...Well, I'm done.
I'm going to throw my full impressions here, though this could honestly exist as its own Reader Review. However, I'm going to make my feelings very clear here in anticipation of a future project so that I have a concrete, digital footprint of my intentions moving forward. Enjoy?
I absolutely devoured Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. Like, I ended my first playthrough on the Sunday night after the game released with 100% Scans and 97% Inventory, which is telling. I had combed the entirety of the playable world and pretty much felt no desire to search for that last 3% of items, though I’m fairly certain I know where they were (the giant desert where none of the landmarks show a “completion” or “clear” indicator), and outside of some concept art and a movie explaining the backstory of the villain(?), I don’t really feel the need to clear the game completely.
I… have mixed feelings.
Gameplay
On one hand, I think the environmental design is overall quite nice. Yes, it’s not as interconnected as the original Metroid Prime, and maybe no game will ever recapture the lightning in a bottle that was that game’s world design. I’d like to think otherwise, but we are on the verge of a collapse of the video game market, so who knows. With that said, the idea of Samus visiting locations that serve a function and operate in isolation of other environments is itself a more grounded and logical way to design environments instead of “door in wilderness/ruins opens by getting shot.” What I do like is how much of the world design here is practical. A research facility has locked rooms for storing specimens, performing experiments, and managing power and maintenance. The bike factory builds bikes and sends them along for certification. The mine is a central chasm that had branching tunnel paths looking for a specific resource. They all make sense, and have a lore purpose, which I appreciate. Although two of them focus a portion of their explorable time to turning the proverbial lights back on, they are all paced well and use their environment and theming in clever ways.
Would I have liked a bit more variety? Yes, but I understand that making a biome and populating it with alien species is a big ask, especially when you’ve done it to great effect in a previous trilogy (even better in the last entry of said trilogy). Jungle, Tundra, Volcano, Mine… the only outlier is a forge built atop a swirling storm. Which is cool, but very “element-coded.”
And on that note, elements of gameplay are fine, no, they’re good- it’s Prime, and I think it’s hard to make something centered around this style of gameplay offensive. I’d argue that Beyond operates in a similar fashion to the original, in that it offers some familiar biomes, weapons, and power ups, which begs the question: what does a new installment in this series have to offer in 2025? The obvious answer is “more characters and cinematics,” which some would argue isn’t the reason they play Metroid. I don’t mind the escort sections, largely because the game doesn’t show its teeth until its final act, though this is a normal playthrough I’m talking about. The characters are what they are, and I’ll talk about them a bit more when I get to the narrative.
Beyond is at its best when it is offering the player novelty: Flame Pool’s boss having a Vi-O-La sequence before the boss battle in earnest, for one. The entire Deep Mine area, regardless of its scripted nature, is a blast and ratchets up tension through claustrophobia and overwhelming odds as the enemies get tougher and trigger more incursions via their own behavior. There are a couple of nice wrinkles that emerge in boss fights, but they hardly feel “revolutionary.” Having to morph ball under the staggered body of a heavily armored enemy in order to plant a bomb is cool and risky in the moment, though it echoes moments present in Prime and Echoes. Weaving shots in between plant vines and through caverns is cool, especially in the case of the latter, when it can result in a chain reaction. The most novel the game gets is in the mote gameplay, which I would have gladly invested more time into if the game had developed more dedicated content around the concept. The ability to turn morph ball bombs and power bombs into motes that can be tossed to hit or power long-distance targets is something that could have been integrated into so many more puzzles, yet they comprise a pretty minimal portion of the overall experience.
So what are we left with? There’s a lot here that is the same, and while I know that “dated” is a negative sentiment, it leaves me conflicted. On one hand, Beyond feels nostalgic and comfortable and of high quality, all while not-really pushing the series in a meaningful direction. The Vi-O-La, a central part of the game’s design (especially since a whole biome is dedicated to building it) doesn’t feature at all in the game’s finale. Like, what?
There were ways that Sol Valley could have been made more engaging, and some of the shrine and Galactic Federation rubble manage to hint at this. I was personally hoping that the Federation rubble would be a bit more labyrinthine, offering up opportunities to go out and find a smaller structure in the overworld that provided a similar Prime experience, but those are instead relegated to the six shrines, which are themselves pretty basic one- or two-room puzzles.
There are also times when you can encounter a particularly fascinating Federation NPC out camping, sharing a conversation with him about his life and adding some actually decent lore to the Metroid universe. If there had been about 20% reduction of green crystals in favor of more content like this, I might have enjoyed the Valley a bit more. Unfortunately, there’s a bit too much of those fourteen hours spend ramming into green crystals… or narrowly missing them and having to turn around for a second swipe. And like, I know, the game is fourteen hours and it feels like that bike stuff is wasted time. I’ve probably spent twice that amount of time screwing around in Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule, but that stuff was more engaging. A boss fight is teased in this region early on and it sure does happen… but it’s no more or less complex than any of the Vi-O-La gameplay before it. Heck, the Vi-O-La tutorial introduces just about everything you are going to experience when using the bike, and that is a bit dour.
Narrative
The Prime series is known for having a dual-narrative strength: Samus is simultaneously solving a problem that involves her being in a lore-rich environment. The plot of the original Metroid Prime involves the Chozo and Space Pirate perspectives on the central threat of the Phazon Leviathan. It was, by design, a somewhat more passive, methodical unveiling of the scope of a threat, and though Beyond is a bit more immediate in its main task, the way it gradually unfolds its mystery is enjoyable enough. The theming of each environment plays into the ways that Viewros has fallen to tragedy.
