Samus Aran is the worst thing about Metroid Prime 4 – Reader’s Feature

After playing Metroid Prime 4, a reader suggests that silent protagonist Samus Aran is the worst thing about it and dragging the franchise down.

If there’s one thing Nintendo has never been very good at, it’s storytelling. Although that’s not quite fair. They’ve never really been interested and so have very little practice and don’t seem to really care whether it works or not when they do try it. It’s not the point of any of their games and where it is slightly more prominent you can see they often run into trouble. Zelda gets by on some charming dialogue and characters but Fire Emblem is just bog standard anime white noise.

Metroid is different to both of those games in that it does have quite a complex lore but essentially no characters, and I’m definitely including Samus Aran in that. The original game was inspired by Alien, which is certainly not what you’d expect from Nintendo, but Samus is no Ripley. Although that probably was the original reason she was a woman in the first place.

Back in the day, none of the Nintendo characters talked or had a personality. Not Mario, not Link, and certainly not Samus. She was called a bounty hunter but never acted like one and then it later turned out Nintendo Japan didn’t even know what one was. But then Super Mario 64 came out and suddenly all these icons started to become actual characters… except for Samus.

There was no Metroid game on the N64, which didn’t help things. So the first 3D Metroid game was Metroid Prime on the GameCube. It was a fantastic game and side-stepped the issue of who Samus was by the fact there was no one for her to talk to and she only did a little bit of talking to herself and almost never had her helmet off. But it worked, at least for that game.

The problems started when all the games after that started to do the same thing, even when it was inappropriate, like Metroid Prime 3 when she’s actually got people to talk to. Metroid Dread is the other great Samus performance because there’s no one for her to talk to again and when she does speak, at the end, it’s an alien language, which is a neat sort of meta joke. But it’s another trick you can’t really do twice.

Obviously, the worst representation is Samus is Metroid: Other M, which turns her into a wimpy doormat who does everything her (male) boss says, even though he’s completely useless. There’s a bit more talking to herself, which I still feel works well in theory, but given the script is so awful it’s hard to defend.

That all brings us to Metroid Prime 4, where Samus doesn’t say a word and there’s no in-game reason for it at all. People talk to her all the time, and ask her things, and she never replies. Sometimes it’s not even clear she’s listening to them, because she barely nods or anything.

For some reason no one treats this as odd but to anyone playing it, it makes her look like a weirdo or maybe someone who can’t talk – the game never acknowledges her being so incredibly rude, so there’s nothing to tell a new player whether she can or can’t talk.

People complain about Myles MacKenzie and all the other allies in the game and I’m not going to defend them, but at least Nintendo is trying with them. They’re shallow and annoying, especially Myles, but at least they seem vaguely like actual people. I’d rather they weren’t in the game, but they do highlight how Nintendo is purposefully not giving Samus any kind of personality.

If they want to make her an avatar like Link that’d be one thing, but that’s not how it’s portrayed, and it’s not how she’s been in the past either. With all these people to talk to, this was the chance to give Samus a real distinctive character, but Nintendo have done the opposite. After building him up they didn’t give the baddie Sylux one either, so you can’t even say it’s just Samus that they’re treating differently.

If Nintendo want to make games with no story that’s fine, I’m totally okay with that. But if you’re going to have one you have to do it properly. Either do nothing or go all in, this weird half-hearted approach is doing nothing but harm, as you can see from the poor response to Metroid Prime 4.

Samus has become the least interesting thing about her whole franchise and is actively making it worse. There needs to be a drastic change of direction in the next one, if the mistake of Metroid Prime 4 hasn’t already made it so that there won’t be another one.

By reader Rooster

The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.

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