Yet another legacy sequel that is bad at everything except shitting on its own legacy. It's really good at that.
I love Metroid Prime. It is probably my favourite game ever. Metroid Prime 2 wasn't quite as good—a bit repetitive, but it still felt like an extension of what I enjoyed from the first game. Metroid Prime 3 was another extension of that same gameplay and design, but with the added Wii controls that still feel really great, and an expanded cast of characters and locations that made it seem like Samus is inhabiting an actual, living universe.
Metroid Prime 4 is garbage. I hate every moment that I'm playing it.
I was really looking forward to this game. I even bought a Switch 2 so I'd get the best experience. I have never regretted buying a games console until now. I wrote a short blog post about the game, but I didn't feel like it did enough justice to how much I hate Prime 4, so I'm giving it a full review.
Controls
Metroid Prime 4 has three control schemes. All of them are bad.
First there is the basic dual-stick setup which is the same as any other console first-person shooter. On paper. In practice it is awful. The Switch's analogue sticks are too flimsy for precise aiming, and this is true even on the better Switch 2 Joy-Cons. Thankfully this control scheme still has the classic Metroid Prime lock-on, which makes most of the game more or less playable. That is until you get to a boss fight, because almost all of them require you to aim at specific points on the periphery of the central lock-on location. Doing this with dual analogue sticks is awful. There are a lot of customization options, like separating y-axis inversion between free-aim and lock-on modes, and even the ability to snap to the peripheral targets. It shows they really did put thought into this control scheme. Unfortunately it is always unresponsive and bad regardless because the Joy-Cons are such shitty controllers. It's amazing how much better the first game controls with essentially one analogue stick than Metroid Prime 4 manages with two. A lot of that is due to just how good the GameCube controller is. You could argue that I should just buy a Switch pro controller, but I would argue that I shouldn't have to buy an extra controller with my system just to not have to play with a shitty controller.
I should also note that the Switch has a GameCube controller, but it isn't compatible with actual Switch games because it doesn't have enough buttons and features. There are third-party GameCube-style controllers that manage to do what Nintendo has fucked up, but the one I had isn't compatible with Switch 2 and the one I bought was only compatible with Switch 2 after a manual firmware update that bricked the controller.
The second control mode is the "Pointer" scheme, but this is a misnomer because these are not the same pointer controls that we got on the Wii. The Switch doesn't have an infrared sensor like the Wii, so what we have here are actually gyroscopic controls. As a result, the system doesn't have a single point of reference and needs to be recentred constantly. As it gradually drifts away from the ideal position, your wrist will be more and more twisted until you have to stop playing to figure out the best neutral position again and recalibrate. You have to do this frequently because, on top of the drift that happens naturally as you play, the game also recentres the controls after after every cutscene. If it weren't for the figurative pain of having to stop and recalibrate over and over, and the literal pain in my wrist caused by twisting it to account for the drift, the pointer controls would be the ideal way to play.
Lastly are the mouse controls, which should be great if you like mouse-and-keyboard controls for shooters. But this setup isn't like a PC's mouse. It's actually push-scrolling just like the pointer controls and it feels awful. You also cannot invert the y-axis, so fuck this control scheme. If you're one of the mouth breathers who gets upset by people who prefer inverted controls, you can fuck your own shit, wrap it in a tortilla, microwave it and then shove your hot cum-shit burrito back up your ass. "Forward" on a joystick or mouse is not "up". It's forward. You tilt your head forward to look down and back to look up. That's why inverted controls make sense to me. Gamers get irrationally upset by anyone who prefers this because Gamers are all shit-fucking babies. And literal Nazis. If you disagree, check out any gaming forum for their consensus on American fascism under their diarrhoea-diaper president.
But I digress. No matter how you choose to play the game, the Switch's shitty controller will be unresponsive and feel awful in your hands. I actually do think the Switch 2's Joy-Cons feel a lot better, especially when connected to the cradle. I had been warming up to them over the past few months while playing other games, but Metroid Prime 4 made me hate them all over again.
