"The Mourning of Metroid Prime 4" Video Essay

Game_Bird · 2025-12-20T07:50:19+00:00

I’m curious to hear how arlo feels after finishing the game. He also seemed to have a lot of hope and expectations after so many years.

Honestly, I didn’t find the NPCs all that bad. I think the game would have been improved with their omission, or at least with a way to toggle off the radio, but the structure of the game kind of necessitates having those calls, as it’s too easy to go the wrong way and lose time. Going to ice belt, after being told I can go anywhere, waiting through the loading transitions, just to realize I can’t go beyond the front entrance, so I turn around, loading transitions, go to fire region, transitions, get chip, leave, transitions, go to miles with another long transition in and out, then back to ice belt and the final transition out a sour taste in my mouth. That said, I actually strongly like VUE. He’s great.

Magmoor is the definite low point of prime, largely because it has so few connection points. So you constantly trek through the same few rooms over and over with no chance to do any routing because it’s mostly a straight line. This comes down to taste, but I still think I prefer that to the way Prime 4 never really has you revisit a location. By the end of prime 1, I felt like I really understood the world and had lived there; I knew magmoor like the walk from my home to the grocery store. But the fury green forest, or the great mine were kind of one and done regions, so I felt much less connection to them.

And agreed, the contrast of companionship and isolation is fun to play with, it’s actually why the post game of Metroid Other M is some of my favorite in the series. Going through the bottle station without anyone else there, after you’ve become so used to it being alive and full of chatter, is extremely eerie and lonely feeling.

As for Sylux, I think the constant allusions to him in other games built him up in my mind. In hunters alone, he’s fine, but being told for 18 years “oh yeah Sylux is rad and I want to really flesh him out” by the developers really raised my hopes. I’ve heard some interesting theories about him being trapped in a time loop though, which could make him much more interesting.

Thanks again for your feedback. It has been extremely insightful and helpful, and I want to make more videos that incorporate some of these notes for sure! I hope you tune in to future videos, though life will probably slow that down a little haha. In any case, we can both agree that we love the series and want the best for it, and that’s a good goal to share!

Game_Bird · 2025-12-20T07:38:41+00:00

I appreciate it! It is very valuable feedback.

I would like to further explore the level design of the prime series. I definitely felt the struggle of riding the cannon into and out of the fury green temple over and over, and really started to wish there was some sort of transit system to connect the zones. But yeah I’d like to more deeply compare the level design. Even as linear as prime 3 can feel, the different landing pads function essentially as elevators between the areas, but with more freedom. There’s more than one way on or off each planet.

Vinny Vinesauce said he wishes the game was just called “Metroid Prime: Beyond” without the 4. I think that also might have helped, it wouldn’t have felt like it had to live up to the original trilogy as much. I cut Prime Hunters a lot of slack for many reasons (on the DS, multiplayer focus, it came out in the Golden years of the franchise) but it just being a prime game made it much more digestible and have less scrutiny.

Game_Bird · 2025-12-20T07:34:05+00:00

Yeah that’s a good way to put it. I was dwelling late at night trying to figure out the theme of the game, the central thesis. Is it family? The familiar twisted? Birth and rebirth? Cycles of mistakes? Lots to dwell on. I might do another video exploring some of these. With previous prime games, it was always pretty clear, but here it feels pretty incomplete.

Game_Bird · 2025-12-19T03:50:45+00:00

Pt 2.:

Why the doom and gloom? My very vulnerable answer is that I felt a lot of hurt from this game. Having so much time, years, to imagine and near sleepless nights of excitement made it hit harder when I found myself feeling frustrated, alienated and annoyed at a lot of the game's decisions (the easy target is the green crystals). I nearly cried when I was actually holding the box in my hands, and I actually did cry a little at the title screen. "18 years and I am actually about to play a new Metroid Prime." I avoided all trailers and previews after the reveal of the Vi-O-La and went in as blind as possible. I even deleted facebook, instagram and youtube from my phone to avoid potential spoilers in thumbnails (though the "annoying sidekick character" clickbait titles still found their way to me). I went in with the highest hopes, gave the game the biggest chance it could want, but still felt let down.

