Topic: Do you think the Metroid series should be rebooted?

If I remember right, after teaming up with Adam's squad she says: "It was the first joint mission I've been apart of since becoming a bounty hunter." Obviously that's something she'd been doing throughout the Prime games, aiding the Galactic Federation with Phazon incidents and such.

While we don't know for sure if it makes the Prime games non-canon, its a pretty simple flub that could've easily been reworded.

It's a flub, but I don't think it's a flub so horrible that they can't just throw a rug over it and keep going. They don't need to render something non-canon or reboot it over a passingly mentioned continuity error.

I actually think the worst thing they can do is go out of their way to "fix" it. Using the X-Men example again, the movie X-Men: First Class is supposed to be a prequel, but it contradicts the original trilogy in several places. It would be a waste of screen time to address all that though. It was more effective to just ask the audience to accept the continuity errors and move on with the story, so that's what Days of Future Past did.

I think that's what the next Metroid should do too, regardless of where it takes place in the timeline.

@LightSuitGuy I don't think that's a reason to reboot an entire franchise for. It's a little mistake in terms of story arc, but I'm willing to bet that every franchise has those.

As for the next Metroid, I'd love to see another third person game, perhaps with a more versatile camera.

I would like that too, but with a few stipulations.

1) Analog character movement.
2) Independent analog camera control.
3) A button to hold for locking on a target.
4) Another button to hold for aiming.

I mean come on, Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time came nearly 20 years ago and laid all the groundwork. GTA3 made it a science. We shouldn't be having these issues with 3D games anymore.

I really liked the addition of melee actions in Other M though. Samus should be a versatile fighter, not just a run-and-gunner.

No, rebooting Metroid is overkill. All that's needed is to return to the aspects that make Super Metroid and Metroid Prime so impacting to the series, and make a decent game out of it - and also take a GOOD look at the writing. There's nothing more aggravating than continuity errors in a game series that aims to build a progressive storyline, even if it's built out of order.

Well, it worked in Other M, because of the ''NES-style'' controls, but I agree, I'd also love to see how a more modern type of 3rd person Metroid will work.

How about GTA in space. Steal spaceships, go around pirating and being chased by Samus. Erm...GTS then. (Grand Theft Spaceship)

Just go the Prime 3 way, but remove planet hopping. Make us explore a planet beginning with a ship on orbit all the way through mountaintops, forests into underground facilities and some crazy subsurface environments. Add a multiplayer with Federation troopers and an asynchronous mode with Space pirates trying to kill Samus, kinda like Evolve.
It's not really difficult, it would just have to look cool.

No. 'Reboot' is a word used by developers who think they're making a movie instead of a game, just like 'cinematic'.
Just make a new Metroid game.

That's what I mean. The story has gotten very convoluted. Metroids have to keep being cloned again and again, to keep the name metroid relevant.

Agreed. I prefer 2d or even 3rd person over first person. It makes me feel more agile. Although at this point, I'll take any new metroid game.

I personally think that Metroid needs a re-imagining. In fact, that might be the explanation behind where Metroid went. Nintendo just might be finding a way to reinvent the franchise.

I agree on that front. I'd like a game similar, but with better parkour, physics, and actual analog and camera control.

I agree about samus needing to talk in some form. Just not like they made her talk in other m. I'd like if she was like commander Shepard. Serious, but with a sense of humor.

I don't think I would complain too loudly either way. If we get a new Metroid game, I'll chalk it up as a win nonetheless. Just keep Samus silent or give her the personality we all feel she should have (a tough, independent woman with maybe an occasionally dry sense of humour)

Tomb Raider is an example of a rebooted series, and I think they did a good job with that. Is Tomb Raider 2013 perfect? No. But remember, Tomb Raider had a handful of mediocre games before 2013. So starting fresh was a good way to go. Metroid on the other hand, had one mediocre game, and it was majorly because of the story and Samus' characterization. The gameplay was passable (though it could have benefited from an analog stick)

Subtlety? Pfft, what? Metroid Prime was go to planet, crash land, alien ghosts, space pirates bad, phason bad, fight monster, sequel tease. What nuance of narrative was there? Corruption, slowly going back to explore more of the destroyed spaceship, seeing phason corrupted bodies disintegrating, and finally discovering that the AI had been stolen which ties into the story later. That's just ace, nothing in 1 or 2 did that for me. It was just one planet, more boring than any of the other planets in the series. I liked that feeling of touching down, exploring, and opening up new areas with the ship. And it's not like you ever had anyone accompany you planetside, you were always just chasing ghosts, especially with the other hunters. That is more of a horrific sense of isolation that I ever got with 1 (no sympathetic characters = no stakes).

