Headscratchers / Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

• Just how the hell did all those Metroids end up on Phaaze? I initially thought that it was the Space Pirates who brought them all there, but considering that they have hives on Phaaze, not to mention the Metroid Prime husks (which I assume would take some time and a lot of Phazon to grow to that stage), it brings me to question just when and how Metroids were first introduced to Phaaze. Any thoughts?
  • The Space Pirates probably brought them there, or maybe Dark Samus took them there, after appropriating Metroid stashes from the Pirates. The Leviathan is capable of reaching Phaaze very quickly, Phazon can cause rapid maturation of Metroids, as seen in Prime 2. And Phaaze is made of the stuff.

• Why is it in Prime 3 you don't have any beam switching?
  • The Trilogy versions of Prime 1 and 2 have you switch beams by holding the + button and still have you switch visors too, so it clearly could have been put in. Likely they had them stack for a more classical feel, since they stacked in every 2D Metroid game except for Metroid and Metroid 2. And to make combat more about your actual skill than about how well you know your enemies' beam weaknesses.
  • From a control standpoint, + was used for entry into Hypermode in Corruption. Having that also as the beam-swap would make a lot of conflict, especially for those who are a bit slow on the draw (like when you start up the game for the first time). From a technical standpoint, why would you want to swap beams - Power is slow, and Nova is a stronger Plasma. Environmentally, there was really no need for elemental beams - Plasma and Wave would work equally well on Elysia, you already have Ice Missiles if you need to freeze something, etc.
  • We have three free buttons right on the remote, sort of. It was the directional pad, the down button was being used by missiles, but there are only three beams, not counting the phazon beam, they'd fit nice and snug up there. But you're right, stacking works perfectly fine in Corruption. I just sorta missed my power beam after getting the plasma beam for the first time.

• There's a green door toward the end of the GFS Valhalla. Why would the Galactic Federation put a door on one of their own ships that can only be opened by a Space Pirate mining laser?
  • Same reason the Space Pirates have doors in their bases them that can be opened by Samus' guns; the proper occupants have proper keys, and Samus' Whatever Beam just happens to be able to break the shield and make the door open manually. Why they are all appropriate colors? I dunno, maybe it's some enhanced reality stuff.
  • Presumably the Pirates carry some sort of keycard with the door's lock frequency coded in One is seen operating a terminal that Samus must drain of energy instead, and they mention in Echoes that they actually do have access to a "dark weapon" which they used to open the Dark Aether portal. Samus's suit just tells her that "this door requires some form of heat signature to open" and Samus just finds the Plasma Beam a hell of a lot more convenient than having to loot a keycard off a dead Pirate (which usually disintegrates, anyways).
  • To me, the worst offenders of door/lock logic were the ones on the Space Pirate ship at the start of the first game. Never mind how contrived a coincidence it is that the mechanisms for unlocking them would just so perfectly match Samus' Morph Ball form...who the hell came up with the idea of using a metallic sphere of ANY sort as a door mechanism!? Apparently Science Team isn't the only ones with vapor for brains.
  • It's not unthinkable that the half-sphere dish that Samus jumps into with the Morph Pall is just a regular energy receptor. She latches on and drops a bomb into it, which activates the slot. The Pirates could easily be carrying a remote of some kind that just transmits an energy pulse to the receptor. It would be dish-shaped to more easily receive the signal.

• Why is Samus' corruption so visually obvious? The other hunters and the space pirates are all corrupted by Phazon the same as she is, but Samus is the only who looks visibly different as a result of it; both her (her face, as can be seen in her visor) and her suit. The more corrupted she becomes, the more obvious it is, to the point she looks a heck of a lot like Dark Samus. I would imagine gameplay purposes would require it to show the player that this is bad and getting worse, but it's weird that she's the only one.
  • Not quite the only one. Gandrayda gains bags under her eyes and some blue veins, and Ghor gets a blue shimmer or two. Still, Samus's is more visible. Maybe it's because she's trying to suppress it? The others had given in to their corruption, so the Phazon was better integrated into their system. Samus, by trying to fight it, might have caused the Phazon to migrate more to her outside body and bloodstream, judging by the veins. Or maybe the others don't have veins?
  • I always thought it was because of how much Phazon she was exposed to. Compared to the other hunters, Samus goes through more Phazon, especially through the use of Hypermode. Not to mention how much Phazon she uses to destroy each Leviathan seed. It's around this time that her condition gets worse. Once she lands on Phaaze, her own gunship won't even recognize her, which might attribute to the huge amount of Phazon present on top of her own corruption to that point.
  • I'd chalk it up to Heroic Willpower (and maybe a little outside assistance from her previously-adapted-to-deal-with-Phazon suit). Samus has much, much more Phazon in her and it's been corrupting her for much longer, but she held onto her individuality longer than the other hunters, who were just caught in the blast radius.
  • Bizarre Alien Biology and human perspective. As humans, we can see the corruption changes in Samus and recognize them as wrong. We'd have to know more about how the other hunters are supposed to look like to know what isn't correct. Rhundas and several of the pirates wear helmets, so who knows what their faces look like. Ghor meanwhile is mostly robotic, so that corruption simply might not manifest. Rhundas also appears to have a few Phazon tendrils, so he is showing some signs of corruption.

