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Alkibiádēs said:
Phazon mines are very cramped, claustrophobic and filled with tedious platforming. The same goes for the lava/fire area. (insert lots of pictures here) Sorry for the small pictures, I can never get the pictures from Metroid wikia on full size for some reason. |
You basically listed every single room I mentioned. As for the others (particularly the Sanctuary bridge), the problem is that while they're "open" in the sense that they look open, there isn't much manueverability in them. You're still stuck with very much one way to go. The bridge that opens into Sanctuary is a fantastic example of this; what should be a very open room is instead simply a linear, straightforward bridge with a single spider ball track that can be accessed later on. Prime tends to leave platforms around and encourage the player to jump all over the rooms, whereas the few "open" rooms in Echoes lack this sense of freedom.
Allow me to illustrate with an example. Take the two largest rooms from both games, that being the opening room in Phendrana and the Sanctuary Temple. Prime handles the opening room to Phendrana quite well; before you can leave the area, you've had to explore all over it. You've jumped on the platforms, headed on the cliffside, smashed through a gate on the wall, and probably entered a few doors. Sanctuary Temple, meanwhile, despite being the biggest room in the game, only consists of only a single passageway from the bottom to the top with a few jumps required. The rest is entirely empty space; there aren't even any secrets hidden at the bottom to discover. What this does is keep the sense of cramped, smaller environments intact; you still feel like you're exploring a minimalistic environment since there's nothing really to do except follow the standard path set forth, whereas Prime does a much better job of getting the player to explore the world it puts forth, making it feel much more open in comparison.
I agree that Magmoor and the Phazon Mines are, for the most part, very cramped areas; and there's nothing wrong with that. It's when a game's level design is almost entirely closed in and cramped where things start to get annoying. Even the smaller rooms in the Phazon Mines tend to do a better job of encouraging exploration than the larger rooms in Echoes, however. Perhaps a lot of this has to do with the fact that many of the larger rooms in Echoes require powerups or other items that you get later on in the game (this is going to sound weird, but bear with me) before you can actually navigate them in any way besides just following a straightforward, linear path. The opening room in Agon Wastes, for instance, has a number of platforms that you can use as a shortcut, but you can't take advantage of these until after getting the Space Jump. The "bridge room" (the first picture you linked) can only be traversed on the bottom floor until you find a panel to activate a kinectic orb cannon. The Dark World in particular has a nasty habit of keeping you from exploring large parts of it by blocking off doors with powerups acquired much later. Part of this I'm fine with; withholding certain parts of the area until certain powerups are discovered is certainly a big piece of the Metroid formula; but Echoes doesn't just withhold parts of the area, it withholds ways to get around the same rooms you're in already, making the moving around process a very linear one and one that feels cramped and contained compared to the freedom Prime offered in this regard.
