Metroid Prime 1 being the best. 2 the worst 3 not far behind the first.
2 was a tacked on way to make the game longer and Nintendo has used the light and dark world thing to death. I have no desire to ever play MP2 again and it's been 11 years.
Yeah, thats pretty much how I feel.
The level design just kind of fell off a cliff after the first one. I mean, the world got much larger, almost twice as large, but it lost the multifaceted room design of the first, typically rooms had one entrance, and one exit, with the occasional 3 way room being thrown in where you go one way first, get something to unlock the next area, and head back out and to the second exit.
The original prime was very dense in its design, you often had rooms with three, four exits, one on the floor, one on the ceiling, one under water, one on a cliff, and the way you traversed these rooms changed over time as well. You would walk through the room at first, maybe fight a boss, then you would roll through a tunnel the next time, which was faster, and let you go out a different exit. Then next time you would space jump across the pillars in the room, and find a new exit, and after that, you realized those half pipes werent decoration, and you could boost ball up to find new exists, and finally, you would find a magnetic rail, and find yet another, new exit, in this room, you had one of the first bos fights in.
In echoes, that would just be a throwaya room. You fight the boss, get the powerup, which was little more than a key, go along several flat uneventful rooms, to where you used the key, rinse and repeat. The weapons were literally reskins of the originals, the super weapons were all simplistic but pretty room clearers with no individual strategies, the power ups were all the same, with the exception of a few new ones, which were all horrible and boring keys, with no use past being keys, with the exception of the space jump/spin attack, which was also almost reduced to being a key, as almost the only times you were meant to use it, was at obnoxious glowing walls screaming HEY!!! YOU CAN WALL JUMP HERE AND ONLY HERE!!! Dont even think of trying to wall jump anywhere thats not a massive glowing panel because we couldnt figure out how to design that!! Fortunately it was saved by simply allowing the player to extend jumping by large quantities. But that was it. One worthwhile new addition, and no rooms that really organically took advantadge of the old move sets like the first one. The dark light mechanic was horrible, took too long to load, was a constant inconvenience, and constantly broke up the game pacing.
The bosses were great though. Although they began to border on tedious.
3 suffered all the shortcomings of 2, but mitigated them NOT by increasing the quality of the world design to prime 1 standards, but by streamlining the exploration to make the back tracking less tedious.... The combat was made much faster paced, and the ability to actually aim changed the game dramatically, and made for the most fun metroid in combat mechanics, making the game considerably more enjoyable than echoes, while still not really holding a candle to the first game, which was a master of the metroidvania design. The third game broke several cardinal rules of metroidvania, so it really couldnt even be considered a metroidvania.
