Developer: Retro Studios
Publisher: Nintendo
Platforms: NS1, NS2
Version Played: NS2
Price: $69.99
Metroid Prime 4, a sequel 18 years in the making. Well, 8 years in development, but it's been 18 years since Metroid Prime 3 came out on the Wii. And I guess it's a sequel in name only because the story doesn't have a whole lot to do with the original trilogy. Sylux is the only real connection to the old Prime games. But it still plays like Metroid Prime. Well, maybe more like Metroid Prime meets another famous Nintendo series.
Metroid Prime 4 takes place in that ever expanding time period in between Metroid 1 and 2, just like the other MP games. So no fusion, no Adams, and no baby. In the game’s intro, Sylux, along with a gang of Space Pirates and Metroids, attacks a Galactic Federation base where they're analyzing a mysterious artifact, one thing leads to another, and Samus ends up being teleported away to a planet called Viewros. Now she has to collect 5 magic gems to activate a teleporter to get back home. Unfortunately, her ship wasn't teleported with her.
Viewros was once inhabited by the Lamorn, a highly advanced civilization that learned how to harness psychic powers and make badass bikes. They're kind of like Chozo, but Axolotls instead of birds. Axolotls are those cute Mexican salamanders with tentacle-like gills coming out of their heads. The ruins of their civilization are everywhere on Viewros and you learn about what happened to them by scanning stuff throughout the game. Even though they're long gone, they left messages and technology for Samus, who they call “the chosen one”. They're psychic, so they knew she was coming.
During her adventures on Viewros, Samus encounters a bunch of Federation soldiers that got teleported along with her. It's not just that Miles guy, there's 5 in total. You talk to them, fight alongside them, and they even call you from time to time. I could hear people crying about their precious isolation the moment I saw Miles. But if you’ve been playing the games since Fusion, you probably saw this coming miles away. The check-in calls and Navi-like hints aren't anything new to Metroid games. The way these characters tag along sometimes definitely is, though. There's multiple parts where you fight alongside them in a sort of Firefight/Horde mode scenario, and one of these characters is basically a walking door opening item. It's more than a little Halo-ish and pretty weird for a Metroid game. I didn't mind it too much, though, because it does work with the story. I also feel like Samus needs to have other friends besides that Adam guy she named her ship’s AI after. Time to move on, girl.
Hopefully these relationships are leading to something, like a sequel! Because if they're not, this game’s story was a huge nothing burger. It isn't moving anything forward in the Metroid universe, and Samus's character hasn't been developed at all. It's just introducing a new race that would've probably worked better as Chozo and Galactic Federation characters that might never be seen again. Remember the “remember me?” guy?
Strangely enough, the Lemorn didn't make many upgrades for Samus that the Chozo haven't made already. Or did they make them before the Chozo? This game does take place before Metroid II. Metroid Prime 4 has a grappling hook, power bomb, double jump, spider ball, Ice Shot, spring ball, you get the picture. The Lemorn literally just put “Psychic” in the names of some of these and called it a day, like some kind of cheap knockoff. The only real new items here are a “Psychich Glove” that gives you telekinesis, the bike, and the Control Beam, a psychic shot that you fly around in 1st person like a drone. Sounds familiar.
VI-O-LA is actually pretty cool, but it's just a mount. It's basically Epona. I would say the Master Cycle, but it really is more like Epona with the charged speed boosts and everything. You use it to get around the desert and to break the green crystal clusters found all over. You can't use it inside most areas in the dungeons, so it's rarely used as a key item.
The desert connecting everything in the game is called the Sol Valley. It's where you’ll find all the dungeons, shrines, Galactic Federation wreckage, and the green crystals. There's also ramps to do sick jumps on your bike. There are puzzles and items in the shrines, like in Breath of the Wild’s, but there's only 5 of them. Packs of enemies appear and attack you every now and then, but it's mostly deserted. This really is just a space to connect everything, like Hyrule Field or Wind Waker’s ocean. It's not very exciting, and the lack of music doesn't help, but you don't have to spend a lot of time in it. I really like how it looks, though, because it reminds me of the desert behind Samus on the cover of Metroid II for Game Boy.
The green crystals are used to get various upgrades throughout the game. I heard some people ignored them and then had to grind for them at the end of the game, since a certain amount is required to get a specific upgrade, but that wasn't my experience. I don't even know why you’d do that. The first upgrade I got with them was pretty good, so I made sure to get every one I saw.