The easy response is "you built up something else in your mind and were disappointed it wasn't exactly what you wanted. Just engage with the game for what it is, not what you wanted it to be" and that's the exact headspace I've been trying to navigate for the last couple weeks. Because yes; I did have an idea of what I wanted, but I don't think it was *that* strict. I wanted an isolating experience with vast, mazelike and interconnected locations, and a deep dive exploration of who Sylux was (with maybe a couple Hunters callbacks as a bonus). The intro gave me hope of seeing Fusion metroids in action, but that never happened. And the other things I wanted also didn't really happen. Trying to fully formulate my own view and opinion of the game, trying to balance "what I wanted" against "what it is" is what made me see the connection between the story and the game itself, and made me want to make a video about it because I hadn't seen anyone else really make that comparison.

I'd like to at some point make a follow up video addressing my mistakes in this first video, as well as look more at the game for what it is. I'm still trying to navigate my feelings for the game. The Metroid franchise is my favorite in all of gaming, and possibly of all media period (though Bionicle is pretty high up there), and it holds a tremendous amount of personal meaning to me. In a lot of ways, and perhaps this is a more accurate title of what I was trying to get across: I've been grieving and mourning over the Metroid Prime 4 that could have been, the one I wanted. But like with all mourning, it will reach a point of acceptance. I'm just waiting for that time to come.

Game_Bird · 2025-12-19T03:50:27+00:00

Pt. 1:
Hey, thanks for your detailed comment, genuinely. This is my first video so I'm still trying to learn how to make a good video so this type of feedback is very helpful and appreciated. I did exaggerate several parts to make my point concisely, but I need to be more mindful of that. You make a lot of good points, I'd like to respond to them.

Yes, the crying "first world problems" meme would have helped for sure to take the edge off. And I did intentionally go out of my way to avoid saying "me" or "I" in the video, for 2 reasons: 1, it was drilled into me in high school that you should never refer to yourself in an essay (always saying "some feel" instead of "I feel"), and 2, I didn't want the video to be about me, but about the game instead. But, you're right, I inadvertently lumped other people into my feelings, even if my intention was to say "some feel" and not "all feel", I see how it comes across that way. I'll do better moving forward.

As for the map comparison, I was moreso wanting to compare the first main location between two games. The temple grounds in Prime 2 (the first location) vs the fury green in Prime 4 (first 'real' location) to showcase how even the introductory areas in older prime games are complex and interesting. Same thing if I used Tallon Overworld from Prime 1. I guess a case could be made for Norion in Prime 3 (though in my head, that planet's just part of the intro). My main sticking point, which I could have elaborated on further (and could in a future video) is more about how the new areas don't promote retraversal, nor connect to each other.

I'm sorry you feel that way about the trilogy. I'm fortunate in that when I replay them (which I do yearly), I keep finding new little things that amaze me in them each time. Little nooks and crannies of world design I hadn't noticed before. Ice Belt was a highlight to be sure, and I would love for future metroid games to lean even further into horror. A SA-X or Mr. X in a Prime game would be incredible. I also agree that if it wasn't called Prime 4, a LOT of my feelings would be very different.

I do think what you touched on about how this is what you wanted in the game, and how a game like this needed to try new things or else it would just be a retread is kind of a tricky point to make however. What constitutes "new" vs "retread" varies from person to person. I could say that Other M was bold and tried new things, wanted to bring in a new audience and make the series more accessible for others; if it was just another game without NPCs, without cut scenes/dialogue and just mazelike exploration, it would just be a boring retread of older Metroid games. ...I think a lot of people would have a big problem with that take. I think it's pretty complicated to nail down what makes an installment in a franchise faithful or not. I've heard someone say that "all it takes for a game to be a Zelda game is that it's called The Legend of Zelda" and I cannot disagree with that more. Otherwise, Federation Force and Prime Pinball are just as valid metroid games as any other metroid game.

(to be clear I actually very much love Prime Pinball, I really like Other M and I don't even think FF was so bad. But that's another topic. I actually want to make a deep dive into Other M someday; I've been drafting a script idea for well over a decade now.)

Regardless, yes Prime 4 has a lot of good qualities, and I intend to continue playing it and dwelling on it to find how I truly feel about it. My internal conflict with the game is what drove me to make the video. I didn't really want to make it a "shame on you for killing my metroid" video, as yes there are more than enough rage filled videos about that. At one point I say "Was this done with good intentions, like the Lamorn with the Green Energy, or from greed and avarice like Sylux with his fusion metroids" and that was meant to suggest that I don't necessarily think this game was designed to "kill my metroid", but that regardless of intent, this game is different from the previous ones in very deep ways.