Not to mention that there were several different worlds with more history to learn via lore scans; Bryyo, Sky City, and the Space Pirate planet.

They honestly should go back to Prime. I really want them to not just go back to what make nostalgia games or whatever but the style of the Prime games is something no game I've played has properly captured. Partially because it cheated by having the atmosphere and (relative) lack of traditional narrative while giving me as much text as you can fit into a small visual novel via scanning. That added so much to the game and made it interesting world building instead of boring exposition (which even in the context of the text in these games, it often would have been if done via cutscenes and dialogue). So I get my love of needlessly long anime-worthy explanations and story without having to constantly make fun of it.

This has been a lesson in how to hide your weak points via clever game design.

Honestly, the rise of audiologs would be a great voice acting compromise as long as we actually have good voice acting. Maybe a small town hub too if you really need some more characters (and it would make a decent contrast to the rest of the world...maybe make it like a seperate planet that has actual civilization)

And yes Metroid is subtle, in the context that so many video games are hilariously not subtle and new games point out everything ever usually. Even the ones praised for story on SNES are not exactly Journey, and they're still more subtle compared to most modern JRPGs.

I suppose, but to split hairs and say 'MP1, subtle, MP3, NOT SUBTLE, WHAT A TRASH-HEAP' is just ridiculous. They're basically the same game template (the gameplay on the planets is exactly the same, just refined), Corruption just had the story progress to the galactic level; where it needed to go. The phazon wiped out the chozo from an entire planet, to think only one person in the galaxy would be concerned about that is just silly. Of course the federation would get involved and send forces to prevent further genocide.

After all, at some point dropping narrative in scan text is just low production values, not subtlety.

I'm just sick of everyone trashing on the later two Metroid Prime games because of some mystical aura that they don't see in them when in reality it's just some hipster, Zelda-cycle non-argument. Echoes would have been a great game if it had a little more time or budget and Corruption is literally the best FPS or Metroidvania game I have ever played. Gah, fleshbags!

Actions by themselves don't tell much of a narrative, there could be any number of ways to fit that into a storyline. What's more important to the storyline is the motivation behind those actions and how they affect the game universe, and those aspects of the storyline are hidden in the scans.

The problem is that you knew exactly what the ship was before you started exploring it, so that kind of detracts from the subtlety. Exploring and finding what happened to the ship is more in line with what I'm talking about though, instead of being outright told what happened, you have to explore the ship and discover it yourself. Although it would be better if it weren't mandatory to go there and it was an optional scan.

It doesn't matter that they didn't accompany you planetside, it's more bothering that they were constantly feeding you intel and assigning you missions. With 1 it was closer to being natural exploration, you went where you were supposed to go by exploring the level and ending up there, not so much because the game told you that's where you're supposed to go.

False. The stakes are just implied, which is part of what makes them more subtle. Think about what would happen if Samus didn't intervene in the events of Prime 1. The Phazon could've spread to all of Tallon IV and turned the planet into a Phaaze clone and even spread to other planets. The Space Pirates would've continue to mine and study Phazon and continue to power themselves up and become more of a threat. Would you not consider those to be high stakes?

And out of those, the only one that has any real relevance to current events is the Pirate lore. Bryyo and Skytown's lore was neat, but it wasn't really connected to the main storyline. It was just the planet's backstory and nothing more. The war between Lords of Science and the Primals and the Elysians' Chozo origins were neat, but they weren't important plot points that affected what you were doing.

Adding audio to scan logs is a good idea, and not unheard of since 2 and 3 have done audio logs before. I don't think a hub world with characters fits though, I think at best it could be an important character in a central location like U-Mos in Prime 2 or someone that Samus can contact via her ship.

You are entirely overthinking this.

There were just no characters alive in MP1 to care about, which is why myself and others felt little stakes. The game was entirely populated by enemies and dead people.

Learning the stories and cultures of the different planets in Prime 3 that were disrupted by their own conflict or the leviathan seeds gave one a motivation to stop the corruption. Because were continually seeing the effects of the corruption on the other hunters.

And you wouldn't have known about the whole phaaze -> leviathan seed dynamic were it not for MP3, that just wasn't made clear in the story of MP1.

And if you come up to a space ship, it's not moving, it's hull is visibly breached, it doesn't hail you, and has no signs of life then you'd figure out that it was a wreck. Going to the last known source of a lost ship's transmission kinda inherently implies that, anyhow. The discovery there wasn't that the ship was wrecked because that would be way, way obvious; it was that they stole the AI.

I appreciate that you want Metroidvania games to be set entirely on one map, but I appreciated the added diversity in Corruption beyond ice world, fire world, water world, mines, bum-ba-de-dum-ba-de-bum.