As Metroid Prime 4: Beyond hits storefronts, I’m pretty sure you’re going to see a whole lot of fevered debate online about the game’s curious choice to place Samus, famously quiet Bounty Hunter, as the de facto head of a squad of Galactic Federation soldiers. Does it still feel like Metroid, famed for its sense of creepy, atmospherically rich isolation, if Samus has a buddy in her ear or – worse – alongside her physically? Or does the presence of friendlies ruin that Metroid magic?
It’s an interesting question, the sort of debate that deserves a weigh-in set apart from our Metroid Prime 4 review. So here we are.
For a start, I think Samus as a character can be more than one thing – lord knows 2010’s Metroid: Other M showed us this, for good and for ill. I’ve been under the impression for a while now that Nintendo has been slightly uncomfortable with the designation ‘Bounty Hunter’. Several games in succession have subtly told us that the company is more inherently comfortable with the idea of her as the space cops’ favourite freelancer. The Galactic Federation is the government of Metroid’s galaxy – or near enough – and while Samus isn’t formally on their books, she’s a hero to the organisation. Casting her that way means, naturally, she’s going to come into contact with Federation forces.
If this is in and of itself fully wise is another question, obviously. But Nintendo and Retro Studios have chosen to go down that path (again) with Prime 4. The question is – does it work?
I fully expect Prime 4’s cast of Federation Marines to come in for a bit of a hiding from critics and in the court of public opinion. But can I be honest? I think they’re absolutely fine. They are inoffensive. Which isn’t to say their inclusion ends up inoffensive, mind (more on that in a moment). If you imagine what a gang of five space marines might look like in a game like this, the caricatures you picture are probably exactly what has been written and cast.
There’s the nerdy, bespectacled engineer – this is Myles, the one who got everybody’s backs up, including mine, at preview. Over the course of the full game he still grates a bit, but he’s alright. Myles ends up as the Navi to Samus’ Link. He creates a ‘home base’ on the alien world you’re stranded on after you first meet him, and stays there – but he’ll crop up on the radio to give you hints or instruction if the game feels like you’ve been meandering for too long without making progress, and he helps Samus to upgrade her gear by using his engineering chops on items she brings back to base. By the end, the main thing that grated on me about Myles is my incredibly picky annoyance that he wears glasses inside a space marine helmet which he keeps down for 90 percent of his screentime. Surely the helmet visor has his prescription built-in? My VR headset has my prescription built-in. God. Sorry. I digress.
Then there’s a scarred, older, more experienced soldier – a Sniper. Then there’s a duo – a gruff and tough commander type (who, of course, is black), and then a young and over-excitable recruit (who, of course, is the group’s token girl). Finally, there’s a robot. These are broad sketches, caricatures. They work in that context. You know who these characters are the moment that you meet them.
I think caricatures can work fine – great, even – in a story like this. The truth is that while there’s a lot by Metroid standards by the measure of any other game, there isn’t much dialogue in Prime 4 at all, so you need to get to know these guys quickly. I think they will annoy some, but I think others will love them. I expect the young lass, who is depicted as a total Samus fangirl, will probably become a favourite of some fans and launch a lot of fanfiction and fan art depicting what her relationship with Samus could be. People will ship them. Fine.
But there is a problem in all of this, as I have intimated throughout this article. That problem is Samus herself.
This issue was also present back in Metroid Prime 3, to be fair – another game which prominently featured the Galactic Federation. But it’s especially weird in this game, which ultimately ends up being about Samus rescuing and reuniting a group of soldiers that have all been stranded on a faraway world with her. Over the course of Prime 4’s dungeon-like levels she quite literally builds a team and becomes its de facto leader, then leads that team on a few group missions towards the end of the game. But Samus doesn’t talk.
This is, I think, the problem. It doesn’t work any way that you slice it. It ultimately did my head in for the whole game, and completely undercut Prime 4’s narrative.
Let’s deal with the elephant in the room first: the idea that Samus is a silent protagonist. She is not. Samus talks. The obvious example is Other M, though let’s perhaps set that aside for a moment because that game’s narrative is a stinker with absolutely terrible dialogue. But even if we look to the other games: in Zero Mission and Super Metroid, arguably the high bars, we have text presented that is Samus narrating her ship’s log in first-person, like she’s Picard or Kirk. That makes sense as something she’d do. In Metroid Fusion we get a number of internal monologues, plus a single line of spoken-out-loud dialogue towards the end of the game. Then, in Metroid Dread, Samus speaks out in what ends up being one of the most exciting moments in the entire series. There’s also examples of Samus nattering more in officially-sanctioned manga and the like.