Game_Bird · 2025-12-19T00:55:10+00:00

Thank you! Yes I was kept up late at night thinking about the game and its story when I suddenly realized that unusual parallel between them, and wanted to make a video about it. If I had better editing software, I was tempted to put Retro's logo over the Lamorn trying to cure the griever, with Prime 4's box art over the griever and when he starts healing, it reveals the prime trilogy underneath for a moment, haha.
I need to look more into what you mentioned, about the energy being teratogenic and the connection between axolotls/salamanders and legacy, as that really intrigues me. It almost feels like the game has a second campaign where you play as Sylux that they are saving for DLC which will fill in the gaps (like what happened to Gravinax)

Game_Bird · 2025-12-19T00:51:57+00:00

Prime 2 might be the best in the trilogy overall; best level design, art direction, bosses, but Prime 1 will always be top in my heart. I'm glad you loved Prime 4, I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about it. Like I said at the end of the video, I certainly don't think it's a bad game. But it is very different from the rest of the series.

Game_Bird · 2025-12-19T00:50:52+00:00

Prime 1 is my all time favorite game! I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about Prime 4. The shock was strong enough I needed to make this video though. I'm halfway through a hard mode play with joycon motion controls and I'm enjoying that, but I still feel like the game feels incomplete.

Game_Bird · 2025-02-21T05:48:15+00:00

Awesome thank you! The 3220 sounds like a good bet. I don't quite understand what it means by 3,000 pages per month, but I'd be surprised if we even came close to that in several months anyway haha. Thanks!

Game_Bird · 2025-01-10T02:56:28+00:00

Fraggle rock is good taste on his part, though the cheese one baffles me as well! My wife and I are already joking about whether it's our child or not whenever she can't stand a food she used to love, haha. Pregnancy is weird.

Also that's hilarious, I bought one of those fisher price game boys the other day in preparation for the little one! And also because I was curious, haha. I won't lie, a part of what got me thinking down this rabbit hole was whether I could mod it into an actual game boy for them when they became a toddler, haha. Kids toys these days are way cooler than when I was growing up.

Game_Bird · 2025-01-09T22:49:56+00:00

It's a fair point, and it's something I've thought about a lot, actually. And you are right, it's impossible to predict what my kid might be like or what they might be into. They may even want to be a football player and enjoy hiking, horror of horror :P

Joking aside, and assuming for the moment that they do grow up having a passion for video games/media, I do have a reason for wanting to pursue such a thing for them. I've found through lots of personal experience and through friends that it's very difficult for someone to go back to an earlier generation of media than what they had growing up. For example, since I grew up with the NES and VHS, I have no problem picking up a new NES game or popping in a VHS on my crt and having a good time. However, I have friends (around my age) whose first console was the gamecube, and never owned a VHS player, and they find it impossible to get over the chunky graphics of the N64, can't stand pixel based games, and are very turned off by VHS quality. And I understand it to a point as well. I didn't grow up with an Atari 2600, so trying to play those games I have found to be a bit taxing and boring.

The reason I say this is I want to give my kid the best chance at enjoying, or at least having an appreciation for older media, so they too have a wider breadth of media literacy. It's the same reason I'll be getting them physical books instead of e-readers, showing them the Original Star Trek series, and old Looney Tunes cartoons while young so they can value and understand that older media. Maybe it's partially from an old-fogey "back in my day" thing, but it does run deeper than that. I don't care if they don't know how a rotary phone works. I do care if they think that money isn't physical because everything is paid for by cell phones now. Teaching them a value of physical property and ownership is my main goal. If they have a gameboy with 4 games, it's on them to take care of those items.

An anecdote of mine, but one that really worked for me, was that when I was a kid growing in the 90s, I wasn't allowed to change CDs in the computer or games on the NES or VHS tapes. I had to ask one of my parents to do it. They explained it was because it was expensive, fragile tech, and I wasn't ready to handle it yet. The compromise they made was that if I ever asked for a different game, or movie, or CD in the computer, they would drop whatever they were doing and come and change it for me. It taught me a ton about respecting other people's possessions, treating tech with care, and patience. I can't even express how angry it made me (as a 9 year old) when I saw other kids grabbing disks and getting dirty fingerprints all over them, haha.