So what I’m trying to say here is that Metroid Prime 4 is by far the most Zelda-like Metroid game ever made. It's got the big area in the middle connecting everything, a bike, people to talk to, tag-along NPCs, a Skyward Sword beetle-like item, the story sounds more like Link’s Awakening the more I think about it, and the major areas are basically dungeons, because they're not connected to each other at all. They even share themes with Zelda dungeons. There's literally a volcano area that looks like Death Mountain from the outside. What else should I call them, temples? One of them is a motorcycle factory! These ain't no temples!
Even though it has a very Zelda-like structure (and story and items), the game still feels like Metroid Prime. It's still a game about scanning everything in sight, exploration, and solving puzzles with the items you find along the way. It's still that game where things don't work until you scan them and you revisit old areas with new items to reach new places and find more items. It's a Metroid Prime game through and through. It just has a big-ass desert in the middle of everything and Samus meets 5 new friends in it.
Metroid Prime 4 is still a Switch 1 game. There really isn't anything special going on with the graphics aside from the game running great. It's 60FPS in 4K and 120FPS in 1080p docked and 720p handheld on NS2. The only time I noticed any kind of frameyness was when trying to play in 4K with the Joycon in mouse mode. Maybe I was moving my hand too fast for the game to keep up. Mouse mode works just fine here, by the way. The thing that truly makes MP4 look great is the art direction. The game has this sort of Star Wars meets HR Giger thing going on and it really works for me. It makes sense that the art is inspired by Aliens and Star Wars because the first 3 games were definitely inspired by those movies as well.
It's been way too long since I played MP3, so I can't really say if this is better, but I can tell you that I like MP4 a lot more than Metroid Prime Remastered. It didn't get rid of scanning, which I’m still not a fan of, but it did get rid of all the other visors, the dark areas, and the constant locking you in rooms with bullet sponge enemies. MP4 is just a less annoying and more modern game that still retains the Metroid style of gameplay. And the bike is awesome! Can we get a Metroid-themed Excitebike or something?
8/10
…Because it's a good Metroid Prime game, but scanning still isn't fun.
Developer: Game Freak
Publisher: Nintendo
Platform: Switch
Price: $29.99
The Indigo Disk is the second and final bit of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet DLC included in The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero expansion pack. That's all, folks. Aside from any upcoming in-game events, this is the last Scarlet and Violet content we're going to get. As far as we know, at least. Pokemon Day is right around the corner. Maybe Game Freak is cooking up a lime-themed Pokemon Verdant or something. The Indigo Disk adds new story content, a new area, a new Tera type, 138 returning Pokemon, and 8 new Pokemon. And BTW, The Indigo Disk is all endgame content. All Pokemon are over level 55 and there's no level scaling.
The Indigo Disk adds a lot of content to the game, but just as I expected, there are zero performance fixes here. In fact, I think the new area, the Terarium (Get it?), has even more spots with bad performance than Paldea did at launch. There is no escaping the terrible framerate. It was probably a bad idea to cram all these different biomes right next to each other and add the ability to fly on top of it. Areas with mud perform the worst, with long stutters that make it look like the game is going to crash. There are also real crashes. More than I’ve experienced since the first few weeks after launch. It's a shame because there's a lot to like about this expansion.
The story of The Indigo Disk starts off by taking you through the Terarium while battling the Elite Four of the Blueberry Academy. It turns out that Kieran, the kid who thinks he’s the main character of this game and tried to take your legendary Pokemon in Kitagami, is the champion here and they have an Elite Four of their own. Of course, now you must beat them all and beat Kieran again and show him that he can never beat you, no matter how hard he trains.
After all that, you go back to Area Zero with Carmine and Kieran and this little jerk tries to steal another legendary from you! Unbelievable! So, what's the treasure of Area Zero? It's a Pokemon. Were you expecting a Triforce maybe? Well, it's that turtle Pokemon all over the new anime series, Terapagos. After you take your rightful Pokemon, you can go back to Kitagami and talk to the Cavewoman or Reed Richards professor and they basically say that there's multiple timelines and dimensions in Pokemon. And that's it for the Area Zero storyline. Kind of disappointing if you ask me. I was hoping we’d get to travel in time or something, but all we get is a few more caves in Area Zero and a new Pokemon.
There is one more story back in Kitagami. Remember that weird doll at the store that everyone thought was a Pokemon? Well, it turned out to be a Pokemon and it’s making everyone eat its mochi and dance like chickens in “Mochi Mayhem”. This is really just an excuse to get all your friends from Kitagami and Paldea (and Kieran) together for one final episode, but it also fleshes out the Ogerpon story. I liked it. It’s fun, goofy, you get to see all your friends (and Kieran) interact, and you get a new mythical Pokemon in the end.
