Metroid Prime 4

Development for Metroid Prime 4 was announced in like 2017. It's why I decided to buy a Switch that Christmas. (That and Breath of the Wild.) Like four years later, Nintendo announced that they wasn't happy with the development, so they were handing it to a different team to restart development from scratch. So we waited for eight years before we actually got the game.

I like the game a lot. They clearly went to great lengths to make it feel like Prime 1, while also having plenty of new stuff. The difficulty levels seem reasonable, at least on the Normal setting. The areas look lovely, especially the natural settings. I could have gone without the motorcycle and hub area, but it doesn't detract too much. It's not like I loved trekking through Magmoor Caverns every time I wanted to change areas in Prime 1. So I'm happy with it.

But I need to rant a bit about the plot. This next part has spoilers.

I don't like the story. The ending is unnecessarily sad, but even worse, the whole thing feels pointless. To be clear - it doesn't feel pointless while you're playing.  You're exploring and finding items and defeating enemies, which is the point of a Metroid game. But if you step back and look at the story, that story lends nothing to the game experience, and sort of invalidates it.

In a normal Metroid game, you are stuck on a planet (or ship or station), alone or mostly alone. Bad guys are up to no good, and you need to stop them or they'll threaten the whole galaxy. In Prime 3 you weren't always stuck, since you had access to your ship, and that hurt the tone a bit. In this game, you are stuck, but there's something missing: the bad guys are not really up to anything.

I mean, there's Sylux and his plot with Metroids and the space pirates, but that was in the intro area. On Viewros, there are no pirates, and no Metroids (just corrupted bosses). The bad guys are mostly mindless monsters, which isn't a bad thing in itself, but here's the thing: the reason you're here is because the Lumorn device teleported you here, to collect keys and Green Energy so you can transport their Memory Fruit somewhere else. The Lumorn are already destroyed; they just want their memory to survive. They should have just written a journal and beamed it to the galaxy. Instead they abducted not only you, but a team of Federation troopers, and (by accident) Sylux. And for no apparent reason, they seem to have transported him into a life support pod, which lets him gain boss-level powers. 

If the Lumorn had done nothing, Samus and the troopers would have been just fine. Sylux would have been defeated. The whole galaxy would have gone on without any negative consequences. But instead, not only did they very nearly kill Samus, but they ended up stranding or killing that team of Federation troopers too. 

So the premise is shaky. There's also the matter of the ending, where you end up bailing on the team. They don't really care about the Lumorn; they're just sacrificing themselves because they believe you're important to the galaxy (and they are correct). Are we supposed to believe they die? I'd think they could take out Sylux, since he should be weak after his fight with Samus. On the other hand, why was he able to do so much damage? Why did it take more than just the robot buddy to hold him back? Why couldn't Samus just hurl a power bomb at him? Why didn't she engage right away, finish him off, and then deal with the teleporter?

And what are we supposed to think happens next? Maybe Samus could send an expedition to retrieve them, although we don't know how far away Viewros is. If the team does survive, can they even get out of the tower? I'm afraid the designers just didn't want loose ends, like having to explain why theses guys weren't in later Metroid games. (That's no excuse - Samus isn't that social, and there's no reason to think she'd bring them along on later missions.)

We're supposed to feel like their sacrifice is meaningful, but really I think they are just victims of irresponsible behavior on the part of the Lumorn. And bad plot writing.

Gradius Origins

I wrote previously about how I was introduced to the Gradius series. It caught my eye and imagination way before I played it, and Life Force (for the NES) and Gradius 3 (for the SNES) are among my very favorite games. Space shooters are super nifty, especially when they have great music. But the Gradius series started out as arcade games, and it was always in the back of my mind that what I was playing was a port of something larger. (The arcade games had better graphics, at least at first, and of course they were harder because they were designed to make people keep putting in quarters.) The Switch has ports of some of those games, but they were always over-priced relative to my level of interest. 

But this year they released a collection, "Gradius Origins", which includes Gradius 1, 2, and 3; Life Force, Salamander, which was the game Life Force was derived from (but with standard power-ups instead of the capsule system from Gradius); Salamander 2, which I had never heard of (and which I'm still not that interested in because it has some slightly icky stuff), and a brand-new game, Salamander 3. The price tag was still a little higher than I was interested in, but since I would probably have bought a new Gradius game for $15 or so by itself, I figured the collection would eventually go on sale enough to justify getting it. That was kind of a boring paragraph, but I am kind of stingy, even with video games, so it seemed relevant.

Anyway, the collection went on sale this week and I got it. I'm pretty happy with Salamander 3 in particular. It has a very similar feel to the NES Life Force (but still without the Gradius-style power-ups). On the easiest setting, it's hard, but not impossible, which is important. I beat it after a few days (and a few YouTube videos). The music is good, but not terribly catchy. I've gotten used to that in space shooters; I guess nothing competes with Life Force and Gradius 3. But it still disappoints me every time. But anyway, that game is very worthwhile.

It's also fun to play the original games. But I'm glad I waited for the sale, because, as expected, there are some issues. The first is that they are hard. This collection has an "easy" mode, which helps, and I'll probably beat the first couple of games at some point, when I'm in the mood to really try. But it's going to be painful. For Life Force / Salamander, it could have been much more manageable if they had given you limited continues. Since continuing lets you pick up right where you left off, having no restrictions is basically invincibility. (Salamander 3 does too. It's designed as an arcade game, even though it only exists on consoles. I think that was a mistake, although I get why some people would get nostalgia from it. But seriously, the words "Insert Coin" don't belong on a console game.) 

But the main thing I take away from these old games is something I suspected all along: the NES games are superior. I like the simpler music, and the red/blue ships in Life Force. I like the lower challenge, including the fact that your shields protect your whole ship, and not just part of it. And I really appreciate that the level design in the NES Life Force - on the arcade, two of the levels are basically just exercises in dodging asteroids, whereas on the NES they replaced those with an inside-an-organism stage and one that starts out with mountains and then turns into an Egyptian pyramid themed area. It gives the game a lot more personality than the originals had. And then there's Gradius 3. I had read that the arcade version of was ridiculously hard, and that's true. It's absolutely ridiculous, and not in a funny way. The SNES version is better in every single way. (But it's still interesting to see the origin.)

So anyway, it's always delightful to go and save the world using a starfighter and an arsenal of lasers and missiles. But I sure am glad those Nintendo ports were available decades ago so I could develop nostalgia, rather than just thinking "that's a nifty idea" based on the demo on an arcade cabinet on a ferry.