2004)
• Metroid Prime: Hunters (DS, 2006)
• Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (Wii, 2007)
• Metroid Prime Trilogy (Wii, 2009; Compilation Re-release)
• Metroid Prime: Federation Force (3DS, 2016)
• Metroid Prime 4 (Nintendo Switch, TBA)

The plot of the original trilogy involves a radioactive mutagen called Phazon that arrives on mysterious comets and wreaks havoc on planetary environments. Series protagonist Samus Aran spends these titles trying to stop the Phazon from turning various planets into dead husks, while at the same time, her Space Pirate enemies are trying to exploit the mutagen for their own evil plans, much like they did with the Metroids before.

Prime 1 has Samus disrupting Space Pirate activity on Tallon IV, where Samus' Chozo guardians had a second home and from which they have since vanished thanks to a Phazon comet crashing on the planet and corrupting it. Echoes sees a similar comet landing on a planet named Aether, which is split into two worlds as a result of the crash, with Samus helping what remains of the native inhabitants save their world while also dealing with a new nemesis known as Dark Samus, an alter ego who's fueled by Phazon, resulting in major clashes between her and the Space Pirates. Corruption concludes the arc by having the Space Pirates manipulated by Dark Samus into finding the original source of Phazon and assaulting the Galactic Federation with a multi-pronged attack; Samus must now venture to multiple planets and space vessels to eradicate Dark Samus and the threat of Phazon once and for all, while being under its influence herself. The trilogy saw critical acclaim, with the first Prime game reigning as the most financially successful Metroid game for a whopping nineteen years until it was overtaken by Metroid Dread.

These games received a Compilation Re-release on the Wii entitled Metroid Prime Trilogy in 2009, featuring numerous updates including Corruption-style controls for the first two games, a widescreen aspect ratio, improved lighting and textures, and a token reward system. Many of the sequence breaks from the first two games were also removed for the collection. Metroid Prime Trilogy would later be re-released on the Wii U eShop in 2015.

The series also features two multiplayer entries: Hunters and Federation Force. Hunters takes place between Prime and Echoes and is disconnected from the Phazon storyline. Instead, the game details a telepathic message from another galaxy about "the secret to ultimate power," with Samus and six other Bounty Hunters answering it for all their own reasons. Federation Force takes place after the events of Corruption and deals with the aftermath of the Phazon crisis. No longer able to take advantage of the mutagen, the Space Pirates have taken to using technology on themselves and their attack animals to replicate its more beneficial effects as they operate in the Bermuda System, while the Federation counters by giving their soldiers giant mech suits in order to stop them. Both titles received mixed reception from longtime series fans; Hunters for being an obvious attempt to win over the Halo crowd and Federation Force for being the first game to remove Samus Aran from a playable role, having the player take control of one of four soldiers in a squadron instead.

Metroid Prime is often considered Nintendo's premiere Western series post-Rare (who had been the primary developers of Nintendo's western output until their acquisition by Microsoft), both due to Metroid's overall popularity in the region and because every installment in the Prime sub-series has so far been handled by a Western developer. All the main, numbered entries in the series are developed by Texas, USA-based Retro Studios. Metroid Prime Pinball, a pinball adaptation of the first game, was developed by Oxfordshire, England-based Fuse Games. Hunters was developed by the Washington, USA-based Nintendo Software Technology, an in-house development team at Nintendo of America. And finally, Federation Force was developed by British Columbia, Canada-based Next Level Games.

In 2017, Metroid Prime 4 was announced as entering development for the Nintendo Switch, ten years after the release of the last numbered entry. The title was originally being produced by an unknown, new development team^note (with many sources claiming it to be the Singapore branch of Bandai Namco) before development troubles had Nintendo publicly announce in early 2019 that they'd be restarting the project from scratch and returning the reins to Retro Studios. Meanwhile, after being rumored for years, the original Metroid Prime was rereleased on the Switch as Metroid Prime Remastered, being a full graphical overhaul of the game while also adding in QOL features such as multiple control schemes.

And for players not deterred by Emulation, there is PrimeHack, a fan-created modded version of the Dolphin emulator that allows for all versions of the original trilogy to be played with WASD controls and mouse aim like a traditional PC First Person Shooter, or with a 2-stick controller that modern players would more likely be used to, as well as adding other Anti-Frustration Features like skippable cutscenes.

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This videogame sub-series provides examples of:

