Topic: Metroid Prime 4: Beyond

Metroid Prime came out a year after Halo and the remaster is one of the best reviewed games on Switch.

The thing with Prime Remastered is that you could see it as an attempt to update the visuals and controls of a classic game, but bring the gameplay to a new platform mostly as it was, back in the day. As such, the fact that some might find it rather dated in some respects isn't necessarily a bad thing, or at least not as much of one as it would have been had it were a brand new game.

It was always a great game for a niche audience, and I don't think that time has widened that niche; if anything, it'd be the opposite.

For the record, I do think they need to do smart updates (so not the stupid and pointless updates they mostly tried in 4) to Prime as a series, but I vehemently disagree on Prime 1 being some notably dated game, especially since too often "this is dated" means "it isn't exactly the same as a modern AAA game" without any context of game design and lazily trying to make every game play like every other remotely similar game.

Also Prime remastered has multiple more modern control schemes, one of which is Splatoon-like, aka a series that is one of Nintendo's most reliable modern money makers.

My actual concern for Metroid as a franchise is more that the 2D games could be reliably huge sellers in a post Hollow Knight world, but they refuse to acknowledge that half of the audience for it is not interested in spending full price for one.

I played Metroid Prime when it first came out on Gamecube and it was visually stunning at the time however I didn't really like the gameplay mechanics that much and often seemed to have to go back to prior areas and I lost interest in it. Halo was incredibly and loved it for the 8-9hrs without the highly repetitive library bit which spoilt the game. For me personally Halo is a far superior game than Metroid Prime. Both consoles sold badly compared to PS2 with similar install bases but Halo appears to have sold 6 million copies compared to 3 million on Gamecube for Metroid Prime and Xbox had the best multi-platform titles by far at the time. Comparisons of Xbox vs Gamecube often had the Gamecube version cut down severely, missing detail, missing video sections, inferior sound, inferior controller, slower loading (if the xbox game was in cache, maximum 3). However the Gamecube was a truly fantastic console with amazing exclusives like Zelda Windwaker. I just remember Xbox dominating with amazing first person shooter games. There were quite a few and where there were Gamecube versions too they were never as good. I guess people are going to argue that Metroid Prime was more than just a fps shooter game but I remember mostly shooting in it with a few puzzles and jumping bits. Even though I have a love of FPS games I didn't pick up Metroid Prime remastered on Switch as by that time it looked incredibly dated and it was effectively the same game I played before with better controls but the pricing was high and there were far better game experiences to be had elsewhere. Generally I don't think people come to Nintendo consoles for fps experiences except for N64 which had a ton of great early fps games like Goldeneye, Duke Nukem 64, Quake and Turok games. Only the N64 and Gamecube were Nintendo consoles with high CPU resources for their day. Everything since has had very low CPU resources that make fps experiences difficult or inferior so fps games have really been older fps games published for other systems many years earlier.

Halo: Combat Evolved & Halo 2
Half-Life 2
The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher's Bay
Doom 3 (and Resurrection of Evil)
TimeSplitters 2
Far Cry Instincts
Call of Duty: Finest Hour
Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Tides of War
Unreal Championship 1 & 2
Star Wars: Republic Commando
Black
Medal of Honor: Frontline
Ghost Recon / Ghost Recon 2
Area 51
Delta Force: Black Hawk Down
Counter-Strike
Armed and Dangerous
Dead Man's Hand
Serious Sam
Red Faction II
Shadow Ops: Red Mercury
Turok: Evolution
Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death
XIII
Rainbow Six 3 / Black Arrow

These games highlighted the console's superior processing power for the time, enabling more complex lighting, enemy AI, and multiplayer capabilities.

