I have played Metroid: Dread more times than I care to admit on the record but haven’t found as much satisfaction and maddening fun in the Prime series. Nevertheless, I have spent a heavy handful of hours playing Metroid Prime and recently (literally yesterday) finished Metroid Prime 4.
SPOILERS AHEAD, OBVIOUSLY.
Samus is dropped off in calamity to a planet she’s stuck on and has to recover her powers as usual, okay, great. Here, she encounters recordings from a lost civilization of Lamorn people, all but 12 of them perishing in some great tragedy. A time element plays, and psychic powers are afoot.
As she wanders the creepy vestibules full of alien lifeforms and contaminated medical bays of an experiment gone wildly wrong, Samus comes across what I originally interpreted to be a harrowing story of grief. The Lamorn technologies were made to share with others born without natural psychic gifts. They were a forward-thinking people struck down by a catastrophic scientific miss. Samus also comes across lost allies of her own people and begins to encounter them as she traverses the tragic world of the Lamorn, weaving an intricate relationship between what is lost and what is yet to be found.
Some reviews grill the game for being too empty, but I found that to be okay, considering the Lamorn are completely extinct and Samus is trying to psychically understand how to free them from their own tragedy.
I’m still left empty by the wasted potential of this narrative idea, though. I thought during the first half or so of the game that I was going to encounter some kind of beautiful narrative of how grief can be so many things: lonely, infuriating, terrifying, freeing, nostalgic even. Instead, I found that myself in the poetic resilience displayed by the Lamorn desperately clinging to Samus, which then the game completely ignores later. It decides instead to place a giant nothing-pit of sand in the game and call it a desert, so it feels “open world“. It is a wasteland, in every way, especially considering how linear the entire plot is.
The pathetic endgame plops you in the cosmic tower to go back home in space and time. You knock around with Sylux, one of Samus’s old enemies who has yet to die a real death, and there is no resolve. The story of the Lamorn has nothing to do with the final boss, other than the fact he stole some of their technology to travel through spacetime. Samus leaves her allies behind and plants a tree on her home (?) planet bearing the psychic fruit.
The Metroid series, whether Prime or sidescrolling, never claims to be a story-driven narrative, but where so many hours were spent developing the storyline, why abandon it in the end? A human woman raised by alien birds alone on a planet with nothing but memories of the past and a team of already-lost comrades could have been so much cooler if we didn’t waste all that time and energy animating a giant cookie cake in the middle of the map. Anyway!
(I did still enjoy this game. The visuals were amazing and the arm cannon was CRISPY.7/10.)