# to C

• 100% Completion: Obvious as these are Metroid games, but notably this is now impossible to achieve legitimately in Corruption and Trilogy if you started a new game at any time after June 2013. Each of those games requires the player to trade friend vouchers over the internet... and the servers are now shut down. The only way around this is to download other players' 100% save files from gaming sites onto your SD card. If for whatever reason you cannot or choose not to... hope you can live without a bobblehead of your Mii on Samus' dashboard.
• Actionized Sequel: Echoes upped the difficulty and frequency of combat sequences, and added more boss fights, as opposed to just one major boss per area in the first game. Corruption's new control scheme and addition of hypermode further contributed to increased combat sequences.
• Alternate Company Equivalent: Phazon is more-or-less Nintendo's version of Tiberium, both being crystalline, mutagenic Toxic Phlebotinum spread as a Hostile Terraforming weapon that triggers a religious ardour in the antagonist faction (starting from Echoes, we have pirates who are seized by "phazon fever" and covet the stuff, and by Corruption they outright worship it).
• Ambiguous Robots: Meta Ridley qualifies, as there's little to indicate how much of him is still living and how much is robotic; the only visible organic parts are some muscles on his legs and arms, and the gums and tongue in his mouth. By the end of Corruption, he's healed enough that his new flesh is beginning to push out some of the robotic parts on other sections of his body. Also, while it is difficult to take a close look at him in Prime since he's trying to kill you most of the time, his model in Super Smash Bros. Brawl depicts many areas of his body that are still organic, such as the top of his head. He also gets an upgrade in the final Leviathan seed, making him Omega Ridley.
• Antagonist Title: Metroid Prime is the final boss of Metroid Prime. Through its evolution into Dark Samus, it lives on as a major antagonist and Final Boss in Echoes and the Big Bad and final boss of Corruption.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • In Prime, attempting to navigate an obstacle that looks passable but actually isn't (such as a barely-out-of-reach ledge underwater without the Gravity Suit) a few times will bring up a prompt telling you to come back later with the proper powerup. There is also the Hint System in all three games; if you spend a long time dinking around and wandering, a prompt will appear and mark on your map your next destination. This can be disabled if you find it distracting, or want to find out where to go on your own.
  • The New Play Control! re-release in Japan and the Metroid Prime Trilogy collection overseas added a New Game Plus feature that retains your log entries in each playthrough, allowing players to no longer fear of losing their log entries entirely if they need to start over to scan something they missed the first time.
  • The Metroid Prime Trilogy version retroactively adds the Spring Ball to Prime and Echoes once you pick up the bombs, taking a lot of the hassle out of Morph Ball segments.
  • If you go into Morph Ball mode during boss fights and revert to normal form, Samus will automatically face the boss so you can start attacking right away.
• Apocalyptic Log: Various lore scans. At various parts in all three games, the apocalypse described by the Pirate logs is Samus herself, as she rips through their forces, and generally leaves a wake of destruction and death. Played for Laughs in part of Echoes, when the Pirates realize they have not one but two Samuses attacking them.
• The Artifact: Shooting doors to open them was breaking the lock/door. The visuals contradict the handwave. Echoes introduces a new Handwave, claiming the doors are protected by low-power energy shields, designed to be deactivated by weapons fire, to prevent the local fauna from opening them.
• Artifact Title:
  • Only the first game mentions "Metroid Prime" by name. Samus does encounter its evolved form, Dark Samus, in the second and third games, but neither of those games mentions the relationship (or indeed, anything else about Metroid Prime). Federation Force and 4 play it straight, as the Metroid Prime in all its forms is definitively dead as of 3.
  • The word "Trilogy" to describe the series as a whole is also outdated since the reveal of 4, and there are spin-offs such as Pinball, Hunters, and Federation Force.
• Art Evolution:
  • Happens to the Space Pirates in between each game - there are no two games where they look alike. The changes are sometimes so drastic that it implies they're all different races.
  • Samus's Power Suit and Gunship design also change between each game, most notable in the jump from Prime to Prime 2. Samus herself also goes through an art evolution in each installment, appearing grounded and realistic at first before becoming more anime to better resemble her Zero Mission look.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence:
  • In the first game, it is implied that the Chozo did this. And then got pulled back by the Phazon meteor landing on Tallon IV.
  • Same thing seems to have happened to the Alimbic in Hunters, though they semi-inexplicably show up in the game's ending so Samus can wave at them. Interestingly, lore indicates that Gorea descended from an ascended state to a physical one just so it could destroy the Alimbic.
• Awesome, but Impractical
  • Most of the charged missile attacks from the first two games, aside from the Super Missile. Overlaps with Not Completely Useless, as they are often only useful in very specific circumstances. Particularly in 2 because you're not just drawing down your missile reserves but also your ammo types as well. Every Charge Combo beyond the Super Missles requires a tribute of 5 missiles as well as 30 shots of that polarity. So, yes, if you're going to unleash the Sonic Boom, you're going to be out 30 ammo of both types when you unload your reality-breaking wall of sound. Destructive, yes, but equally as costly.
  • Prime: The Super Missile was useful most of the time. The Wavebuster was good for robots and parts of the Ridley fight. The Ice Spreader was effective when the Final Boss was in ice mode and was weak to it. The Flamethrower was almost completely useless until Trilogy's new controls were used.
  • Echoes: The Sunburst: It becomes available too late to be useful, as you've already acquired the Power Bombs, which do pretty much the same thing with a higher radius of destruction and a faster release.
  • Most of the Phazon weapons in Corruption aren't very useful compared to the standard Hyper Beam. Even the super strong Hyper Missile doesn't home in on enemies like other missiles, yet it costs a hell of a lot of Phazon (though this can also work in your favor during corruption), and is relatively slow to fire compared to the rapid fire of the Hyper Beam. The Hyper Ball is a little bit like the Wavebuster, but it's just not quite strong enough to justify using in most cases. The Hyper Grapple comes too late in the game and is used very situationally, but it does have one useful function: on Phaaze, you can use it on Phaz-Ing to deplete your corruption level.
• Backtracking: As the exploration element is as strong as in any 2D Metroid title, the Prime series will make you backtrack to find keys to the final boss (though there are hints provided). In general, this sub-series is the de facto face of this trope as upwards of half of normal gameplay is solely this trope. Corruption lessened the problem by making more than half the keys optional and allowing you to find them through normal play.
• Bag of Spilling: Justified in Prime and Echoes: in the first game, Samus's power suit is badly damaged while escaping from the Pirate Frigate, deactivating or destroying all of her upgrades. In Echoes, the Ing ambush her and steal a large number of her upgrades, forcing her to track down and kill the Guardians that took them to get them back. Averted and played straight in Corruption, where you start with a number of upgrades, but still have to find new copies of ones you had at the end of Echoes.^note In that case, it's possible that returning to her Varia Suit at the end of Echoes also disabled all of the Luminoth tech she had acquired, along with other upgrades.
• Bait-and-Switch Boss:
  • Done twice in Echoes. You fight two boss-versions of two enemies, called the Alpha Splinter and Alpha Sandigger. However, they get possessed by the Ing a few minutes into the battle, becoming the Dark Alpha Splinter and Bomb Guardian respectively.
  • Another one from Hunters. During the escape sequence after beating the first Arcterra boss, you run into a Guardian, who just love to ambush you during escapes. However, in just one second after it appears, a hunter, Trace, kills it and proceeds to attack you.
• Barrier Change Boss:
  • Both forms of Prime's final boss, and the first form of Gorea from Hunters. Gorea and Metroid Prime's first phase each cycle between colors, with each one indicating the beam they're currently vulnerable to. The second form of Metroid Prime switches between being visible in different visors periodically.
  • The Quad CM and Ingsmasher from Echoes are a non-boss example. The two use shields that shift between light and dark modes, each being weak to their respective opposites or the Annihilator Beam.
  • Emperor Ing's final form also switches between being weak to the Light Beam and weak to the Dark Beam.
• Batman Can Breathe in Space:
  • Ridley in Prime. He actually manages to one-up this by flying directly from an orbiting space frigate to Tallon IV,^note an impossible feat, considering that space has no air molecules to push against in flight, though his "flight" may have been powered by his mechanical parts, with the wing flapping as just muscle memory, surviving re-entry in the process.
  • The Phazon Metroids in Corruption are also able to survive in space.
• The Battle Didn't Count
  • Dark Samus in Echoes, the Hunters in Hunters, Ridley in Corruption.
  • In Dark Samus's case, getting her health bar depleted does at least prevent her from manifesting her physical body for a time, though it does nothing to prevent her from regenerating and growing stronger before the next fight.
• Battle Tops: Echoes has the Quad drones as well as the Quadraxis boss battle, which can curl up into spinning top shapes. The former can only be stopped by bashing into them using the Boost Ball, the latter is difficult to stop but can be if you spam beams at its legs. Noxus from Hunters has his Alt-form, the Vhoscythe. It's a Battle Top that can swing around a massive blade.
• Big Bad: Meta Ridley and Metroid Prime in the first game, Gorea in Hunters, the Ing led by Emperor Ing in Prime 2, and Dark Samus in Prime 3. Meta Ridley and Dark Samus are the only ones to appear in person more than one time (i.e. at any point before the final series of boss battles). Metroid Prime/Dark Samus serves as the Big Bad of the whole trilogy.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • In Metroid Prime, the corruption has stopped spreading on Tallon IV, but Samus' actions have created Dark Samus. She also mourns the destruction of the Chozo Temple, which was their last great work. The game ends with her just sadly staring at the smoking ruins of it.
  • In Echoes, Samus succeeds in destroying Dark Aether, but by this point the Federation marines she had been sent to rescue are dead, the Luminoth species has been reduced to but a few individuals, and, unknown to her, Dark Samus has survived and is in perfect position to set its plan in motion, leading to the events of the sequel.
