YMMV / Metroid Prime 2: Echoes

• Anti-Climax Boss: The third and final battle against Dark Samus, while no walk in the park, is much easier than the Emperor Ing boss that precedes it. It only consists of two phases: In the first one, Dark Samus follows the same attack pattern that players have already gotten used to. In the second one, her attacks are almost completely harmless, since the player is supposed to absorb them with the Charge Beam in order to damage her. The fight must be completed within a time limit, but since it clocks at 8 minutes, it's more than generous to complete the task at hand.
• Best Boss Ever:
  • The first two Dark Samus fights, which are by common consent the most fun fights in the game - particularly the second one, which is a unique Elevator Action Sequence. Dark Samus is usually a good bit more powerful and significantly more agile than you and has a lot of tricks up her sleeve, but not so much that she's overly frustrating. Combine that with an amazing atmosphere, good opportunities to test your new powers out, and narrowly avoiding her blowing up everything around you, and top it off with excellent music.
  • Quadraxis is also a fan-favorite battle due to the sheer scale of the fight combined with the act of tearing apart the boss's defenses little by little, and the awesome, pounding theme.
• Best Level Ever: Excluding the portion with the Spider Guardian, the Sanctuary Fortress and Ing Hive are frequently cited as the best area of the game due to the Scenery Porn, the energetic music, the elaborate Morph Ball puzzles, and the Dark Samus 2 and Quadraxis boss battles.
• Complete Monster: In the manga adaptation (Episode of Aether), "Boss", the unnamed Space Pirate leader, raids the space ship Crest and tries, alongside his crew, to hijack it, killing a civilian who happened to be there. When the Crest Captain begs "Boss" for mercy, the Space Pirate overhears a worried child calming his sister down, saying that help is on the way. "Boss" torments them as much as possible before trying to murder them, as well as everyone else on board the ship, laughing at the older child trying to protect his younger sibling. When Samus comes to the rescue, "Boss" holds one of the children and the Crest Captain hostage and when Samus aims at him, he throws the hostages, chasing after them with the intent to slice their heads off.
• Contested Sequel: Fun game with interesting new locales, different powerups, and increased challenge, or Mission-Pack Sequel loaded with Fake Difficulty and unnecessary key-hunting and ammo mechanics?
• Continuity Lockout: While Dark Samus is Metroid Prime in a new form thanks to fusing with Samus's old Phazon Suit and part of her DNA, the game never explicitly declares this in order to prevent confusing new players, only hinting at it through visual clues (e.g. her heavy addiction to Phazon, her first Logbook Scan, and her appearance during her final battle^note Parts of her armor are translucent, showing her very Metroid Prime-like head, her red core structures, and tentacle-like "bones" inside her chest, plus the eye on the back of her hand which alludes to the secret ending of the first Metroid Prime). Players who didn't beat the first game 100% and aren't aware of the backstory from online sources will be left wondering as to where Dark Samus came from and would probably assume that she was just an inhabitant of Dark Aether, only to be confused when she attacks Ing-possessed Space Pirates in Sanctuary Fortress and is weak to the Dark Beam instead of the Light Beam.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Grenchlers are basically the baby Sheegoth from the first Prime game, only smarter, faster, more durable, and more shot-happy, and happen to possess a drastically inflated hitbox. The only saving grace is that their shots no longer freeze. They'll also pursue you if you try to avoid them, as they can swim and jump on platforms.
  • Rezbits have a very crippling form of Interface Screw, as it completely crashes Samus's visor; you can't even see out the viewport without its aid, it crashes so hard.
  • Dark Pirate Commandoes are especially this before acquiring the Dark Visor. They only intermittently phase in and are vulnerable, their EMP bombs haze over Samus's visor with whitenoise static, they do lots of damage, the Light Beam does not nearly enough to kill them quickly, and you can't even duck out a door to escape them as the room gets locked down. Counter-intuitively, the best way to deal with them is to freeze them solid with a charged Dark Beam shot and then finish them off with a missile.