The point is, Samus is no mute. She’s a woman of few words, but she can talk. We’ve seen her talk so little in part because primarily these games are about a woman on her own. We know enough game protagonists who can’t shut up talking to themselves, to our eternal pain. Samus is mercifully not one of them, and that’s great. But from where I stand, that isn’t to say that Samus can’t speak at all, especially when in the presence of others. That feels weird.
And so it goes in Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, a game in which Samus doesn’t say a word. To be clear, I have only finished the game on Normal Mode, and not with 100 percent scans, so if there is a hidden one-liner on a hard mode 100 percent completion run, I wouldn’t know. But that wouldn’t make a material difference anyway, because the problem is with how Samus appears with these marines. These guys love her. They implicitly trust her. But they also talk to her like it’s a two-way conversation. Samus just comes across as weird.
In one instance, when she first meets one of the soldiers, Samus sneaks up on him. He spins, aiming his gun at her. He demands she identifies herself. At this point in the game Samus has a new suit, so while the silhouette is still there she looks different to the Samus he would know of. Samus… simply takes another step forward towards him, in silence. He judges her not a threat, but he would’ve been well within his rights to try to blow her damn head off.
In another scene, the excitable younger soldier asks Samus exactly what the mission is. Samus stands like an action figure, then does a very basic gesture to bring up a hologram of the planet and her objectives. It seems incredibly obtuse and she explains nothing, but she implicitly understands. Maybe there’s headset-to-headset data shared, I don’t know. But again: girl, be normal. Say something.
This isn’t like Link, where he has no dialogue but in a gesture or via a dialogue choice window it is implied that Link is indeed speaking, just without the player seeing or hearing it. It’s presentationally clear here that Samus just isn’t talking. The feeling of awkward weirdness only grows as the game winds on. These guys begin throwing their lives on the line for this woman who offers nothing back in return. This might even work if they acknowledged their leader’s silence – but they don’t. Everyone just acts like this is all normal. Maybe it is, with this being Samus’ in-universe reputation. Either way, it sucks.
My take from this is that the wrong lessons were learned from Other M. That game was criticised for its Samus, but it was because she was a whiny, weird version of the character whose existence seemed to disproportionately revolve around one annoying man. But the lesson from those criticisms appears to have been that Samus should just never speak at all, and that solution is incompatible with the narrative concept of surrounding Samus with buddies. At least, without her coming off as cold, weird, and unlikeable.
There is a way to do this. In Halo we have another helmet-clad hero-of-few-words surrounded by chattier characters (Cortana, Johnson, the Pilot, et al) and he works. The difference is though he’s sparse with his words, Chief interacts with those he finds and rescues. Most of those interactions are him rasping back things like, “Change of plan” and “I need a weapon”, but they even manage to give him vaguely emotional moments of supporting his allies. Because in the end, there’s a human being in that suit. He’s just all-business. The dialogue he has is carefully written to not undercut his stoic, quiet nature.
I suppose that’s my problem, in the end. Samus is going to be a bit emotionally stunted and strange. She was raised by giant space birds! But there’s a human inside that suit, and in Prime 4 it doesn’t feel like it. Even the silent animation of her in cutscenes isn’t as characterful as it was in Metroid Dread, in fact. The trick of a glimpse of her eyes reflected in her visor is still there, sure, but by surrounding her with human characters, albeit broad sketches, her robotic nature begins to feel like a problem. She’s on this planet with a group of people but she acts, consistently, like they aren’t there. Like she’s still on SR388, all alone.
We’re left with the folly of a game that both wants to have a silent protagonist while also placing said protagonist as a valiant leader of a cast of heroes. As the final stretch of the game offers heroic shots of the group gathered, as the group act like they’ve got a real relationship with her, it all feels contrived. And like I say, it undercuts anything this story attempts to do.
The truth is, Metroid Prime 4’s marines are fine – they just don’t work with Samus as she is presented, and so it’s also true that the game’s narrative would probably be better if they’d been absent. Or, it’s true that the game’s narrative would be better if Samus acted like an actual person. For this story to have truly worked, its writers needed to pick a lane.