I can say for myself that Metroid Prime is not a remotely similar experience to any game I've ever played except other Metroid Prime games and people's lacking memory is not a worthwhile discussion to me. And while I am not an FPS expert by any stretch the only FPS where I played it and actively felt that Metroid Prime could learn something from it was modern Doom, which is still such a wildly different game that at no point when playing Doom 2016 did I feel like I was playing a Metroid Prime replacement, even in terms of combat. Metroid Prime combat is specifically based on dodge and shooting, often using specific mechanics between the shooting (or with the shooting) to attack a weakness in a specific way, or just actively being puzzle bosses that most first person shooters never even attempt to do.

One of my issues with 4 in fact is how too often non-boss enemies, especially in backtracking, lack the type of comparatively interesting combat moments of say, dodging around enemies to hit their backside or using the right visor or needing a morph ball bomb or multi-tasking locking on to avoid letting an enemy get you while another is in your right, a major thing that made enemy encounters in backtracking tolerable (along with finding weaknesses to destroy previously tougher enemies).

Granted, I would not be against other interesting sci-fi first person games influencing Metroid Prime as well either (Bioshock, Portal, even Alien Isolation), but those are still fundamentally different experiences from Metroid Prime.

Games with a similar experience to Metroid Prime? Setting aside games that came afterward and which were significantly influenced by Metroid Prime itself. . . I'd say the closest analog are other games within the "Immersive Sim" design space, notably Deus Ex and System Shock 2 ( and to a lesser extent, the Thief games ). "Immersive Sim" and "3D Metroidvania" aren't exactly the same thing, but there is a lot of overlap. All share a focus on an explorable first-person space intended to immerse the player in a feeling of "placeness"; and which include not just "loot" in the conventional sense but also lore about the world around you, letting you decipher the situation.

Has the non-boss combat in any Metroid game ever been much to write home about? The 2D games generally wouldn't fare well if you considered them as run 'n' gun games, while the Prime ones aren't exactly first person shooters either. Sure, Samus has a gun and can shoot things with it, but that's not really the point. The enemies are there more to be minor hindrances and sap her energy than to present a substantial threat.

Not especially, no. It feels like the equivalent of if people told me pre-BOTW Zelda was falling behind because it wasn't God of War or Bayonetta. (which is perfect now that I think about it because Darksiders exists to prove that very idea would only have a niche audience anyway :V)

Which also again makes me think that's an underrated issue with 4, since they somehow decided to have less variety in combat encounters.

I also just don't fully agree with the concept that its inherently niche, at least not to the extent where it can't be a reliable game release from Nintendo. From Software games, Persona, Yakuza, Monster Hunter were all obviously niche series that had no chance of growing bigger until they did. Obviously to different extents but it happened, so I don't buy it as a major issue. I think pricing issues for 2D games, and the fact that the series only really has momentum from the past 15 years from one great full priced 2D game and one shadow dropped and thus not heavily marketed at all remaster and then a very divisive Prime follow up that objectively failed to expand the audience with gameplay elements most Metroid fans aren't here for, are all bigger issues than caring about some mythical wider audience.

If there were actual reliable new releases after the 2000s and Nintendo knew how to take advantage of the indie Metroidvania boom and sales were not notably better than it would be better to say there's a limit to the series' success, but that has not happened.

I enjoyed MP4 plenty enough, just it seemed a fairly short experience (despite racking up 17ish hours). I don't have any particular pull to play it again already, but I'll certainly keep my copy for the future (and I keep anything Metroid anyway).

I don't think that Metroid is inherently niche. It's just got a solid history of four solid decades of only producing relatively niche games.

Maybe it will eventually turn out that breakout hit, but I think that it's more likely to come by incorporating influences from other genres, like Zelda took from open world games, rather than just playing entirely within the Metroidvania formula.

I think if Nintendo just sold Metroid 6 at 30 bucks it would outsell Dread to the point of eventually being comparatively profitable.

I think Nintendo execs probably don't understand why movies cost so much but movie tickets are like 12 bucks either. :V The concept of selling cheap to grab a wide audience probably confuses them.

Note: Metroid Dread was worth full price, unquestionably, but I want Metroid to be popular more than fair pricing to be agreeable to people who are not me.