  • Corruption has the most positive ending out of all games in the trilogy, with the revived Dark Samus being destroyed and the Phazon threat being gone for good. However, Samus has been forced to put three of her fellow hunters out of their misery, and is shown grief-stricken as she reminisces about them in the next to last cutscene. The game then concludes by showing that Sylux (in his ship) had been stalking her for a while, suggesting he is up to no good.
• Blackout Basement
  • Removing some power sources or upgrades releases captured Metroids and shuts off the lights. The Space Pirate Base in Phendrana is an excellent example from Prime. Corruption has the abandoned GFS Valhalla.
  • The atmosphere turns dim when you fight Chozo Ghosts. The first time, it is terrifying.
• Blade Below the Shoulder: In all three games, Pirate Troopers have wrist-mounted bayonets. In the third, it's a stubby little thing with two blades. In 1 and 2, they're sword-sized, saw-edged "energy scythes".
• Body Horror:
  • Phazon and the Ing, particularly in logs of victims. The already horrific Metroid Prime also suffers this when Samus overloads it with Phazon, causing it to multiply out of control until it's some blob thing, which then explodes.
  • There is also the Space Pirate Log on their attempts to reverse engineer Samus's Morph Ball, which goes horribly wrong.
  • Samus herself suffers from this in Corruption. By the end one of her eyes is completely black, the other one is fully glowing blue, and a Phazon vein can be seen in the middle of her face.
• Bonus Feature Failure: Trilogy kept the friend voucher system from Corruption... but made it so that you could only trade with friends who had Trilogy. With it being a limited-edition release, you can imagine what a bad idea this was. On June 2013, the servers for this feature were shut down, meaning that if you haven't received 15 vouchers in Corruption and Trilogy by now, you never will.
• Book Ends:
  • The series of lore entries you find scattered across Elysia. Chronologically, the last entry ("Defeat") ends with the same two sentences that the first one ("Creators") started with:
  I am Elysian, descendant of both the Chozo and the First. I am facing the last moments of my life and transferring my memories into the data pod.
  • The final battle against Emperor Ing takes place in the Dark Aether version of the same room where you fought the Dark Alpha Splinter at the start of the game.
• Boss Remix:
  • The boss theme for Final Form Dark Samus in Echoes is a remix of the escape theme from the original Metroid.
  • The boss themes for Amorbis in Echoes and the Arctic and Fire Spawn were remixed from the Parasite Queen's theme. On that note, the Parasite Queen's theme bears strong similarities to Mother Brain's theme in Super Metroid.
  • The Chykka Larva theme from Echoes was remixed for the fight with Gandrayda in Corruption.
  • Quadraxis' theme is a remixed Ing battle theme.
  • When Metroid Prime's second form first appears a dark remix of the original Metroid theme plays.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Super Missiles, compared to the other charge combos. It is also required to beat the games (as it is used to blow up locks), the other beam combos are not.
  • The whole Power Beam becomes this in Echoes due to the other beams' limited ammo.
• Bottomless Pits: There are no such pits in Prime. In Hunters falling into a bottomless pit was instant death, and for Echoes and Corruption you merely respawn where you fell at the cost of some energy.
• Breath Weapon: Besides Ridley (since he is a Space Dragon): Metroid Prime, Sheegoths, and the Parasite Queen.
• Broad Strokes: While Sakamoto respects Retro's efforts with the trilogy, and sees them as good side-story games overall, he didn't take them into account when writing Metroid: Other M. This is later rectified in Metroid: Samus Returns where Meta Ridley, called Proteus Ridley in that game, invades SR388 to snatch the last Metroid hatchling, making the trilogy (quadrilogy in the case of Metroid Prime 4) canon to the franchise all along.
• Bullfight Boss: Numerous bosses in the series, including the Plated Beetle, (Dark) Alpha Splinter, and Alpha Blogg have charge attacks you need to avoid, and the Plated Beetle is only vulnerable from behind, so avoiding its charge attacks is necessary to kill it.
• Bubblegloop Swamp: Torvus Bog, and a good part of the Tallon Overworld.
• Camera Lock-On: An in-game function when you aim. Corruption and the Wii rerelease of the first two allows free movement with the arm cannoning while aiming.
• Call-Forward: Both instances appear:
  • Scanning the first Metroid will reveal the information of its home planet, SR388. Metroid II: Return of Samus takes place on the planet.
  • When Dark Samus knocks out Samus and her 3 allies, she remains in a coma for one month and her Varia Suit has to be altered in the meantime for Samus to use Hypermode. In Metroid Fusion, Samus loses consciousness after being infected by an X parasite. Both suit alterations occur when she is unconscious and must have surgery that alters her suit.
• Charged Attack: The Phazon Beam in Echoes requires you to absorb Phazon particles that Dark Samus shoots at you to use. The other beams in the series can be charged manually at anytime.
• Checkpoint Starvation
  • The Phazon Mines. There's a save station, near the entrance. Better use it, 'cuz it's the last one you'll see for a long time. Getting to the next one requires you to run a gauntlet of shadow troops, mega turrets, wave and ice troopers, and two mini boss battles against an elite pirate and a cloaked drone. The drone battle is especially cruel, as it ambushes you right outside the next save station, which is blocked by debris. The only way to clear away the rubble, is with a power bomb: earned by beating the drone then navigating an electric mini maze.
  • In all, it'll take you about half an hour or more of nonstop fighting and puzzle solving to get from that first save station to the next one. And if you die, at any point along the way, you get to do it all over again.
  • In the submerged part of Torvus Bog, you have to open three locks to gain access to the lowest levels, where the Gravity Boost (and the Alpha Blogg) is. Opening the last lock makes it impossible to get to the save station without the Gravity Boost...and the Alpha Blogg is right between the Gravity Boost and the save station.
  • Phaaze in Corruption is a point of no return (and the game even warns you as such); however, if you make it to the final bosses and die, you're able to restart from there instead of back at the beginning of the planet.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • In the first game, early on, you can scan lore in the Artifact Temple that discusses Chozo statuary, ending in the line: Those who destroy them will feel our wrath, unfettered and raw. Much later, Ridley finds out exactly what that entails.
  • In Echoes there is an active portal in the Hall of Honored Dead. You can't reach it, and scans say it is unstable anyway. After the showdown in the Sky Temple Gateway (the Dark Aether version of this room), a wall of Phazon collapses revealing the still active portal. This is the portal that Samus then uses to escape.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience
  • In Prime, there are the Beam Troopers ^note in Power, Wave, Ice, and Plasma flavors, to match your beam weapons, the Fission Metroids, and Metroid Prime. Their current color is the color of the only weapon type that can harm them.
  • The doors are colored based on what is needed to open them.
  • In Echoes and Corruption, scanned items are like this - red or blue depending on importance, and then green once scanned.
• Continuity Nod
  • The remixed music found throughout the Prime games. Tallon Overworld's first theme is a remix of the first Metroid's Brinstar, Tallon Overworld's second theme is a remix of Green Brinstar, Magmoor Caverns is a remix of Lower Norfair, Hydrodynamo Station is a remix of Red Brinstar/Maridia, Berserker Lord Battle is Arachnus-X Battle, Pirate Homeworld is Crateria, and the Multiplayer is Green Brinstar. Not to mention several of the usual Leitmotifs.
  • A particularly hilarious Continuity Nod is in two of the GF Troopers' Logs. The first one complains about another Trooper raving on about how Samus destroyed an entire planet of Space Pirates, claiming it to be lies. You can later read the log of the Trooper who was praising Samus's feats, saying Samus would be in the thick of the fight.
• Continue Your Mission, Dammit!: Aside from the optional Hint system present in all three games if left active, a minor example in Corruption: When Ghor starts attacking Samus's ship you'll continually get messages from the ship informing you of how the ship is taking more and more damage and you need to hurry. In actuality, you can take all the time you need to get back to the ship and it won't be any more or less damaged than if you got there as fast as possible.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Averted. Without the Varia Suit, Samus will take damage from simply entering an area that has lava. This only applies to Prime, as Samus keeps the Varia Suit throughout the rest of the trilogy.
• Cool Starship
  • Samus's gunship was already cool enough on its own, but the updated version in Corruption gains missiles, a multi-ton grapple beam, and a remote guidance system that allows it to perform automated airstrikes or come to the player's location at the press of a button.
• The Corruption: As the subtitle of Corruption attests, Phazon. It can infect and mutate organic or mechanical life forms, is near impossible to destroy without using other Phazon-based tech, and aggressively sends out infectious "Leviathan Seeds" to convert entire planets into more Phazon. There are multiple incidents of a Phazon-based being reconstituting itself from Phazon after being reduced to ashes by Samus.
• Cut and Paste Environments: Most of the Dark World areas of Echoes are pretty transparently Palette Swaps of their light world counterparts, occasionally with a platform or two added or removed, though admittedly since it's an alternate dimension, this makes narrative sense. Many corridors in Prime's Chozo Ruins also look alike.
• Cutscene Power to the Max:
  • Flavor text power, in this case. The scan visor would have you believe that Hunter Ing are tremendously elite badasses. If you charge up a safe zone with the Light Beam, it's fairly rare for a fight with one to not end in its suicide-by-beacon, with this often occurring before it can actually do anything. They do take a long while to defeat conventionally if you don't utilize this tactic for some reason, though.
  • Gorea is so built up by lore as being invincible so you'd think the final fight in Hunters would be massively challenging. Nope. Gorea is by far the easiest final boss of all 4 games, and is in fact MUCH easier to defeat than some of the previous bosses in that game that were placed there as tests of skill to prepare the hunters for Gorea. Which makes total sense when you think about it.
  • Also, in Corruption:
    • Game: A basic Space Pirate takes two Charge Beam blasts to kill.
    • Cutscene: 1 to 3 regular Power Beam shots kills a Space Pirate.
  • Echoes also does this with the Gravity Boost. In the game, it gives Samus limited flight while underwater. In the cut scene following Quardraxis' defeat, Samus is seen using the Gravity Boost to fly away from the explosion, even though the item can't be used out of the water.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: For the most part averted, as most characters get along just fine with their cybernetically-enhanced Powered Armor... and then there's Ghor. While a cyborg Gentle Giant most of the time, when he "cybernetically fuses," he becomes cold, unfeeling, and aggressive. He only has 6% of his original body to begin with, but if that amount goes down farther, he gets nasty quick.

