I've been replaying Metroid Prime Hunters because it's a game I have a lot of nostalgia for, even if it isn't exactly a great Metroid game. There's a lot I still like about the game, not limited to the hunter concepts, atmosphere and music, but there's also a lot left to be desired. Just for fun, I've been thinking of ways one could spruce up the game and make it more appealing to fans of the traditional Metroid formula.
I'm inclined to say the game was designed to be simple, with evident focus on making a good multiplayer (arguably the one point they really succeeded on) and no real care put into the single player campaign. My train of thought is based around improving the single player storyline- though I'm not a game developer and I'm sure a professional could do much better than me.
The Hunters
I'm going to start off with the hunters because they are such an integral part of the game, to the point that they're literally in the title. The premise is incredibly cool- six enemy hunters, of varying backgrounds and moralities, have picked up the same signal as you and are now on the path to claim the Ultimate Power for one reason or another. In Hunters, Samus has to make her way through the Alimbic Cluster, occasionally encountering a hunter in either a scripted event (first-time meeting per each Hunter) or a random miniboss fight (one of the six hunters, in one of a set of specific rooms). If the hunter kills Samus, they take one of the octoliths she has collected, and she has to track them down to get it back.
Realistically, even if the rest of the story was mediocre, the hunters should've been the shining stars and had the effort put into them. In practice, they're not that exciting. They're generally not too hard to defeat, which I might expect on a first encounter, but they're actually easier the second time around when they SHOULD be more difficult. It should feel like they're hunting you for octoliths just as hard as you'd be hunting them if they had one. Some smarter AI might do wonders for them, because with their limited difficulty you're not actually that likely to ever get killed by them and need to go on a hunt.
The hunters have cool designs, but battle tactics aside, they're incredibly generic. In Corruption you don't spend too much time getting to know your fellow hunters but you still get the measure of their personalities and grow quite fond of them, and feel sad when you have to destroy them. In Hunters, the hunters are just time-consuming obstacles as much as a Guardian or something else.
They were scarier in Breath of the Wild.
With such varied personalities, some character interactions or indications of their motives and moralities might go a long way. No speech required- they could speak through actions. Like maybe have Trace, being the sneaky-sneaky stealth hunter he is, wait for you then lock you in with a bunch of enemies while he claims the prize at the other side. Whereas Sylux or Weavel might give in to vengeance and knock a bunch of things out for the sake of getting to kill you personally.
Not only would it be interesting to see more of their interactions with Samus, but with the environment too. These hunters are presumably picking up the lore as they go along, and supposedly finding their way to the octoliths. Some might realise Samus is doing well, and wait for her to beat the bosses so they can steal octoliths from her when she's worn out post-boss. Maybe some are actually competent enough to find artifacts or even octoliths for themselves.
Imagine situations like this: you stumble upon a boss portal with no artifacts in place. You get two, have to pass by the portal again, and surprise surprise- three artifacts already? Then you get shot in the back and frozen in place by Noxus; he knew you were coming and he'll be damned if you're getting that octolith before he does.
Presumably the game wants to ensure all the Hunters are your potential foes right up until the very end, but it might be interesting to see some of them actually take sides with Samus, if only temporarily. Spire and Noxus are arguably the "good guys" and if there was more in-game indication of their personalities, it would add a layer of depth in that you, a fellow "good guy" can pity their cause but still have to do your job- even if it means defeating them in the process. Maybe in places such as the very final level, there's room for one of them or even one of the "bad guys" to choose to help Samus- like shooting someone else to spare her from trouble once they realise she's doing the right thing, or something like that.
On that note, it would be interesting if we actually learned anything at all about these six hunters, since they're such noteworthy enemies. In the Prime trilogy, arguably the most significant and omnipresent enemies are the Space Pirates, and we learn LOADS about them and their thoughts through log scans.
