Metroid

The other hunters are good

I liked the colossal figure at the end of Byrro because it looked conceptually like a Zelda monster with a defined weakpoint, but it refused to lie still and let me beat on it like Zelda bosses do.

I kind of forgot they existed. Whoops.

That one was fun, but if you read my spoilered text in my first post about Prime 3, you’d see why I personally didn’t like it. I feel like it should have come later in the game, honestly, or at least let you have more energy tanks before fighting it.

The idea of “leviathan guardians can only be damaged with Hypermode” makes sense, but it’s not a fun way to fight them. Forcing the player to waste energy in order to even damage the boss is never a good thing.

Honestly, it's been nearly a decade, so I just completely forgot about that aspect of the fight.

Hyoermode doesn't stop enemies from dropping health pick-ups

So the fact that you're invulnerable during the OP godmode combined with that usually means that Hypermode doesn't actually have any opportunity costs throughout a large portion of the game.

If I'm a big dumb idiot then punch me and give the correction explanation of how game mechanics are exploited

You’re right, but I always feel weird willingly using up an energy tank. In my opinion, Hypermode should have been exclusive to Phaaze, and the enemies should have been slightly nerfed to compensate. Hypermode feels like something that was just thrown in to relate to Phazon.

Besides, what you said may be right, but it also means the solution to every enemy with more health than a Steambot or Atomic is “Hypermode”. It makes combat monotonous to me, because the game never introduces enemies that are immune to Phazon in order to get you to use the normal/plasma/nova beam, but it introduces plenty of enemies with far too much health to be fun to fight with your standard equipment.

This was also the game that gave you a single beam and a single missile, if I remember correctly.

I don’t remember that, unless I’m interpreting you wrong. Prime 3 had Power, Plasma, and Nova beams. It only had one kind of missile, though, and the beams stacked instead of letting you switch between them. Is that what you meant?

Yeah. At any given time, you only have beams and missiles, rather than a variety of beams to switch between like in the first Prime.

The grapple beam being in Samus's free hand was cool, though.

Wasn’t that introduced in Prime 2?

It was (well, technically, the Grapple Beam was introduced in Super) but the Prime 3 version is way better.

And to think the Prime 3 version is the one we see being used on Samus Returns. Which I love.

The thing I enjoyed was that, in the previous games I'm familiar with, the grapple beam came from Samus's cannon, while in Corruption, her cannon is free while she's grappling.

It's also free in Echoes.

Grapple Beam was in Prime 1 as well, but you couldn't shoot while swinging from it like you could in Prime 2 and 3.

grapple in prime 1 and 2 were on weird side cannon on samus's left arm, while in corruption, it's just her free hand firing the beam directly.

I don't really get the "anything with more health than a steambot has to be killed in hypermode". Ennemies may have a bit more of health, but dying in three fully charged shots instead of one to two like about ANYTHING in prime 1 doesn't strike me as a big deal. Saying you need to go hypermode on every single ennemy sounds just disingenuous to me.

If anything, ennemies taking forever to kill and that drag on for forever is much more a Echoes thing for some types of ennemies(ESPECIALLY if you can't afford to use light/dark beam at the moment) and for some bosses (chykka larva anyone) than for corruption.

I have a madman of a friend who actually felt there wasn't enough incentive to use hypermode in the game and did the game on the highest difficulty no problem whitout using hypermode outside of the scripted sequences. I don't get him, but hey.

Though i would agree we lack some power in samus's arsenal to dish out some good damage that isn't hyper mode. power bombs and super missiles didn't had to go away, and ship missiles are forgotten as fast as they're introduced.

There is only one beam in corruption, because everytime you get a new one it stacks up with the older instead of being a separate beam. Or if we count this as three different beams, there's two missiles in the game : normal missiles and ice missiles.

Prime 3 bosses strikes me as much more memorable and more fun than anything in echoes, really.

