The galaxy is not at peace
It’s a year of celebration for beloved
game franchises. Everywhere you look, it seems somebody is celebrating a
milestone birthday, and they’re doing it in style. The Legend of Zelda
celebrated 30 by hosting an entire E3 floor for the next game in the franchise.
Pokémon is releasing loads of new content for their 20th, including
several new games. Sonic the Hedgehog’s 25th anniversary is also
this year, and the way they celebrated it was…interesting, to say the least.
However, there is another game
celebrating a milestone this year, and quite a big one at that. It’s gone
almost entirely ignored by the developers of said franchise, aside from a small
game that was quietly released with no publicity last Friday.
I’m sure you already know what I’m
talking about because of the title of the editorial and the image, but for the
uninitiated, I’m talking about the Metroid series. Formerly one of Nintendo’s
flagship titles, it celebrated its 30th birthday on the 6th
of this month.
And how did Nintendo celebrate three
decades of one of their most popular franchises?
They released Metroid Prime:
Federation Force, filed a cease-and-desist on a fan game, and perhaps
unwittingly retweeted an article about Axiom Verge that included a comic strip
of Samus complaining she hadn’t had a game in years.
But let’s start at the beginning,
shall we?
I’m not much of a Metroid fan myself,
to be perfectly honest. I like the lore and characters of the franchise, yet I can
never seem to get invested in the games. That’s more my personal preference
than anything, though. They’re clearly excellent games (well, most of them).
They’re just not for me.
Metroid is just one of the many
franchises Nintendo seems to love to shove under the rug for years and act like
it doesn’t exist, others including the F-Zero and Mother franchises. They have
a clear fanbase, with thousands of gamers clamouring for a new game in the
series, and yet Nintendo refuses to deliver. I used to include Star Fox in this
lineup before that series got dragged out of its hiding place in April, only to
produce the dreadful Star Fox Zero.
If younger gamers only knew Samus Aran
from the Smash Bros series, I wouldn’t blame them. It’s been 6 years since the
last real Metroid game was released, and 9 years since the last Metroid game
fans actually enjoyed. The latest entry in the series was Metroid: Other M,
released in 2010 for the Wii, which was met with passable critical reception
and complete backlash by fans. They hated
the portrayal of Samus Aran, arguably the first real badass lead female
video game character, turned into this whiny baby who needed men to tell her
what to do and where to go. No matter what the rest of the game was like, most
fans couldn’t even bring themselves to get past what looked like Nintendo
dragging an excellent character through the mud.
And then, there was silence. Years
went by without any sign of Metroid, aside from characters cameoing in other
games like NES Remix and Nintendo Land. Retro Studios, developers of the
Metroid Prime trilogy, moved on to making new installments in the Donkey Kong
Country series. It seemed that after Other M was such a disaster, Nintendo
wanted to put the series to rest for a while.
Then, at E3 2015, Nintendo unveiled
Metroid Prime: Federation Force, a blocky Left 4 Dead style game where player
controlled not Samus, but 4 generic space soldiers as they blasted their way
through ugly enemies and environments. Also included was Blast Ball, a cheap
looking Rocket League cash-in, which eventually released for free on the eShop
earlier this year with no fanfare from Nintendo whatsoever. Federation Force
launched last Friday, again with zero build-up or promotion, and was met with
mixed reviews overall. Even more bizarre, while I won’t spoil the ending of the
game, I will say that there’s a lot of symbolism for the franchise as a whole
in the final boss. It’s something that needs to be seen to be believed, and is
surely to be the butt of several comment section jokes in months to come.
But the crazy train just didn’t stop
there.
We now arrive at August 2016,
Metroid’s 30th anniversary. Federation Force is coming out and
little to no one is excited for it, let alone Metroid fans. Then, a small group
of fans known as AM2R took it upon themselves to remake Metroid II: Return of
Samus with updated graphics. Unfortunately, Nintendo swooped in, calling a
cease and desist just as the project gained traction, effectively killing it
where it stood. Fans were crushed. Although Nintendo has a notorious history of
excessively protecting their intellectual properties to a fault, this one
almost felt like a personal attack. The fans were trying to celebrate Metroid’s
birthday when Nintendo themselves refused to, but it felt like they wouldn’t
even let them have that.
Despite this, Nintendo decided to
celebrate the anniversary their own way…by releasing Metroid costumes in
Miitomo. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure no one’s played Miitomo
in the last few months.
Then, as if things couldn’t get any
weirder, Nintendo took to Twitter to advertise the arrival of the game Axiom
Verge on the Wii U. They did this by retweeting an article sent out by the
Axiom Verge developers, which features a giant comic that takes a pretty decent
stab at the recent absence of a certain franchise. Take a look for yourself:
So either whoever’s running the
Nintendo of America Twitter took one look at the tweet and said “Hey, Axiom
Verge is coming out! I’d better retweet this!”, or they know exactly what’s
going on and are just milking it for laughs. Honestly, in all my years as a
Nintendo fan, at this point that second option being the truth wouldn’t
surprise me. Nintendo’s previously shown that they listen to fans, but they’re
also infamously stubborn in actually doing what the fans want them to do.
Remember the time they opened an E3 presentation with a Mother 3 joke?
Nintendo is one of my favourite game
companies, but by god, are they ever confusing sometimes. They seem to try to
listen to their fans a lot. Look at Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It’s clearly
trying to be the polar opposite of Skyward Sword, a game met with mixed fan
reception. And yet at the same time we see things like this whole Metroid
debacle, as well as the amiibo shortages of early 2015, their refusal to make a
new game unless they can “innovate it” somehow (Hello again, Star Fox Zero!),
their current treatment of the Paper Mario franchise, and the infuriating
secrecy around the NX. And believe me, I’ll be writing editorials on those last
two when the time is right.
So to end this whole mess, let me give
you a comparison. For its 20th anniversary, Pokémon got an entire
new generation of 3DS games, a fighting spinoff, a mobile game that took the
world by storm, events all year long, and more that I’m sure I’m forgetting. In
contrast, Metroid got a small eShop release with zero marketing, a cease and
desist on a promising fan game, some Miitomo cosmetics, and an embarrassing
retweet for its 30th. Granted, Pokémon is clearly the more popular
and renowned of the two franchises, but come
on. This is one of gaming’s landmark franchises! Perhaps later on, we’ll
see the return of Samus, Ridley and friends in games that will rival the Prime
Trilogy, but for now, Nintendo’s interests are clearly elsewhere.
But hey, it could be worse. At least Nintendo
isn’t making a Metroid game that involves going through a portal to fight
hordes of zombies in one of the most stereotypical game formulas known to
mankind. Only a truly awful developer would make a game that stupid.
Kept you waiting, huh?
Song of the Week
Phendrana Drifts from Metroid Prime.
It’s relaxing, the melody is great, and is easily one of my favourite “snow
level” tunes ever put in a game. If you’ve never listened to it, frankly,
you’re missing out.
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