D to F

• Damn You, Muscle Memory!
  • Many people dislike the control scheme in Prime and Echoes because the other analog stick is not used to aim, like in Halo or many other FPS's.
  • Nintendo compensated for this in the Wii-versions of Prime and Echoes, by implementing the same control scheme as the one used in Corruption. In effect, this made some bosses (Flaahgra, Meta Ridley and Metroid Prime) significantly easier. On the other hand, the Elite Pirates and Beam Pirates (Power, Wave, Ice and Plasma) were made harder, depending on how much the crosshairs move when rapidly firing. You are able to turn off the "free aim while locked-on" feature that is present (and recommended) in Corruption though, making the aiming while locked-on more similar to how it was in the Gamecube versions of Prime and Echoes.
  • The turrets in Prime. The ability to aim in any direction within Samus' field of vision allowed players to take advantage of the Missiles' homing capabilities... by standing behind a corner and taking them out from a safe area or blocking their line of fire with a solid iron-beam and firing missiles around it.
• Dark Action Girl: Dark Samus, the reincarnation of the titular Metroid Prime, is a major antagonist throughout the trilogy.
• Darker and Edgier: Echoes and, to a lesser extent, Corruption.
• Death World:
  • Dark Aether in Echoes. Even the atmosphere is deadly. And you have to explore it as you delve into the Dark World equivalents of Aether's mainlands (of which there are three plus a Hub Level).
  • The Space Pirate Homeworld in Corruption. From orbit, it looks like a volcanic wasteland, and on the surface it constantly rains acid that will kill you in seconds unless you get the Hazard Shield.
• Demoted to Extra
  • The role of the Metroids are extremely downplayed in Echoes, to the point of being merely cameo enemies. The Space Pirates also play a much smaller role in the story than they did in the first prime, possibly to give focus to the threat of the Ing and Dark Samus. Ridley, their leader and Samus's Arch-Nemesis, is not only completely absent from Prime 2, he doesn't even get an offhand mention.
  • Averted with one specific Metroid, which takes a spotlight role in Echoes: Metroid Prime AKA Dark Samus.
• Detachable Lower Half: Weavel can do this in Hunters, with his lower body functioning as a turret. This also happens with the Quads in Echoes, although they prefer to fight with their heads attached to their bodies.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • Even though there's no way you should have it at the time, Thardus in Prime is still weak against the Plasma Beam.
  • Contrary to what its name implies, Dark Samus is most vulnerable to the Dark Beam, because technically, it is a creature native to the Light World.
  • In Prime, throwing on the X-Ray Visor will make Samus's right hand visible. In addition, the hand will make a different gesture depending on which beam is active.
  • Also in Prime you're expected to continue through the Phazon Mines after acquiring the Power Bombs and free the Metroids in the quarantine cave. However, if you decide to backtrack without entering the Metroid caves and lowering the quarantine shield, you won't encounter any Metroids in the earlier rooms and the lights will be on in the early parts of the Metroid caves once you finally head there, which makes it easier to traverse without using Visors to see clearly.
  • In Prime 2, should you run out of ammo for any of your beams, to prevent you from getting stuck behind a door that requires a particular beam, you can charge it to fire a normal shot. While impractical for combat, it makes traveling much less annoying than it could otherwise be.
  • In 3, when you first get the Hyperbeam and before the initial corruption, you're told it will shut itself down as a safety feature in 30 seconds if you still have Hypermode power left. Once you have to start worrying about your suit overloading, keeping yourself alive long enough without depleting your Hypermode energy will eventually cause the safety to kick in.
• Diegetic Interface: Courtesy of Samus' Powered Armor, naturally.
• Doom Magnet: It seems Samus cannot escape the cold hand of destruction, whether it be a large base or the entire planet that it's on. Her "kill count" in the Prime games includes the Orpheon in Prime, the Oubliette in Hunters, Dark Aether in Echoes, and Phaaze in Corruption.
• Double-Meaning Title: Besides the obvious Antagonist Title, "prime" in a mathematical sense can refer to the derivative of a function, just as Metroid Prime is a distinct but related offshoot of Metroid.
• Down the Drain: The Crashed Frigate in Tallon Overworld and the Reactor Area in Torvus Bog. There are no submerged areas in Corruption.
• The Dreaded: Samus...to the Space Pirates. Many of their logs allude to the fact that "The Hunter" has arrived and everything else goes on the backburner until that situation is dealt with. In the second game, when they discover that Dark Samus is running around, their logs essentially devolve to "Oh god, there's two of them!"
• Dub Name Change:
  • Phendrana Drifts and Magmoor Caverns from the first game lose their placenames and are simply know as "Ice Valley" and "Lava Caves" respectively in the Japanese version.
  • Conversely, Sanctuary Fortress and the Ing Hive from the second game gain placenames and are known as "Horeito" and "Dark Horeito".
• Dynamic Loading: In all games, once you shoot a door, you must wait for the room on the other side to finish loading before it opens. During the timed missions of Hunters, the timer keeps ticking while the door loads.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: Dark Aether in Echoes and Phaaze, the source of all Phazon, in Corruption.
• Easter Egg
  • When you leave the GF ship on Bryyo's first mission in Corruption, you can faintly see Rundas watching you. If you shoot him with a charge beam, he'll fly away.
  • In the same game, inputting certain combinations into Samus's ship communicator will net you messages from Nintendo.
  • On the Space Pirate Homeworld, there is a Dark Tallon Metroid, albeit one sliced into pieces to the point that it's near unrecognizable.
  • In Prime 3, there is a single scan that refers to 'Project Dread', the name of a long awaited 2D Metroid game Nintendo had mentioned to be in development. Fans were displeased to find that this was only a joke. Fast forward to 2021, it became a reality.
  • In the Wii releases of Echoes and Corruption, the four lights at the top of the screen correspond to the Wii Remote's battery life.
• Elaborate Underground Base: Most of Phazon Mines is underground, and serves as the Space Pirates' main base on Tallon IV. A vast portion of the base on Pirate Homeworld is underground.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • Phaaze, a sentient planet that infects other planets with living meteors. It is Phazon (hence the name).
  • Gorea, whose backstory is right out of the Lovecraft playbook: a formless, starborn evil who crashed into the Alimbic System and started killing everything in sight, absorbing and copying any and all weapons thrown at it. It eventually takes imprisoning it away in an extradimensional tomb. Needless to say, it wants out. Bad.
• The End... Or Is It?: The 100% endings of all the Metroid Prime games:
  • Prime: The hand from Samus's Phazon Suit (absorbed by the eponymous villain) pops out of a puddle of Phazon with an eye on the back.
  • Echoes: The scene cuts to outer space, where a billion tiny bits of Phazon converge on one another to reform into Dark Samus.
  • Corruption: Samus rides off into space, only for the Delano 7, Sylux's ship from Hunters to follow her. This one has yet to be answered.
• Enemy Scan: Extended to everything else as well, courtesy of the Scan Visor. Make sure to scan first and shoot later if you want 100% Completion, since some scans (notably boss ones) are permanently missable.
• Escort Mission: Two of them in Corruption, one of which involves Samus needing to escort a number of Galactic Federation bombers to a large door at the end of a series of Space Pirate-infested rooms. However, you are also assisted by a large number of GF troopers, who actually heavily outnumber the Space Pirates to the point that, while the Space Pirates are stronger on average, the GF troopers can outnumber them to the point that they can kill a few Space Pirates for you, or at least weaken them enough for you to deliver the final blow. Even against the Berserker Knight, the troopers can assist you in killing the massive beast. A gold medal can be earned by keeping all troopers alive, which can be quite a challenge if you don't stay ahead of them or mess up against the trio of Commando Pirates at the end.
• Eternal Engine: Upper Phazon Mines in the first game, Vesper Defense Outpost in Hunters, Sanctuary Fortress in Echoes, and the Pirate Homeworld in Corruption. Bits and pieces of other mainlands are mechanical too.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Justified, because Phazon corrupts lifeforms, making them more aggressive and deadly. In Echoes, even the atmosphere of Dark Aether is deadly.
• Evil Laugh: Dark Samus. Especially in Corruption. Every time that you finish beating one of the corrupted hunters, before the final battle, even during the final battle!
• Evil Twin: Dark Samus.
• Evolving Credits: In Trilogy, the main menu is set inside Samus's Arm Cannon. When you load a save file, the camera zooms out and Samus turns and shoots said cannon. The suit she wears while doing this is the same suit she's currently wearing in the save file you're loading. In Corruption, it even displays the changes in her PED Suit as it gets more and more corrupted.
• Expy:
  • Several enemies get retooled for each game, and the weapons tend to get this. Ice Beam becomes the Dark Beam, Plasma Beam gets Nerfed into the Light Beam, and Wave Beam gets buffed up into the Annihilator Beam.
  • Thardus is the Metroid universe's answer to Gorignak.
• Eye Open:
  • After saving in Echoes, there's a brief closeup of Samus opening her eyes.
  • Also how Prime's 100% ending ominously ends.
• Fast-Killing Radiation: Phazon is a Toxic Phlebotinum that is incredibly mutagenic and also emits radiation. Some minor enemies will immediately die when coming into contact with it. Samus without protection can't withstand it for long either and less than a minute of direct exposure (standing in it) will kill her. Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption at least have suit upgrades that make her immune to Phazon, but in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, she's out of luck for the entire journey.
• Feed It a Bomb: Some enemies can only be killed by feeding them Morph Ball Bombs. A hilarious example is the Triclops/Mechlops, who instinctively grab any nearby round objects, whether it's Samus in Morph Ball form... or the bombs that she can drop in said form.
• Final Boss: Metroid Prime in the first game, Gorea in Hunters, Emperor Ing, followed by Dark Samus in the second, and Dark Samus, followed by the corrupted Aurora Unit 313 in the third.
• Final-Exam Boss
  • Metroid Prime's first phase. Also, Gandrayda assumes the forms of several bosses you've fought before, but is fought only about two thirds of the way through Corruption.
  • Especially in the NA version of Prime. Some Pirate Lores in the game tell you just what armaments Metroid Prime has, and even allude to its weakness.
  • Also every area has its own major boss that you fight before you go onto the next area, such as Chykka, Thardus, or Helios, that always require you to use the abilities you have found in that area, not always all the abilities you found but at least one of them, examples are that Thardus requires the Thermal Visor, Chykka requires the grapple beam, and Helios requires the seeker missiles etc. In the EU Version of Prime, it is actually stated on some scans exactly what you have to do to defeat the bosses. For Flaahgra, the scan entry says that "removing its source of solar energy will kill it" while the Elite Pirates and Phazon Elites (and the Omega Pirate) have a line of scan text saying "shooting the Phazon bubbles on the legs and shoulders will inflict heavy damage to the pirate". Thardus is a bit less tricky, as you have to remember what you can read on 2 different scan-notes in the Phendrana Drifts, one stating that "Phazon is highly visible through any means of heat-vision" and another one stating that "Thardus has Phazon infused into the rocks. Exposing the Phazon and blasting it might inflict severe damage."
  • Gorea in Hunters forces you to remember which color represents which weakness (much like the Metroid Prime and Emperor Ing did) and also to remember obscure lore you found throughout the game to know in which order to shoot crests on the walls with the proper weapon in order to get to the final phase of the battle and the game's true ending.
• Fire, Ice, Lightning:
  • The trio of beam weapons you find in the first game are the Wave Beam, Ice Beam, and Plasma Beam.
  • The three hunters allied with Samus in Corruption has a weapon that befits each of them. After you've killed all of them and taken those weapons, Samus herself has a version similar to the first game, but split among her three primary attack methods: her beam has fire, her missiles have ice, and her grapple lasso has lightning.
• Flash of Pain: Enemies flash red when they take damage.
• Fling a Light into the Future
  • Samus was this for the Chozo, as were the countless power-ups they set up across the galaxy for her to find when she would need them.
  • In Corruption, the wall murals tell the story of the last of the Bryyonian Lords of Science. After pretty much the entirety of his species had regressed to a primitive, violently tribal state, he found an apprentice to teach both the high technology and the ancient magics of their people, then pulled an Heroic Sacrifice when they were found in the hopes that she would be able to one day restore their culture.
  • Similarly on Elysia, after Ghor succumbed to Phazon corruption and started infecting the robotic Elysians with a virus, one of the last left records of their culture for others to find.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In Echoes, the Pirates witness a battle between Samus and Dark Samus, and wonder if they can work out some sort of arrangement with Dark Samus to kill their common enemy. Corruption involves Dark Samus joining forces with the Space Pirates, though not quite in the way they had envisioned.
  • You can find a Chozo Lore entry in the first game that warns that any who deface or destroy their Chozo statues "will know our wrath, unfettered and raw". When you finally fight Meta Ridley in the Artifact Temple, his attacks start destroying several statues, generally leaving the field completely cleared of them by the end. And when you beat him, the temple's security system activates and vaporizes Ridley. It's a very literal example of Laser-Guided Karma.
• For Science!: While the Space Pirates ultimately want to be the dominant force in the galaxy, this is largely how they go about their business.
• Free-Sample Plot Coupon: Played with; each of them involves a Plot Coupon hunt, but it doesn't begin until about mid-way through the game.
  • In the first game, the first of twelve artifacts can be found at the Artifact Temple you need to bring them all to in the first place.
  • Echoes takes it further, as one of the ten keys needed to access the final area is already in its lock thanks to the efforts of a long-deceased Luminoth warrior, so Samus only needs to find nine. And one of those nine keys lies close to its required destination, needing little effort to find it; namely, its location is the Dark World version of Samus's landing site.
  • In Corruption, you're instead hunting Energy Cells to restore power as you go to portions of a derelict space vessel; conveniently, a wrecked fighter is crashed in its docking bay, with its Energy Cell having fallen out for you to grab and use right away.
  • Hunters downplays this trope. The whereabouts of the first Octolith are found at the start of the game, but like all other Octoliths it's guarded by a boss that must be defeated.
• From a Single Cell: Metroid Prime, and by extension Dark Samus, is absurdly hard to kill, surviving the destruction of an entire planet while being trapped in an alternate dimension at the same time. It seems capable of reforming from even the teensiest bit of Phazon leftovers. This is explicitly stated in-game.

