What makes Metroid Prime 4 interesting for all the wrong reasons
Posted on November 8, 2026 by Ethan in Features, Switch, Switch 2
I recently finished Metroid Prime 4: Beyond for the very first time, and it’s become a very fascinating game to think about and discuss. It had an incredibly long development cycle, for one, and, in many ways, it failed to live up to the expectations of its fans. But it’s not a bad game, either – just an above-average (and very nuanced) one.
So today, we’re going over every single detail of Metroid Prime 4 – its strengths, its weaknesses, where it went wrong, and why it’s (probably) still worth playing at least once – even if it’s just a used copy that you wind up returning. This will cover full game spoilers as well, by the way, so keep that in mind before you continue.
Metroid Prime 4: Beyond first entered full development sometime in 2016, and was first announced to the public at E3 2017. There, it appeared as nothing more than a logo with a “now in development” tagline – it makes sense that we didn’t see more, given that work hadn’t even been underway for a full year yet. That was the beginning of the Switch era, and fans were very excited that Nintendo was finally bringing back 3D Metroid after such a long hiatus. We technically saw Metroid Prime: Federation Force in 2016, but that wasn’t what anyone wanted at all. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to anyone at the time, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond would remain in development for an additional eight years and almost miss the Nintendo Switch era entirely.
Soon after its reveal, it was stated that Retro Studios, who had created all three previous Metroid Prime games, would not be involved with Metroid Prime 4’s development. Instead, it’s thought that a team at Bandai Namco was developing the game – though it’s never been officially confirmed by Nintendo outright. To this day, we know almost nothing about the Bandai Namco version of Metroid Prime 4. All we know is that in 2019, it was announced that development on the game would be completely restarted under Retro Studios. Even then, the full title wouldn’t release until December 2025 – and you can tell Nintendo learned from this experience. Nowadays, the company tends to announce most games only when they’re a few months away. Metroid Prime 4 and Bayonetta 3 were both revealed long before they were ready, and the longer the wait from announcement to release, the higher fans’ expectations pile up.
Playing the final build, you can definitely tell Metroid Prime 4 had a troubled development, which is part of what makes this game so interesting. A lot of flawed games have solid ideas, but rushed or botched execution due to time constraints or something similar. But it sort of feels like the opposite with Metroid Prime 4 – many of its ideas are heavily flawed, but executed about as well as possible given the circumstances. It creates this odd cognitive dissonance – the game feels polished and fluid, but not exactly well-thought-out. And that doesn’t mean Metroid Prime 4 is bad, either. It’s just sort of above-average, which is no doubt a big disappointment given how long its development had fans waiting.
The first thing you’ll notice when you play Metroid Prime 4 is its visuals. They’re absolutely stunning – everything is packed full of crazy levels of detail, which is especially impressive given that the game was initially targeting Nintendo Switch, an eight-year-old console. The first area, Fury Green, has tons of tiny plants, leaves, and an astounding attention to detail that we saw in Metroid Prime Remastered as well. Honestly, it makes a really strong first impression. Retro Studios has an incredible team of artists, and it’s on full display with Metroid Prime 4. Take the human faces, for instance – they’re incredibly realistic without dipping into the uncanny valley.
For the most part, the world design is interesting, too – that is, aesthetically speaking. As mentioned earlier, Fury Green makes a strong first impression, but Volt Forge makes an even stronger impression. It’s a motorcycle factory powered by an everlasting thunderstorm – that’s a really neat idea, and it makes me wonder if it was one of the first areas finalized for the game since it feels the most inspired. Ice Belt is solid too, with some memorable moments like falling bridges and a tornado of wolves, but Flare Pool and especially the Great Mines kind of fall off and employ much simpler aesthetics. Even so, the first few areas flow together nicely once you get in the groove of exploring them.
But it’s very difficult to get into the flow of exploration in the first place thanks to Sol Valley, which causes the game to lose tons of momentum. Everything feels good when you start out in Fury Green, and after obtaining the first teleporter key, you’re launched over to Volt Forge to construct a Vi-O-La bike and obtain your second key. At that point, things are going pretty well – but after that, you have to make your first full visit to Sol Valley, and you’ll be making many, many of these visits afterward. From here, the momentum drops off a cliff. Generally, when open-world Nintendo games release, you always see people saying “oh, the open world is empty”. People said it with Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Mario Kart World, and I always felt like it was kind of an exaggeration. But Metroid Prime 4’s open world actually is about as empty as possible – there’s almost nothing at all to do in Sol Valley.
In fact, the only reason Sol Valley exists at all is to pad out the run time. It’s full of green energy crystals you have to collect in order to beat the game. You’ll see them pop up on the horizon, and to retrieve them, you have to run into them with your bike. It’s very easy to accidentally miss a small cluster of crystals and have to turn around and go back, which isn’t so bad the first time but becomes frustrating after the 50th time. In previous Metroid Prime games, all of the major areas were directly interconnected, and there were shortcuts you could gradually unlock between them. That doesn’t exist here at all – all five major areas are completely isolated from one another, which is a critical flaw as far as Metroid Prime titles are concerned. Instead of thoughtfully navigating through rooms trying to find a way to get to a different area, you’re holding down a button and staring at sand for five minutes. I couldn’t name a bigger downgrade if I tried.