There are two issues with "just price to cheaper to push units", at least as are relevant to this case.

1. A cheaper price does not automatically lead to greater revenue. Yes, a lower price might lead to greater sales, but whether those greater sales outpace the smaller revenue per sale is variable. Every product has an optimum price, where the balance of price vs sales leads to maximum revenue, but that is almost never going to be at some arbitrary low price, because "price" is almost never the main thing leading a person to not buy your product.

2. Long term expectations. Nintendo is historically very concerned with the problem of their products being "devalued", and given their long term perspective and the tendency of customers to behave irrationally about pricing? They are probably right to be worried. Selling a given game for a very low price may be a long term detriment, if it results in a large number of customers who now view that pricing as an expectation, even for games unrelated to the product. And "raising prices" almost always leads to terrible PR, even if no prices were actually raised. Better to not overly court that issue.

I think the latter would be an issue more worth taking seriously if most other full priced games, including evergreen ones, didn't get better sales. And that there is obviously a middle ground between "60 percent off in 6 months" and "Arms is still 60 dollars and will be 40 dollars on sale, no cheaper, after nearly a decade".

If ARMS isn't worth the $40 sales price to you, then what harm does it do to you if it never drops cheaper? It simply means you don't find the game worth buying, and thus don't buy it. You will presumably live your life, and go buy other games you find more worth your money. And Nintendo will go on with their life, confident that if you don't find ARMS worth the money, some other game they sell will be. And if not? Plenty of other people who will find it worth buying and playing, or some other game by Nintendo.

Which is to say: this is exactly the marketing mindset that Nintendo is rejecting, the idea that they have to pursue every single last potential customer down to whatever arbitrarily cheap price they want for a game. They are confident that whatever they might gain from severe discounts in sales, they would lose in other future people delaying purchase in hopes of a theoretical future sale. Instead, they want customers to put up or shut up, and stop treating their buying habits as some kind of negotiation.

I find it annoying because I like enough of Nintendo's smaller games and would not want them to go away forever just because Nintendo is stubborn. Metroid in particular is a series I adore and want as many people as possible to enjoy it, but even Dread with all its acclaim and initial sales success does not seem like it has kept selling as well, which particularly stood out with how much of an immediately massive success Hollow Knight: Silksong has been, partially because of years of the original game being reliably affordable to people who buy games in this genre and thus could keep up the momentum. And thus a tiny indie dev is running circles around Nintendo in terms of games sales of a genre that is partially named after said Nintendo series.

While I really didn't agree with the sentiment, the Advance Wars remake consistently had people asking for it to not be a full priced game and then ended up as the rare first party Switch game to never get confirmed for even 1 million copies sold, which also stands out as a series that might be gone now because of that.

I will also not fall for the implication that Nintendo is making the right business decision all the time, other than for their "too big to fail" games and Switch era of systems, because that is what dominates their sales, so they can succeed no matter what they do with any of their more niche titles. Even ignoring that many of the people involved with the Wii U, marketing included, still work there, so it is not a magical "knows what they're doing" organization in every instance like people pretend successful businesses in every single aspect purely because they are currently very successful.

Ice belt power on appreciation post:

Cannot be overstated how good the Prime 4 music is. Great stuff.

Also, I dunno how I didn't immediately point this out, blaming fans for just wanting the same old Metroid when Prime 4 is widely agreed upon, across the board, to be at its best when its most like the other games and at its worst when it tries to add something notably different, is an insane take. Like yes there are stubborn fanboys but a large portion of the Zelda fanbase loves BOTW, the Metroid series got re-invented as a pseudo-FPS and the DS games are pretty beloved by enough people despite also being fairly out there compared to where Metroid started, at least AFAIK. This isn't a case of complaining that its different, its complaining that it wasn't done well, a widely agreed upon opinion.

This is just pretending people hate Other M's story for what its going for rather than its actual execution again. Cringe.