• Disappointing Last Level: The Sky Temple. After backtracking through the entire game world to find those Sky Temple Keys, you are rewarded with the final, brand-new area... that has three rooms. These rooms are devoid of enemies and the only thing of note is the Final Boss. While its Aether equivalent didn't have much to it anyways, Sky Temple feels really shallow and empty compared to the rest of the dungeons, even more considering it's the last one in the game.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Quadraxis gets this position simply for offering up a lovely design, great music and a really beloved battle, culminating in a very memorable moment from a very memorable machine.
• Franchise Original Sin: Many players of Other M were offput by one of Samus's early flashbacks to her Federation Army days, as it put emphasis on her feeling like she was looked down upon in the military due to being a woman. Prime 2 was the first instance in the franchise to show us evidence that female combatants in the Federation are pretty rare and have a problem with being taken seriously, as Angseth's trooper log records her complaining that the men in the squad were wasting her talents by assigning her to monitor duty instead of putting her shooting skills to good use. Prime 3 didn't have anything this blatant, but a subtle detail shown in that game was that the only female personnel present were Bridge Bunnies, while all the Marines were male. With this in mind, it looks more like the Other M scene didn't come out of nowhere but was more evidence of an in-universe issue that has existed since Echoes.
• Goddamned Bats: Hunter Ing can be difficult if you don't know how to deal with them. They can phase to avoid your shots, are hard to lock on to, and are generally creepy. Once you realize they can only attack you once they stop phasing, and can have all their attacks interrupted by a single light beam shot, they're cake. Even on hard mode just a handful of light beam shots will take them down, and better yet, if you're in a light-charged crystal or beacon, they have a tendency to just fly right into it and suicide when they get bored.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • The Spider Guardian is a Puzzle Boss that must be done entirely in Morph Ball mode, which has wonky physics and controls. You have to bomb the boss to stun him, then do some creative bomb-jumping to hurt him before he becomes invulnerable again. Touching the boss does 30 damage, and if you die, the last checkpoint is all the way back before you got the last Translator package. The Trilogy release added the Spring Ball to the game, which at least removes the bomb-jumping requirement, but everything else is unchanged.
  • To defeat the Power Bomb Guardian, you have to navigate a network of Spider rails using your Boost, Bombs and timed drops while the boss and its Inglets lob stuff at you. It's fought in Dark Aether, so your health is also being constantly drained.
  • The final battle with Dark Samus can be rather aggravating- to finish her off you need to catch enough motes of her Phazon shots on your charge beam to be able to unleash a blast of pure Phazon back at her, but the positioning to catch the motes without getting hit can be unforgiving (you have to be directly in front of her) and if you get hit you drop your charge. You can't save between the battles with the Emperor Ing and Dark Samus, but you do get some solace in that the game sets up a checkpoint just after the Emperor Ing's defeat, cutting down some of the tedium from fighting the Emperor all over again.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • For some reason, the Jump Guardian's hurtbox is still present before it actually appears. If you take an alternate path to the room where you fight it, you can just fire at a spot in midair for about a minute and then trigger the boss, who now will go down in a few seconds due to you whittling down its health before it even entered the area.
  • During the Chykka battle, standing in dark water and triggering a cutscene will cause Samus to be able to jump like she's underwater above the water once the cutscene concludes. Touching dark water again removes the effect. Just be careful, because you mess up your game if you leave the arena before killing Chykka.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Dark Samus debuting in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is funny because she would one day be Promoted to Playable in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as one of several Moveset Clones, or as they're known in that game, Echo Fighters.
  • If you look up in any Dark Temple Grounds room where the Sky Temple is visible, you can see red beams of light stretching from the Temple to the Energy Controllers that are still active on Dark Aether. Recover the energy from a temple and a light beam will disappear, signifying that you are one step closer to taking on the Emperor Ing. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild would do the opposite; freeing a Divine Beast would activate a red Laser Sight aimed at Hyrule Castle in anticipation of blasting Calamity Ganon in the final battle.
  • One of the enemy species in the game is called a Scatterbug.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: A common complaint of Echoes is that it's much harder than even the series' already difficult standards. This, coupled with It's the Same, Now It Sucks!, may have contributed to its lesser reception compared to the first Prime, even if the game was still a critical hit otherwise.
• Memetic Mutation: See Memes.Metroid.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The screeches of dying Ing, especially the Ing Hunters and the various Guardians.