G to I

• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • Metroid Prime has a rather nasty bug unless you frequently save your game. Sometimes when approaching a door, the game simply freezes and forces you to reset. If you hadn't saved a long time, sucks to be you. Luckily, the freezing bug is quite rare to the point where it wouldn't happen twice in the same play-through.
  • The first North American version of Prime got careless with one of its Chozo Artifacts: you get the Artifact of Warrior by beating the Phazon Elite, but the door doesn't lock to make sure you do so. If you leave, save, and come back, the Elite and Artifact are gone for good, and you need all twelve Artifacts to win.
  • In Echoes, you can render the game Unwinnable by triggering the floaty-jump glitch during the fight with Chykka, then using your glitched super-jump to leave the room. When you return, Chykka is gone, and she's taken the Dark Visor with her.
  • Echoes also has a simple puzzle for the player to solve after they get the Annihilator Beam. The only problem is that if they leave the room before solving it, it never resets. Saving afterwards renders the game unwinnable at what is right near the end of the game. Back when the bug was discovered Nintendo sent out free memory cards to affected players with save files just before the event.
• Genre-Busting: To this day, there is no agreement to whether the Prime series should be called a First-Person Shooter, a First Person Adventure, or a First Person Platformer.
• Genre Blind: The Space Pirates have their infamous 1 meter diameter tubes, seemingly made specifically to allow Samus in her Morph Ball form (a feature of her suit the Pirates are already aware of by this point in the series) to traverse them.
• Gimmick Level: Many areas in the series, usually involving the use of the Spider Ball. The Spider Guardian and Power Bomb Guardian in Echoes have you fighting them entirely in Morph Ball form.
• Gravity Barrier: Only possible because the Space Jump no longer gives infinite vertical travel.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Phazon, the sentient, toxic mutagen that created Metroid Prime, the Ing and is the source of the Space Pirates plans in the trilogy. There is a greater greater scope villain behind Phazon, Phaaze, the sentient planet which is the source of all Phazon.
• Great Offscreen War: The Horus Rebellion, the war that drove the Luminoth into hiding from the Ing, and the war on Bryyo.
• Green Rocks: Phazon is to Phaaze as Kryptonite is to Krypton. Only the effect of Phazon is the same regardless of galaxy, whereas Kryptonite is of effect only in the presence of a yellow Sun.
• Hailfire Peaks:
  • Tallon Overworld is mainly open forests with a few caves, but due to the frigate Orpheon crashing nearby there's a section that's Down the Drain combined with Techno Wreckage.
  • Bryyo Cliffside is part The Hedge of Thorns, part Death Mountain. The rest of Bryyo has a fiery zone (Bryyo Fire), as well as an arctic one (Bryyo Ice), making it the most multifaceted planet in the game.
  • The upper parts of Phazon Mines are exclusively Eternal Engine, while the lower regions are Underground Level.
  • The surface of Torvus Bog is a Bubblegloop Swamp, while the underground temple combines Temple of Doom, Eternal Engine, and Down the Drain.
• Healing Checkpoint: Save stations double as energy-replenishing stations. Samus's gunship has the same capabilities, but will additionally refill her ammo reserves.
• He Was Right There All Along: Numerous bossesthroughout the series are hiding in their boss room underground, lying dormant, or in the case of the Dark Missile Trooper, deceased until Samus enters the room and the boss reveals itself, awakens, or is possessed by the Ing and the fight begins.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Metroid Prime's only fatal weakness is Phazon, the very same substance it continuously generates and ultimately tries to corrupt the galaxy with. If it didn't keep feeding Samus the stuff it'd be literally invincible^note Scans, at least, note that Prime literally cannot stop producing Phazon, as it is functionally the equivalent of waste to it: it can't keep it in and has to expel it to survive. The same is true of Dark Samus at the end of Echoes, who would explode if she stopped expelling Phazon particles.
  • Also, in the first Prime at least, the Metroids would latch onto the Space Pirates and kill them for you. These are the same Metroids that the pirates had bred.
  • Also, Dark Samus in Corruption, who is only Killed Off for Real because she decided to connect herself to Phaaze, meaning that when she is "killed", Phaaze explodes, destroying all Phazon and ensuring that she stays dead.
• Hostile Terraforming: Phazon tends to do this. It turns out to be a Sentient Phlebotinum Planetary Parasite that originates from the planet Phaaze, which deliberately seeds the universe with Leviathans, essentially Phazon meteors.
• Humans Are Special: Humans (specifically, the human-dominated Federation) are the only recorded species to ever stop a Leviathan impact. The Luminoth shot at theirs with everything they had, and it did sod all. The federation fires a single planetary defence laser and completely vaporizes the one headed for Norion.
• I Have Many Names: Metroid Prime itself - it's also named The Worm by the Tallon IV Chozo and Dark Samus/The Dark Hunter once it copies the form of our hero.
• An Ice Person: Noxus, Rundas, and their respective species.
• Improvised Weapon: The Plasma Beam and Nova Beam in Prime and Corruption respectively were improvised from mining equipment.
• In-Series Nickname:
  • The Chozo called the Metroid Prime just "The Worm" and Samus ''The Hatchling" or "The Newborn".
  • The Pirates refer to Samus as "The Hunter", which gets extended in Echoes when they find themselves face-to-face with Dark Samus, whom they title "The Dark Hunter".
  • In Prime 3, Gandraya calls Samus Sammy
• Interface Screw: A popular method of attack from enemies is hitting you with electrical attacks to make your visor fill with static for brief moments. An especially notable case is the Rezbit, who has a special viral attack that actually causes Samus' suit to malfunction, both disabling her weaponry and causing a special kind of static to make it impossible to see, requiring a special button combination to reboot the entire Power Suit.

J to L

• Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: And you have to look for the pieces to find it. It's possible to go through the entirety of Prime without understanding the plot at all if you don't scan anything. Echoes and Corruption give you progressively more information, though the real meat of the plot and backstory is still in the scans.
• Joker Immunity: Ridley surviving the events of the Prime trilogy is a Foregone Conclusion given his role in Super Metroid, but he manages to live through situations that would have spelt death for any other less significant antagonist. In Prime 1, Ridley is blasted in the heart by the Chozo statues' laser beams and falls into the abyss at the Impact Crater, and in Corruption he is overloaded and explodes in a burst of Phazon, yet his logbook entry still indicates he has somehow survived.
• Jump Jet Pack: The Space Jump is enabled by a set of boosters attached to the boots of the Power Suit, allowing for a single midair jump. The Gravity Boost in Echoes functions similarly and acts somewhat like a triple jump, but only while submerged.
• Just Following Orders:
  • Inverted in Echoes: Samus, a bounty hunter, gets orders to the effect of "investigate missing Space Marines" and does everything else under her own steam. It can be imagined that the Galactic Federation enjoys explaining this to her when it comes time to pay her. "Well, good job saving the universe, now here's your paycheck for checking up on our Marines."
  • Played straight in Prime and Corruption, as in the first case, Samus was specifically acting on her own (hunting down the Space Pirates) and in the second case, she was hired to deal with the Phazon Leviathans, which is what she spends the entire game doing: finding out how to reach and subsequently destroy the Leviathans on each planet. So she was exactly following orders.
• Kryptonite Is Everywhere: Justified in that Phazon is trying to get everywhere.
• Late to the Tragedy: All three console Prime titles. Norion in the third game is the exception, which you save at the last second. It's also implied that Aether was just minutes away from falling before the Dark Alpha Splinter fight, which would make the tragedy even worse.
• Law of Conservation of Detail:
  • All of Samus' explosives have materials they are most effective against: Brinstone / Radion for Missiles, Sandstone / Talloric Alloy for bombs, Cordite for Super Missiles (no Super Missile material in Echoes) and Bendezium / Denzium for power bombs. If any of these is mentioned in a scan, you will end up destroying the scanned item with the appropriate explosive. Corruption adds Phazite, which can be pierced by the Nova Beam. If an enemy's scan mentions Phazite, it is vulnerable to a one-hit-kill from the Nova Beam/X-Ray Visor combo. Everything in Echoes is made of Denzium.
  • In Prime, every destructible object's scan data also notes its already compromised (age, stress fractures, shoddy craftsmanship ect.). Presumably this weakens it enough to be vulnerable to the right part of your arsenal and is enough of an aberration to grab the Scan Visor's attention, while the intact bits around it are still solid enough to not fall apart in one shot.
  • This is seen in the game's physical layout. Any platform you can stand on is typically necessary to get somewhere, any Morph Ball tunnel or Spider Ball track is guaranteed to lead somewhere interesting, almost every room has at least one item hidden inside it or has a small, hidden tunnel that leads to a small room with a hidden item... etc.
• Ledge Bats: Fission Metroids in Prime, Rezbits in Echoes.
• Left Hanging: Getting 100% of items in Corruption unlocks a short scene after the credits where the Delano 7, Sylux's gunship, uncloaks and follows Samus to wherever she's going. While Federation Force technically picked up the plot point by having its own post-credits scene where Sylux steals a Metroid hatchling from a Galactic Federation facility, it didn't explain the relevance of the prior scene, and how the two scenes are related (assuming they even are) is left unclear.
• Lethal Lava Land: Magmoor mostly, and Alinos in Hunters also has elements of this.. "Bryyo Fire" from Corruption is an interesting case; it does have a "fiery" theme and appropriate colors, but the oozy stuff throughout the level is not lava, but a highly volatile chemical called "fuel gel" that is both corrosive and flammable. It still "behaves" like lava does in most games, though, and Ice Missiles can be used on it to create temporary safe platforms.
• Level-Map Display: You can acquire the map, or explore everywhere to get the whole map layout.
• Load-Bearing Boss:
  • Prime deals you one right away with the Parasite Queen, and even justifies it. She falls into the frigate reactor when you kill her, with predictable results.
  • The end bosses in the trilogy all apply to varying extents: Metroid Prime presumably causes the Impact Crater to cave in, Emperor Ing actually isn't one, Dark Aether is doomed because of what Samus does after his death, and Dark Samus's death causes Phaaze to start disintegrating.
• Loads and Loads of Loading: The games are infamous for this. Shooting at doors triggers the games to first load what's on the other side, then open them. This can sometimes take a while, most notably in Corruption, which did away with the load-hiding corridors found in the first two.^note The corridors were small and low-detail, meaning the Gamecube had more power for the subsequent room Given that the Wii U re-release of Trilogy is digital-only, it ends up largely shortening load times all around — to the point where that version of Corruption ends up being faster for speedrunners, despite the loss of most of the speed tricks that the original Wii version had.
• Lore Codex: Samus' log records information on anything you can scan, including enemies, item pickups, puzzle mechanisms, local and ancient lore, and so on.
• Loose Canon: The Prime games are set between Metroid and Return of Samus but are generally not referenced by games outside its own sub-series.

M to P

• Made of Explodium: Lampshaded; one destructible material is called "cordite"^note A type of smokeless powder the British Navy used. Also the Sap Sacs; a scan notes that they developed their explosive nature because they were almost eaten to extinction; a little odd, since fruit typically spreads seeds by being eaten.
• Malevolent Architecture: Samus finds this everywhere.
• Metroidvania: Despite the games being three-dimensional, they still remain true to this genre due to how the areas are explored.
• Mini-Dungeon: Prime and Corruption have, respectively, the sunken Frigate Orpheon and the wrecked GFS Valhalla as relatively large and intricate mini-dungeons, which respectively precede the Phazon Mines and Pirate Homeworld as huge, gargantuan dungeons.
• Mirror Match: The Echoes multiplayer mode. Hunters can do it too, with multiples of a character having alternate color schemes. The Hunters: First Hunt demo's Regulator mode ended with one of these.
• Monster Threat Expiration: The eponymous creatures are the scourge of the universe in Metroid and Super Metroid, needing to be frozen and pelted with missiles to kill. Through the Prime series, they become progressively less of an actual threat. In Prime, a Power Bomb will kill any Metroid instantly (yes, even those pesky Fission Metroids), and after being frozen even Hunter Metroids shatter in one hit. In Echoes, they can be beaten with enough firepower from any of your weapons and even Dark Metroids can be frozen with the Dark Beam and subsequently shattered with a single missile, and in Corruption, you eventually get the ability to kill them in one shot using the Nova Beam. Until then, though.... In addition, no Metroid in the Prime series has ever got beyond "Hunter", which does rather knock down their status as threats. Justified in that Metroids will grow and adapt differently depending on what planet they're on, and all of the experiments with Phazon have done really odd things to their physiology, leaving the non-SR388 strains in the Prime trilogy with less defense against non-cold weaponry.
• Mook Horror Show: See Apocalyptic Log.
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family: The Bloggs from Echoes and a few of the unidentified creatures at Phaaze in Corruption.
• Muggles Do It Better: The Chozo and Luminoth, for all their power, couldn't even slow down the Leviathans that impacted Tallon IV and Aether. The Federation's Ground-to-Space cannon instantly destroyed the Seed aimed at Norion (although it's implied that the seeds in Corruption are somewhat premature).
• Multiple Endings: The Prime series have extended ending sequences if you collect a lot of items. Hunters does away with this and has two different endings based on how you approach the Final Boss.
• Natural Spotlight: On parts of Tallon IV where it is not raining, and several places on Bryyo.
• Nerf: The Puffers had their gas duration when they explode vanish instantly in Echoes and Corruption, most likely due to the gas lingering too long in Prime, which could halt progress if the player doesn't want to take damage.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Thanks, Samus, for releasing Metroid Prime (aka Dark Samus) from its confinement so it can wreak havoc across the galaxy.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Ridley started as a dragon space pirate, and adds more to this title in the Prime games, culminating in him being a mutant zombie cyborg dragon space pirate.
• Nintendo Hard: Echoes is much harder than Prime or Corruption. Enemies are tough, come in swarms, do insane amounts of damage, and that's before you get into a Dark World that drains your health constantly and teems with even tougher enemies.