It's also stupid to blame fans for Metroid not being more popular, as if Nintendo hasn't regularly avoided far bigger fan outcries, like they made two entire games to make good versions of Paper Mario Sticker Star, a thing even people who like those games weren't asking for, they aren't making lazy retreads purely because of a minority of vocal Metroid fans.

Finally went ahead and finished this yesterday after pausing my playthrough for a few months (been a crazy period for me; recovering from a surgery now has given me space to dig back into gaming).

Overall, while I think people were exaggerating the extent of the problems, and that it'll likely be re-evaluated as being better than it was given credit for... I do kinda agree that the desert and the characters are both problems with this game.

In terms of the desert, I think the big issue is that it's poorly implemented, because there's almost no point in exploring it until the very end of the game, which makes running around that area a massive slog. The desert and green crystal stuff would've been much less obtrusive if they'd made it where you utilized that space more fully throughout the game as you were driving between dungeons.

The structure of it is also problematic. Going from one area to another is SUCH a slog. Fast travel of some sort would've alleviated so many headaches associated with having to go back and forth between the major in-game areas. WHY do I have to drive all the way across the desert back to Fury Green, enter the cannon, watch the unskippable cutscene, skip the skippable ones, run back through multiple rooms, wait for Myles to talk to random characters and slowly saunter his way back to the table, listen to more dialogue... every single time I get a decent shot upgrade? In the grand scheme of things, it's probably minor, but it's aggravating, and that aggravation stacks on top of other issues I already have with the game.

And that's the thing: the characters aren't as bad as people made them out to be, but they also add annoyances to the game, from the upgrade process to having to babysit these people during the final boss fight and actually losing because they're too stupid to get out of the way of clearly telegraphed attacks by Sylux. I'm not against the idea of a Metroid game having a cast, necessarily. I'm not a "muh isolation" chud who acts like the series hasn't evolved since the first entry, but if they ever make another Prime game, they need to integrate the cast in less obtrusive ways.

And what's it all for? MEGA SPOILERS: The end of the game is literally Samus abandoning these people to a doomed fate on some far off alien planet after Sylux pops up again out of nowhere. I suppose it's meant to be a tragic turn of events, which I'm not necessarily opposed to, but it just came off as random and depressing instead, making the game feel sort of pointless.

And that all sounds intensely negative, but... I mean, I think it was a pretty good game overall. Definitely not my favorite Metroid game, but it's beautiful, controls very well, really shows off what the system can do, has some great dungeons, and overall is a good time. I think its reception is largely a victim of the internet culture war against Nintendo atm, and over time it'll be re-evaluated.

A flawed experience, but one I'm willing to play again, and I do hope we see more Metroid Prime at some point.

I was honestly considering getting Prime 4 for my (unless things change) last Switch voucher, but those last few months led me to really reevaluate some things. The whole controversy involving the characters and game design was a part of it, but it got me thinking how the only reason I played the original trilogy was because of an excellent deal on the WiiU I forgot the details of, and while by no means did I hate the experience, I definitely didn't LOVE it either. Not to mention how, stinger notwithstanding, it had a perfectly complete ending.

So despite the fact that this might be the only game I have some level of interest in that would be a better deal exchanging a voucher for (considering how all the others are already old enough to get the occasional 30% off sale), I feel that using it for a game I already don't feel all that excited about (and that's before factoring in the stuff that might make me not enjoy it at all) would be a bigger waste than roughly $10. So I guess I'll leave Prime 4 for a sale at some point in the future - hopefully Prime 5 will make people happier and reduce the baggage of 4.

Well, i watched Youtuber, Beatemups' review of it and he hated the Game as a big Metroid fan so i passed on it. I only played ''Metroid Prime'' and i dropped it after 5 hours anyway. May be i get back to it, someday. It was certainly not bad, i just really got annoyed that it didn't show on the map with an arrow or something, where you were supposed to go.

I am no Metroid fan as you can see, so i don't really care, if Metroid got shelved by Nintendo for a long time after this Matroid 4 failure. Though, i still want to try ''Metroid Dread'' game.