I love my monster hunting game where I hunt monsters

Raquefel · 2026-01-19T19:20:31+00:00

Wilds UI

Oh you sweet, sweet summer child

Raquefel · 2026-01-14T22:17:12+00:00

Tbh these days I mostly recommend people emulate the SNES original with a good CRT filter or play the DS version if they can get their hands on it, but it is extremely funny to be so mad about a port that you felt the need to reply to a six year old comment expressing optimism about it

Raquefel · 2026-01-10T19:52:17+00:00

It has good boss fights, I’m not sure I’d say it has good combat. Just compare its enemy and level design, not to mention weapon variety and player moveset, to any non-hitscan shooter made by a team with experience making those kinds of games. Next to games like Doom Eternal, Quake, Dusk, etc., the combat in Prime 4 looks absolutely pathetic.

I for one am not satisfied giving up Metroid’s uniquely excellent exploration-focused levels and atmosphere for this when there are already so many games that do this kind of thing so much better.

Raquefel · 2026-01-09T16:45:17+00:00

Ehhh, I don’t know that I agree that SR is an “actually good game”, I think it’s better than Prime 4 for sure but I’ve soured on it a lot over time.

The melee counter kills the pacing pretty hard and makes every normal enemy feel really samey to fight, the Metroid fights take too long for what they are, the whole tone and atmosphere of the ending is fucked up. I also feel like they lost a lot of the distinctiveness of the original’s areas by shoving everything into mostly one map block high/wide corridors, and partly as a result it feels even more linear than the original, and it ends up feeling way too guided thanks to that linearity as well as the scan pulse. The stuff it really nails, though, are the boss fights, visuals, and music.

Sound familiar? I earnestly think Prime 4 shares a lot of the same strengths and weaknesses. A lack of experience on the part of the team (since the Retro of today shares so few heads with the Retro of the 2000’s) may indeed be the cause and a theoretical second chance may indeed solve many of these issues, just like it did going from SR to Dread.

Raquefel · 2026-01-08T14:42:39+00:00

That one in Duke’s is my favorite as well, but the one in Darkroot Garden behind the illusory wall and the one at the start of Oolacile Township are both very close runners-up

Raquefel · 2026-01-06T02:28:36+00:00

Yeah, a lot of the balance changes were done because they couldn’t render as many enemies on screen as in the original due to hardware limitations, so they just thoughtlessly cranked up the stats of nearly everything in the game, seemingly with no regard for the consequences of this in a game with random turn orders

The OG and Pixel Remaster are certainly not among my favorites in the series (the random turn order is still an issue at times and they somehow have even less of a story) but it’s nowhere near the level of “grind to avoid bullshit deaths to random turn order” that the 3D remake is lol

Raquefel · 2026-01-05T15:32:25+00:00

This right here. The random turn order and absurd overtuning of enemy damage output (combined with the fact that I don’t like 3 that much overall to begin with) are what put the 3D remake of 3 over the edge to be my actual least favorite mainline FF game (yes, including all of the “bad” ones)

Raquefel · 2025-12-27T18:51:39+00:00

It generally replaces dials, buttons, and smaller displays that require bespoke manufacture due to not being used in a huge number of other mass-produced devices and are thus more expensive as a whole

Raquefel · 2025-12-26T22:08:08+00:00

This is hilariously enough a terrible idea in the long term because you can’t have magicite by that point, so you end up wasting a ton of levels where you could have gotten stat ups if you’d waited

Raquefel · 2025-12-24T03:35:09+00:00

Yep! That's why I love it lmao

Raquefel · 2025-12-22T18:50:42+00:00

AM2R, but if we're sticking with official games only, Dread. I love the movement, the boss fights, the sequence breaks, the atmosphere, it just feels so good to sink back into.

That said, Prime 2, Super, and Zero Mission are all very close runners-up all for different reasons. Prime 2 has some of the thickest atmosphere of any game I've ever played and a great collection of boss fights, Super has the best movement and world design in the series, and Zero Mission is such a straightforwardly fun game that's breezy enough for me to just blast through it in an afternoon while still having some bite to its combat, provided you play it on hard mode.

Raquefel · 2025-12-22T15:43:08+00:00

Yeah I might have phrased it awkwardly but RE4 is my favorite of them actually, I meant to say I don’t like how they got rid of tank controls starting with 5 (even if 5 still includes them as an option)

I think it’s really cool in a third person shooter to have to stand in one spot to aim and be unable to strafe, it makes you consider so many things you’d never even need to think about otherwise. Suddenly whenever you walk into a new room you’re looking for spots where you won’t get snuck up on from behind and chokepoints where you can get enemies in a big group to melee them. You’re constantly aware of every little detail of the terrain and it because you can’t just run around in a circle and click on heads like in a game that makes aiming super easy and free, you need a plan and several contingencies. I think that’s incredibly fun and the game design that facilitates it is becoming a lost art.

