Metroid

after a time a lot of 'critique' videos start to blur together

Nice to see that he talks at length about the game's troubled production before starting the review proper. Most long-form videos on Dread usually save that for the very end.

Fixed the links; just had to remove the hyphen to resolve the issue. The hyphenated version was the old version of Metroid Database that remained in use for a number of years while everything was being slowly transferred over, as far as I know. So the link used to be valid, but they probably let ownership lapse once they finished making sure everything was good at the new location. At which point these slots guys nabbed the domain. Any other instances of this problem can most likely be solved in the same manner if found.

Edited by RacattackForce on Dec 25th 2023 at 4:11:01 AM

Thank you!

Happy(?) fifth anniversary of the Prime 4 reboot announcement.

Edited by tclittle on Jan 25th 2024 at 7:13:40 AM

I'm half-expecting Prime 4 to be a Twilight Princess/Breath of the Wild/Miles Morales situations with the Switch and Switch successor at this point

Hopefully it won't be the next Metroid Dread in terms of wait time.

Every year that passes without a peep on Prime 4 only reinforces my belief that the game's announcement was nothing more than a cynical marketing tactic to make the bitter pill of the Metroid 2 remake go down smoothly. They had no actual plans for it and still have no idea what they're doing with it to this day.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jan 26th 2024 at 5:44:59 AM

What bitter pill?

I mean, there are different studios for Metroid games, so I'm more inclined to believe Prime 4 was just mishandled legitimately.

Honestly I can't remember how I felt when the big "Metroid Prime 4" logo appeared, but the Samus Returns reveal was huge to me. At that point pretty much all discussion of Metroid was people asking for Prime 4, it kind of felt like 2D Metroid was long dead by the time I got into it. And then in comes Samus Returns, first 2D Metroid game in 13 years, and it felt like the first step towards maybe ever getting a followup to Fusion (a feeling which was validated when the developers of Samus Returns created a followup to Fusion).

Nintendo had just crushed a very popular fan remake of Metroid 2 that had been in development for years and was days from release, and a lot of people were upset about it. They Cease and Desisted the project at the last possible second and then like a week later announced both games together.

"I know a lot of you are upset about the fan remake of Metroid 2 that we let happen for years before stomping on the throat of, but we're here to announce an official remake of Metroid 2!" -> Outrage and jeers.

"I know a lot of you are upset about the fan remake of Metroid 2 that we let happen for years before stomping on the throat of, but we're here to announce an official remake of Metroid 2 AND ALSO A NEW METROID PRIME GAME IS COMING AFTER ALL THESE YEARS!!!" -> Uproarious applause. Oh my god, new Metroid Prime!? I thought they were never making another Metroid Prime! Nintendo is the best company ever!

I called it out at the time as an obviously cynical marketing strategy to smooth over the anger over what they'd done to the fangame, rather than an actual reveal of a game they had in development and were proud of.

Years later as the game continues failing to materialize, I maintain that position. Prime 4 might wind up being good or it might not, but the reason it's being made is not because they had a bunch of great ideas and a half-finished game they were ready to start bragging about. They threw up a title to turn a PR catastrophe into a PR win, and now they're scratching their heads trying to figure out what to do with it.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jan 26th 2024 at 7:25:11 AM

I think you are vastly overestimating how much Nintendo cares about the reactions to them shutting down fangames.

Edited by Moth13 on Jan 26th 2024 at 11:29:19 AM

Kind of sounds like conspiracy theory to me.

I feel like the strategy behind E3 2017 was pretty obvious. It was about putting as much positive attention on the Switch as possible in it's first year, so that customers would see at as a popular system and feel pressure to buy their own, and third party developers would see it as a system with a large enough userbase to warrant releasing/porting their games to it (in turn giving the Switch a large library of games, creating more customer demand, resulting in an even larger userbase and even more potential profit from releasing games on it, etc.). Announcing games that were "being developed for the Nintendo Switch" without regard to how far away their actual releases were was just part of that. I doubt the backlash over AM2R factored in.

Yeah, Prime 4 being announced was honestly no different from the Fire Emblem Direct in february mentioning a switch game in development or TPC mentioning a Switch Pokémon game being made, it was essentially trying to draw as large a crowd as possible to hopefully make up for the Wii U's failure.

Only real difference is that Three Houses and Let's Go/Gen VIII did not have their development rebooted like Prime did (even if the latter game probably should have)

Edited by jdeo1997 on Jan 27th 2024 at 3:31:04 PM

It wasn't about any fan games. It was about Federation Force. They definitely felt the backlash on that one and wanted to make sure the fans had something big budget to look forward to in addition to the 3DS sidescroller.

I’m at least grateful Nintendo didn’t notice or didn’t act until AM2R was complete and released

My reaction to Metroid Prime 4 was just "Wait, they're announcing it now? It probably only started development last month, what are they doing?" Samus Returns was my "hell yeah!" announcement.

Gave me the same vibes as the Kingdom Hearts III announcement. "Uh, is this wise, this early in the development?"

Happened across a pretty stellar artist on Tumblr who really shines a spotlight on Samus and her Chozo heritage.

Edited by Avenger09 on Jan 26th 2024 at 10:37:22 AM

Not if Samus goes Super saiyan on his ass!

I'd love to see if future works would put Raven Beak in Samus' backstory.

I feel like Raven Beak works better if Samus barely knows who he is, but on the other hand, it feels like a waste not to make him more relevant.