Vi-O-La
One of the big new features of Metroid Prime 4 is Samus's new motorcycle, Vi-O-La, which I am never going to bother spelling like that again. The bike's controls are almost fine, except you need to control the camera to aim at enemies while you're driving, but you can't aim and shoot at the same time with dual-stick controls. Viola also makes the whole game control worse because you activate it with the plus button, which means the universal pause button is no longer universal. For some reason this is the only control you can't remap. And you can only ride your bicycle in the barren desert between areas, so the plus button is useless everywhere else but you'll be pressing it all the time anyway as you try to pause the game to rethink whether you want to keep playing.
You have to drive around the shitty, literal sandbox crashing into green crystals to get enough of them to unlock the ending. These crystals are only green the first time you break them, so you'll want to get them all. Collision detection for this is all over the place. Sometimes all of the crystals will break if I hit the cluster centre mass. Sometimes I needed to be dead centre on a crystal to break it. Sometimes I would hit the edge of a crop and a crystal would break on the other side of one in the middle that didn't break, because this game is stupid. Even boost-sliding into a patch isn't a guaranteed way to break them all, so you have to constantly stop to make sure you get the stragglers. Too bad this is the one game where the left trigger/brake button doesn't reverse your vehicle. It just lets you do doughnuts for some stupid reason. You have to hold back on the analogue stick to reverse, and it's so slow that you may as well circle around.
To acquire and upgrade your bicicleta, you have to visit and continually return to Volt Tower, which is the worst location in the game. The first time you have to come here, it locks you in and forces you through a long driving tutorial and then a boss fight against a big, floating circle that has no build-up and nothing to do with the rest of the area. Which brings me to my next topic:
Level Design
The first area you enter on the new planet looks pretty good. It's the typical jungle biome reminiscent of the Tallon IV landing site in the first game. But each room is so small that it feels cramped and artificial compared to the Tallon overworld. It's still a nice looking area, though, and that is more than I can say for most of the game.
There is a snow area that looks nice at first as you enter a big, snowy expanse. But then you spend most of it walking through the same mechanical corridors as every other area, except with blue colour grading because blue means cold and red means hot. Good job, Nintendo. You have shown you do understand the basics of artistic design. I was starting to doubt that.
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| This is the only time I was impressed by how this game looks. |
I also want to note that you have to sit through two loading screens every time you visit the winter chunder-land. First you ride a big elevator, and then in the very next room you have to take a gondola. I do actually like the cutscene for the gondola, though. It's one of the few things I enjoyed about Metroid Dread, so I'm glad they carried that over.
Separating each area is the aforementioned big, empty desert that is Retro Studios' idea of an open world. It is boring and ugly and you will be required to spend a huge amount of time here. But if they cut it out, you wouldn't get to ride your bicycle. But if they cut out the bicycle, the game would be objectively better.
Enemy placement is remarkably bad too, and just like in previous games enemies respawn as soon as you get two rooms away, so you will be experiencing how bad their placement is over and over again. In previous Metroid Prime games, rooms would be littered with ambient enemies that you have to deal with the first few times before you get used to the layout or unlock abilities like the double jump that let you get around them easily. In Metroid Prime 4, the main fodder enemy that you'll keep encountering is the dreadlock-sporting "Griever" that is annoyingly too mobile to avoid in the game's particularly cramped rooms, but also too strong to kill quickly. You will encounter these fuckers everywhere. If you try to rush past them, you will take damage. If you stop to fight them, you'll feel like you're wasting your time on the same enemies over and over again.
The absolute worst enemy placement, however, is a missile turret in a hallway right outside a save station. There is nothing else in this hallway. It only exists to get to the save station, and the turret only exists to fuck with you. You have to deal with it every time you want to save here because, if you don't, you'll have to deal with it shooting at you from behind when you leave the save station. Whoever did this is the worst game designer in history. Special recognition is warranted for this one particular developer who is the worst at their job that any game developer has ever been. I wish I knew who you were so I could congratulate you in person.
