So, have a look at the pirates throughout the series. Prime 1 fucked them up horribly–don’t get me wrong, they look awesome, but they’re completely different in every way from how they ever were, before or after.
Purple leathery skin with smooth green metal texture, a weird rifle-barrel thing, rings around its shoulders, and a positively awkward two-thumbs one-finger system… plus a beastlike mouth.
But if you look further, and see the concept art for 1…
It had a scaly grey armor texture, a claw-like gauntlet gun, fins over its shoulders, and a beak. Plus it had ‘gills’ on the undersides of its arms and legs.
Now look at Echoes, both art and ingame.
Scaly grey armor texture. Claw-like gun that either replaces the arm or fits over it like a giant gauntlet thin. Fins over its shoulders. A beak. Gills under its arms and legs.
Also note that Prime 1’s art has claw-like protrusions on its waist–similar appendages exist on 2’s Commandos. And their fingers are arranged like Prime 1’s art’s, with two fingers and one thumb, instead of the other way around.
Everyone went “wtf, are there more species of pirates?” after Echoes revealed these things, and confusion ensued.
Fastforward to Prime 3. The basic troopers look more like the old-school pirates, losing the spikes and fins and helmets, and standardizing the claw-gun by making it a ‘gauntlet’ that unfolds into a claw. Then, on top of that, they come in an Armored variety, which is nearly 100% identical to Echoes’s trooper design in every single minute way–minus the beak, and the helmet provides a ‘beak’-like protrusion over the mouth anyway: And closer examination of Prime 1’s art shows a mouth under the beak!
Echoes’s scan logs confirm that the troopers’ equipment had been upgraded since Tallon IV, explaining the differences between 1’s (art) and 2’s (game and art). And bingo, everything is singularized.
But wait, there’s more–now look at the Militia in 3.
A beast-like mouth. A weirdly shaped non-gauntlet gun. Rings around the shoulders. Leathery skin. Metallic arms and legs.
… Sound familiar?
My initial feel was that this was just supposed to represent Prime 1’s pirates as a ‘link’ between the ‘racial diversity’ displayed in the past games, but… Jones put a lot of work into those pirates, and made an awesome design combining classic Super Metroid bug-lobsters with modern 3D-workable ferocity, which got totally butchered into a lizard with metal limbs. I’d be pissed, and perhaps he was too–maybe that’s why Militia suck so much.
They’re ugly as hell and pathetically weak, and all of their design flaws are ripped straight from Prime 1’s ingame model, whereas all of the strong pirates are evolutions of Jones’s original creations.
Kinda interesting, if you ask me, but maybe I’m just obsessive.
On another note, Jones also drew concept art of the Varia Suit, which included the Echoes/Hunters/Corruption-style visor and more vibrant colors.
Whaddayano? Prime 1 dulled it and changed the visor, and every future game went back to what Jones originally created. At least Corruption didn’t include an insanely weak Prime 1 Varia knockoff as revenge for that too…
Edit: On a side note, the infamous “crotch claw” beta pirate from Prime 1 has the bubbly grey skin texture, the shoulder fins, the waist claws, and the proper finger alignment. Its gun was even more ridiculous looking, though.
