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Frogger on 25 September 2017
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Pavolink said:
spemanig said:

I think I backed up my claims with pretty iron-clad arguments in a way that you have yet to.

Free aiming is very good for Metroid. Not by any chance a devolution. You are just wrong. Hopefully you are not that proud of being wrong to keep writing about it.

 

spemanig said:

I think I backed up my claims with pretty iron-clad arguments in a way that you have yet to.

 

mZuzek said:
spemanig said:

Metroid's original design philosophy was to be like a silent movie. That's why "environmental storytelling" is such a treasured aspect of the series, a description I still don't like btw. Either way, it was never meant to be a literal communication of story, and Prime is not understandable at all without scanning. As much as i hate scanning, Prime is a demonstrably worse game without knowing whats going on. It has terrible narrative conveyance.

Yeah. Personally, I'm not a fan of the scan logs, but I'll still read all of them because they're part of what makes Prime itself and they're a big part of the world-building of that game, so I can't just bring myself to ignore them. However, I appreciate the unspoken stuff a lot more in the 2D games - a recent example being Area 7 in Samus Returns, an area I just found visually interesting and blazed through the first time, but then after talking with a friend I came to realize it was the Chozo Laboratory where the Metroids had been created, and from then noticing all the little details and theorizing about stuff is so much more enticing. Seeing dead bodies in Super Metroid brings about a lot more dread and makes you wonder about what exactly happened than any moment in Prime where you see a dead body and then read a dumb little log saying stuff like "victim appears to have had his head severed" or something.

I think a lot of the beauty of Metroid comes from this mystery and from all the untold and unknown things. It's why I'm so hyped about the stuff in the Chozo Memories, because it makes me theorize a lot about something we know very little of.

Agreed. One thing I really don't like about SR is when it turns these moments into a cutscene instead of just letting players happen upon them, but when it doesnt do that, those moments can be very special. The reveal of the chozo memory spoiler is a definite highlight.

Even so, I'd take a silect and unecessary cutscene showing me something id rather discover myself over scan logs any day with absolute glee.