metroid prime 4: beyond
{B}
"yep, that sure is a video game." <- how to summarize our feelings at any moment during our playthru in a single sentence. hey, this game is absolutely fucking beautiful though, yea? just look at it. (insert figurative screenshot here)
i'm going to avoid talking at length about my complaints with this game (because we already spent the entire playthru bitching about the annoying things to our roommates), and i'm sure it's nothing that other people who have reviewed this game haven't already covered ad nauseum. it all boils down to the handholdiness being overbearing to the point of insult. you get the gist, i'm sure.
it got me thinking, though. about the concept of "what games should be". how many times have we seen someone on the internet say, "it's a good game, it's just not a good [insert franchise] game". what does that even mean, actually? like, the meaning seems obvious at face value, but i think there's actually a lot to unpack here, and the metroid series makes for an excellent case study.
so, let's state the obvious upfront: whenever someone says something like that, they're not really talking about "what this series should be" from an objective point of view, but something more like, "what i think this series should be", right? in reality not even the people who own and manage these intellectual properties ever seem able to agree on what any given series "should" be (as if any sort of inherent ethos like that would ever mean more to them than the pursuit of profitability).
the metroid series has essentially been deified in the eyes of the gaming community, thanks to its contribution to establishing the now increasingly prolific genre, metroidvanias. the funny thing, though, is that the "metroid series" is remarkably inconsistent in its design philosophy. in fact - and i am saying this as someone who has been an avid fan of metroid games since childhood - i would assert that, more often than not, gamers obtain their understanding of "what metroid is" moreso from the generic idea of the metroidvania game than from the actual metroid games directly.
super metroid ostensibly codified many aspects of the metroid formula, such that very many ideas which first appeared in super have gone on to appear in almost every metroid title ever since, and yet... quite literally not a single one of the metroid games that have come after it plays similarly or imitates its structure. there are always crucial deviations in structure that, whether silently or blatantly, undermine the level of freedom the player has to choose the shape of their route through the game. that freedom, that nonlinearity, is the principle aspect of design that defines the entire genre, the thing that players think of first when they think about what it means for a game to be a metroidvania. and metroid games have been allergic to this type of world design for the majority of the series' lifespan.
so, i could ramble for a while with different theories about which elements of metroid games are consistent enough across the series to inform what the series' own goals for itself might be, but i think that's still missing the point. perhaps it's precisely because of this tension between what the games are like and what gamers expect from them, but i feel like metroid, more than most other decades-spanning franchises in the industry, pretty clearly seems to have distinctly different goals in each installment. super prioritised exploration, but fusion chose to prioritise narrative. the prime games emphasized immersion and lore. dread, despite taking measures to appease mouth-foaming nonlinearists, disguises itself as a linear game to the inexperienced player and overall prioritises its emotional atmosphere. we don't talk about other m, not even in this context.
okay, let's reign in the hypotheticals and get back to talking about prime 4. my point with all of this is that, yes, prime 4 is a disappointingly linear game, but i didn't want to let that bother me very much while i was playing it. the prime games have never been especially non-linear anyway, after all. i decided to shift my focus instead to figuring out what it seems like the developers' vision for the game was. i never formed a very clear idea of this, certainly not enough to be able to put it into words here, but i can at least say i think they mostly pulled it off fairly well.
when i could ignore all the things i wished this game might be during the near-decade of waiting for it to come out (and also ignore the insufferably overbearing npc helptexts), it turned out i was just playing a pretty decent, well-made game. it's fun. it plays good. and it looks damn amazing while doing it.
that's not to say it isn't still full of frustrating bits. even going beyond the obvious faults, it's far from a perfect game. but i dunno, i also just feel a little compelled to cut them some slack, considering the tumultuous dev cycle. the fact that it turned out as alright as it did is perhaps a small miracle, i'd say. i mean, even though i don't have that many specifically good things to say about it, i still played it twice in a row! credit where it's due, and all that. it's metroid. i like metroid. it's comfy, even if it's mid.