• No Fair Cheating: Echoes is known for having a plethora of glitching and Sequence Breaking opportunities, but the Flying Ing Caches (along with the Sky Temple Keys they hold) do impose some level of meta-Railroading. Since you need the Dark Visor to not only see but also damage the Flying Ing Caches, the boss that drops that visor (Chykka) can't be skipped.
• No OSHA Compliance:
  • All over the place, but Skytown, Elysia is the worst offender. Being an abandoned Chozo settlement on a stormy gas giant and running on steam power, the facility is in a state of disrepair as evident by the structural pods frequently shaking and electronic systems experiencing power surges. Somewhat ironic, because they seem to be one of the 2 most likely to HAVE an OSHA equivalent, the other being the GF, but Samus seems to be a trouble magnet for their ships.
  • Even outside of architecture, the Space Pirates' Science Team are absolutely horrendous with personnel and engineering safety. Their most successful but dangerous designs are a double-edged sword. The Phazon experiments can give them great powers but also kill them or drive them insane. Aside from being crudely-designed in general, their boarding pods offer poor protection between the boarding party and the explosive used for creating breaches; and in some cases, the explosive may detonate prematurely or be a dud. In cases of criminal incompetence, they also tried to replicate Samus's Morph Ball, but with the knowledge of how it works lost with its original designers, they gave up after a few test subjects were gruesomely compressed into fleshy balls.
• Non-Lethal Bottomless Pits: Echoes and Corruption will respawn Samus on safe ground with 10 points of energy lost if she falls into the abyss.
• Not Completely Useless:
  • The Screw Attack is an unlikely tool against Emperor Ing (due to a glitch), the third Dark Samus battle in Echoes (use it right before she Turns Red), Gandrayda (kills her in 6 hits), and Omega Ridley (forces him to switch attacks saving time and health).
  • The missile combos in the first two games (aside from the Super Missile) are of generally little use for the amount of ammunition that they consume, but they can be very useful in a couple of situations.
• Nuclear Option: To destroy the shield on the Elysia Seed, you need to assemble and deploy a Theronian Thermonuclear Warhead.
• Oddball in the Series: The two Nintendo DS games, namely:
  • Hunters takes place in another galaxy, implies technology that is millennia ahead of anything we've seen in the rest of the series, features new characters that are never seen or mentioned again, is the only game in the entire series not to feature any Metroids whatsoever^note And mind you, they were in the prototype demo for the game that was originally included with the DS, has an online multiplayer mode that is significantly deeper than the single-player campaign, and just generally doesn't even follow the Metroid formula.
  • Pinball, a pinball adaptation of Prime.
• Oh, Crap!: The Pirate Logs tend to become this when they start talking about Samus; especially in the second game when they realize Samus and Dark Samus are two different beings.
  Pirate Log: Surely, we are cursed.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: The title/menus themes in the first two Prime titles, Magmoor^note a remix of Super Metroid's Lower Norfair, and too many to count in Corruption...
• One-Hit Kill: In Corruption, the X-Ray Visor coupled with the Nova Beam grants one the ability to shoot straight through Phazite-armor on enemies and hit their internal organs. In Prime, the Plasma Beam can incinerate nearly any enemy with a single charged shot.
• One-Winged Angel: Metroid Prime and Emperor Ing. They become less disfigured in each change.
• The Overworld:
  • Tallon Overworld in the first game has elevators to all but one of the other zones. True to form, its BGM also plays a remix of Brinstar from the first Metroid game, the region where that game begins.
  • Temple Grounds in Metroid Prime 2 doubles as the Hub Level.
• Palette Swap
  • Most of the enemies from Metroid Prime. And between games, Echoes has model swaps, such as a recycled horned creature and a mechanical version of a small bug.
  • Samus's arm cannon configurations are also texture swaps of each other across the games (example: the Dark Beam in Echoes is the same model as the Ice Beam model in Prime), which was probably done to save on space, memory, and programming effort.
• Permanently Missable Content: All games have some of this.
  • Didn't scan that boss before you killed it, or scan something in an early area before passing the point of no return? Say goodbye to 100% Completion! Lessened in Trilogy, where the Log Book is carried over to a New Game Plus, allowing you to focus exclusively on the missed entries.
    • One odd example is the Ice Shriekbat in Prime. Every other enemy except bosses respawns when you leave and return to an area. The Ice Shriekbat only appears in a couple of places in Phendrana and doesn't respawn, so you better scan them the first time. To complicate things further, they don't show up on your thermal visor, so you may not even notice them until they dive bomb you and explode. Finally, they look and attack exactly like the normal Shriekbats, so you may not even realize they're a separate species.
    • The Aqua Drone in the sunken ship only appears the first time you enter the Biohazard Containment room. One it's destroyed, it doesn't respawn. Like the Ice Shriekbat, you may not even realize it's a different enemy compared to the regular Security Drone, and there's no real reason why it doesn't respawn.
• Phlebotinum Muncher: The eponymous beastie of Prime, and its reincarnation as Dark Samus in Echoes and Corruption.
• Phlebotinum Dependence: Samus in Corruption; After getting the PED, the typical "Health Orbs" are actually made of Phazon.
• Phlebotinum Overdose: In Corruption, spending too much time in Hypermode causes Samus to go into Corrupt Hypermode, and the energy bar for it fills rapidly. The only way to get out is to dump all of the energy or prevent the bar from filling for half a minute. Fail, and Samus turns into another Dark Samus. Ironically, this trope is also how the original Dark Samus is destroyed each time. Scan data frequently refers to her being made "unstable" due to Phazon overdosing. Note, that's "destroyed" not "killed". Also, this is forced onto the player in the end of Corruption, when Samus goes to Phaaze. Her level of corruption by this point is so severe that she must place herself into a permanent Hypermode state simply to stay alive, and she is no longer able to stave off an eventual Phazon overload simply by firing her Hypermode weaponry. The health pickups at this point in the game even become "Anti-Phazon units" to further drive the point home.
• Phlebotinum Overload: A very, very important trope used in the series. Too much Phazon is dangerous even to the corrupted, and is key to defeating the Final Boss of all three main series games. Phazon is so corrosive that not even a sentient planet made of the stuff can handle too much.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: The pirates do undertake some pillaging and rampaging, but it usually ends up with them setting up shop on the planet they plundered and using it to conduct biological and weapons research. Their main goal is to gain ground and resources to expand their research rather than simply take from their victims.
• Pivotal Boss: Amorbis fights like this, as well as the Parasite Queen, the Incinerator Drone, Flaahgra and Emperor Ing's initial form.
• Power Crystal: The Lensman-like hand crystal on the back of Samus' left hand. Originally just a visual effect, Corruption uses it as the source of the Grapple Lasso.
• Power Floats: Dark Samus tends to hover everywhere and she's positively charged to the brim with Phazon energy most of the time. Samus herself also gets in on this just before destroying a Leviathan seed, Phazon energy coursing around her at intense levels.
• Power-Up Magnet: The Charge Beam will draw in health and ammunition pickups.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy:
  • Ice-themed people, of which we have seen two: Noxus (from planet Vho) and Rundas (from planet Phrygis). Noxus is fairly low-key, but Rundas definitely fits. Samus herself is also an example: modern Chozo are/were a peaceful people, but had a strong warrior tradition in the past.
  • The Luminoth have shades of this themselves. Due to the Ing, though, they had to be.
• Psycho Serum: Phazon.
• Puzzle Boss: Many, including:
  • Flaahgra in the first Prime.
  • There's so many in the late stages of Echoes (Spider Guardian, Power Bomb Guardian) that it becomes a relief when you fight Dark Samus for the second time: there's no tricks about it, just a good old fashioned shoot out.
  • This even extends to a substantial portion of Echoes' (and to a lesser extent, Prime's) enemies. Your weapons can take down most enemies when you first encounter them, by dint of skillful playing. Then you get a weapon or item that can let you one-shot them—such as the classic freeze-and-shatter, or the Plasma Beam's tendency to incinerate enemies with one charged shot. The killer insane suit-hacking, laser-shooting Rezbits could get a freeze-and-shatter from the Dark Beam—if you're quick enough, you can prevent their impenetrable shield from coming up. Likewise, the game's giant bruisers can be taken down with a Power Bomb dropped near them.

