Metroid Prime 4 is pretty ok
There has been a ton of discourse around Metroid Prime 4. Realistically, there was no winning for Retro Studios with a game that spent 8 years in development hell, including a complete change in developers, and a total 18-year gap between Metroid Prime 3 and Prime 4. But getting another Metroid Prime is a good thing! Allowing Retro to work on something new after delivering two fantastic Donkey Kong games is a positive decision!
However, updating the Metroid Prime formula for the modern day turned out to be a mixed bag. The main areas of the game were super interesting to explore. The gameplay is just as solid as any other Metroid Prime game. The story is intriguing, and the way the lore of the Lamorn is revealed to the player makes for a very compelling narrative. Samus is exploring a dead world—after all, there isn’t anyone left to explain how the world died. But there are so many small details in the game that detract from what could have been a really solid experience. (Spoilers below.)
The open world is painful to explore.
Samus’ new motorcycle is a great addition to her toolset, and it’s a lot of fun to boost, drift, and jump over obstacles while looking for little shrines that contain upgrades to your weapons. But the open world is a literal desert, completely devoid of landmarks, wildlife, or anything interesting to do or see.
Narratively, this makes sense. Samus is dropped on this alien world, and we slowly piece together the disaster that happened to this civilization as we explore various areas and collect our teleport keys to return home. This race is dead; the civilization has died out. So, the desert being all that remains of a few other key facilities makes sense. But it doesn’t make for a great environment to spend a ton of time in. And you do spend a little too much time motorcycling around between both traveling between all the main areas (no fast travel—this is, after all, a Metroid game) and hunting down the stupid green crystals that the player needs to collect to avoid being burdened with the worst ending.
The green crystals are probably my biggest issue with the game’s design. You have to smash the crystals as you go between the game’s areas, which is fine. Doing that, plus a little extra exploring, allowed me to unlock the good outfit and a bunch of upgrades. But getting 100% of the green crystals can be brutal. They aren’t all on the overworld, so even after getting a radar to help you track them down, you still need to recheck the six shrines and the little hidden cache right before the first boss you fought 12 hours ago. This could have been more forgivable and still allowed for the exploration and collection the developers wanted to provide.
Samus’ NPC buddies
Early in the game, you stumble upon Miles McKenzie, a Galactic Federation engineer who wants to be helpful to Samus. But the help he provides is the worst kind of handholding. There are times where his tips can be genuinely helpful and reduce excessive re-exploration. That’s good. But some of his comments are little more than filling dead air, like a friend who’s terrified of leaving a long silence because it might be uncomfortable—he just keeps saying the obvious. In a series that is about atmosphere and being alone in an alien world, it’s strange that Retro seemed terrified of letting Samus be alone in this world.
The other NPCs in the game aren’t as offensive. Even the Samus fangirl is fine—that’s an interesting thing to run into in this world! Especially because you only spend a limited amount of time with her. But there are moments in critical cutscenes that past Metroid games would handle with dialog-free gravitas… Metroid Prime 4 decides to let its NPCs just point out the obvious to Samus, literally saying, “That’s the teleporter! You have the keys!” This robs the moment of any potential significance.
There is also a sequence in one of the areas where the NPCs act heroically and sacrifice themselves to help Samus grab the final key... only for them to show up after the area, smiling and acting like it was no big deal.
I did think some of those characters’ moments and interactions with Samus were additive, but they took far more away from my Metroid Prime experience than they enhanced. It’s a little shocking that so many of these moments weren’t removed at some point in development. I wonder if this was the result of some Nintendo executive interference, more than Retro believing this was the experience they intended.
What’s the deal with Sylux?
The 100% completion of Metroid Prime 3 teased the new villain going forward: Sylux, a bounty hunter who seems to have beef with Samus. Prime 4 starts off with Sylux attacking a Federation research facility before we get transported to Viewros. We don’t really get any information about who Sylux is, why he was attacking the Federation, or why he hates Samus at all… until the very end of the game. Scanning Sylux gives you all the lore that should have been in the beginning of the game. He experimented with Metroids and became the head of the Space Pirates! It’s such a weird thing to not focus on during the game.
I do like how his backstory is revealed to Samus. Samus’ psychic powers enable her to see the violent images that haunt Sylux and understand the reasons why he hates her. Getting 100% completion unlocks the full cutscene. Sylux was a stubborn Federation captain who wanted glory by capturing a Space Pirate weapon. He disobeys orders and goes in to try to capture it… only for the Pirates to fire it and kill his entire unit. Samus shows up, blows up the weapon, and Sylux becomes a real jerk about it.
Since then, Sylux has dedicated his life to trying to kill Samus. But that just doesn’t seem like enough. Maybe he feels like blowing up the weapon made the death of his comrades pointless? Maybe the guilt over getting everyone killed drove him insane? There’s just not enough information for us to really understand his motivation. For him to be the main antagonist we fight three times, we should understand exactly who this guy is by this point.
The Sylux issue feels especially strange. His backstory being shoved into a few paragraphs and a cutscene feels out of place. And given the fraught development of this game, it’s clear that almost anything could happen. Prime 4’s focus on Sylux feels like there’s a missing chapter. A Prime 4 where we see Sylux become the leader of the Pirates, Samus chasing him from Federation research facility to research facility, watching him adopt all the secret technology he steals into his suit to become stronger. Where Sylux explains his motivations and why he holds this grudge. Or where it’s explained to the player how Sylux lost his mind. But we never got that chapter. We got the next adventure, where Samus uncovers a dead world and explores ancient ruins. Where the main antagonist is just a footnote, and the player is supposed to accept that.
That’s the real tragedy of Metroid Prime 4: the failed potential. We were given a good game. A mechanically solid game. A narratively interesting experience. But it falls short of fitting into the larger story of Metroid Prime and the broader journey of Samus Aran. I hope we get more Prime games. I hope Nintendo and Retro learn from the feedback of this game. I hope we get the narrative details that were absent in this game. But Metroid Prime 4 is going to exist as a disappointing entry in the series because it couldn’t carry 18 years of hype… and it probably was always going to fall short of that. But let’s hope it also represents the revival of a new, interesting chapter in the Prime series. If this is where Metroid Prime ends as a series, we are probably worse off for it existing and not just leaving the Sylux cliffhanger at the end of Prime 3.
