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Resident_Hazard on 28 December 2010
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Mr Khan said:
Resident_Hazard said:

I don't think DKCR's difficutly has anything to do with Nintendo, after all, the original games were pretty simplistic and the first one was a cakewalk.  Retro's standard is to make highly challenging games, as was shown with Metroid Prime 1 and Metroid Prime 2.  That's Retro's style. 

This backs up my theory that Nintendo is the reason Metroid Prime 3 was the easiest thing since Paris Hilton--if left to Retro, it would've been just as challenging as the first two, but Nintendo gave them the singular guidance to "make it easy for the Blue Ocean crowd."

I would think Retro got the message that Metroid Prime 2 was too damn hard, and toned it down (we can also see that from the fact that Prime 2 in the Trilogy version is significantly less cheap on a few of the worst-offender bosses).

Not getting how Prime 3 was especially easy. More accessible controls, but they made up for that with some pretty vicious regular enemies. The enemies that could go hyper-mode on you could chew through health far faster than anything from Prime 1, and most of the stuff from Prime 2 (sans the cheap-o bosses: Boost Guardian, Emperor Ing Phase 3, and final Dark Samus)

If I'm reading you right, you didn't think Prime 3 was especially easy.  Now, I'm a huge, huge, huge Metroid fan, and I spent ample time loving the crap out of Primes 1 and 2.  That said, those games challenged me to love them with some of the most punishing gameplay imaginable.  I was routinely beaten to a pulp in both titles, spending hours on singular battles.  The Omega Pirate was hard enough on regular mode in Prime 1.  On hard mode, that boss might as well have been a certified rapist.  Prime 2 was even harder, and I was stuck on that one--the final sequence--for a year on regular mode.  Only coming back when I was good and brave enough (later, I discovered by accident that if I "restarted from last save" after the Emperor Ing, I actually started after that 45-minute battle and didn't have to do it again to face Dark Samus 3--a year of frustration because I thought "restart from last save" meant fighting the Emperor Ing again!!). 

Suffice to say, I spent a lot of time being killed over and over again in Primes 1 & 2.  Enemies, bosses, stages, etc.  Everything was just so immensely challenging.  Then Prime 3 rolls around, and enemies drop like flies, bosses are all push-overs, and puzzles aren't quite as challenging.  It wasn't the controls that made Prime 3 easy, it was Nintendo making Prime 3 easy that made it easy.  Fewer enemies, weaker enemies, weaker enemy attacks, simpler bosses--everything.  The game was clearly intended to be "blue ocean friendly" with it's much lighter difficulty.  I think I died maybe 3 times throughout the whole game, and I don't think I did once on any of the bosses.  Again, I think I lost at least 20 lives alone to the Omega Pirate in Prime 1 on either difficulty setting. 

The commercials indicated as much, having Metroid Prime 3 advertised as being played by regular people rather than hardcore gamers.  As if Nintendo was saying, "See?  Anyone can play!"  Which, of course, they were.