It would be interesting if the other Hunters left similar things- at the very least, the option to stumble across their ships and read their last recorded logs, with their thoughts and feelings and a taste of their personalities. Perhaps new logs are added after their first encounter with Samus. The ships would also be a more sensible place to get hold of their signature weapons, rather than finding them across the Alimbic Cluster with no real explanation as to why they are there.
Overall, the Hunters represent a lot of missed potential, and I probably haven't covered it all, but as the titular characters they should have posed more of a threat while being more interesting and getting the player more invested in them.
Level design
Hunters is an incredibly linear game. It's not quite on Other M's level, and at least offers times when several planets are open to you and you have to go investigate a few before finding the right way. But the quest to find artifacts and octoliths is very straightforward, especially since the hunters etc. only provide generic battles and don't really change your environment or get in your way. A few more scripted events with the hunters nudging you off-course could've done some good. But with so few branching or interconnected areas, that isn't necessarily possible on the map as it stands.
I'm pretty sure the developers have actually confirmed by now- if it wasn't obvious already- that the game's single player was an afterthought to the multiplayer, and the room designs are all based on various repurposed multiplayer stages. In all fairness, it could be worse, and offers many points where you can encounter the other hunters and have a good fight. But it does lead to a very linear path back-and-forth to the boss portals. This does little for exploration, which is one of the Metroid franchise's core aspects.
Even in Fusion, where Adam pretty much told you where to go, there was exploration to be done and hidden places and items to find. In Hunters, the items are not incredibly well hidden, nor are there many of them at all, so the item hunt that has been a significant part of almost every Metroid game is non-existent. Typically you explore until you find an item which allows you to access a few more areas you couldn't get to before, opening up the ways to new items and bosses and such, but the capacity for this is limited here. You don't pick up power-ups as you would traditionally, and if it weren't for the weapon-specific force fields you need to destroy with the new beams you pick up, there's nothing really out of access to you from beginning to end. You can reach every ledge with your jump, go into hot areas with your varia suit, boost past instant-kill pistons with your boost ball, all without having the challenge of finding the relevant pickups first.
On the subject of the weapons, they come to very little use aside from some enemies with weaknesses, some buttons that need to be laser-sniped by the imperialist, and the aforementioned force fields. Maybe this is a minor gripe, but it would be cool if their uses were a bit more varied, like having to melt stuff with the Magmaul, energize or drain things with the Shock Coil, freeze a path with the Judicator etc.
Guard nodes: harder to beat than the actual bosses.
Overall in terms of level design I'd rearrange the linear paths to interconnect different rooms and make a less easy start-to-boss route, requiring the player to actually try and fail to get past certain rooms due to available power-ups (I guess this is attempted with the force fields and coloured doors but they just block you out of rooms altogether). I'd also try to add in more pickups, hiding them in new places- some of which are more easy and obvious, others which are hidden and hard, and require newly acquired skills to reach.
I will say this, the actual visual design of the worlds isn't badly done at all. It may not be as gloriously detailed as Tallon IV or Aether due to the graphics of the DS, but it's nonetheless quite nice to look at and does quite well with what it has. There is undoubtedly a scary abandoned atmosphere (that was one of the things that drew me into the game when I was a kid). It does well with what graphics it has.
I’m writing at 3am, so this thing genuinely has more brainpower than me.
Bosses
If Hunters weren't repetitive enough as it were, the bosses are literally copied and pasted onto every planet and space station four times over. This infamous fact is an obvious relic of lazy, last-minute single player campaign design. The bosses as they are aren't particularly impressive either- it would be fine if the first Cretaphid and first Slench were kept in place, but the second and third and fourth of each of those are just underwhelming in both their repetitiveness and their continually unimpressive tactics.
First thing I'd do, tear out 6 of the bosses and replace them with something new and interesting. At the very LEAST, have four boss types total and use each boss twice, but the same two bosses four times over is a bit much. Ideally each boss room would have a new and increasingly difficult boss, offering new challenges and new ways to utilise your newfound weapons aside from "this boss has a weakness to X weapon". This would be the perfect time to show off the secondary effects of your beams, like the Judicator's freezing or the Volt Driver's disruptive effects.
