GameStack.pop()

Finally!
I beat Metroid Prime 2 yesterday. It's pretty funny, how much I came around on the stuff that I don't generally like when finishing this game. I guess it's been a while, so I should start with the key hunt. Just like Metroid Prime, at the end you have to track down a set of items to gain access to the final area. In the first game, I think it was 8 artifacts, 3 of which I had stumbled upon in my travels. The last five I had to figure out the location of by reading the scan log book and guessing where the clue referenced. A key word was bolded in each section, so it didn't take that long, but it was a chore. When I got the key hunt task in Echoes, I was really dreading it. I had found 4 of the 9 needed keys ahead of time, and had scanned all of the keybearers at one point, so I knew it was a matter of going to the locations that I had been to in the past, and getting a key from the Dark planet. What I didn't realize until much, much later was that the logbook was arranged in such a way to make the key hunt almost trivially easy. Once I figured out that it was broken down by area, and still numbered when you got to the actual Key Entry in the log, it was really fast to get the last of the keys. Kudos to the developers for making the worst part of the end-game of Prime into something that really works in Prime 2, even if a stubborn fool like me took a while to see it.

Thankfully, the section after the key entry is simple: save station, wall jump, boss fight(s). Like, seemingly, every other game these days, this was a multi-stage boss fight, with the requisite Metroid countdown after the first boss. In this game, the 'final' boss battle was the Emperor Ing, with 5 scannable sections, and a 4 part battle. It basically took me one life to get the hang of the first mode, and another to get the hang of the second. The third stage was really easy, but it took me 4 tries to get past the final part. Once you get past all of that, the countdown begins. It's a short trip out of the area, so 8 minutes is a really long time, until you get intercepted by Dark Samus' final 2 modes. The first mode went by pretty easily. The second mode was tough. After dealing with Archer turning off the game (making me re-do Emperor Ing) and just plain losing twice, I got the hang of it, and beat the game. 80% Completion, 23 hours. It was quite satisfying, and now I'm on to play Psychonauts.