| <\-- | from rp0 · 1765848952911.0 reply |
metroid prime 4 sucks
I find it kinda embarrassing to talk about it in paradise where I already talked about how donkey kong bananza sucked but like where that game sucked because it offered many compulsive dark patterns and gave basically nothing to top-end players while also releasing a bait dlc in the first month, mp4 (that's metroid prime 4) sucks because we knew it was going to suck. I'm not going to engage the spoiler culture here, if people in untitled social somehow are interested in the game, consider this a psa
we always knew it was going to suck. it was announced as a launch title in 2015 for the switch and clearly never came to exist until nintendo was able to requisition Retro Studios, the original developers of the Metroid Prime trilogy to do it. this happened in 2019, but we know that Retro was definitely working on different shit at the time so they probably had to reorient quite a bit, so let's say 5 years of development time. it also was likely required to be visually stunning (and it is) given the switch 2 hasn't really had a title to show that off yet, unless you count mario kart world which I have not played but it's not exactly realistic. knowing what we know about how long it takes to develop assets at this fidelity, there was probably very little time to work on the actual structure of the game, probs a year at most. from scratch. when you weren't expecting it. it's certain to be a disaster.
so why is the game bad?
first, it's stunningly linear. metroid prime games tend to have a formula of nonlinear exploration before you find some tech shit that is linear then, you get an upgrade and then go back to wandering. it does tend to have backtracking and the original game had a very funny rune quest where you had to find these sigils at the end of the game throughout the world and solve little puzzles to get to them. in normal play you'd probably find very few of them.
this game? it's just the tech shit you linearly walk down. first area? jungle. find the temple, get an upgrade. second area? factory. get to three bottoms, get an upgrade. third area? ice zone. get to a lab and get to the bottom. fourth area? lava field. get to a facility and get to the end. fifth area? get to the bottom of a mine. the middle three of these, I shit you not, follow the same formula where you get to the end and have to activate something and then escape because it's dangerous now. for a game series known for having stunning environmental art that sure is a lot of enclosed spaces where they don't have to sell that at all! it's extremely linear to the point where the only option you have for "taking a different path" is usually the fucking save stations which actually don't matter because the game employs a checkpoint system because it's so fucking linear that it no longer can rely on it's staple mechanic that makes exploration feel meaningful
anyways. fine. it's linear. they are allowed to change tack a little bit, but there's a problem: backtracking. as a common complaint about the series, it's actually something quite good about the game since it keeps you moving through the spaces and learning them instead of just forgetting everything like metroid: dread so untastefully did. however when the game is linear, you aren't trying to figure out the best way back to a space, you are just transparently wasting time as you realize the devs are padding for length. there's an upgrade you get that literally takes no additional effort to unlock you just have to go back and get it because it happened to be unavailable at the time.
this game is trying to have it both ways. it is trying to streamline a game series that relies on not being streamlined and through torturing its existence, everything just falls to pieces. it's funny, my experience of the public imagination of nintendo is that they are somehow the only big games company still making good games and maybe all these things I've talked about do help the geriatic millennial who grew up playing these games go to bed or maybe it makes the games more appealing to the next generation but shit man it just reeks of the same garbage other AAA studios are up to. nintendo is not somehow free of all the pressures of other games companies. they will cleave away at games until they are palatable chunks to congeal over. and some series are amenable to that. we can turn mario into sludge. zelda took some imagining but it can become sludge. metroid cannot become sludge, it resists it and trying to force it has failed miserably. maybe if they had more time, but a delayed game is an embarrassment forever while a released game is only an embarrassment temporarily
did I mention that after you get through the five areas they make you spend about an hour or two driving around an empty desert to run into some crystals before you can access the final boss? that there is no final area, just some cutscenes then boss? that actually there's not even any metroids except in the most superficial sense? that they absurdly added talking npcs but kept samus mute? that the game is perhaps 10-12 hours with the bullshit and sub-10 without it? that, I remind, this is a $70 game ($100 CAD??) if you buy it for the switch 2?
I missed like a whole generation of nintendo games because I took one look at super mario odyssey and breath of the wild and I knew this shit was not for me. I bandied past the affirming discourse because I saw dull open world for what they were, but that positivity stuck with me and I somehow convinced myself to pick up sequel titles to series I really cared about: donkey kong and metroid prime rather than the more mainline nintendo offerings. and I do think it was valuable to revisit these characters in these modern spaces as it allows me to really deconstruct what I found interesting as a kid. it is expensive to do but now I know firsthand what I've always known: if I want to find the joys I experienced as a kid in playing games it will always be in the small, new, and rare. any large calcified company will never be able to serve me.
anyways, sorry about the rant but I am mad. is this a good post or should i put in more effort next time?