• Nintendo Hard: Between more emphasis being placed on combat and boss fights, and the latter being much more frequent and difficult than the first game, having to use an ammo system for your other beam weapons, a huge chunk of the game being spent in another dimension where you constantly take damage when you step out the safe zones, and the level design being more intricate and maze-like overall, the game really raised the stakes in difficulty. This also why the game averts the Easy Levels, Hard Bosses approach seen in the first and third mainline games.
• Padding: The late-game collectathons in this series already suffer from this to begin with on a general perspective, but the Sky Temple Keys are without a doubt the worst case of this. None of them can be found at all until you have the Dark Visor (which doesn't happen until halfway through the game), most of them are locked behind very late-game abilities (four of the nine of which are locked behind the very last mandatory ability you get in the whole game) meaning you can't easily pick them up as you go to mitigate backtracking, they all hide in the dark world (which isn't as interconnected as the light world, necessitating inter-portal travel), and if you missed the Keybearer scans, all you have to go on are A-Kul's clues, which range from a bit helpful to very vague. All of this ends up inflating the game's time by several hours with no real value added to the experience.
• Paranoia Fuel: The game is guilty several times over of letting you see the boss before you fight it, but it stands out in lower Torvus. Upon entering the Sacrificial Chamber, players are greeted with the sound of something huge stalking around up there and occasionally roaring. But because of the darkness and the grating, you can't see exactly what it is. There's no real danger until you actually fight it, though.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The entirety of Dark Aether can be very overwhelming: At the start of the game, Samus loses health incredibly quickly whenever she's outside a safezone, and most safezones need to be triggered manually to remain active. This causes the Dark Aether sequences to turn into a series of mad dashes from one safezone to the next, carefully waiting one run after the other so that Samus' health can regenerate between battles. Thankfully, the Dark Suit alleviates the speed at which Samus loses her health and the Light Suit stops Dark Aether from hurting her altogether, but the constant loss of health still contributes at least partially to the Boost Guardian's difficulty.
  • All beams except for the standard Power Beam require ammo. This makes it a little aggravating when enemies and boxes shot with the Dark Beam leave behind ammo for the Light Beam and vice versa. In areas like Dark Aether where pretty much every enemy is vulnerable to the Light Beam and the Dark Beam is almost useless, this can lead to huge frustration when you run out of ammo for it and can't pick up any more. The Annihilator Beam even uses up both kinds of ammo (though thankfully, enemies have a chance of dropping both kinds of ammo upon defeat with it). This mechanic was removed from Corruption and only missiles required ammunition.
  • Seeker Missiles sound good on paper, but held back by the fact that they have a tendency to not work if you stand a little too close to what you're shooting. It can be rather irritating to try opening a door with a Seeker Missile blast shield, only for the smoke to clear and realize that one of the missiles, for whatever reason, did not hit its target, forcing you to waste another six missiles trying again if you can't take out the last target with another missile in time. Most of the time, when the Seeker Missiles aren't required, it's easier just to use normal Missiles or Super Missiles. The Trilogy re-release makes Seeker Missiles slightly easier to use with motion controls, but it's not much better.
  • The controls of the Morph Ball in this game are oversensitive, the camera placement is often wonky, and several puzzles require precise bomb-jumping and movement. It's no coincidence that the game's three hardest bosses (Boost Guardian, Spider Guardian and Power Bomb Guardian) all require you to remain in ball form for the majority of their fights. The Trilogy edition retroactively added the Spring Ball mechanic to ease the reliance on bomb-jumping, but the other issues remain the same.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Using Sequence Breaking, it's possible to skip the battle with Amorbis and thus never acquire the Dark Suit. Hope you know how to manage taking 5 damage per second in Dark Aether's air and have weaker defenses for a long time until you obtain the Light Suit.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Mostly thanks to Dark Aether and its literally oppressive atmosphere, followed by difficult bosses, very labyrinthine level designs and frequent cases of Checkpoint Starvation. Moreover, stronger enemies are more common and the ammo system forces you to rely on the weak Power Beam more instead of more powerful weapons. Not that the first Prime was easy, but Echoes definitely has more potential to frustrate players.