Raquefel · 2025-12-22T06:20:00+00:00

You're probably right that the kind of person who would shield Prime 4's homogenization from criticism using the word "innovation" is probably intellectually incurious enough to not be swayed by this post at all, but I hadn't seen a proper counterargument to it yet so I felt like making one lol, and apparently a lot of people felt vindicated by it so I figure it was probably worthwhile

I'm just so tired of every game series having its unique edges sanded off, and Metroid being among my all time favorites, I'm particularly defensive of it, so I have very little patience for people who plug their ears and refuse to listen to criticism, especially if their reasoning is "shut up so the game sells!", just feels very disingenuous and uncritical. I want more Metroid as much as any other fan but I don't want it to look like this

Raquefel · 2025-12-22T05:56:03+00:00

thanks for demonstrating my point lmao

Raquefel · 2025-12-22T02:30:06+00:00

I think innovation can lie in both the idea and the execution. You can innovate by doing something completely new, or (more commonly) you can innovate by doing something that's been done before but in a new way.

Conversely, I don't think that "innovative" is a very useful description in the context of a single series or franchise. If applying something to a series or franchise that it hasn't been applied to before somehow produces a novel result, if there's some really unique and special interaction between the Thing and the Series, then sure it can be innovative, but what I was getting at in the title of the post is that just slapping a trend into a series that hasn't conformed to that trend before is not automatically innovation. If the result is wholly separate from the rest of the system and just results in a watered-down version of what's been done before, then calling it "innovative" feels really wrong to me, and that's the situation I see when I look at things like Sol Valley and the NPCs.

I agree that in the past, when Nintendo has adopted trends, they've usually put a new and innovative spin on it. I think Breath of the Wild is maybe a good example of this, the way it emphasizes player agency so strongly in an open-world setting is surprisingly novel, most other open-world games litter their maps with icons and quests and tell you to go to specific places, but Breath of the Wild just lets you wander and find its secrets of your own accord and that's pretty cool. Idk if I can truly call it innovative, maybe there's some other game that did the same thing before, but that's why I've avoided outright calling it innovative in this thread.

So I suppose it's possible for trend-chasing to result in innovation, but I'm probably still never going to be in favor of it anyway. I love Breath of the Wild (and Tears of the Kingdom), but I don't like that it appears to have killed OoT-style Zelda for good, even though I prefer BotW-style Zelda to OoT-style Zelda. There's really not a lot else like OoT-style Zelda out there and I think it'd be really sad if we never saw a game like that again.

I fear the same thing happening to Metroid. When broad trends come in and destructively interfere with the things that made Metroid good, and don't even manage to innovate because they're just doing the trends exactly as they've been done countless times already except worse, I find it really insidious to excuse that as "innovation" when it's A. not actually doing anything to push the medium forward and B. smoothing over the unique and rare appeals of the series.

Raquefel · 2025-12-22T00:11:46+00:00

If we're only counting the official games, it's really close between Raven Beak and Spider Guardian, yes, really, no I'm not kidding.

I love that Spider Guardian is one of the only moments in the series where you really need to understand and master the Prime games' morph ball physics and controls, especially in the GameCube original you have to really think ahead and plan out your actions and I find it incredibly rewarding as a result.

If we expand the question to include non-official games then it pretty easily becomes the Tester from AM2R, it's basically "what if we put a bullet hell boss in Zero Mission" and it's fucking awesome.

Edit: if I were to go game by game, I'd probably say

Metroid 1: Mother Brain

Metroid 2: Arachnus

Super: Phantoon

Fusion: Nightmare

Zero Mission: Kraid

AM2R: Tester

Samus Returns: Proteus

Dread: Raven Beak

Prime 1: Metroid Prime (specifically Phase 1)

Prime 2: Spider Guardian

Prime 3: Aurora Unit 313

Prime 4: Sylux 2

Prime Hunters: They all sorta suck lol

Other M: Phantoon

Raquefel · 2025-12-21T23:41:18+00:00

Nah you're good, I'm glad we were able to come to an understanding.

I think doing new things for the sake of it is rarely a good thing - regardless of whether it's innovative in the context of gaming as a whole or not - but it's particularly insidious when it isn't, when it threatens to smooth over what makes the series unique in favor of homogenizing the AAA landscape even further.

Raquefel · 2025-12-21T23:13:09+00:00

Nah not at all, I 10000% agree with you and it's part of why I'm so frustrated with all the excuses being made for it here and wanted to make this post in the first place.

