What went wrong with ‘Metroid Prime 4: Beyond?’

Now that the dust has settled on the long-anticipated Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, many fans are playing insurance adjuster, reviewing what is seen as an absolute car crash. Many fingers point to the series’ executive producer from the beginning: Kensuke Tanabe. This is thanks to a recently translated set of interviews with Famitsu and Nintendo Dream, in which Tanabe discusses his upcoming retirement, his vision for Prime 4, acknowledges the struggles in the game’s development, and gives clear depictions of his tenacious choices for Nintendo’s prestigious sci-fi franchise.

I can’t blame the fandom for trying to find a villain in the story of how this game turned out the way it did. I was among them at first. But the truth is, most people who play video games don’t have the slightest clue about how much work it takes to make a stable, playable game. And one man cannot change that math alone. However, his influence is worth examination for a game that didn’t sell anywhere close to the 3.7 million of Metroid Dread in 2021. This is despite the fact that Metroid Prime 4 was a closely followed development and irreverently hyped since its first announcement in 2017. That hype machine got messier since its development “restarted” in 2019. 

Tying the anchor.

That development restart was a sort of a fib, or at least a mistranslation. This is discoverable as divulged in the Tanabe interviews. Original Prime development studio Retro Studios was saddled with a lot of elements of the game’s first iteration, believed to have been done by a team at Bandai Namco. Those elements include most of the aspects of the game that earned Metroid Prime 4 its hardest criticisms by reviews and by fans: the open world desert, the story and cutscenes, and the Federation Trooper companion characters – Myles McKenzy in particular.

Despite being a lead producer in a company as secretive as Nintendo, Tanabe was very honest with his ownership of some of these muddied elements. Speaking with Nintendo Dream, he discussed his initial desire to make an open-world Metroid in response to the love of Breath of the Wild, citing wishes for such from social media. He also was the one who conjured the idea of the bike VI-O-LA, long before Link ever even got one in BOTW’s DLC.

The fandom continues to decry that an open-world structure like that would never work for Metroid, as a prerequisite is a map that walls off player progression until they acquire increasingly more powerful abilities. While I disagree that an open map format that recalls Zelda’s structure isn’t impossible. Prime 4’s execution is not it. In many ways, it is a step backwards in exploration design for the franchise as a whole.

Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up!

Unfortunately for Tanabe, the part he was most passionate about in Prime 4’s development – that didn’t land the way he wished – was the story content. The most bogged-down aspect of Prime 4 is part of that story, the Federation Troopers: a faction in the game that the fandom prefers to see less of, but Tanabe clearly admires. While at first blush, this ensemble of supporting characters feel like they could strike a balance much like the troopers to Elen Ripley in Aliens, their tone and characterization is decidedly dated in a world that has grown tired of Marvel-esque dialogue over the last six or so years. 

Surely a lot of these choices were locked in long before even Avengers Endgame released, and it doesn’t help that some of the talent behind these aspects were by ex-developers of the maligned 343 Studio entries of the Halo franchise. However, the story issues run deeper, extending beyond dialogue choices. These characters are a fundamental part of the game that pulls players further away from feeling like they’re experiencing a Metroid game. These NPCs warp the structure of the game entirely: interrupting what should be isolating spaces, requiring escorting, needing to open doors, and creating long, excruciating backtracking to Fury Green to upgrade your weapons. While backtracking is standard practice in a Metroid title, this game’s version of it is dull and arbitrary, less about becoming familiar and more about padding.

Bad vision.

Another part of the Prime franchise that should be a slam dunk is the scanning visor. When Retro Studios developed Metroid Prime 1, it innovated on what would be modern environmental storytelling by having readable files by the Chozo remnants and the Space Pirate’s log files to piece together the game’s world and what led to the horrific development of the titular Metroid Prime. Prime 3 introduces scarce cutscenes and voice dialogue, but scanning remains a fundamental part of the game’s identity. Prime 4 fails at even this. 

What we all took for granted was that those logs were fun to read. Tanabe notes in the Nintendo Dream interview that they had hired an experienced storywriter for these logs, which should have been straightforward, as this kind of storytelling has become very popular in modern games, following in the footsteps of the Prime trilogy. That writer’s efforts were in vain as they did not stay on the project, and Tanabe took to writing those log entries himself.

In these entries, he keeps sentences simple, as that’s how he wanted them to flow. Not only is the final product dull to read through, but Prime 4 is also more ruthless with its requirements to fulfill 100% scans throughout the game. The frequency of different versions of items that require scanning, crates, and computer terminals, for instance, repeats the same or similar information across the game. Some of these items even need to be rescanned two or three times to create new entries, depending on the event context. The result feels more like a chore, and doesn’t entice excitement with exploring Viewos. 

Oh brother, this guy stinks!

Speaking of the game’s ending, a sticking point that struggles to coalesce by the game’s conclusion is its ostensible main villain, Sylux, the rival bounty hunter. While the fights with Sylux are strong design, the context around them is overwhelmingly weak in comparison to how much setup exists between previous titles and the marketing of Metroid Prime 4. Samus fights Sylux in three different boss battles: the first two are mini bosses that turn out to be sentry bots impersonating him, and the final boss, which requires players to support the Federation characters until a spectacular final one-on-one encounter. 

Before this final encounter, Sylux receives a handful of screaming pieces of dialogue, and Samus has fleeting pieces of psychic flashbacks of his tragic, begrudging backstory. That backstory’s stunning cutscene hides as the game’s 100% completion reward. This falls flat as players realize that all this time is about rage over a random battle from Sylux’s Federation days. The vendetta he holds in this context appears laughable, a shameful result for such a unique character who has mystified the fandom for 20 years since his first appearance on the Nintendo DS.

Tanabe did articulate in the Nintendo Dream interview some context on the incomplete nature of this villain, as his goal was for Prime 4 to begin a new trilogy that framed around Samus and Sylux’s rivalry, and delve further into his character. Despite this, the story spends most of its time on the Lamorn, the Grievers, and the dreaded Green Crystals. Despite having the longest average runtime of a game in the Metroid series, it does very little with these ambitions for its villain.

The Metroid franchise needs to let go of its film influences.

Tanabe notes in this Nintendo Dream interview that his mind is full of cinematic ideas, drawn from his studies of film production at university. This is clearly evident in his contributions to the Prime franchise over the years. Still, he has progressively provided less grounding as imagination ran wild over eight years of development.

Given that Metroid has always had film influences, even going back to Yoshio Sakamoto’s love of the Alien series and Argento films coming through the series’ first 2-D entries, a lot of Metroid’s weakest moments in its history feel derived from their developers being beholden to that love of film – Metroid: Other M comes to mind in particular.

Surely, there is a balance to find somewhere, as that film influence also serves the series well across Metroid’s best games. However, as one of the longest-running series in Nintendo’s library, with the fewest entries, the Switch generation is an important inflection point where the franchise must define itself among the games of the genre it has heavily influenced. Games like Hollow Knight: Silksong, which heavily lean on influences from Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night, are constantly breathing down Metroid’s neck.

What – and who – is next?

Now that Tanabe is retiring, many look to his successor, Risa Tabata, who has been at his side since the beginning of the Metroid Prime franchise as a producer, as well as Donkey Kong and Paper Mario, and even beloved niche titles such as Chibi Robo and Captain Rainbow. There is hope that, with her appointment, this trilogy can continue in a satisfying way, allowing Retro Studios (or whoever works on it) to give Samus Aran an adventure deserving of her legendary status.

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is available now on Nintendo Switch/Switch 2.

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Images courtesy of Nintendo.