• That One Boss:
  • The Boost Guardian is probably the most infamous boss, ending more games than all the others combined. Aside from the obvious issue of being the first Dark Aether boss fought without Safe Zones (meaning you constantly take damage from the atmosphere - U-Mos have mercy on your soul if you plan to do a No Dark Suit run), he is a Lightning Bruiser who either bounces randomly around the room or deals 50 Collision Damage in puddle form, when you have 5 energy tanks at most. While he's in puddle form, you must bomb him while in Morph Ball mode, further limiting your mobility. One of the game's developers even admitted that he was unable to beat the Boost Guardian without going into debug mode to make it easier. The Trilogy rerelease toned down the damage significantly.
  • The Alpha Blogg. He is fought at the end of a long and arduous water segment in which it's easy to lock yourself out of the save point, thus potentially requiring you to go through the whole segment again if you die. In battle, he is a Lightning Bruiser of a Bullfight Boss that hits hard, moves fast, takes a lot of punishment, has a tiny and risky window of vulnerability that shrinks even further as he takes damage, and gives up few health restoratives. Fortunately, the normally Awesome, but Impractical Darkburst allows you to take off 50% of its health if you fire it into its opened mouth when it tries to bite you. Unfortunately, the Darkburst is a Death or Glory Attack because you spend massive amounts of ammunition to fire one. If you miss, you are screwed because you now have significantly less dark ammunition, which the Alpha Blogg is weak against.
  • Chykka is not an easy boss. Despite its size, it possesses great speed, making it difficult to hit. In addition, it's also a Flunky Boss. After it is finally dead, the player can scan its corpse to read a log that goes out of its way to say "this thing is completely dead". In particular, it says this:
    "Bioscan complete. Target Chykka has been terminated. Lifesigns are at flatline. No regenerative ability in effect. No evidence of symbiotic corpse possession. Resurrection does not appear likely."
  • The Emperor Ing is possibly the hardest final boss in Metroid history. You have to shoot his tentacles in his first form while they’re either (a) being swung at you for huge damage, unless you do some creative dodging and jumping; or (b) being held above his head, which means you’ve gotta aim above him and keep backing up to see all of him. Either way, the aiming system will inevitably force you to back up into the walls of his tiny room, which are covered in damaging Phazon. Even when you can nail all the tentacles, he can only be damaged via a quickly rotating slit in his core - good luck sidestepping to get one or two shots in before he rotates it away, or he shoots a stun-locking laser at you, or (you guessed it) you wind up in the Phazon. And after this difficult phase, the second one is an all morph-ball form... and there’s still another form after that.
• That One Level:
  • Torvus Bog. It's filled with enemies that are much stronger and more annoying than those faced so far. Half of its bosses can be That One Boss, and it is home to the infamous Boost Guardian (one of said bosses). Then you travel into the water-filled depths, in which visibility is extremely limited, you have very little mobility while your enemies are highly mobile, there are long stretches of difficult puzzles, and completing the final puzzle blocks off access to the save point, meaning you might have to go through the entire sequence again if you die to the Alpha Blogg. At least both sections of it have amazing music.
  • The end-game scavenger hunt for the Sky Temple Keys is one of the main criticisms of the game. Only four of the nine keys can be obtained without the Light Suit. Although many hints are provided as to the locations of the Keys, they can be a little obtuse and it still involves a great amount of backtracking and exploring the both the light and dark worlds. In comparison, the respective gathering arcs of the Chozo Artifacts (Prime) and Energy Cells (Corruption) are more reasonable, as is the Octolith hunt in Hunters for being the game's focus since the start.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The Ing are terrifying in concept, but Generic Doomsday Villains in practice. Unlike the Luminoth or Space Pirates, there is no Ing Lore to scan into the Logbook. While this makes the Ing more unknowable and unsympathetic, it also makes their culture shallow compared to other civilizations in the Metroid universe.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: Unlike the more realistic face used in Metroid Prime or the more anime-stylized face used in later 3D games, Echoes tries to go for something in-between for Zero Suit Samus... and the result is rather off-putting. Her highly saturated colors clash with the world's realistic shading, and her expression is just a blank stare as lifeless as a Barbie doll.
• Unnecessary Makeover: While in the context of the story, it's understandable why Samus no longer has the Phazon Suit since Metroid Prime has fused with it to become Dark Samus, many fans consider the Dark Suit to look rather ugly, especially compared to how sleek the Phazon Suit looked.

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