What I would do is pile together all copies of each Cretaphid and each Slench. Normally, the first Cretaphid gets down to 2/3 health and its lasers go a row lower, which isn't the most challenging change. So, I'd have the Cretaphid get to 2/3 health and then start using green blobs. Gets down to 1/3, starts using blobs AND lasers. Instead of spreading these abilities across four Cretaphids desperately trying to make each one seem different and advanced from the rest, have them all be stages of the same boss, allowing that boss to get slightly more challenging during the one fight and not needing to repeat it four times over!
(It doesn't need to be super hard anyway, it's only the first major boss of the game.)
Same with the Slench- 3/4 health it detaches from the wall, 2/4 health it starts doing the charge attack, 1/4 health it rolls around on the floor (and its patterns aren't so darn predictable while it's doing so). Something like that. Then we don't need a whole four of them, and the other six bosses can be brand new mechanoids which get more challenging as time goes along.
Kinda going back to a previous section here, but maybe since they're one of the most important things in the game, have the other Hunters intrude on the boss fights. Perhaps you could have an encounter where somebody else fills out the portal before you, and when you get in there you find a Hunter- maybe even one picked randomly by the game- who is fighting the boss but just can't beat it.
There's a variety of scenarios you could get out of this, which could help to show off the personalities of the Hunters. E.g. one might team up with you but get defeated at the end. One might team up with you, only to battle you for the octolith afterwards. If its your last octolith, one might actually just say "here, you take that, I'm done" and let you have it. Maybe one chickens out once you turn up, and they may or may not hang around outside the boss portal to grab you.
One final thing I think I'd do is make the Stronghold Void a more interesting place. Each one is ever-so-slightly visually different, to reflect the planet or station you came from, but they're all basically the same short, straight path down to the boss room. Personally I'd design them more like Leviathans, with a room or two between you and the boss, and the need to use a few of your newest power-ups to get to it.
As a side note, the cutscenes before and after bosses can go- though if they had eight different bosses, having the pre-boss cutscenes wouldn't be so bad since they could be a cool way to show off each new boss. The after-boss cutscenes are usually just the boss exploding, and you get that anyway when the screen whites out once you land the final blow, so unless something more significant can happen I would personally skip those cutscenes and go straight to getting the octolith. If there's gonna be cutscenes, save them for something else, probably something involving the other hunters.
Story and Final Boss
I'm gonna go ahead and say that while the story is totally a Prime rehash, I actually kinda like it. Yeah, fundamentally it's the same eldritch-abomination-crashed-into-our-planet-and-now-we're-all-dead. But there's something I find incredibly scary about the idea of Gorea, in a way. Based on the lore scans you get in game, it's clearly meant to be a REALLY overpowered big bad, even if the actual boss fight doesn't live up to the reputation.
The sense I get from the lore scans is that the Alimbic people were not quite like the Chozo or Luminoth- they're not all peaceful or wise. They're arrogant bastards who thought they were the best at everything until something very big came and knocked them down a peg or two, and wiped out their galaxy-spanning civilisation in the process. They repeatedly go on about how much their pride cost them, and that kinda ties into the hunters as well.
The lessons learned by the Alimbic people are ones the Hunters can take from. They conquered the whole Tetra galaxy with their supposedly unstoppable military force, like the greedy Kriken Empire from which Trace hails. But their pride was their downfall. They thought they were the best, their morals superior to all else, like Noxus and the Vhozon. But for all their faith in themselves, they lost the battle against Gorea. The last Alimbics desperately sought to save their kind, just as Spire seeks the Ultimate Power to save his. And Spire, like the rest, is falling into a trap- a lie put out by Gorea to lead to them to his prison so they can free him.