Q to T

• Race Against the Clock: It's Metroid, so this should be rather obvious:
  • Prime had the escape sequence in the beginning, where you have 7 minutes to escape from a self-destructing pirate frigate that just had an enormous parasite dropped into its reactor shaft.
  • In Echoes, we had the very last battle against Dark Samus: A fair fight in a different dimension that is on the verge of collapsing. The fight cannot take more than 8 minutes. And that's including travel time from the previous boss.
  • In Corruption, by the time all the reactors on Norion have been activated, a meteor is about to crash into the planet. If the player hangs around for too long instead of hurrying to the ground-based Satellite Cannon, the meteor will kill everything on the planet. And this is the only Metroid game to NOT have a timer visually show you how long time you have left before you die. However, the nice announcer system lady who voices the klaxon horn alarm speech will say "X minutes until impact". Due to the lack of on-screen timer (generally a staple for the Metroid series), it's easy to initially assume that what the PA system is saying is merely fluff and that you can Take Your Time. It isn't, and you can't.
  • The battle against Ridley in the beginning is this as well. You're both falling 18,000 meters at a pace saying 100 meters a second. That means you have 3 minutes to shoot the ever-loving crap out of Ridley or fall to a painful death alongside him.
  • Elysia has the escape pod on the Theronian Bomb; You had to repair something to escape from the bomb before it was dropped onto the planet's Leviathan with you on it. Then there was Phaaze, where, given the circumstances, your health acted as a timer that you could add to.
• Rainbow Speak: In scans to point out what something is made of, so you know what to use to blow it up.
• Real-Time Weapon Change: In the first two games, where you choose one by flicking the right analog stick (or d-pad). This was dropped in the third game in favor of an upgrading beam system similar to the 2D games, where each new beam you get has the properties of its predecessors.
• Recurring Boss:
  • Aside from the other hunters and Gorea, there are only two bosses in Hunters that are fought again and again. They change attack patterns, but the way you beat them is usually the same.
  • Dark Samus in Echoes.
  • Metroid Hatcher in Corruption.
• Regional Bonus:
  • In the first game, some bonus, some not: Samus' suit has additional dialog, and there are larger missile pickups and some interface and gameplay tweaks, one of which is a slower map loader that prevents crashes suffered by the original North American version. On the other hand, the previously easy Security Drone enemies are upgraded to full-on Goddamned Bats with tripled energy, and the plot is somewhat mutilated due to fears that the series would be poorly recieved; the PAL version removes references to Samus' previous life with the Chozo, along with references to the Space Pirates finding Metroid Prime's and its stealing their tech. Later games don't have much in the way of bonuses.
  • Many sequence breaks are removed in the PAL version, though not as many as in the ironically-titled North American Player's Choice version. Scandashing is impossible, a lot of areas have Bendezium rubble that can only be removed with Power Bombs added, the Player's Choice version even goes so far as to add locked doors that only go away when you've picked up things you're supposed to have, though it doesn't include any of the actual Regional Bonus content. Apparently Retro really, really want you to play the game "properly". Echoes had a few similar changes made for the EU release which just require different speedrunning tricks, and one in the Japanese version that stops a no boost ball speedrun cold in the room "Crypt" in Dark Torvus.
  • In Prime, Meta Ridley also has more attacks and isn't as easily beaten (oversights in the NTSC were sorted out), making it pretty hard (though it's hard anyway). Flaahgra's boss theme looped incorrectly in the original NTSC version as well, playing only the first part over and over, which is rectified in the PAL version.
  • Most, but not all, of these changes were included in Metroid Prime: Trilogy.
• Riding the Bomb: Justified. When the SkyTown pod carrying the Theronian Bomb is deployed, the Space Pirates launched a counterattack to protect the Leviathan. Samus had to stay with the pod to fend off the Pirates, or else the pod and the bomb would be destroyed, along with the only chance to save Elysia.
• Rule of Three: The games frequently invoke the rule of three, with three Temples in Echoes (and each of them requiring 3 Keys for full access), 3 Phazon-infested planets in Corruption, and the 3 alternate beams and 3 alternate visors in each game. Also, in the second game, Dark Samus is fought a total of three times. In Hunters, each of the eight portals leading to the Octoliths has to be activated by retrieving three Alimbic Artifacts.
• Sacrificial Planet:
  • Inverted in Corruption. The planet Norion is doomed from the start from a looming Phazon Leviathan impact, but Samus manages to save it at the last minute. Later on it's revealed that several other planets suffered a Phazon Leviathan impact while she was in a coma and are already showing signs of corruption, so Samus goes to those planets to stem it.
  • Played straight if the planets in the earlier titles, Tallon IV in Prime and Aether in Echoes would be any indication regarding the fate of the Phazon-corrupted planets in Corruption. The difference being that Samus already saved those planets and they're on their way to recovering so she knows she could save the others.
• Sanity Slippage:
  • Private Haley from Echoes really loses it on Aether.
  "I hear. Them. Everywhere. They're coming. Can't sleep. Ever. They'll eat me. Eat."
  • Also, the Pirate Logs from Corruption. At first, they're scared shitless of Dark Samus. Then they suddenly become her "first disciples." And it only goes downhill from there.
• Save-Game Limits: Sometimes you have to walk abusive distances (with boss fights in-between!) from one save room to another. The Phazon Mines from Prime is perhaps the most infamous example of this.
• Save Point: Much like the main series, the second type of save point is a common sight. However, unlike the main series, every save point in the Prime games refills health. Samus's gunship continues to act as a save point on its own in addition to refilling both energy and ammunition, and Corruption's ability to remotely fly the ship to various locations adds a useful portable save system to that game, although it's limited to designated landing zones.
• Scenery Gorn: Crashed Frigate and Impact Crater in Prime, any of the Dark Aether environments in Echoes, and the GFS Valhalla in Corruption is probably the most destitute locale you pay a visit to.
• Scenery Porn: Phendrana Drifts in Prime, Sanctuary Fortress in Echoes, and Bryyo and Skytown Elysia in Corruption are all exceptionally beautiful. Though for Skytown, just try not to accidentally fall off an edge while staring at the scenery. Sanctuary Fortress is less dangerous on the "falling to your doom" end. For that matter, the entire trilogy triggers this as well as Scenery Gorn.
• Schematized Prop: Many of the later games have taken up this trope, most notably using a Power Suit schematic as the item/weapon status screen (Zero Mission, Prime, Corruption, Super, Fusion; the schematized suit was also seen in the instruction manual for Metroid II). Other examples include the model of the FS-176 solar system in Metroid Prime (who knew Zebes and Tallon IV were in the same star system?) and the detailed descriptions of items, ships and upgrades throughout the Prime games.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale:
  • Hunters provides some very interesting numbers on the weapons of the Metroid universe. The Volt Driver apparently has enough juice to power countries, the Judicator approaches Absolute Zero, the Battlehammer contains a nuclear reactor, and the Magmaul utilizes hydrogen the same way stars do. If that isn't enough, the Annihilator Beam from Echoes combines matter and antimatter (annihilation surpasses nuclear reactions in output), the Dark/Sunbursts are a portal to hell and miniature star, respectively, and the Sonic Boom's description says it breaks reality. At this rate, it'll be able to compete with 40K in over-the-top weaponry.
  • Additionally, Hunters stated to take place in another galaxy. Not only does this imply that the Galactic Federation in general and Samus' gunship in particular has technology that allows it to span the intergalactic void in trivial amounts of time, it also causes issues when recurring enemies (like Zoomers, War Wasps and Blastcaps) appear. Blastcaps are even stated to have spread from Tallon IV using space spores. Assuming spores that don't travel faster than the speed of light, the time this would take is far greater than the age of the universe - and that's not even counting the time it would take them to have evolved on Tallon IV in the first place.
  • In Prime, there is an observatory with a scan of Planet Zebes with a given mass of 4.8 trillion teratons. This implies that a young, unarmored Samus can withstand gravity over 800 times that of Earth. The other planets in the system, including Tallon IV, have similarly overblown figures.
• Scrapbook Story: The Lore/Data scans.
• Sean Connery Is About to Shoot You: The covers for Hunters and Trilogy. In Trilogy you spend the menu screen inside Samus's arm cannon.
• Sequence Breaking:
  • It's a Metroid game, so this is in effect, though much of it requires the exploitation of glitches and tiny little ledges in the scenery. This series of videos takes it to the extreme.
  • Thanks to a possible case of trying to fix this on Retro's side, the developers seemingly to want to force a subversion of this, particularly in the first Prime. When Retro saw how many ways the game's sequence could be twisted and mangled, the game's Player's Choice re-release saw the removal of an important sequence breaking move (the Scan Dash) and impenetrable locks that won't release until you have done the required tasks.
• Serial Escalation: Pretty much everything in the trilogy. The highlight is Phazon, which is constantly spreading and invariably made almost everything in the games berserk and badass.
• Shapeshifter Baggage:
  • In Corruption, no attempt is made to explain where all that extra mass comes from when Gandrayda turns into Ghor in his ginormous powered armor. Lampshaded in the Federation logbook entry for "Hunter Gandrayda" that says, "Can assume the form and abilities of most living things, including bioforms considerably larger than the subject". Then there's the fact that she can become a swarm of bots.
  • This trope seems to apply to Samus as well^note She seems to turn into energy, if the glowy part seen through the cracks is any indication. This is lampshaded in one of the Pirate Logs you can find in Prime. While the Space Pirates have been diligently reverse-engineering all of Samus' technology, enough test subjects with broken spines makes them abandon Morph Ball research, rather quickly. However, the measurements given suggest that it's far easier than expected.
    Pirate Log (excerpt): "Aran's Power Suit technology remains a mystery, especially the curious Morph Ball function. All attempts at duplicating it have ended in disaster: four test subjects were horribly broken and twisted when they engaged our Morph Ball prototypes. Science Team wisely decided to move on afterward."
• Shoulder Cannon: Elite Pirates have shoulder-mounted plasma cannons. The Omega Pirate has two of em. Their Suspiciously Similar Substitutes from Echoes, the Ingsmashers, have these as well.
• Shoulders of Doom: The PED Suit in Corruption makes the normal Varia Suit versions slightly smaller, but the Hazard Shield add-on bumps them back up to Varia size. The Dark Suit in Echoes has ridiculous looking shoulders. The Light Suit actually makes them normal-looking.
• Shout-Out:
  • Several to the Alien franchise. Ridley the pirate is named after director Ridley Scott, and the opening shot of Prime is almost identical to that of the first film. A blink-and-you'll-miss-it example is the name of the planet that houses one Federation shipyard, where the GFS Olympus and Samus' gunship (the one used in Echoes; she goes through gunships like other people go through tissues) were built: Aliehs III.
  • The sound effects heard after the save room fanfare is a direct reference to Walkabout, with the sounds being similar to those used in that movie's soundtrack: particularly the scene of the kids surviving their first night in the wilderness. Clark Wen, who worked as audio lead for the first two Metroid Prime games, was a fan of the movie and used the soundtrack as a major source of inspiration for the game.
  • A "Horus Rebellion" is mentioned early in the third game and can be taken as one to the "Horus Heresy" of Warhammer 40,000. This is likely Retro returning the favor, as 40K novels Horus Rising and Know No Fear feature a daemon named Samus.
    "The Pirate attacks must have the old man nervous."
    "No kidding. Last time this many fighters were scrambled was during the Horus Rebellion."
    "That was some nasty business."
    "I have a feeling this will be worse."
• Shown Their Work: There's a great number of subliminal touches, such as Samus using hand gestures in her cannon arm to transform the weapon (something you can only see when have the late-game X-Ray Visor) add so much more to the experience, despite being completely supplementary.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Phendrana Drifts, Bryyo Ice, Arcterra.
• Space Pirate: The Space Pirates. It seems more a name than a description, though.
• Space Marines: The Galactic Federation Marines in Echoes and Corruption. Of course you can't have pirates without the Marines, because Space Is an Ocean.
• Sprint Shoes: The Boost Ball, as a replacement for the Speed Booster of the 2D games.
• Starfish Robots: Hunters has robots on the Vesper Defense Outpost that resemble pillars with several short legs.
• Stealth Pun: The finger configuration for the Wave Beam is an open hand with the fingers spread out. You know, like you're waving.
• Steam Vent Obstacle: Steam vents produce steam that can clog up Samus's visor temporarily.
• Sucking-In Lines: Most of the beams while charging. It isn't just for show; the Charge Beam actually has a secondary effect of pulling in pickups to you.
• Superweapon Surprise: Don't mess with Chozo statues... just, don't: "Those who defile [our statues] shall know our wrath, unfettered and raw."
• The Swarm: Ingstorm, dozens, hundreds of tiny little Ing-forms, that delight in finding cracks in your armor, no matter how small, and eating. It's like not having the Dark Suit all over again, except the Ingstorm does considerably more damage. Seriously, don't go into Ingstorms without the Light Suit. It's one of the single most damaging hazards in the series prior to Corruption, in which the fuel gel and acid rain doesn't cause significant damage at first but quickly ramps up to a several-tanks-per-second rate if you haven't gotten out of the hazard after a few seconds.
• Sword and Gun: Energy Scythe and Blaster, rather, for the Prime-series Pirates.
• Sorting Algorithm of Evil: Justified in Prime, a pirate log notes that the weak enemies in the first part of the game was the result of an attempt to avoid detection by a federation battle cruiser. Now that the cruiser is gone, they can appear out in the open and fight Samus with full force. Echoes makes a mention that controlling three sectors instead of four means the enemy can concentrate its forces better.
• Tactical Suicide Boss:
  • Periodically, the Pirates in Corruption will throw Phazon grenades at you. In either of the previous two games, this probably would've done significant damage but in Corruption, it automatically throws you into corrupted Hypermode for free, meaning those pirates are typically dead a few seconds after they throw the grenade (just be sure you're ready to blast away to avoid terminal corruption). However, if you are already in Hypermode at the time, it instead brings you out of Hypermode.
  • There are also many regular Tactical Suicide Bosses, like Metroid Prime itself.
• Taking You with Me:
  • Metroid Prime in the first game attempts to absorb Samus's Phazon essentially for this trope.
  • After Dark Aether begins to implode and Dark Samus is defeated, the Ing attempt to prevent Samus from escaping their world so she'll die with them.
• Take Your Time:
  • Subverted in Corruption; When a meteor is coming down on Norion, you can take all the time you want and it will never get any closer. However, once you defeat Meta Ridley, you have 5 minutes left before impact regardless of how long you took to get to that point.
  • Echoes features generously placed cigarette breaks for the player. Found a light beacon? Great, go have a smoke and you get all your health back. This in theory makes it one of the rare games to heal the character using the player's hitpoints. On the other hand, you'll need those hitpoints, so it's a rare bit of generosity in an otherwise difficult game.
• A Taste of Power: Occurs in the first two. Not in the third, since Retro thought doing it thrice wouldn't add anything.
• Tech-Demo Game: While all three games have impressive graphics for their time and platform, Corruption was a major proof-of-concept for FPS motion controls on the Wii. Many critics agreed that the game proved that the Wii Remote could be used to make serious "hardcore" action games, and not simply casual games.
• Techno Wreckage: The Crashed Frigate in Prime, the Celestial Archives vessel in Hunters and the GFS Valhalla in Corruption.
• Technology Porn: Present throughout the entire series, especially in the cutscenes. Sanctuary Fortress in Echoes basically takes it to Scenery Porn levels.
• Teleporters and Transporters: Chozo Ghosts, Space Pirates, Warp Hounds, Reptillicus...
• Teleport Spam: Chozo Ghosts and Warp Hounds, but the Pirate Commander takes the cake.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill:
  • Shooting regular enemies (particularly weakest ones such as wasps) with missile combos. Waste of ammo, but entertaining.
  • Hitting Plated Beetles with the Wavebuster will cause them to have a spasm.
  • Blasting one of the various large groups of tiny enemies with the Sonic Boom (the strongest Missile Combo in Echoes) is nearly guaranteed to give Samus a full power-up in terms of ammo and energy, making it an interesting case of Video Game Cruelty Potential.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Cordite is a propellant explosive used in large-calibre naval guns. The Chozo made wall hangings from it and the Space Pirates use it for hatch covers. How their entire civilizations avoided spontaneously exploding is not clear.
  • The Triclops in Prime will eat Morph Ball Bombs if you lay one in front of one.
  • In Echoes, if you energize a Light Crystal/Beacon with the Annihilator Beam (and therefore both Light and Dark beams), any Ing nearby will be attracted to it and incinerate themselves.
• Toxic Phlebotinum: Phazon.
• Tron Lines: Used frequently throughout the series. Most commonly used to indicate active power lines, often as a puzzle requiring Samus to re-arrange component parts to power specific items. And as Samus gets progressively more Phazon corrupt through Corruption, her PED Suit shows these. Particularly prominent on the Morph Ball.