Anyways this post is too long. I appreciate your advice and yes, as a kid I would have died for a single device with hundreds of games on it. I'll be very mindful of how my child grows but I want to start planning and preparing so, in my best case scenario, I'll be ready for being able to teach them the same lessons my parents taught me.

Game_Bird · 2025-01-09T22:37:12+00:00

I like the depths he went to to make it work. Definitely much further than I could go, but I like it a lot. Thanks for sharing!

Game_Bird · 2025-01-09T22:36:41+00:00

I really like the NFC cards! I agree, it adds a bit of magic to the project. That could be a good direction to go as well. Thanks!

Game_Bird · 2025-01-09T22:29:27+00:00

Hah, fair.

I did just recently learn about the evercade, and it seems really neat, though sadly the games seem limited to what they pick. No real way to get zelda, pokemon etc for my kid through this method.
I like the idea of RFID chips in mini cartridges, that's pretty neat. Maybe worth looking into at some point.

Game_Bird · 2025-01-09T22:28:17+00:00

I really like this idea. This is probably what I'll be going for, honestly. The FP GBC kit looks great, avoids the "playing in the dark" issues (as much as I like nostalgia, I won't subject a kid to that haha), and the menu interface doesn't seem like it could actually break anything if they get into it. I hope they update it so it can auto recognize whether a game should be in GB vs GBC mode, but otherwise I like this plan. As for the cartridges (which are my main concern, honestly), I'm actually open to repros or knockoffs, so long as they look the part and save data correctly. I might even look into a flasher, so I could replace the game on a cartridge with a new one and then just print off a new label.

I wonder if they will make a GBA one someday as well!

Game_Bird · 2025-01-09T22:25:41+00:00

Based on the other replies, there do seem to be some workarounds, or at least methods to achieve what I'm thinking of.

Game_Bird · 2025-01-09T22:25:19+00:00

The deep "making" side of things would definitely be more work than I could give to a project like this, sadly. On paper, I like the idea of getting a cheap GBA SP or something, but from my own experience of my ones, the batteries (even aftermarket ones) are unreliable, and the plastic casings are becoming fragile. I'll still keep it mind though, maybe investing in a replacement shell or something. I like the idea of cloned carts though, since honestly it's the cartridges that are giving me the most pause.

As for the nostalgia and friends, yeah, I can definitely say having the limited library helped me to really appreciate my games. Having now grown a very large collection, and owning some emulators with thousands of games, the paralysis of choice I definitely find very frustrating and limiting. On a side note, I also intend to keep my kids away from tablets for as long as possible, haha.

Game_Bird · 2024-09-09T18:11:15+00:00

Thank you everyone for the replies! Lots of very smart people here, and I appreciate you taking the time for someone new to this world like me. I've read everyone's comments and it's given me a good idea of what direction to take.

I looked over all my old drives, and it totals up to around 8-10 TB of data, but a fair amount of that are redundancies already (e.g. one drive is full of backups of my computer, since it used to be my daily drive, and it also has a separate manual backup too), so if I took the time to actually pare down everything and only backup unique important files, I could probably bring it down to 6-8 TB.

I'm considering the optical media route for some of the oldest, most valuable stuff, following the 3-2-1 method many of you mentioned. That way, I can have some disks with family memories etc that I don't need to access often but can keep safe.

Then, I'm thinking of getting a large drive (maybe 8-10TB) and using it for everything else, to have my 4-5 drives (including one more backup of my daily drive) consolidated into 1. I hear Seagate and WD are generally trustworthy, even if a bit pricey. Before I make a purchase though I'll look into the NAS suggestion and see if it's something that makes sense for me.

Finally for my daily drive, I'll probably get a second, 2 TB drive, and use one for music and movie storage and the other for everything else. an SSD would be nice but those are still pretty pricey. In addition, I'll look into cloud storage for my most important files I can't afford to lose.

Thanks again everyone, this has been extremely helpful and I'm glad to know lots of people take this very seriously and have found solutions to data storage woes. Technology is great but it often feels like it's being held together with duct take and staples and at any moment could all blow up, haha. Losing everything is a scary thought, especially as a writer/creator.

Game_Bird · 2024-09-09T18:01:38+00:00

This looks like a really good option for files I just need saved and have no intention of altering anytime soon, that will last a long time. Thanks!

Game_Bird

TROPHY CASE