That might sound like a lot of story content, but you can go through all of that in under 10 hours. The real meat of the game is in the new Blueberry League Club Room, which you unlock soon after getting to the new school. This club room has a bunch of stuff you can do and unlock with the new currency, Blueberry Points.
You get Blueberry Points from doing quests in the Terarium. These quests are called Blueberry Quests, or BBQs. These quests just keep popping up on a list as you complete them, just like the Nook Mile quests in Animal Crossing New Horizons. You don't even have to talk to an NPC. There's quests which require you to sneak up on a Pokemon, battle a wild Terastalized Pokemon, catch a Pokemon, and a bunch of other stuff. There's also multiplayer only quests that have you making sandwiches together, taking group photos, and other stuff. Basically, you get points for using the game’s mechanics.
You can then use these Blueberry Points on stuff like new photo filters, themes and music for the club room, and new Pokeball throwing animations. You can also use them to run the item printer, which is a machine that takes your Pokemon materials and turns them into items, like held items, Tera shards, vendor trash, and bottle caps. You can also get rare Pokeballs, like Master Balls and Friend Balls, from this machine if you randomly hit the “Pokeball Lotto”.
One of the coolest things you can buy with BPs is new Pokemon for the 4 biomes in the Terarium, which just means starter Pokemon in the wild, as far as I can tell. That means they can also appear in outbreaks, so you can easily shiny hunt them. All the starters from previous generations are available, but not the ones from Scarlet and Violet.
Another thing you can do with BPs is bring NPCs (or “coaches”) to the club room. You can host 2 at a time, and you can bring in all the Gym leaders, teachers, Nemona, Penny, and others. You can battle them and get rare items, emotes, and clothing, you can trade Pokemon with them, and they'll even talk to some of the other NPCs you bring in. You’ll have to mix and match to see all the unique interactions. It's not exactly a Battle Tree, but it's pretty cool if you like NPC battles, or just want to hang out with Iono again.
There's also an NPC who will give you special items that make legendary Pokemon appear around Paldea for doing BBQs. Most can be unlocked by doing solo quests, but there's also a bunch that require you to do group quests in multiplayer. These group quests aren't simply quests done in multiplayer, though. You have to do a bunch of quests in multiplayer for the group quests to pop up, and you have to do 12 of these to get the items for all the other version’s exclusive legendaries and all the group quest exclusive legendaries. It's a huge grind. I spent a lot of time doing solo quests and grouped up 4 different times for hours and hours of BBQing. All of these legendaries are 1 time spawns and they are shiny locked, BTW.
The new Tera type is Stellar, the type Terapagos comes with. This is a very complicated type. As if people didn't have enough trouble understanding what Terastalization did already. The Stellar type gives moves of all types the 1.5X boost from Terastalizing, but only 1 time for 1 move of each type. So say you have a Pokemon with 1 water, 2 fire, and 1 psychic move, you can get the boost once for all of the moves except the second fire move. Unlike other Tera types, Stellar doesn't affect your Pokemon’s typing at all, so if your Charizard Terastalizes into Stellar, it's still going to be Fire/Flying both offensively and defensively. There's no actual Stellar typing for Pokemon. Even Terapagos is a Normal type. All rumors of Pokemon changing forms while Terastalized into Stellar are false. Terapagos changes forms when it goes into any battle, but it doesn't have anything to do with the Stellar type. Stellar has a few other effects when using Tera Blast and Terapagos' signature move, Tera starstorm, but you should just go watch a guide video on that if you're interested.
After finishing a certain challenge from one of the Elite Four, you can unlock Koraidon or Miraidon’s flying abilities. Whenever you want to fly; you jump, start gliding, and then press L3 on the left stick. It's kind of an awkward button combination in practice, and the movement controls are weird because they change depending on where the camera is, but you can fly now! You can fly in any outdoor area, including in Mesagoza, and even in Area Zero. There are no weird World of Warcraft-like restrictions to it.
That's a lot of stuff to keep you busy until the next game comes out. You're definitely getting your money's worth with this expansion pack. I’d say it's a pretty good send-off for Scarlet and Violet. It would have been perfect if it also fixed the framerate, though.
11. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Shredder’s Revenge: Dimension Shellshock - This DLC adds 2 new characters and a survival mode with roguelite elements. That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s only $7.99, and one of those new characters is Usagi Yojimbo. This little expansion adds a lot of replay value, and adds the final missing piece to the dream TMNT game. What more could you ask for? Well, I still want to play as the frogs, but this is still pretty awesome.
