farnham said:
I think the problem of the game is not much the dark world.. because that segments are basically the regular levels with the tweak that you are in constant health dropping mode.. (which is annoying but not a real thread since there are health balls all over the place)
for me echoes' dark world has always been a place requring higher alertness, but by no means more difficult, or for that matter - dreadful; that is, it starts as one, but the sense of dread from it vanishes as soon as you realize you can sustain your energy bar with greater ease on dark aether than on luminoth's side, and darklings are faster to dispatch than the average light-side critter. dark aether is trickier per se, but once you learn the tricks, it becomes your haven - many a time have i fled to the nearest dark portal when the heat from a battle on light aether had burned me. but that's not what makes dark aether the genius part of the game that it is - no, it's the different perspective on the player's routine, the sense of a twisted reality where everything looks familiar but nothing responds or happens in the established way. and the intricate interweaving of the topologies of the two worlds creating some of the smartest and most rewarding spatial puzzles an adventure game has ever offered - nothing short of masterful. i never understood the opinion that dark aether is a mere repetition of light aether, a cheap way to increase the game's length - that opinion can only come from somebody who completely missed the very foundations of echoes. anyway, i think i got carried away.
I think the problem really was that you gain the powers of samus really really slowly.. If you looked at all the stuff that Samus is supposed to be doing.. (Echoes Visor, Dark Visor, iPod Samus, Screwattack etc) Its really frustating to be in Torvus Bog and trying to get the underwater booster that will only help you in that particular level.. Or seeing the spiderball lanes but not beeing able to use it until you beat the spiderball guardian (which is pretty much late into the game)... The Bosses are awesomely made but very difficult to beat too. But thats not necessarily a con..
as you say, echoes bosses difficuty is not a con. actually, it is inversely-proportional to the player's ability to 'solve' the boss, the latter always being a very dynamic and aggressive puzzle. in this regard echoes simply trumps over corruption's bosses which, too, have a level of 'solvability', but are much more an exercise in patience and acrobatics.
as re the slow powers gradation in echoes - i'd gladly take that over corruption's 'a bunch of powers per minute, with little to no use throughout the game'. overall, corruption's powers gradation feels utterly unpolished to me.
Outside of that Echoes improved everything over Prime... The graphics looked better then Prime... even better then Halo 2 (it has no bumpmapping but the poligon models are just much better designed) which came out the same year.. The Enemies were really really interesting (while some where rehashes from Prime).. Dark Samus battles were awesome.. And it has interesting environments which completely shit over magmoor or phendara (torvus bog was shit though...)
here i can only agree with you, to the point that i too think torvus bog was the weakest link in the level awesomness that is echoes. i think the problem with torvus was that the very nature of the place required more organic design than what the geometric budget of the game could offer at the time, which brought to some questionable design decisions and trade-offs. i, for one, would love to see echoes wii-made, if for not other reason but to see torvus bog implemented to the same organic feel as bryyo, combined with the level of detailization of elysia - now
that would be the torvus bog i'd have loved in echoes.