Below are full spoilers for the story of Beyond:
I think character drama is a tough thing to write, and it doesn’t always mesh well with video game logic and objectives. The character interaction and the motivations of the main… villain here are weak, the latter I feel could have been improved with some reshaping of what is already in the game. With that said, the fact that this game really let it all hang out in its trailers and didn’t have much else to offer narratively is… disappointing. Mostly, it just serves to highlight how miserable Samus’s story really is: an orphaned child infused with Chozo DNA who has encountered a variety of colorful characters, only to lose them along the way. The only explicitly positive ending to any of these stories seems to be Echoes, which has Samus thanklessly leaving after having ensured the survival of a desolated race. Beyond does not offer a much happier conclusion, with Samus having given a future to a dead world’s legacy, but not without having made some sacrifices along the way.
This surprises me, because while I wouldn’t call her a particularly community-focused character, the final moments of this game feel a bit out of place for Samus. You’ve spent the entirety of the campaign rescuing and picking up these lost souls, only to leave them in the lurch at the last second. I was given a game over for hesitating to activate the Master Teleporter and then had to re-fight the final sequence of the final boss. I understand the tragedy of the scenario, but it strikes me as antithetical to the messaging and crux of the gameplay, which is perhaps what makes it feel disempowering. At the same time, it is also very obvious that the Federation members you are working alongside place your survival and mission in much higher regard than there own: this is most evident in the Deep Mine section of the game where they go out of their way to keep you moving forward at the cost of their own safety. So although you have developed a very cooperative relationship, with their efforts being the primary way of accessing Chronos Tower in the endgame, they ultimately feel that the legacy of the Lamorn and Samus herself are more important. That these Federation members who sacrificed themselves might also be temporally displaced brings a great deal of finality to their narrative, though that would sort of defeat the purpose of this game being the start of a new saga in the Metroid Prime series.
Which begs the question: is this game about time travel? While Kensuke Tanabe’s comments have previously implied an interest in exploring this idea, the truth is that Beyond is a game about thoughts and emotion. The psychic powers of the Lamorn are the central focus, particularly because their desire to unite their world in the Psychic Age eventually led to its downfall. A downfall that Samus herself doesn’t really have to worry about, because the green energy that mutated the Lamorn into Grievers apparently has no effect on her. Sure, it boosts the aggression and power of some of Sol Valley’s enemies, but that has minimal impact on the gameplay. Also, it complicates the nature of the green crystals that ensure the psychic memory of the Lamorn, which may or may not also be connected to the green energy they used to bring life to the planet? Hm.
Considering that Samus also learns about her connection to Sylux via this psychic awakening, it stands to reason that the artifact triggered at the beginning of the game is not a time travel device, but rather a warping of spacetime, which could theoretically result in temporal displacement, but the narrative certainly doesn’t seem to suggest this. So, maybe Beyond isn’t about time, which is a shame, because it really could have been.
It turns out that Sylux has just been chilling in the Master Teleporter and in control of Chronos Tower since the start of the game, which enabled him to screw around with happenings remotely as the game was progressing. He comes out in the end when Samus is about to save the day because he’s a bad guy, he then proceeds to use the most unhinged forms of technology ever seen with little plot relevance, save for maybe the ability to create wormholes that are tied to the technology of the Lamorn?
When the first Sylux encounter is revealed to be a drone in disguise, I was immediately suspicious of his own nature and potential history with the Lamorn- I even considered that Sylux was in reality some sort of artificial construct created by the Lamorn to fit their Chosen One role. I’ll be real: I hate Chosen One narratives, and when the Lamorn never outright call Samus by any name other than “Chosen One,” it made me believe that Retro had crafted a bit of a smarter narrative than the one that exists here.
Heck, you even have one of the key colors of Sylux- green- being used as a growth accelerant and cause for societal collapse. But more pertinently, the Vi-O-La suit is almost meant to look near identical to Sylux’s own suit as it develops, with the black accenting mimicking its placement on his suit. I just feel that there was huge untapped potential to make Sylux a similar “Chosen One,” who had his glory stolen by Samus and the Federation as they set about making things right. Maybe it could have involved him crash-landing on the planet in the past and being trained by the Lamorn in a way similar to Samus with the Chozo, only for her to swoop in with this time travel plot and set things right. When the gang came back to the future, I believed that Sylux would see a new civilization restored by and celebrating Samus, thereby fueling his hatred. But no, he’s just an ambitious and spiteful jerk.
So having his rage be the final barrier to leaving Viewros makes sense from a psychic standpoint, which means his survival at the end of the game- assuming he has survived the Master Teleporter explosion- could be the key to a continued rivalry in the series. But honestly, with the tumultuous nature of this game’s development and the implications that has on budget and profit, as well as the way the story overall concludes, it feels like Metroid Prime 4 is not really the beginning of anything. It is a retread of the past, with such strange steps to the side rather than forward that I wonder what enthusiasm might exist for this series at Nintendo, Retro, or in the community.
But damn, does it run well and look pretty as hell.
...Honestly, I'm not done. I'm going to be jumping back into this game probably on and off throughout December while I chip away at the Pokemon DLC, because I failed to get 100% inventory completion and that's going to drive me bonkers. I think I'm willing to give it a go, possibly on Hard mode, though I am a bit intimidated by the final act of the game on a higher difficulty. But all of this will result in at least a 100% Clear review in Reader Reviews, though I am anticipating making this into my first foray into some sort of video content.
Topic: Metroid Prime 4: Beyond [Volt Forge] (Read 4689 times)