10. Double Dragon Advance - My favorite Double Dragon game and one of the best beat ‘em ups of all time, and after 20 years, it finally has a console port! The emulation options are kind of weird, with options that don’t seem to do anything different from some of the other options, but there’s nothing really wrong with the port. It plays well, it has the display options you need, and you can play 2 player co-op without 2 GBAs and a link cable. The game is awesome too! It’s a re-imagining of the original Double Dragon arcade game. It has all-new graphics, new levels, a deep combat system with lots of moves and no leveling up, new weapons, enemies from all the arcade games, new enemies, new cutscenes, and new music.
9. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor - Horrible performance aside, I really enjoyed this game. I think they improved on pretty much everything I had a problem with in Fallen Order. The only thing that I don’t think is better is the story, but that might just be that I see these games as non-canon stories. I just don’t trust that anything that happens in these games is ever going to matter to the rest of the Star Wars universe. I’m not even sure if the High Republic stuff is going to show up in the High Republic. And that’s in the past!
8. Pokemon Scarlet and Violet: The Secrets of Area Zero - Another game with horrible performance. This game would be much higher if the framerate was a steady 30. Regardless, the content in this expansion is pretty great. New stories, new battles, new Pokemon, returning Pokemon, and 2 huge new areas to explore. It’s a shame they never fixed the framerate because this might be the best Pokemon game ever made.
7. Advance Wars 1 + 2 Reboot Camp - It’s 2 very faithful remakes of the first 2 GBA games for the price of 1. They have 3D graphics, beautiful new versions of the soundtracks, and online play with friends. It’s honestly more Advance Wars than I could handle in 1 go because it’s 2 pretty big games. I got through the first game and haven’t really touched the second one. It’s a shame this game was delayed so many times because it would have probably gotten more attention if it was released earlier.
6. Vengeful Guardian Moonrider - Here’s a really cool game that went under a lot of people’s radar. It’s from the developer of the awesome Contra-like run ‘n gun shooter, Blazing Chrome, and it’s basically Shinobi III meets Mega Man X. It’s fast-paced, old-school, 2D Ninja action, with robot masters, special weapons, and a gritty 90s sci-fi-inspired story.
5. Gravity Circuit - This was a good year for games with big Mega Man X vibes. Gravity Circuit takes a lot of inspiration from classic action platformers, like Shinobi III, but I think the simplest way to describe it would be to say it’s like Viewtiful Joe meets Mega Man X. It has beat ‘em up-inspired combat, lots of Mega Man X-like platforming, and robots. That might sound a lot like Moonrider, but it’s actually very different. Gravity Circuit is colorful, light-hearted, and the beat ‘em up combat gives the gameplay a completely different feel.
4. Pikmin 4 - This one caught me by surprise. I liked the previous Pikmin games, and expected it to be good, but I didn’t expect it to be this good. It’s all the little changes they’ve made while still making it feel like Pikmin that make it so good. The dog mount, Oatchi, underground areas, new modes, and the removal of the day and juice limits are all great. It's also a huge game with tons of stuff to do. I really wasn’t expecting to be playing this for over 50 hours. This is hands down the best Pikmin game yet.
3. Gal Guardians: Demon Purge - I don’t know why Inti Creates made this part of the Gal Gun universe and not a Bloodstained game, and I’m not a fan of the comedic anime hornyness, but I can’t deny that this game is incredible. It’s the 16-bit sequel to the Bloodstained Curse of the Moon games I wanted. It’s the modern day Classicvania Konami won’t give us. It plays like a mix of Castlevania Bloodlines and Rondo of Blood, it has good music, lots of replay value, and it looks fantastic. It even has co-op. I think it’s even better than the 2 Bloodstained CotM games.
2. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - This is a tough one. On one hand, I love this game. I like it even more than BotW. The new powers are fun, exploring the sky is fun, the remixed Hyrule is awesome, the Shrines are great, the story is much better, and so on. It also has one of the worst things I’ve ever seen in a Zelda game, the Depths. I hate dark sections in games, and they literally made a dark version of all of Hyrule. I spent hours and hours fumbling around down there trying to uncover everything, hating every second, and all I got was a medal! That’s worse than Korok poop! At least exploring Hyrule and doing puzzles to get all the Korok seeds was fun!
1. Super Mario Bros Wonder - The best 2D Mario game since Super Mario Bros 3, as far as I’m concerned. The controls feel great, the graphics are awesome, it has ALMOST all the playable characters you could want in it, it’s full of Mario fan service, it’s trippy, it’s huge, and it has some super challenging levels. I 100%ed it and enjoyed every second. This game is a masterpiece.
