This week, the official Metroid website was updated with information about Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, sparking speculation that the long-gestating game is finally readying for release. If you’re a Metroid Prime fan, the last seven years have been long and difficult. Nintendo first revealed the game with a title card at Nintendo’s 2017 E3 presentation.
Since that announcement, Metroid Prime 4’s development has outlasted E3 and, likely, the console it was supposed to release on. With a Switch 2 reveal set to happen before the end of the fiscal year, Metroid Prime 4’s 2025 release window makes it a likely launch game for the Switch successor.
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Metroid Prime 4: Beyond Is Almost Here
After Prime 4 was announced, rumors started to circulate that Nintendo was working on a Metroid Prime trilogy remaster collection. In fact, there were claims that the collection was actually finished and Nintendo was just holding it until Prime 4 got closer to release.
Years later, no Metroid Prime remastered collection has materialized. Nintendo even did us one worse last year, when it released a remastered version of Metroid Prime, sans its sequels. It didn’t retail for full price, instead going for $40, but given that many fans had been expecting to be able to replay the trilogy on modern hardware ahead of 4 — and had already been anticipating it for years at that point — it was a bit of a bummer.
Nintendo loves to make its older games available on modern hardware, but in ways that kinda feel like a f*** you to its players. Would you like to play NES, SNES, N64, Game Boy, and Game Boy Advance games on Switch? Great! Just subscribe to Nintendo Switch Online in perpetuity. Want to play Super Mario Sunshine and Galaxy on modern hardware? You better hope you also had that thought at some point between September 18, 2020 and March 31, 2021, or you’re out of luck.
Nintendo’s Weaponized FOMO
Even if you did buy Super Mario 3D All-Stars during that obnoxious FOMO-generating limited release window, that still wouldn’t get you Super Mario Galaxy 2, which is stranded on the Wii to this day — making it the only mainline 3D Mario game not available on Switch.
Metroid Prime 2 and 3 are similarly stranded. If you want to do a playthrough of the series in anticipation for 4 launching next year, the currently available solution is to play a bright, shiny, convenient remaster of the first game on Switch, then go buy a Wii, a GameCube controller, and some used copies of the sequels.
That’s unnecessarily frustrating and one of the many, many downsides of Nintendo abandoning the Virtual Console, which made older games available for purchase on the Wii and Wii U, in favor of a sporadically updated subscription service on Switch. With the Wii and Wii U, you could buy any available game from a wide variety of releases spanning Nintendo’s history and keep them for as long as the consoles functioned and you had the games installed. Now, you need to continually pay Nintendo for the privilege of accessing those games.
It sucks that companies are no longer interested in selling their products to consumers because they can make more money by leasing them. Though Nintendo is pleasantly anachronistic in many ways, this is one area where it is as up-to-date and cutthroat as its competition. We live in an annoying future. But it would be slightly less annoying if Nintendo finally just put Metroid Prime 2 and 3 on Switch. Heck, they don’t even need to be remastered. I’d settle for straight ports.
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