U to Z

• Underground Monkey:
  • Echoes recycled a lot of enemies from Prime with new models. Some were barely changed (like the recoloured Triclops) while others were given a complete overhaul, the Beetle becoming the much smaller Splinter, the Elite Pirate the Ingsmasher, Baby Sheegoths becoming Grenchlers, Chozo Ghosts becoming Pirate Commandos, etc. There's also a few examples in the games themselves, like the normal / ice / plated Parasites in Prime and the light / dark creatures in Echoes.
  • The common Corruption enemy Crawltank model was basically taken from the very rare (only appears in one room) Echoes' Watchdrone.
• Unflinching Walk: Samus partakes in one of these whenever she finishes off a Leviathan in Corruption. She also does one after killing Thardus. One of its rocks bounces off her helmet, and she just looks annoyed that it messed up her walk.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: A couple of glitches in the original games can cause this; if you leave a room before collecting an important item or triggering all the switches in a single go, then save, consider your game screwed. Thankfully, later releases fixed these problems.
• Updated Re-release: Metroid Prime Trilogy is just that: Prime, Echoes, and Corruption on a single Wii Disc, with Prime and Echoes getting Corruption's control system and achievement-like unlocking system. This can also be considered a Regional Bonus, as the Trilogy collection is only getting released in western countries with the extra content, the Japanese market having received the two older wii-makes as separate games earlier in the year.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Each game ends in a really climactic area.
  • Prime ends in the Impact Crater, the impact site of a meteor carrying a horrible toxic mutagen that is the cause of the entire planet's corruption.
  • Echoes ended in the Sky Temple, the main fortress of the Ing which is also ringed in by the same mutagen from the first game. It is also the dark version of Where It All Began
  • Corruption tops them all, however, seeing how the final dungeon is you storming Phaaze, an evil sentient planet that is the source of the mutagen that's been the chief cause of the trouble through the whole trilogy.
  • Hunters deserves honorable mention for ending in the prison to a species-killing Eldritch Abomination, accessible only by blasting a hole in reality.
• Video Game 3D Leap: Of the complete overhaul variety, along with a perspective shift.
• Video Game Vista: Generally adds a cutscene every time a new area is visited for the first time. Of particular note in their Scenery Porn value are the cutscenes for Sanctuary Fortress in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes and for Elysia in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.
• Villain-Based Franchise: Though it stars Samus... Whose name is in the title? That's right. Who's the final boss of all three games? That's right. Interestingly, the Metroid Prime doesn't reach Big Bad status until the third installment; spending the first game sealed up in a cave, and the second gorging on Phazon and taking pot shots at Samus.
• Villain Decay: The Space Pirates get hit hard with this in Echoes—after being the driving menace of the first game, they are abruptly downgraded into a recurring nuisance to Samus— but this can be justified by the game wanting to play up the threat of the Ing and Dark Samus, and that the Pirate force you fight is a very small reconnaissance/mining team that was critically low on manpower, supplies, and morale. They also go through this in Corruption, in which they become mind-controlled pawns of Dark Samus. Though to their credit, having her leading them did make them a rather serious threat to the galaxy, so to some degree it's an inversion.
• Voice Grunting: Samus.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: Flaahgra is one of the earliest bosses yet is pretty tough for first timers. Especially if said first-timers miss the Charge Beam. It's fairly conspicuous, but if you don't explore much, you will miss it. Also, the Alpha Splinter/Dark Alpha Splinter in the second game, made better (worse?) that the much easier warmup boss, the dark missile trooper, is completely optional and easy to miss.
• The Walls Have Eyes:
  • There are hallways where the walls are covered in eyeball enemies that shoot lasers as they look around. Echoes also had numerous decorations on the wall that resembled eyes; scanning them reveals that they're biological cameras transmitting images to U-Mos.
  • In Corruption, the interior of the Leviathan starship is covered in dozens of eyes. You can even shoot them for an achievement!
• Warp Whistle: Echoes enables travelling in temple Pillars of Light, and Corruption allows landing on certain areas with the gunship.
• Weaponized Offspring:
  • Echoes has the Chykka, guardian of Dark Torvus, who spawns Chykklings during the fight against her. This generally makes the fight easier, since Chykklings are easily destroyed and usually drop profuse amounts of health and ammo.
  • In Corruption, the Fargul Hatcher (which appears in only one spot on the planet Bryyo) uses this form of attack by spawning a wave of Fargul Wasps at Samus.
• Womb Level: Phaaze. The Impact Crater resembles a fossilized version; most notably in the Phazon Core room one finds giant teeth and a cankered bone pillar, as if a Leviathan's flesh is gone and all that's left is a hollowed-out cavern and bones. Leviathans themselves are Womb Boss Chambers.
• X-Ray Vision: The X-Ray Visor is the only thing that can target shifting Chozo ghosts and nets you an Easter Egg of Samus's trigger finger.

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