Metroid Prime Hunters was the very first game that most people could technically play on their Nintendo DS, thanks to the demo that came with every system during its first year of production. But a lot of people didn’t actually get the full game. I was one of the many who actually bought it on the first day it was released. Looking back, I feel a lot of nostalgia for it, even if it had its own share of problems and concerns.
Looking back, this definitely had much worse graphics than I remember. The Nintendo DS was about as powerful as a Nintendo 64, so it obviously wasn’t going to look as good as Metroid Prime on the Nintendo GameCube, but I had high hopes anyway. For a portable system, the graphics were actually really good for the time. However, they have not aged all that well. And while I loved the Nintendo DS, a lot of its games suffer from the same graphical issues.
What was special about this game in particular was its introduction of brand new characters to the series. We don’t have characters like Mother Brain, Kraid, or Ridley show up, so they created mercenaries, assassins, and whatever else, basically giving them the same general shape and form as Samus so they could all play similarly while still having their own unique characteristics. For fans of Metroid Prime 4, this was also the first game to feature Sylux, but he didn’t have the same kind of impact that he had in that game. Metroid Prime Hunters didn’t highlight the character well enough for him to feel that important. And I didn’t particularly care for him compared to any of the other characters.
And I actually can’t remember who I played as the most in Metroid Prime Hunters. I know it wasn’t Samus, because almost nobody ever played as Samus online. I know it seemed a little too obvious to make her the best character, so it seemed like the development team decided they needed to nerf her. But every character had their own kind of blaster and even their own version of the Morph Ball. Some were good, some were bad, but I don’t remember anybody being particularly overwhelming or terribly bad. So you got to see a good mix of characters online.
But definitely the worst thing about the game was the controls. You basically had to use a stylus to move around along with the D-pad and, I think, some buttons too. And it didn’t take long for your hands and fingers to start feeling a little too sore. In some ways, the aiming was actually pretty good, but in other ways, it just wasn’t quite right. I have very similar feelings about mouse and keyboard controls on PCs as well. While many gamers consider that to be the holy grail of first-person shooter controls, the better aiming just never made up for how difficult it was to move around, so it never felt like a perfect mix to me. But I remember that I could never play Metroid Prime Hunters for a super long session without my hands feeling like I was 80 years old.
And about twenty-something years later, Metroid Prime Hunters is a game that nobody really plays anymore, especially since its main draw was its online play, considering that the campaign was completely garbage. I had hoped they would actually make one for the Nintendo Wii with better graphics, which actually would have worked really well, but Nintendo never bit the bullet on it. Which is a little odd, considering that I know it must have sold enough copies to have been profitable. But Nintendo had to make games for both the Wii console and the Nintendo DS handheld, and I guess a potential sequel just got lost in the shuffle. But I find that it is an important part of Metroid history, even if it doesn’t really matter in the long run.