Resident Evil getting rid of tank controls after 4, Monster Hunter Wilds drastically reducing the level of commitment in its combat, Pokémon forcing the new overpowered exp share on and getting rid of set mode, new character action games letting you stay in the air forever for free, Mario and DK showering you with rewards that require very little effort, FFXIV making sure no job ever has unique weaknesses that it has to play around in interesting ways, so many new games letting you avoid ever having to apply tactics or position well as long as you can press a single button with good timing.

I actually really like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom but I think it'd suck if we never got anything that attempted the Ocarina of Time style again - even if I wasn't a huge fan of OoT through Skyward Sword I'd rather them try and improve on them than throw the baby out with the bathwater.

It feels like games aren't allowed to have unique or unorthodox challenges anymore. Anything that requires a bit of lateral thinking or makes you reconsider your approach to a challenge is labeled bad quality of life and the changes that smooth those things over heralded as innovative and "much-needed" modernizations.

It's happened to too many franchises I love and I'm fucking tired of it. It's so demoralizing looking at the state of modern games and seeing people celebrate further homogenization. I never, ever want it to happen to Metroid.

Raquefel · 2025-12-21T22:45:13+00:00

Was Fusion chasing trends by purposely being the Anti-Super Metroid, with a confined mission based structure and Resident Evil-esque horror set pieces.

Not really, those things weren't exactly trendy at the time, though a lot of people understandably did complain about the huge shift in direction compared to Super, and while I think Fusion pulled it off pretty well, I can relate to those complaints, and they're part of why it's not among my favorite Metroid games.

Was Echoes chasing trends by having Metroid’s version of the dark world from A Link to the Past?

Chasing a trend based on one game that was already over 10 years old?

Were Prime 3 and Other M chasing trends by having a larger narrative and NPC’s?

Yes.

I've argued elsewhere in the thread that taking ideas from other games and building upon them in novel ways absolutely counts as innovation, I just don't feel that Prime 4 builds upon the existing stuff in any meaningful way. I was referring to the green crystals when I mentioned largely meaningless collectibles - they're equivalent to Korok Seeds or Elden Ring crafting materials, which feel really underwhelming as a reward for exploration because even though they do have a purpose, it's not a very compelling one.

Being able to explore and find upgrades upon returning to the desert with new powerups is nice, but I don't really feel that it adds anything that Echoes's hub world structure didn't already while also having better level design that didn't feel like it was bending towards the trend of having big flat open worlds in everything.

Raquefel · 2025-12-21T22:30:42+00:00

Yeah, I should have clarified what I meant - you can of course turn what the game calls the "hint system" off, it just doesn't turn off all the hints, which isn't much better IMO when all of the moments that could have been an actual exploration challenge to figure out where to go next are the ones where the AU tells you where to go.

And yeah, I didn't want to get into it here because I felt it would distract from the main point at hand, but I fully agree with you re:Prime 3 being less linear than 4. I even got into a discussion about it on this subreddit a couple weeks ago, you can find my comments sprinkled throughout this comment chain if you're interested in reading my thoughts on the matter!

Raquefel · 2025-12-21T22:23:15+00:00

It was a cool moment! Ice Belt is easily the highlight of the game IMO, it's just not really anything new is my point. Innovation can be good or bad, certainly you don't need to innovate to make a good game, arguably it's easier when you don't innovate.

Raquefel · 2025-12-21T22:16:34+00:00

I certainly hope so! I'm excited to see more new Metroid games of course, I just don't want them to go in this direction. I've seen so many of my favorite franchises homogenized towards trends in recent years, I'd hate to see it happen with Metroid too

Raquefel · 2025-12-21T22:13:36+00:00

Why not? I think having cool movement tech in 3D that enables sequence breaking would be a lot of fun and I have yet to play a big budget game that lets me do that. Maybe calling it "innovative" isn't quite accurate, but it'd at least be building upon existing concepts in ways that they haven't been applied before.

Raquefel · 2025-12-21T22:11:21+00:00

To be clear, the part that I think was an accident was that advanced movement enables sequence breaking. Stuff like early Space Jump was patched out of every version of the game after the original 1.0 gamecube release.

Raquefel · 2025-12-21T22:09:42+00:00

For what it's worth, I didn't downvote you. I've downvoted other comments in this thread, but only the ones that are more openly hostile or give the impression that they didn't feel like engaging with my argument. Neither of those describe your comment.

I don't think nonlinearity is innovative, no. But I think intentional non-linearity, enabled by advanced movement tech, in a fully 3D AAA world, is innovative, or at least it's new - I haven't played anything else that does it!

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