Metroid Prime Remastered

Well, we all knew this was coming. My decision to cover this game will, of course, be controversial to some of my readers, but for reasons I will refuse to elaborate on, anyone criticising me for my media consumption is violating my freedom of speech and also bullying me. I must live my truth.

I scarcely need to name the game in question. After years of rumours and feverish speculation  this game, part of a storied media franchise and a universal keystone of millennial nostalgia everywhere, is finally here. It’s by far the biggest, most highly-anticipated game of February and quite possibly the year.

That’s right: I’m talking about Metroid Prime Remastered on the Nintendo Switch. 

Most people seem to develop intense nostalgia for the first game console they ever played, but for some reason my nostalgia-organ didn’t fully develop until the Gamecube, which came out when I was 13. I don’t know if it was the adorable little mini-discs, the weird controller or the fact that the console had a handle, but something about the Gamecube imprinted itself on my brain like I was an orphaned duckling bonding to a sock with a smiley face drawn on it. I’m still eagerly awaiting the day when indie developers start making throwback games to the visual style of first-party Gamecube releases, with their for-the-time astonishing fur and water effects.

But until that day arrives, we’ve got this “remastered” release of Metroid Prime. For those who lack good taste and discernment, a brief history lesson.

Metroid has always been the black sheep of Nintendo’s homegrown franchises, both because the franchise’s moody sci-fi atmosphere is out of step with Mario, Zelda and Kirby and because it’s the one Nintendo property that’s historically been more popular in America than Japan. Maybe because of these factors, there was no Metroid game on the Nintendo 64 when all of those other IPs were making the jump from 2D to 3D. That would have to wait for the Gamecube, and it would be handed out to an American developer, Retro Studios, that had never shipped a finished game before.

Due to this and the decision to make the game first-person (which actually came from the executives in Japan, not Retro) the game was met with intense skepticism when it was first announced. That skepticism promptly vanished when the game actually came out, and it’s now widely regarded as an all-time classic.

The remastered version on the Switch features completely remade graphics and a modern dual-stick control setup (the original came out before that mechanic had been codified), plus the motion controls that were added in the Wii re-release. Other than that, the game is identical to the original version, for better and for worse.

Like all Metroid games, Metroid Prime casts the player as Samus Aran, interstellar bounty hunter and large shoulder pad enthusiast. Having acquired a suit of hyper-advanced armour from benevolent space birds, Samus travels the galaxy taking on jobs and generally being a badass. These adventures see her repeatedly cross paths with the titular Metroids, adorable little jellyfish aliens that are, improbably, a dire threat to life everywhere. Prime begins with Samus fighting some space pirates (she really doesn’t like space pirates) and then pursuing recurring series villain Ridley down to the surface of Tallon IV, a planet that’s been corrupted by a mysterious energy source called phazon. Since the space pirates have been applying phazon to the local Metroid population to see what will happen, cleansing the planet of its corruption neatly combines Samus’ two main passions in life (killing space pirates and killing metroids).

As you might be able to gather, Metroid Prime has a fairly simplistic plot. This is in keeping with previous Metroid games, which rarely get more complex than “there are Metroids, kill them”, but Prime smuggles in more story via the scan visor, a handy feature you can use to extract tasty lore dumps from objects and computers in the environment. This ends up giving Samus a lot of character despite her status as a completely silent protagonist, as we learn that the space pirates are absolutely terrified of her and have imbued her with a near-mythical level of dread. It’s a neat way to make a protagonist feel more complex despite not giving them any dialogue whatsoever, kind of like how the Doom 2016 reboot made the Doom Guy out to be a legendary badass entirely through environmental storytelling and lore.

(A later Metroid game would try to give Samus a more direct backstory and character, with disastrous results)

What Metroid Prime was always known for is its world design: Tallon IV was considered at the time to be one of the most evocative and atmospheric settings in all of gaming, both beautiful and achingly lonely. The original game was always impressive for evoking the feeling of a huge alien landscape despite actually taking place in very small, compartmentalized rooms. Locations like the central hub of Phendrana Drifts made it seem like there was a much bigger world just beyond the player’s eyeline, using clever framing and environmental effects.

After twenty years of huge open worlds I was concerned that this sleight of hand would no longer work, but in fact it was the opposite: game after game of slapdash, semi-procedurally designed open worlds have made me appreciate the meticulously-designed little rooms that make up the game’s world all the more. I mean, look at these bois:

I am officially announcing the Small Room Manifesto. Less sprawling open worlds, more cool little rooms. Just imagine the resources and artistry that goes into a modern bloated Ubisoft game, redirected towards making some sick-ass little rooms like these.

Doing a ground-up visual remake of any game risks losing what made the original special, but Metroid Prime is particularly susceptible to this effect given how important its art direction is to the whole experience. I’m pleased to report that the visual overhaul hasn’t diminished that all-important atmosphere one bit–this is one of those remakes that looks the way you remember the original looking, as though Retro extracted the nostalgia-laced memories from your brain and digitized them.

Where the game hasn’t always aged gracefully is its gameplay, which hasn’t been touched apart from the updated controls. In most modern games that involve a lot of backtracking, the developers would typically have a central hub area the player can return to easily (indeed Metroid Prime 2 would use this approach). Here this isn’t the case. In fact, since you can only access some areas from other, specific areas, you spend a lot of time having to re-traverse the same handful of locations over and over again. As fun as these sick-ass little rooms are to explore, it’s extremely disheartening to realise that your next objective is literally all the way across the map. The game is really crying out for some Dark Souls-style shortcuts that would let the player skip some areas they’d already cleared.

The other stumbling block is the combat. Enemies that fire projectiles can’t really by dodged despite a dash that’s meant for this purpose, which means that battles against these enemies come down to killing them quickly, before their unavoidable pew-pews take off too much health. This isn’t terrible or anything, but it gets repetitive and can make some later boss fights way more frustrating than they need to be.

These are problems that will hopefully be resolved in Metroid Prime 4, whenever that game re-appears (any day now, right Nintendo?). But for the moment, Metroid Prime Remastered is a very pleasant reminder of a lost era of game design, which was objectively superior to what AAA developers are putting out today, this opinion is absolutely not influenced in any way by nostalgia, don’t @ me.