This is going back a ways to the last system I bought that I was truly excited about... The GameCube. This would be Nintendo's last attempt at keeping the war alive between them, Sony, and Microsoft. Sega had already played themselves out of the market for the most part and would soon completely give up as a console manufacturer. The GameCube was in a distant third place in the consoled wars and kind of struggled for original or exclusive content. One thing they would always have going for them as a company was a few of their titles such as Mario, Zelda, and Metroid.
Metroid Prime was really an amazing development in the Metroid saga because it was the first one to go 3D. This was something that was concerning to all of us gamers at the time because not all games actually need a 3D edition and we had seen a few get "screwed up" by the devs trying to do that.
Thankfully Metroid Prime was an absolutely fantastic and very nicely polished game. It was tough, there's no denying that, but it was also fair. The game was designed very well and was entertaining as hell. I enjoyed almost everything about this game, but not all of it.
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Ridley is a character that you meet up with in, as far as I know, all of the Metroid games and there's an ongoing joke about how it is very Michael Myers or Friday the 13th of this creature to not really be all that fussed about dying, he / she just comes on back for the next edition.
Ridley is normally reserved as one of the final bosses and I would say that he is the first one where it was pretty cryptic what the hell you needed to do to get an upper hand. Like most bosses, he goes through several "phases of abilities" and the fight changes as you go on.
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The first part is pretty easy because he just flies around and on occasion will appear at the end of the platform where you can easily dodge his attacks because at this point you are very familiar with the dodge button. Fire a few super missiles into his chest at a distance and his ability to do the annoying flying around too far away for you to strike him is eliminated.
This is the first problem I had with this fight, when Meta Ridley decides to do the fly away and fly back, the animation takes a really long time in a gaming sense, and this serves no purpose in the fight. Try as you may to strike him while he is doing this, nothing will harm him. He also doesn't make any attempt to harm you during all of this and it doesn't seem to have much of a purpose other than for you to oooh and aaah at the graphics and this is probably exactly what everyone did the first 5 times or so, but then it just becomes too time consuming and annoying.
After you hit him a few times during some pre-described opportunities to do so, his wings burn off and it becomes a melee battle of sorts and it is much more fast paced.
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The first several times that anyone makes it to this melee portion of the fight they are almost certainly going to lose very badly. He is very quick and because of the display it can be difficult to even keep track of where he is. He does this dash attack that puts him all over the place and you are most likely going to take a few hits just looking for where he has gone. You really have to stay on your toes simply to keep track of where the boss is in relation to you and not knowing that is going to result in many strong hits being landed on you.
This is all fine and dandy of course because as the 3rd to last boss, and the only boss that has a real presence in the other Metroid games, you expect Ridley to be difficult. The problem I have with this boss is that so much of the battle is spent where you are NOT ALLOWED to hit Ridley no matter what weapon you use. Even though it seems as though it should be doing some damage, there are only certain small windows of opportunity where you are allowed to do any damage.
This game was released before just anything could be found on the internet so most of us that were trying to figure it out just had to frustratingly try over and over again to find where the hell the weaknesses were. It was obvious that Ridley had a glowing orb of sorts on his chest and this was the obvious weak point but even if you are to strike this point dead on outside of the "allowed" sections, it does no damage at all.
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Above you can see the orb on his chest but you aren't allowed to hit it until certain segments even if what you just shot at him clearly DID hit said orb.
It would be yesterday before I would find out that one of his main vulnerable points was just before he does this really fast dash attack and you have to hit him right in the mouth before he finishes the animation. If you are just a second too late or too early, he completes the dash attack right through you since you have to be right in front of him to have a chance at hitting this weak spot.
Even some of the best players out there cannot defeat this boss in under 10 minutes and when you watch it going on, a great deal of that time is spent just running around the platform with zero chance of dishing out any damage. You are simply waiting for the attack pattern to involve a portion where the system allows you do any damage.
I don't really like bosses like this because it removes the realism from the game. I get that it is actually quite common in Metroid games but that doesn't mean that I have to like it. I'm not a fan where any boss is just invulnerable for long periods of time without any explanation to why that could possibly be. Metroid is a game of near zero dialogue so finding out these invulnerability periods is very frustrating as you cycle through your entire arsenal trying to figure out if you are simply using the wrong weapon.
You are not using the wrong weapon, it just isn't possible to do any damage to this boss until Nintendo decides that you are allowed to. I guess I just don't like boss fights where no matter how good you have gotten at the game or even that particular boss fight, it is going to take a really long time for the fight to be over.
Metroid Prime is still one of the best games on the GameCube and I would say one of the top-50 games ever made... that doesn't mean that it is perfect though and I feel as though this boss fight is kind of a blemish on an otherwise damn near perfect title.