I think I would still centre the story around the hunters, with less focus on the Alimbic people than, say, Prime gives to its Chozo. But it would be interesting to see those hunters pick up the lore as Samus does and react to it. Perhaps have Spire give up on getting an artifact, and you wonder "why is that?" so you scan around expecting some kind of invisible force field but instead find a lore snippet left by one of the last Alimbics, telling of how they gave up trying to save their people and sacrificed themselves so they could protect other races in other galaxies from Gorea's path of destruction (or if you don't care about lore, you never have to load up the scan visor, just snag that artifact and be on your way.)
Some hunters won't learn, but maybe it will be their downfall. Maybe it is all their downfalls, that they refuse to learn and still go in search of this ultimate power on the Oubliette ship- meanwhile Samus knows what's up and instead of seeking the Ultimate Power, by the time she reaches the endgame she's just here to wreck Gorea's shit and make sure the other idiots don't unleash hell on the entire universe.
Maybe this next bit belongs in the previous section, but I'd have Gorea be a genuinely threatening last boss. I can kinda see why they went with the one-beam-at-a-time thing because the beams are literally the only power-ups in the entire game, but it still makes for an uninteresting fight. I did like the prophecy thing though, that was neat.
The first boss of Metroid Prime is scarier than the last boss of Hunters. What happened to “orgies of annihilation” Gorea?
Gorea can start out a little weak- it's fine, he's been stuck to this "seal sphere" for around two thousand years or so. But as the battle progresses, he needs to break through the walls, metaphorically and literally if needs be (think AM2R's Metroid Queen.) He needs to shape-shift, become a bit more unpredictable, get further and further away from the starting point as you desperately fight to contain him while he ploughs though the prison ship. He needs to be a boss as threatening as the Emperor Ing or worse, something that obviously wants to consume and destroy. You need to feel like you are the last line of defence between Gorea, cancerous swallower of galactic civilisations, and everything you care about protecting.
I think there needs to be an explanation for the Omega Cannon, too. It's clearly useful against Gorea, so why didn't the Alimbics use it? When you pick it up, you're told the consequences are too dire. So those consequences need to be seen. Maybe start out having it damage you when you use it, requiring skill to not kill yourself in the process (as long as it doesn't make the game unbeatable, it would have to be balanced well enough to seem powerful without being horrible to use.) Maybe the consequence is that it downright destroys the Alimbic Cluster- unfortunate for all the wildlife, but there were no Alimbic people left there anyway, and so the loss is arguably not as great as it would've been back in the day.
Alternatively, you being Samus Aran, you save the Alimbic Cluster by transporting the Oubliette ship back into the Infinity Void and then running back to your ship before the traditional endgame countdown finishes. Yay for you! You and your fellow hunters escape, possibly having gained a strange sense of camaraderie with all of them except for Sylux who you still need to hate for the purposes of Metroid Prime 4, and the universe is totally safe from Gorea because you annihilated him with a fate more brutal than even Phaaze got inflicted upon it. Also, if you have one endgame escape sequence you could cut out all the other post-boss escape sequences, which are kinda repetitive and annoying anyway.
Overall
On the whole, Hunters isn't necessarily a good game, but it's not an awfully bad one either. Everything I've covered above could make the game a lot cooler, but I'm not surprised that none of it was included in the game itself, because the game was basically designed around the multiplayer. If for some reason they ever remade Hunters, I'd hope to see at least some of the things I've brought up, or else any other good ideas that can spice the game up and bring it a little closer to the normal Metroid formula, gameplay-wise.
Personally, I still like Hunters a lot. Maybe that's nostalgia, maybe it's because I love the atmosphere and music a lot (as I've probably already said a few times) and maybe it's because I have a big imagination and can picture things as being better than they are, even if they aren't represented that way in-game. I can fully understand why many people have a neutral-to-hatred attitude towards the game. I didn't even mention the godawful hand-cramping control scheme which needs a SERIOUS revamp. But Hunters has the bare bones of a potentially fantastic concept for a Metroid game, and an improved version of it- one which treats the eponymous hunters much better for a start- could bring something brand new and brilliant to the table.
