Metroid Prime 4: An Acceptable, but Disappointing, Return
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I have been waiting for Metroid Prime 4 for the majority of my life. The Metroid Prime series is weirdly vital to my early gaming experiences. I remember seeing Prime 1 at an EB Games demo kiosk and being entranced by it. I was, even back then, a huge sci-fi nerd. Some of my earliest memories are of watching Star Wars and Star Trek with my dad. So naturally this caught my attention. But I was young, and my parents were kinda strict around ESRB ratings - not something I blame them for, as they were borderline tech-illiterate and having to parent a kid engaging with a medium they'd never experienced, and frankly I had it easy compared to some. But then Prime 3 would be one of the first T-rated games they did let me play, a little before 13, along with Twilight Princess. And I would play the first two eventually through the Prime Trilogy release on Wii. And I absolutely loved all of them. Even to the point where I have the potentially controversial view that the Prime games are better than the 2D Metroid titles. Though, uh, I never played Federation Force. Wish I'd picked it up off the 3DS E-shop before it closed. But it's a multiplayer focused game, and I'm more a single player guy. Plus there's the whole thing of Federation Force being a spin-off when Metroid fans had been starving for a new mainline game.
But since I never really counted Federation Force, I'd been waiting so long to see the cliffhanger at the end of Corruption followed up... And I kept waiting... And then the game was announced and yet I had to wait more... And then when we finally got some information... Well, it was exciting to have Prime 3's cliffhanger followed up, even though that is now a cliffhanger that has been left dangling longer than some people playing this will have been alive. But other aspects, like the bike and apparent open world elements, had me worried. But I was still going to play it. Of course I was.... Then I had the brilliant idea, the day before Prime 4's launch, to play through the Prime Trilogy again first. So then I did that, had a great time, and remembered why I love this series so much. And so I played Prime 4 with probably the clearest eyes possible.
The Legend of Samus
And you know what, it still does a lot of the key things right. The atmosphere is still mostly there. The scan visor is still great, encouraging you to slow down and take in the environment. And the combat is almost certainly the best in the trilogy. It combines the free-aiming of Prime 3 with the ammo-limited beam special weapons of Prime 2. Enemy variety could be better, granted, but your weapons all feel satisfying. And the game doesn't pull punches. Even fairly early on, you'll see enemies taking off half or all of an energy tank in a single hit. Made all the more brutal by the fact that there's a drought in the midgame where you won't get any more energy tanks for a while. If the concern was the game would be too easy or something, it's not.
The game's biggest problems, where its troubled development shows, is in the structure. From the moment I set foot in Volt Forge, the second of the 5 main zones, something felt... Off. I didn't feel like I was playing a Metroid Prime game. And then a little later, as I was thinking about how the third area felt kinda repetitive, it hit me. Prime 4 isn't structured like a Metroid Prime game. It's structured like a Zelda game, with an overworld section and a set of dungeons. Mostly, it resembles Skyward Sword, with its very barren overworld that mostly exists to fill in the gaps between areas. While the dungeons tend to be fairly linear and heavily scripted. And look, I love pre-BotW Zelda. Back in the 00s, growing up as a Nintendo kid? Zelda and Metroid were two of my favorite series. I'd love to see another classic Zelda game again after so long. But I paid for a new Metroid Prime game, not a new Zelda game. And Metroid is a series where its structure is its biggest appeal - hell, it's one half of the name of the Metroidvania genre, a genre primarily defined by that very structure. A sort of open-feeling game with an emphasis on exploration and unlocking new areas via upgrades.
Unfortunately, the dungeons are very linear. There is backtracking - both mandatory revisits to the areas to get items needed to progress, akin to how Prime 2 and 3 would have you revisit the previous areas, and optional backtracking to find items you missed or that required upgrades you now have. And I don't mind backtracking. Especially in this genre. But it's a shame that's the limit. The Prime games have always been subtly linear. But here you feel that linearity more strongly than in any other title. Paths don't loop back around on each other or branch off very much. Honestly, I feel like the Zelda comparison is unfair to Zelda: This would be considered low-quality dungeon design there too.
And the "overworld" does not balance this out in the slightest. Zelda games also tend to have better overworlds than this. I was skeptical from the start - I tend not to like open world games very much, and I especially dislike forcing them into game series that didn't have them previously. And this fell short of even my low expectations. It's a barren desert that you navigate far too quickly on your fancy new motorcycle. There's a bunch of collectables to find, and a few items you can gather once you have the right upgrades, and searching it is how you get the upgrades that give you charge shots for your special beam weapons. But there's really nothing interesting here. You can go anywhere from the start, but not in a cool Breath of the Wild way. There may be nothing stopping you from going over there, but there's also nothing over there except some green crystals and an item you can't actually get because the item itself is locked behind an upgrade you don't have yet. It almost reads like a parody of an open world game in its emptiness - all the interesting stuff happens when you step away from the open world, the open world is just the liminal space between.
But the biggest issue is that the way this is designed is directly counter to one of the appeals of the Prime subseries specifically. Atmosphere. Prime has always had great atmosphere, strengthened by the first person perspective. But when you get out into the open world, Prime 4 abandons that. You're taken out of first person, given a barren world devoid of interesting stuff to look at or search for scans, and made to go way too fast such that they actually had to make the only things of interest extremely obvious. The open world isn't something I dislike just because it's different, it's something I dislike because it actively undermines one of the best parts of the series.
The Story Question
But the area where the game most shows its troubled development is in its story. Now I'm not opposed to having a more typical story in a Metroid game. But there's a lot of issues with it. For one, it definitely ties into the more linear dungeons - the dungeons heavily rely on scripted NPCs, and while I wouldn't mind scripted, linear sections in a game like Prime 3, the problem is that the entire game is like that. Additionally, the game's main plot threads feel all disconnected from each other until the final minutes. And most of the key bits in the ending that salvage the story and make it actually good are in the secret endings. The main plotline is ultimately the simple guiding task of Samus and a few Federation Troopers trying to escape the planet, that they conveniently got teleported to after Sylux attacked a Federation base. Unless you get enough of the green energy crystals, the plotline with the prophecy that brought you here doesn't actually tie into that. And unless you get 100% scans, then you don't get an extended cutscene that provides further context to Sylux as a villain and provides meaning to the ending. I'm going to have a spoiler page here, so check this out for more.
The last issue I have with the story is probably a more controversial take. Up to now some people might be thinking "you're just stuck in the past and don't want the game to evolve." To which I would reply that I do want it to evolve, I just want it to evolve into something good (adding an open world does not count as evolving if it's one of the worst implementations of an open world ever put in a game). But my controversial take is that Samus should have spoken in this game. I know, Metroid fans have a bit of a sore spot around that idea, after Other M. But the game is already written in a way that often feels like there's a pause for her to talk. And her having a bond with the Federation Troopers is kinda important. But they stick to her being an old-fashioned silent protagonist, and so it makes me wonder why even bother trying to focus more on the story. There's just too much dialogue here for a silent protagonist to feel natural.
I still enjoyed this game. It's a good game. The problem is it's a good game in a series with some of my favorite games of all time.