Just like in all Metroid games, you will need to revisit locations over and over as you unlock new abilities. A lot of people complain about backtracking in games, but I usually like it. It makes me feel more connected to a game's world if I have to keep exploring its locations instead of constantly moving forward and only seeing each place once. But Metroid Prime 4's enemy placement is so bad that I actually dread having to go back to an area.
I know for certain that my frustrations with the game aren't just a skill issue, too. I did drop the difficulty to "Casual," but that's because I was too miserable while playing the game to waste time fighting stronger enemies or having to repeat anything after dying. I was just as miserable after reducing the difficulty as I was before, which means the game isn't bad because it's too hard. It's just a bad game that isn't worth playing on hard or even normal difficulty.
A/V Design
The game looks alright. Like I said, the jungle and ice areas are nice enough to look at until you get to the endless metal corridors, but the other locations are just those same metal corridors with different environmental themes or the desert overworld. One of the first things that stood out to me, though, was how much it relied on post-processing effects. The old games looked good because of good art design making the most of the flat textures and low-poly models. All of that base-level design is covered up in Prime 4 by overuse of shadows, bloom and shit like chromatic aberration that I always turn off if I can. Looking at the scenery I get the sense that, if I could turn off all those effects, Metroid Prime 4 would look worse than the first game because the core art direction isn't there.
Samus's new suit looks cool, and you still get the nice little touches like frost building up on her gun arm and seeing her eyes reflected in the visor when there's an explosion. It's as appealing today as it was in the old games, but it's the bare minimum we should expect from a sequel to Metroid Prime which did this sort of stuff twenty-three years ago.
The music ranges from good, like the title screen track, to repetitive garbage like what you'll be subjected to every time you're forced to revisit Volt Tower. Most of the music in between is fine. It doesn't stand out one way or the other. For a series that inspired a wicked-awesome metal cover album, "fine" is not good enough.
Voice acting is generally pretty good, and even though I'll always love Jennifer Hale in everything she ever does (ever), I think that Samus's new voice actor, Erin Yvette, does a really good job. Her screams when you get hit are a bit more anguished, which makes Samus feel less like a badass but more like a real person. It'd just be nice if you actually got to hear her speak...
Story
Is there a story? I could hardly tell.
The writers tried to combine the minimal, environmental storytelling from the first game with a direct narrative told through cutscenes and they did neither well.
Remember in the first Metroid Prime how every boss had lore entries you could scan to give you its backstory before you finally reached it? Metroid Prime 4 does the opposite. You get nothing to build up the boss before it suddenly pops up, and then only after you defeat it can you return to a location near your home base to scan a hologram that'll actually tell you something about the thing you already fought. And you know what those lore entries always say? The boss was a friend of the local denizens whom you're here to save before they disappeared. Even the robots that you have to fight over and over were built by the locals. So if you're their saviour, why is all this shit attacking you? Presumably it's because all of the robots are being controlled by the bad guy, even though this is never shown, and the bosses are infected with metroids which... never did that before. It's like the writers heard of Metroid Fusion but they didn't have a Game Boy Advance to actually play the game, so they just assumed "fusion" is a thing metroids do. They even call the infestation "Metroid Fusion", because everyone who worked on this game is stupid and bad at their job.
Speaking of the bad guy, remember Sylux from Metroid Prime 3? Probably not, but whoever created him must be Metroid Prime 4's lead designer or otherwise had a big influence over this game, because they made him the main villain. He's a quintessential fanfiction character. He's critically important to the story, but whenever he shows up he just seems like another fodder enemy because his visual design doesn't stand out. He just looks like a tall guy in a boring suit of armour. I can picture him in the sketchbook of some high school edge lord who thinks he's designed the coolest O.C. ever.
The main plot involves Cyrus attacking the galactic federation before a device is activated that whisks them all to another planet or dimension where Samus is once again the prophesied saviour. Samus is the saviour in so many prophesies that if she gets one more she can get a free sub.
