Nintendo showed off the early parts of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond during today's Nintendo Treehouse stream, including the game's opening cutscene running on Switch 2. The scene shows Samus Aran flying in to join a massive space battle rivaling what you'd see in Star Wars, and this brief glimpse of Metroid's wider universe has brought the long-dormant series lore hound in me roaring back to life.
Metroid Prime 4 starts with a brief bit opening text explaining that Samus is responding to a distress call from Galactic Federation forces under assault from the Space Pirates. She arrives amid a giant space battle, getting into brief dogfights with enemy craft and launching cannons at a big capital ship. Then she swoops in toward the ground battle, which features a ton of Federation soldiers fighting alongside a giant robot suit that looks straight out of a mech anime.
This basically boils down to "a pretty good cutscene," but it's wild seeing this sort of large-scale conflict and world-building in a Metroid game, and it carries into an action-packed introductory gameplay sequence. This is a series that's always been about being a lonely explorer in remote alien worlds, and Prime 4 certainly seems to stay true to that experience for the most part, but this opening is action-packed to a degree that feels almost more akin to Halo than Metroid.
Assuming the game adequately balances the traditional exploration with this kind of new action sequences, I'm stoked – and judging by the response other Metroid fans have been having on social media, I'm not alone.
When the Prime series was at its height in my teenage years, I was obsessed with piecing together the tiny bits of lore implying a wider world around Samus and the Metroids, and it looks like we're finally getting to see what that world properly looks like. It even looks like Metroid Prime 4 is doing so without falling prey to the story-focused Other M's many foibles.
I was cautiously excited about Prime 4 thanks mostly to the series pedigree, but this tease has me fully on board.
Prime 4 is just one of many upcoming Switch 2 games.
