Metroid Prime 4 is the Dragon Age Veilguard of Metroid

As I progressed further in Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, I kept feeling like it had a lot of Dragon Age: The Veilguard vibes. Maybe it was just a similar feeling of disappointment, I thought, since, in both cases, something I was looking forward to fell far short of my hopes. Then I sat down to properly think about it and realized the two have almost identical issues all stemming from the same root problem: forgetting their identities.

Veilguard throws hordes of generic enemies at you who do little more than wait around for you to kill them. There is, occasionally, danger in numbers, as swarms of ranged or semi-elite foes pose more of a risk than 50 generic demon-spawn, but for the most part, there's little challenge involved in taking them down. Battles that require you to use a special type of ranged attack present the biggest challenge — but only because BioWare gave those ranged attacks limited uses. The battle locations and enemy behavior are little different than any other fight in Veilguard, but the arbitrary limitations are meant to make them feel meaningful and difficult. There are glimpses of what could be a strong, action-based system, but this version just has you mashing skill buttons indiscriminately for the most part.

Prime 4's Grievers — the planet's big, scary monsters so rabidly vicious, so intent on destruction that they easily overran the advanced Lamorn civilization in ages past — are at their deadliest when Samus is running away. And that's just because they move fast, and contact damage is a big deal in Prime 4. Otherwise, you're free to pick them off one-by-one or ignore them completely. The rest of the indigenous lifeforms have little interest in making lunch out of Samus, but that doesn't stop Prime 4 from throwing dozens of critters, robots, and mutants at you over the course of its 15-hour run time.

Metroid Prime isn't that combat heavy as a series, even the action-oriented Metroid Prime 3, but the encounters you do run into have some kind of meaning. The Phendrana Drifts research lab battles in the first Metroid Prime are memorable for how unusually intense they are, compared to what came before, and how they expect you to make smart use of the tools at your disposal. Prime 4's take on those tools involves separating the fire and electric beams into separate weapon types that use a special kind of limited ammo. Like in Veilguard, encounters that rely on this limited ammo play out exactly the same as other fights. Forced scarcity just makes them seem harder.

You might think these similarities are just a coincidence, but the problems come from fundamental structural issues with both games. And more specifically, the lack of connection between what you're doing and where. Retro divided Viewros into familiar elemental segments, but these locations are just theatre sets. No relationship exists between them and the environmental challenges you have to complete, and enemies just exist to block your way. There's no sense of detailed encounter design, and where a fight happens doesn't matter. You could pit Samus against a Griever in Fury Green and one in Ice Belt with no difference in how the fight unfolds; you could battle cult members in Nevarra or Minrathous and have the same experience in both locations. Puzzles in Flare Pool could just as easily live in Volt Forge; you deal with the same "blob of evil energy" obstacles in the same way across every part of northern Thedas. Setting should influence everything in Dragon Age and Metroid, but they feel tacked on in both games.

You see the issues this creates outside of combat as well. Prime 4's story is a mess. I don't just mean the big, glaring "what are we even doing" that is Sylux's role in the game. That's a whole other thing on its own and another big Veilguard similarity. Bosses are mutated by Metroids in the same way literally everything in Veilguard happens because of The Bad Gods. Like with Sylux and the 'troids, you rarely see those gods and their demon servants do anything other than be cartoonishly evil. But you're expected to believe in their inherent badness so strongly that you just accept that anything that's wrong is wrong because they were involved.

Anyway, the bigger mess is the way Retro actually tells Prime 4's stories, with a broad approach to information that misunderstands what made other Prime games interesting. There's so much to scan in every part of Viewros, and a good 80 percent of it is pointless. You might learn that this type of shipping container is used in that process (which has no bearing on anything) or that motorcycles play a weirdly prominent role in Lamorn culture. But it says absolutely nothing about the location you're in or what Lamorn life was like. You're just expected to believe they were a special race of psychic genius aliens with a penchant for heavy industry and be satisfied with that.

Hell, for as much as Retro shoehorns the Vi-O-La bike into everything, there's no visible indication that these devices were ever used for anything other than opening doors, which is… certainly a choice. If the Lamorn used cars as doorknobs, it's no wonder the species went extinct. At least on Prime 2's planet Aether, you could see remnants of the Luminoth's wrecked culture. At least on Tallon IV in the first Prime, you knew how the Chozo thought, believed, and despaired, and felt their slow downfall in everything from their poisoned rivers to their wrecked reflection chambers. You didn't just hear about it or watch it. And you didn't need to scan 500 trucks and pieces of industrial machinery to figure it out.

Veilguard has an almost identical issue. Its fragmented, oddly told main narrative says almost nothing about northern Thedas or what life is like there, but it relies heavily on the idea of the place. Minrathous is seedy and complex, though you see none of it. Treviso is a glittering cesspit of riches and corruption, or so you're told. Even the codex entries, which are legion, primarily concern themselves with unrelated anecdotes. Learning about Nevarra's distant past or what one of your allies did there three years and two weeks ago on a Tuesday is amusing, but hardly relevant to what's happening now and why it matters. Providing information is not the same as storytelling.

Playing Metroid Prime 4 and Dragon Age: The Veilguard feels like watching a magic trick where the magician forgot what to do and hopes you'll be distracted enough by some shiny cardboard cutouts that you won't notice their mistake. I get that both games faced troubled development cycles and behind-the-scenes issues, and I know both series are in the throes of an identity crisis. But that doesn't change the fact that even the basic elements of both games are missing what makes Metroid Prime and Dragon Age themselves. Elements that, handled correctly, could've mitigated some of the effects of other issues like enemy behavior. Imagine a Viewros with a story that had some bearing on Samus' time there or even on her chatty companions. (It's not hard to imagine. Metroid Dread did it very well.) Imagine a Minrathous that wasn't just a facade, that actually made you care about it and feel sorry for letting it get destroyed. If there's a future for both series — and it's very much doubtful that Dragon Age has a future now — hopefully both teams can look to the past to find a better way forward.