She also gets psychic powers this time as an excuse to make her re-collect all of her upgrades, but other than a barely-used telekinesis power all of the upgrades are the same abilities she's always had but with "psychic" in the name.
There are a bunch of supporting characters and I actually don't hate them. They're better than the cast of Other M, and I'm the only person in the world who actually likes that game. Yes, I would have preferred it if Samus were going solo like the first game, but that took a lot of skill from the developers to pull off. Skill that the current incarnation of Retro Studios clearly doesn't have.
What's weird is that the friendly NPCs are all fully voiced but Samus is silent even though she has never been established as a silent protagonist. She didn't speak in the original Metroid game, but that's because it was on the NES. She had a lot to say in Other M, even if it was all monotone, and she even speaks in the intro to Super Metroid. No, she didn't talk in the other Prime games either, but in the first one there were no characters to talk to, the second one didn't have recorded dialogue, and the third one only had minimal interactions with other characters. In Prime 4, characters will ask Samus questions and she just stands there like she's mute or autistic. This would be fine if "mute" or "autistic" was an actual character trait of hers, but other games in the same continuity have clearly established that she is fully capable of speaking, so she is just choosing not to speak to the characters in Metroid Prime 4, presumably because she thinks they're assholes.
Conclusion
I want to finish by talking about the state of the Metroid series and Nintendo in general.
Like I said at the start, I love Metroid Prime, but I also really like the rest of the series too. I've played them all and I enjoyed all of them up until Metroid Dread. That game was so bad that I stopped playing within a few hours. The E.M.M.I.s were the worst part of it, but even without them the game would be an uninteresting slog through a series of ugly cave environments. Even Metroid Fusion, which takes place entirely on a space station, managed to include interesting biomes.
I recently came to the conclusion that I do not like Nintendo anymore, and I can trace that shift directly to the death of Satoru Iwata. During the Wii and Wii U days when he was in charge, Nintendo games and systems were incredibly solid and innovative. Old Nintendo systems could famously withstand anything, from Mount Everest to literal bombs, and that feeling of durability persisted all the way to the Wii U. Both Switch systems, on the other hand, feel flimsy with unresponsive, uncomfortable controllers.
The DS, 3DS, Wii and Wii U were creative experiments that set them apart from the other systems. The original Switch only seems innovative until you realize it was just an iterative step from the Wii U game pad, and the Switch 2 is literally just a Switch 2.
Nintendo's games are simply chasing trends now. Breath of the Wild is just an open world crafting/survival game that came out when those were at the height of their popularity. Mario Kart World's only selling feature is being open world. Metroid Dread seems like it was trying to be a 2D Souls-like by ramping up the difficulty, which in the developers' minds means one-hit kill enemies and boss fights that take 15-30 minutes to complete.
We are seeing more direct sequels and remakes from Nintendo than ever—like Tears of the Kingdom, Super Mario RPG, and Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door—because Nintendo is out of ideas. And they're out of ideas because, unlike Satoru Iwata who was a game developer before becoming president of Nintendo, the current and previous presidents who replaced him are businessmen. That's it. That's all they do. That's all they've ever done. Business. The current president, Shuntaro Furukawa, started as an accountant at Nintendo. The guy before him, Tatsumi Kimishima, was a banker who joined Nintendo as chief financial officer of The Pokémon Company. All they know is business and money, and they're what has destroyed the soul of Nintendo. Even though they aren't the ones making the games, they're the ones setting the direction for the company.
Decades ago, when people would complain about Nintendo for their "kiddy" image, they'd say that the company didn't grow up with their audience. But what we have now is a company that did grow up and became a stuffy salary-man who has no time for his kids because he has the quarterly audit to deliver.
I hate what Nintendo is now. I hate how they've given up innovation for sequels, remakes and chasing trends. And I especially hate them for making me hate a Metroid Prime game. After the twofer of Dread and Prime 4, I will never look forward to a new Metroid game again the way I did when I was a kid.
I hate Nintendo because they actually managed to kill that part of my inner child.
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