Prime 2’s my favorite of the trilogy, but I just can’t bring myself to put it much higher than Prime 1. It’s got several positives over its predecessor (beam types and ammo make combat a bit more interesting, backtracking feels more natural and player driven, and the item hunt in general feels so much better), and ultimately I think I do like it more. I feel like more interesting things could’ve been done with the Dark World with a bit more time; I think that there’s a lot more potential for interdimensional puzzles than what made it into the game. The Dark World’s atmosphere is great, feeling like one of the most hostile environments in any game I’ve played, though ultimately all Dark Worlds look about the same. Maybe they could’ve branched off a bit from the purple color scheme in different areas? The Ing are perfectly unsettling, but maybe there could be some more unique enemies in each Dark World? Echoes has such a unique aesthetic that’s one of my favorites in the franchise (including some of my favorite suit upgrades too), though you never really see it until you get to Sanctuary Fortress, and by then the game’s almost over. In the meantime, you have to trek through the Temple Grounds, a dull shade of brown, Agon Wastes, a slightly different dull shade of brown, and Torvus Bog, a refreshingly wet area that unfortunately had its look pulled right out of Prime 1’s Tallon Overworld. Most of what bugs me about Echoes comes from its relationship to Prime 1.
It’s sort of the Majora’s Mask of Metroid games, being the sequel to what’s claimed to be one of the greatest games of all time, developed on the same engine in a short period of time, and then released to much lower honors. But while Majora’s Mask has gained quite the following for being so unlike any other Zelda game, my issue with Echoes is that it doesn’t stand out enough from Prime 1. Agon Wastes just feels like a less interesting Chozo Ruins, and Torvus Bog just feels like a different take on the Tallon Overworld. So many enemies are reused (albeit slightly altered), and they just don’t have the same impact the second time around. And the game just never feels quite as immersive as Prime 1. The atmosphere of Tallon IV was really Prime 1’s greatest strength, and it’s largely missing here. Plus, the whole “a meteor hit our planet and then everything went wrong!” story is less engaging a second time, and still leaves a little confusion as to how exactly Dark Aether was created.
But besides the meteor debacle, I do like what the story has here. You’re exploring a world that’s just barely hanging on by a thread, and you’re constantly reminded of this by the Luminoth corpses scattered around, the lore telling of a war that the Luminoth are horribly losing, and even the sky itself flashing purple in the intro with how unstable the world has become. At the time you start the game, the enemy has essentially already won, and the entire game is about turning the tide. I love how it feels like the Ing are all desperately trying to keep you from escaping when you first take the planetary energy in Agon Wastes, but that feeling just isn’t captured again in Torvus or Sanctuary, where it feels like you’re able to just waltz over to the nearest portal without any resistance.
I appreciate the world design of Echoes a lot more than Prime 1. Every area is somehow connected to every other, and it’s generally arranged like a ring, so there’s nothing like having to run through Magmoor Caverns every time you want to get to Phendrana Drifts from anywhere else or vice versa. The game generally has you clear one area at a time, which hurts the feeling of cohesiveness that Tallon IV had, but reduces the amount of running around you have to do. The game never asks you to leave an area right in the middle of it... or, well, until it does. The detours for the Seeker Missiles and Power Bombs are both annoyingly unexpected because the game sets you up to never expect them (I don’t see how you’d naturally think of it without hints), but at least the former doesn’t ask you to go very far. The latter at first seems like it could be a Prime 1 Gravity Suit-esque dilemma, but unlike said dilemma, here you’re sent through rooms you haven’t visited in a long time that actually have new secrets to discover, and when you do finally get the Power Bombs, and elevator takes you right back to Sanctuary Fortress, so there’s no unnecessary running back. At one point exploring Torvus for the first time, I found an elevator to Agon and decided to use it to explore a bit more over there with my new abilities, and was rewarded with the Darkburst for my efforts. Backtracking feels so much better here because you’re not constantly forced to do it, and the lower frequency of it allows there to be more to discover when you finally do.
I ultimately enjoy Echoes more than Prime 1 because its structure avoids all the tedium of the latter, but I recognize that the game devotes a lot less attention to the immersive aspects that a lot of people loved about Prime 1. It also reuses a lot of assets and ideas from its predecessor (most frustrating in the area designs throughout the first half of the game), which especially harms the experience if you play the games back to back as I did. I can understand which game you enjoy more coming down to personal preference.