Also there's the fact that hypermode naturally switches to corrupt mode after 5 secondsafter corrupted mode gets introduced (and it's super early), and when using corrupted mode you don't use your energy, so it isn't as big of a deal to use a whole etank as it may sound.

Although I DO agree mogenar (the bryyo golem) comes too early in the game for its own good.

Edited by Yumil on Aug 26th 2018 at 11:41:55 AM

I might have been exaggerating when I said “anything with more health than a Steambot”, but I mostly meant the space pirates. They have far too much health and there are far too many of them. Once you get the Nova beam, it’s not as bad, but that’s a late game item.

I could see that be true for the pirate planet, but that's also where you get nova beam. most pirates before that can certainly use an occasionnal etank to get dispatched faster when in bigs numbers, but they still don't take much more than prime 1 pirates to die. They might actually even have less health, because I'm mostly remembering prime 1 pirates as weak after several palythrough on randomized where a charged plasma beam annihilates them. Except plasma beam is not exactly an early game item either.

Outside a 100% run, you only use the plasma beam against pirates once, and it’s on the way to Omega Pirate. Other than that, the Prime 1 pirates definitely take more effort... without armor. Armored, Assault, Berserker, and all the other Pirate variants that wear armor have nearly four times the health of other pirates.

I also actually wasn’t referring to Urtraghus, but Bryyo. Pirates are everywhere on Bryyo, and Reptilicus aren’t much better. You don’t even have too many energy tanks when you unlock it, so Hypermode is annoying to use up until about halfway through Elysia.

yeah you need them to break phazon armor alright, but not every single pirate comes with those, and you don't have to spend the whole etank on it either. as for reptilicus, while I vaguely remember using hypermode a time or two in "you. just. die. right now" way on them, it's no obligation, and I would still take that over trying to deal with power beam pirates, ghosts chozos or quads/rezbits.

Edited by Yumil on Aug 26th 2018 at 6:38:12 PM

Really? Super missiles don’t require you to use an energy tank, and the Dark Beam only takes five ammo. All the enemies you listed, aside from the Rezbits, can be killed easily with a super missile (plus a boost ball for the Quads), and Rezbits can be killed easily the same way as Metroids. I remember the vast majority of pirates having some sort of armor, which you can’t break without hypermode or a lot of charge shots. I might be confusing Reptilicus with their Warp Hounds, because I remember those having far too much health. Either way, Hypermode becomes far less irritating once you complete Bryyo, as there are either fewer pirates, or you have the Nova Beam to deal with them.

Dark Samus

So much yes, even if I'm scared of what this boss will be like on hypermode.

I'll give you that I'm heavily skewed toward those guys because the super missile, or worse, the charge beam,reguarly ends up in the phazon mines and i end up doing the whole game without those. I really need to get prime 1 randomized out of my head.

Rezbits can just die, tho, for the sheer annoyance factor they can have if they decide to.

But now that you mention it I remember the enemy I hate the most of the whole prime franchise : the chozo ghosts retrains that are the pirate elite commandos of echoes. they can just go die. Even with light beam they take an unreasonable amount of punishment.

But on the flipside, just like those things "just" take a super missile, most of the ennemies on bryyo or after take like 20-30 hp worth of hypermode to kill one, which doesn't sound too different to me.

Edited by Yumil on Aug 26th 2018 at 7:57:59 PM

To me, it’s more the principle of the thing. I don’t want to intentionally lose energy during a battle. Besides, super missiles are five missiles apiece (and I never use missiles outside of door opening and charge combos), while a single Phazon charge shot is about a quarter of an energy tank. That said, maybe it’s just my inherent desire to not lose health. I’ll probably be doing Prime 3 on Hypermode difficulty in at most six months, so I’ll see how I feel about it then.

Also, a quick tip for the Pirate Commandos: Kill them the same way you kill Metroids - Dark Beam followed immediately by a missile. They die in one hit.