I also think it’s very, very bad that Sol Valley is a desert. Typically, I feel like deserts are usually the most uninspired level themes in video games – they’re not visually interesting most of the time in my opinion, and this title does a really good job of proving my point. Not only is Sol Valley completely empty, but its visuals are also severely lacking compared to every other area of the game. The endless sand makes it very difficult to tell where you even are on the map because the whole thing looks the same. There’s a save station in the center of the valley, but I also thought it was silly that you couldn’t save anytime in Sol Valley – that’s where you’re most likely to get burnt out and decide to take a break for the day, and you have to drive back to the center of the map in order to pack it up. At least there’s a save station there at all, though. The whole experience is at least made a little bit better by the music player – without it, you’d just be driving in complete silence. Which would be ridiculous, right? Unfortunately, it is ridiculous, because you only unlock the music player after beating the game once or purchasing a $40 amiibo. The amiibo is really cool, to be fair, but it’s still expensive.
There’s another huge problem within Sol Valley, and it’s all caused by one single line of dialogue. When you’re given full access to Sol Valley for the first time, an NPC radios in and tells you that you can decide which teleporter key you go after next. At this point in the game, you still need to visit Flare Pool, Ice Belt, and the Great Mines. The problem is, you cannot in fact decide which key to go after. If you go anywhere but Flare Pool, you’ll find you can’t progress any further due to lacking necessary upgrades. So even though you’re told you have free rein, you’re expected to follow a specific linear path anyway. This just makes me wonder why Sol Valley is here at all – if the game’s going to put you on a linear path, why is there a huge open world that lets you travel to any area you want? Why not adapt things to allow the player to actually travel to each world in whatever order they want? And if not, why not just connect all the areas to each other directly in a straight line? As linear and boring as that would be, it’d be better than the dead air of Sol Valley.
This, in turn, makes me wonder if Sol Valley was a Nintendo-mandated addition. It feels like Metroid Prime 4’s development was heavily affected by the release and reception to Zelda: Breath of the Wild (which is backed up by official statements), and that’s not a good thing – Prime 4 would have been much, much better if there were no green energy crystals and no Sol Valley and all the levels were connected to each other as in previous games. It also makes me wonder if Sol Valley played any role in the game’s development being restarted. Despite all this complaining, I still don’t think Metroid Prime 4 is bad – but it’s interesting that such a soulless and pointless area was left in the revised version of the game. I wonder what aspect of the first revision Nintendo wasn’t satisfied with? We may never know.
Another one of Metroid Prime 4’s commonly criticized aspects is its NPC characters. While I didn’t feel like they were that horrible, they are still questionable at best. In most other Metroid entries, especially the Prime ones, Samus is completely alone – and that feeling of isolation and getting lost is what core Metroid fans are looking for in Prime experiences. Earlier, I mentioned that many of Metroid Prime 4’s ideas are flawed, but their execution is pretty good – and the NPCs are a rare case of the opposite. Adding more supporting characters to a Metroid game isn’t a bad idea in and of itself, but the way Prime 4 does it is… interesting. For one, I felt the NPCs actually weren’t serious enough in many instances. They’ve all been teleported to an abandoned world full of killer creatures, and yet at many points NPCs make humorous quips that didn’t feel fitting for the moment. If you’re trying to escape a dangerous, super-hot abandoned facility full of aggressive robots, do you really have the time and headspace to say “Piece of cake. Red velvet cake” when you open one of the doors? It isn’t a huge problem, I just thought it was odd that they seem to make cheesy or lighthearted comments every so often given how dire their circumstances are.
More importantly, however, is that the NPCs give you a lot of unwelcome advice. To be fair, I do unfortunately see why they did this – you can tell Metroid Prime 4 was developed with a goal in mind to get more people playing the franchise for the first time. That could be the reason Sol Valley was included, too – so they could say “open world” in the advertising and maybe someone unfamiliar with Metroid would gain an interest. Likewise, it makes some sense that NPCs offer guidance and tell you where to go next – that way new players don’t get stuck or forced to look up a guide or something like that. Even so, however, many of these NPCs tell you exactly where to go before you’ve even had half a second to figure it out yourself. Most of this advice is communicated to Samus via radio within Sol Valley – when you exit a main area to the valley, you’ll often receive guidance a few seconds after you hop on your bike. Which is really weird, because the player is expected to spend lots of time farming green energy crystals. If you’re supposed to spend a while driving around the valley, why are we constantly reminding the player where to go as if they need to leave Sol Valley as soon as possible? It didn’t make a ton of sense to me. An option to turn off hints here would be great, and you could always turn them back on if you need one.
