+ Super Mario  Galaxy

-Ocarina of Time

This is it! Either of the games deserve to win

This isn't supposed to be a discussion thread and we're getting quite off-topic here. However, I feel the need to reply to this. Hopefully I won't feel the same about further replies.

Ocarina of Time was my first 3D Zelda and it's neck and neck with Twilight Princess as my LEAST favorite of them. I don't have this whole "played it first" or "revolutionary for its time" bias.

Prime 2 has an interesting story, sure, but it only led up to a highly disappointing ending - the first game didn't really try too hard to make a story so it didn't have that problem. Also, Prime 2 started the whole "Samus is a badass" thing with stupid cutscenes that don't belong in Metroid, which is supposed to be all about immersion. I won't argue that Prime 2 looks better, but I don't think the difference is that big, in fact I find it barely noticeable at all.

I think Prime 1 has better bosses. The second game tried too hard to make the bosses way too gigantic, formulaic and just downright annoying. I probably feel like that because they were all in the Dark World and that just makes everything obnoxious. I didn't like a single boss in that game (have to say the extreme opposite for Prime 1), and I thought the final boss during the escape sequence was just about the most unfair and poorly designed thing they could have done. So I also disagree about the game never being unfair.

Level design is, in my opinion, Prime 2's most horrible flaw. The world of that game is just A PAIN to explore. When you look at the map, it's confusing. When you're just playing through it, it's confusing. Several areas have loads of rooms that feel like copy-paste and the exploration is done on an incredibly linear fashion which means if you need to get to the other side of the world you'll spend quite a bit of time going through the same annoying rooms over and over AND OVER. And that's not even touching the atrocious Dark World. That thing was so badly designed it hurt. It was completely segmented in tiny areas and the exploration was made even more linear, while having the terrible "lose health outside of beacons, recover when inside" mechanic which only meant I had to just stop and wait for 2 minutes everytime I got to a beacon.

Prime 1's world is the opposite. While vast, it's very well designed for exploration as it is easy to understand, memorize and the connections between each area are everywhere to be found. Unlike Prime 2, because you're getting area transports all the time, there's a lot more variety to the environments when you're exploring, and the roadblocks are unlocked in a natural way instead of them just feeling like they're locked for 95% of the game.

Edit: and about Metroid Prime being dead, well... fuck you people. You're all wrong.
Personally, I think all 3 of these games are overrated, but Prime was at least almost as good as people said.

The game wasn't hard. I stopped in every light beacon because I cared about my energy, as any self-respecting player should. The final boss isn't unfair because her attacks are hard to dodge or whatever, but rather because the game does a TERRIBLE job of explaining (through either text or visuals) a desperate player how they're supposed to beat her.

They spell it out but it doesn't work like that. Not when she spends most of the time using another attack (that the game never even tells you exists) that you can't absorb whatsoever. It's especially harder to understand when you have a clock telling you you must do it in less than 4 minutes.

I'm not going to reply further after this because it's not the right thread and to be honest, anyone who honestly thinks Echoes is a better game than Prime is absolutely out of their mind.

That's not a good visual clue. The game never tells you she has any attack other than the phazon one, and since she's entirely made of like, phazon, it makes sense to think that the attack you should be absorbing is like, you know, the one she's actually using. But then it doesn't work once, twice, three, four times in a row and the naturally frustrated player thinks there's something wrong, as there are so many things wrong with this game.

And about the time, I know it's not 4 minutes. However, it's 8 counting from the start - naturally, during the process of escaping the tower, trying to jump right with the ridiculously awkward screw attack, getting to Dark Samus and beating her first (third?) form and scanning her fourth when you realize she changes, that takes a while. I don't remember how much time I had left when I first got to the unfair part, but it was certainly around 4 or 5 minutes. By then, I already got frustrated as the boss felt broken and I just couldn't take that game any longer. It was just annoying, unpleasant to play, with some really bad level design and EASILY the worst Metroid game I've fully played so far.

Prime 3 was a big improvement, but because of it's lackluster second half it fails to come even close to the first game.

Congrats on reking OoT.