Tooie provides the player with some really fun/ compelling tools such as Kazooie’s glide or the Clockwork eggs that really sell that Metroid-style exponential power progression. It feels so good to cheese item pickups with your late-game abilities which you couldn’t do in Kazooie.

Tooie often gets slagged off for being a Bad platformer but the platforming is a means to an end for the adventure game it’s trying to be. It’s a Zelda style big interconnected world full of characters that you can jump around. I still find that fun even if the level design can be a bit flat

Eventually I fully gave into Tooie’s madness and really appreciated the more technical and esoteric playstyle. A lot of Tooie feels like playing chess as a 3D platformer: moving the pieces/ characters around very deliberately across the levels to unravel the puzzles.

Part of why I like it so much is that it really had to win me over. I went into it right after playing Kazooie with a lot of negative preconceptions. At first I was frustrated I couldn’t collect all the items in each level in one go, until I got comfortable with the more Metroid-y structure

I like Teleroboxer more than a lot of the actually great legendary retro games people like to talk about so I may be uniquely positioned to get full value out of this. But also.. damn that’s a lot of money and it’ll be even more to get a flashcart/ collect more games

Other M is like a bad Famicom Detective Club game and all the hallmarks of that series (weird handling of women, ridiculous dramatic contrivances, obtuse “look at this one specific thing” gameplay) just hit absolutely wrong in Metroid

I feel like there are definitely cases of “this franchise has become a husk of its former self” but it feels like every fan is so quick to jump to that conclusion and dig their heels in. In niche communities like Metroid, that doomerism can be so exhausting

Also it minimizes the people still left at Retro from those days who are working on Prime 4 and the devs from Nintendo’s side like Tanabe who were always very important to the Prime series direction.

Saw a post that was like “this isn’t Actually Metroid Prime 4 because it’s not the original trilogy dev team” and like.. there would be no Prime 4 without new people making it. Those Retro guys were burnt out after Prime 3 and had no desire to keep making Metroid, a lot of them left.

I’m saying all this because I gave into this kind of behavior in the past and I regret it. The creators of all the things we love are people just like us and they are not put on this Earth just to please us. You may think you want a product that is 100% customer centered but you really don’t.

I’m not saying you have to agree with or enjoy every decision these creative figures make but there’s so rarely any attempt to understand why certain choices were made. No empathy either, just complete vitriol over the creator having different views/ motivations than their audience

I see it EVERYWHERE in Nintendo discourse, people just love running with narratives about figures like Miyamoto or Tanabe with this attitude of “look at these Clowns, they don’t Get It like we do”. It’s such a weird and mean way of thinking about people who made a thing you really like

I personally find it tiring how every Metroid conversation revolves around putting Super/ Prime 1 on a pedestal and anything deviating from them is “doing Metroid wrong”. It just erases how/ why the two series have evolved and is implicitly like “they grew this franchise Wrong”

I wanted to put some of those things out there into the conversation and try and approach this game with more empathy and less vindictiveness. Games are made by people and will never be perfect. Every person that worked on Prime 4 did so out of good faith to try and entertain us.

If you add too much new stuff, you run the risk of alienating fans which have very strong opinions about every little thing.

If it’s too much old stuff, you run the risk of the new installment feeling like a redundant retread like Shenmue III.

It’s a tough balancing act hard for anybody to manage

I think this is kind of an inevitability when you do a dream video game sequel like this so long after the fact. It’s hard to just pick up where you left off after not working on a franchise for so long and have strong new ideas that fit it like a glove.

So it may be hard for fans to reconcile their own perfect vision for a Prime 4 they have spent over 15 years imagining with the reality of this game which was made to fulfill a demand after so much time. Without a lot of key Retro devs involved as well.

Kensuke Tanabe has talked before about having ideas for continuing the Prime over the past ~15 years but it wasn’t like there was a project proposal sitting in a drawer somewhere made right after Prime 3.