metroid prime 4 sucks
(this is just pure haterade. there’s no valuable analysis going on here, if you liked metroid prime 4, ok! neat. carry on)
it turns out that the only thing worse than chasing a trend that doesn’t really mesh with your franchise is to abandon chasing the trend so late in in development that you end up panicking your way into creating something that meshes even less well.
metroid prime 4 is a total failure on every level except for two:
the art design is genuinely wonderful, when it’s allowed to be (i.e. when it’s not being applied to the most boring desert in all of video games)
the UI and gameplay mechanics are generally rock-solid, which makes sense considering they’re essentially identical to every other game in this series
otherwise, everything about this game that’s unique or an attempted progression on the prior entries in the series is bad.
the motorcycle is the loudest failure because it’s an open and constant admission of so many other failures. you use it to travel between the actual levels, across a barren and bland desert, occasionally crashing into some green rocks because it’s the closest thing to interaction you’ve had to do outside of holding right-trigger for a couple of minutes. it achieves the aim of a loading-screen elevator, but less efficiently and with more time for you to gawk at the sheer hours of wasted effort until even the gawking feels repetitive.
the other thing the bike does is open doors via abysmally slow stock animations involving a lot of gears and slowly rising platforms. thrilling.
the game’s new set of abilities (sorry, PSYCHIC POWERS) are either cribbed from previous games (but now it’s a PSYCHIC spider ball!) and/or utilized entirely for tedious puzzle-solving and combat. I liked the guided-shot okay until the third time I had to fight the mini-boss that requires you hit three orbiting drones through a wave of other orbiting drones several times in succession in order to be able to do any damage, which puts a lot of strain on the floaty flight controls and camera that they aren’t refined enough to handle.
the story has a theoretically interesting angle (you’re explicitly doing archaeology, the alien species asking for your help is long dead) except it’s just a variation on a thing every metroid game is doing, and the execution here is remarkably bland and over-reliant on the samus-as-holy-savior stuff that always feels like a bummer when it comes up too much in any given metroid.
but also we have NPCs!
oh christ the NPCs. nothing tells you how fucked this game’s development was than the moments when mackenzie won’t shut the fuck up about how you need to get to the lava world now that you have the lava wheels on your bike, multiple times, as you drive your bike in a straight line directly towards the lava world. thank you video game for repeatedly yelling at me about your own failures of level and world design.
metroid prime 4 is the most scared game I’ve played in a while. the game is absolutely terrified that you’re going to feel potentially lost, miss a turn, stop doing the next thing on the checklist (there’s only the one checklist). your shithead NPC companion will never leave you alone. he’s not physically present as much as the opening moments might make you fear, but he’s still always barking at you.
when he isn’t, it’s because the game has you going down a straight corridor towards another straight corridor, and so it can breathe a sigh of relief knowing you won’t have any dangerous pretensions about choice or exploration.
the favored level design here is “walk through a linear series of rooms while the lights are off, get to the place where you turn the lights on, then walk backwards through that same linear series of rooms, but now the lights are on and probably some bad guys woke up!” the game puts a dot on your minimap when you enter a zone that shows you where the area boss fight’s gonna happen, and then there is virtually no need to ever open your map again because there is no branching or maze-like behavior at all (except in very short bursts that always, always wind back on themselves in the simplest possible fashion).
going back to the NPCs for my last big complaint: all these idiots talking to samus makes the decision to have samus be mute extremely weird. it’s not weird in, say, metroid prime 1 or super metroid, because in those cases samus is exploring a hostile alien world by herself and has no need to be talking to anyone. in a game where she is interacting with someone a lot — metroid fusion — it’s also fine because she does talk because samus isn’t a fucking mime, she’s not doomguy, she’s just a bounty hunter who usually operates solo!
if you didn’t want to give her a voice actress and risk people being annoying about it or comparing it too directly to other m, there’s a simple enough solution there: get rid of the fucking NPCs, or at least avoid having them do stock-video-game conversations about where the objective is and what it looks like. having samus do mario-RPG-ass pantomime in these sequences is absurd and does the opposite of what metroid games usually do, which is use her relative silence as a way to reduce the friction between player and situation.
that this game doesn’t suck to play on a moment-to-moment level only exacerbates its failures, to my mind. the scaffolding for even a “pretty good” game was already here, it’s called the metroid prime trilogy, you get zero points for that stuff still being here and you certainly don’t get points for the stuff you tried to add. so if we’re doing the math, that’s going to be zero points overall. congratulations.
(I think the new suit sucks too, but now we’re just being petty. wouldn’t want to be petty)