Then there’s Samus, who honestly feels kind of mischaracterized here. In any other Metroid game, she’s a mostly-silent protagonist, but she does speak when she needs to. In Metroid Prime 4, however, Samus does not speak nor really even react to any NPCs talking to her. This doesn’t make her seem cool, either. It just makes her seem rude and indifferent, and in a different way than most Metroid games. Metroid Dread handles Samus really well, in fact – she never speaks to Raven Beak or ADAM, but she does speak to Quiet Robe who addresses her around halfway through her adventure. Samus’ normal silence makes the things she does say more impactful, but even in Metroid Prime 4’s most dire circumstances, she does not say a single word to anyone – not even to the NPCs who sacrifice their lives at the very end of the game to allow her to return home. It just makes her feel unusually disconnected from what’s going on – her normal quietness makes sense in games where she’s alone, but if you’re making a Metroid title with lots of extra characters, she’s going to need to talk to make it work.
Sylux is Metroid Prime 4’s main villain, and he spends almost the entire game doing absolutely nothing. After attacking a Galactic Federation outpost, he’s teleported to Viewros along with Samus and the others, where he spends almost the entire game recovering in a healing pod. His backstory doesn’t make much sense either – he’s seen as a Galactic Federation soldier betraying his boss’ orders and telling his platoon to move forward to try and seize an enemy weapon for himself, but this doesn’t work and Sylux’s entire platoon is killed. His life is spared, however, and when Samus offers to help him up, he denies her assistance. And that’s his entire backstory! That’s the entire reason he kills multiple Galactic Federation soldiers, tries to steal weaponry, and eventually causes six soldiers on Viewros to essentially give up their lives, too. Unfortunately, he reminds me a lot of Infinite from Sonic Forces – he talks a big game, but in the end he’s just a pitiful little man who doesn’t really have any substance to his motivation at all. This is a shame, because Sylux has a really cool design. He’s also not killed in Metroid Prime 4’s ending, and he’s demonstrated to be able to utilize wormhole technology, so we may see him again.
Metroid Prime 4, in general, does start off pretty strong. The Galactic Federation outpost at the beginning of the game is insanely detailed and chaotic, Fury Green is full of lush plants and cool creatures, and Volt Forge has an amazing atmosphere. But all in all, you really can tell something went wrong during development. The areas are fairly linear, for one; it’s not a huge deal in Fury Green or even Volt Forge because they’re the starting areas. It sort of makes sense to get new players used to the controls before dropping them into a more complex labyrinth. But that complex labyrinth never comes – Ice Belt is fairly linear, Flare Pool is also fairly linear, and the Great Mines – the final area – are quite literally a straight line. This linearity means the game wouldn’t take very long to finish, especially if you know where you’re going.
You start noticing all these little things the developers added to make the game take longer. Scanning takes almost twice as long compared to Metroid Prime Remastered, for one, and there’s no way to tell which parts of the environment are recorded to your logbook and which are just there for flavor. Some rooms have over twenty objects to scan, which means if you’re going for 100 percent logbook completion but aren’t using a guide, you are literally going to spend hours just scanning things. Sol Valley is one giant runtime extender, as we’ve mentioned, and has little of substance within. After you clear the Great Mines, you have to navigate Sol Valley for mech parts to break the barrier to Chrono Tower, which winds up being more filler content. Green Crystals are only there to extend the game’s run time as well. You also have to return to base camp every time you collect a shot upgrade so Samus can actually use it, which extends the run time even further.
And it’s just such a shame, because the game starts off great, and then it just loses all of its momentum. By the end, you’re stuck in Sol Valley clearing the last of the game’s objectives. There’s no final dungeon area or anything, either – it’s just straight to Sylux.
Despite all that, I don’t dislike Metroid Prime 4. The core of what makes the series great is still here, and the game still has moments of brilliance that shine through its flaws. The game still looks amazing, runs great, and has good music, and those things carry it a long way. If I had to rate it out of 10 on a personal level, I’d maybe give it a 7 at the highest? It’s strange, because I essentially just complained for 3,000 words, so you would think I’d be a lot more harsh. Maybe it’s because I haven’t played Prime 2 and Prime 3 yet? But overall, I do think the game is more misguided than it is straight-up bad. Retro Studios’ signature production values are there, and everything is super clean and polished – a lot of the ideas are just bad. Now that I’ve 100 percent completed Metroid Prime 4 on both normal mode and hard mode, I don’t think I’ll be replaying it anytime soon. But I just find the discourse around the game genuinely interesting, which is a nice change of pace. Some people hate this game for what it couldn’t accomplish, and some people like it anyway – both are fair. Maybe if we have more developer insight in the future, we’ll learn some interesting tidbits about the development process. I’d really love to see what led to them including Sol Valley and NPCs, and what the original vision for the game looked like.
No matter how Metroid Prime 4 turned out, it’s a very good thing that we could see Metroid Prime 5 someday. Some say it’s already in development, and if that’s true, I hope the criticisms from Metroid Prime 4 are taken into account here. Metroid Dread was a big revival for the Metroid franchise, and the Metroid Ravenous trailer was so good that a lot of people are getting into the franchise for the first time. We need 3D Metroid to follow and re-establish itself as a heavy hitter!
In any case, what are your thoughts on Metroid Prime 4? Did you clear it, or lose interest before the ending? Do you think it’s okay as a game, or do you find it severely lacking? Let us know in the comments down below.
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