Topic: Metroid Prime 2 and 3 before Prime 4?

I've never played the Prime series until the recent remaster. I'm on board to get Prime 4 but don't want to skip 2 and 3. Does anyone know if the other two games will release before Prime 4? I find it odd that they have not released them after the first remaster, I feel like they would have to for hype and for those to catch up like me.

To my knowledge, there has been no official announcement of 2 and 3 remasters or rereleases.

If you have a GameCube and Wii, you can try to track down the original games at a local used game store. There is also Metroid Prime Trilogy for Wii, which has all 3 games, but that may be harder to track down. With GameCube coming to Switch Online, there is the possibility that 2 will come to the service eventually.

However, I think that at some point they will rerelease the games before MP4 launches to help generate hype. But that’s just my two cents.

Leakers suggested they were going to be remasters rather than a remake like MP 1...years ago.

"Metroid Prime 2 Remastered, coming soonish." -Jeff Grubb, July 2023.

Meh, leakers.

@Magician At this point they’ll be slapped on NSO one day and Nintendo will do bare minimal announcement and that’ll be that.

Very possible. We got the F-Zero GX Recharged leak a year ago. Turns out that was just an addition for GC on NSO. The idea works for MP2, being added to NSO down the road. I'm not sure what that would mean for MP3, even though the Wii was just a glorified GC, lol.

I don't know.

@FragRed I think if Prime 2 was going to GCN NSO, it would've been in the teased batch. There were 7 games announced for post-launch which is enough for about a year or so of Nintendo's typical NSO dripfeed.

For example:

• July 2025 - Super Mario Strikers
• September 2025 - Super Mario Sunshine
• November 2025 - Fire Emblem Path of Radiance
• February 2026 - Pokemon Colosseum
• April 2026 - Luigi's Mansion
• June 2026 - Chibi-Robo
• August 2026 - Pokemon XD

So I think Prime 2+3 will be a shadow drop Switch 1 release in the next Direct (if there is a next Direct). While the focus is no doubt on Switch 2 now, I don't see there being a 6 months or so gap between XCX and the next Switch 1 game.

Was true too, was in the pipeline. But when Retro took back Metroid Prime 4 from Namco, all work on the remakes/remasters of MP2 and 3 were put on hold.

Metroid Prime 1 remaster/remake ended up being way more ambitious than many thought it would be, with many elements being completely reworked visually. MP2 and 3 were to be given similar consideration, but Metroid Prime 4 became all-important.

I still hope after MP4 comes out Retro will get back to doing the other ones, this time with Switch 2 in mind.

As someone who myself would love to get HD updates of 2 and 3, I would nonetheless encourage you to not let their absence affect your enjoyment of 4. Prime 2 is one of my favorite games of all time, but I honestly don’t feel it’s all that necessary to play them in any particular order story-wise; you can treat them like Sherlock Holmes stories and bounce around as you like.

I think it’s a safe assumption that 2&3 will be updated at some point, but in the meantime, it’s been long enough that they will surely find a way to recap the pertinent information in 4.

By the way, out of curiosity I recently hooked up my Wii U to check out Prime 3 on my 4k screen. Don’t do that: it looked ghastly!

Yeah, it's not like there's much of an overarching story between the Prime games. They're all pretty much self contained and I don't think that you'd lose much by playing them out of order.

I've a feeling that 2&3 will be coming eventually, because if Nintendo just wanted to bury them, they wouldn't be calling the new game 4, but would have soft-rebooted it instead.

Yeah, I really miss the sensor bar for motion controls. Metroid Prime Trilogy is just sublime that way.

One thing I love about Prime 3 is that it feels like Nintendo’s answer to Uncharted or a summer movie blockbuster. It’s pretty epic.

Maybe the mouse controls will become the new preferred way to play.

Although I really can't go back to Wii version of Metroid Prime after the Switch version. The atmosphere was simply too sublime pumped up to that level, no going back imo.

@NeonPizza My feelings regarding the controls are in complete alignment with yours. I would gladly pay for a Switch sensor bar attachment! The remastered gyro controls are certainly inferior, and as such I didn’t mess around with them much and fell back to analog aiming. But I retain a spark of hope when I recall how much I flailed about when I first played with Prime 3’s motion controls on the Wii. I resented it for about 15 minutes and feared I wouldn’t be able to play the game at all, but then it clicked and had me feeling as though I were actually inhabiting that world. So maybe a little extra time with the Switch 2 Pro gyro controls will see you adapting, even if it’s not quite the same. (Weirdly, the gyro aiming in the Switch port of Mario Galaxy worked just fine for me, but yeah, Prime Remastered is definitely missing something.)

Prime 2 left me with a feeling of panicky dread and isolation at points, when you’ve descended to some remote corner of the world and feel like there’s 1000 km of howling wilderness between you and your ship, and nobody friendly has any idea you are there. And then you enter Dark Aether and realize how far from home you truly are. There aren’t a lot of games that have ever made me feel so utterly alone. So 3 was a welcome relief!

I think Prime 4 will probably do a cut scene recap of the events of 1-3 and Hunters before you start. I think there will be videos dropped before release with a ton of this information.

So really I think Prime 2 will come to NSO, but remasters could come back.

Even if they do this, I don't think I'll play Prime 4 before 2 and 3 are available to play on the Switch. It feels pretty stupid to release the first and fourth part of a series on the same console, but not the second and third.

I think it'll happen but I do understand your frustration, especially if you've never played MP2 and 3. I never finished MP3 so I'd definitely welcome that one again for sure.

Jeff Grubb should do an update on what he said about the sequels being re-released. I really want 2 and 3 to be re-released in some form even if only on NSO. Also hope they will re-release The Other M.

They can keep Other M tbh... (nah I still want them to release it even if i greatly disliked it)

Tbh, I played the 2D Metroid games completely out of order, so I don't feel its a huge deal if you don't play Prime 2 and 3 before 4? Like the only really notable story continuation for Prime 1 in 2 and 3 is the 100% ending of Prime 1, and those games stories are resolved by the end of that trilogy. And Prime 4's connection seems to be with a side character from the Hunters spinoff anyway, so the most notable story continuation is not even in Prime 2 and 3 (until proven otherwise of course).

That doesn't guarantee this game won't turn things on their head and make parts of the past games' story more significant, but I never felt knowing about past Metroid stories hurt my experience with either current 2D Metroid or going back to older ones, so this game would have to be more continuity focused with no recaps for me to feel its vital to play Prime 2 and 3 first.

I think you've only got to look at how Nintendo handled the 2D Metroid games on Switch. When Dread came out, you could only get the NES and SNES games on NSO. They only added the GB and GBA games later, and Samus Returns is still stranded on the 3DS. Releasing out of order and skipping games entirely is just the Nintendo way.

It doesn't really matter though, as they're typically not story heavy games. Other M is the main exception to that, but it's a story that tends to rub fans the wrong way, and one of the more skippable entries in the series generally.

Honestly Prime 2 might put a lot of people off Prime 4 if they did. It might be in their best interest to make it a bit inaccessible (I don’t think it’s a bad game at all - it is good - but it’s not a game aimed at a very broad audience like Prime 1 is).