• Why did Gandrayda make a gambit to lure Samus to her then attack her with the guise of a soldier but after explaining where the next power-up was? The entire gambit makes no sense when you start to dissect it. Did she want to lure Samus to that particular area to fight her? Then why bother to tell her about the powerup if she planned on killing Samus. If she was just trying to escape the room that needed two people, she could have disguised as a space pirate and trick one into helping her. Why frame everything in a way to trick Samus into believing she was a soldier ally and then try to shoot her in the back? Absolutely nothing about her behavior makes any sense.
  • To attempt an answer, it may be that Gandrayda wasn’t ENTIRELY corrupted at that point. From her perspective, she was helping out a colleague in her own, cheeky, way (note how she trolls Samus in the beginning), but was rapidly succumbing to Phazon, and just so happened to boil over shortly after. Would make her erratic boss behaviour a bit more disturbing in hindsight...
  • Gandrayda effectively recreated Samus own situation to try and get her guard down. Single survivor of a space pirate attack, stranded in dangerous territory for a long time, eventually rescued by an extremely powerful but empathetic third party. It's a short recreation of Samus childhood. Presumably either Samus had a weak spot in her armor that Gandrayda was hoping to exploit, which she'd know about from transforming into Samus, or she was hoping since the power suit and its variations are partially controlled by thought that having Samus focus on something else would result in her armor being more vulnerable. That and if it didn't work of course being in an open arena would allow Gandrayda the best possible combat options to avoid being killed by Samus as she would be in an enclosed space.
  • Given her laughter, she clearly found luring Samus into a trap funny. She didn't just want to kill Samus, she wanted to have fun. This ties into the the young, immature, and maybe psychotic behavior she demonstrates in the game and lore scans.

• If you don't get through the one Pirate Homeworld part with four guys, Admiral Dane says something like "We don't have enough guys, we need to pull out", and then you just randomly die. Would it have killed them to at least have a pirate or something parachute his way in and laser you to pieces with a high-powered particle beam?
  • Because if they did, someone would inevitably ask why didn't the parachuting particle beam Pirate parachute down and particle beam Samus at the earliest opportunity. If you've got a cool parachuting particle beam Pirate at your disposal, surely you'd want him to parachute and particle beam folk at any time, rather than an arbitrary point in time that just happens to be conducive to parachute particle-beaming.
  • What problem did they have with making you go back to the rendezvous and get more bombers, then return?
  • Like many things, Gameplay and Story Segregation: Samus didn't fuck up. The instant death is just a flimsy way to show that you failed, and force you to succeed.

• Why is Meta Ridley the one with organic-looking blue armor while Omega Ridley has basic grey metal plating? Omega Ridley should be blue, he's the one who's been corrupted by Phazon more! It just seems backwards. Maybe Retro Studios had to switch the models due to a rigging problem? Or it was an accident?
  • This is supported by the game's beta footage, which features the blue "Meta Ridley"◊ performing his intro cutscene with Samus instead of Omega Ridley. However, Samus is also in her Varia Suit here, so the models seem kinda arbitrary for this scene.
  • Meta Ridley's model (the blue one) is also notably larger than Omega Ridley's. It's possible that they originally planned for Omega Ridley to be the big blue model, but since Meta Ridley grabs Samus and has lots of up-close shots in his battle, they decided to swap them and use the bigger one for that scene instead. Otherwise Samus would be face-to-face with a smaller and lower-poly Ridley model, which wouldn't look as good.
  • An in-universe explanation could be that his blue Meta Ridley form required extra Phazon plating to stay alive. Likely still injured from his explosive defeat on Tallon IV, maybe it acted as an emergency Powered Armor of sorts. Then once he'd been healed by Phazon corruption for a while, he was able to remove some of it and return to a less-armored Omega Ridley form. That would then move to his Proteus Ridley form in Samus Returns, where his cyber armor is basically falling off.
• Why is Rundas' voice so much higher when you fight him in Bryyo Fire? He goes from baritone to goblin man. Maybe an effect of Phazon corruption? But it didn't happen to Ghor or Gandrayda either, so...
  • Just a guess; the higher-pitched voice is his natural speaking voice, and he was putting on a bit of an act in the beginning. "Justice will prevail and all that stuff" certainly sounds like someone trying to sound cool and aloof.
  • A realistic possibility is that Retro somehow didn't record any battle voice clips from Christopher Sabat (e.g. the team finished Rundas' boss fight earlier than recording), so they had to improvise their own. It doesn't sound like him at all, but they tried to disguise it with effects.