i was playing Metroid Prime 4: Beyond shortly after it came out, and got about 6 hours in, but then UNBEATABLE came out (have you played it yet? yes, you!) and consumed my life for several weeks, and also those few hours of playing MP4 had made my right arm and wrist incredibly sore for a solid week. i didn’t want that to happen again, but i also didn’t want to play the game without mouse controls, so i just kind of… didn’t play it, for months, until i finally made a 3D‐printed mouse grip for my right Joy‐Con 2. i also started using a lap desk instead of a little table when playing at my couch, which improved the comfort of my posture significantly.
i think this is the game where i had the most accurate prediction of how it would shape up when i demoed it before the Switch 2 launch, perhaps because it’s also the simplest evaluation: it’s just a fourth Metroid Prime game. like, that’s really all it is, but that’s fine! the series might not have the same groundbreaking impact anymore that it did on the GameCube, but it still pushes the hardware to its limits. it’s still kind of clunky in the way that those older games were, but it also remains highly polished overall and good fun. game design has advanced a lot in 2 decades to be sure, but this game does bring some things up to a more modern speed, and the Metroid Prime games also have particularly timeless designs (as many Nintendo games do), a label which i also apply to Metroid Prime 4. i think it’s good! because it’s a Metroid Prime game through and through, and Metroid Prime games are thankfully always good regardless of context.
i guess a vocal subset of loud gamers online didn’t like this game though, which sounds to me like an issue with expectations. this is, of course, quite often the case with negative reviews from loud gamers online, and i kind of expected this even just from demoing it before the Switch 2 launch. i could tell Metroid Prime 4 wouldn’t be groundbreaking or anything, which would cause problems for it given the intensity of the rose tint on gamer glasses in regards to this series. while i imagine Nintendo was trying for something very different when they were initially tackling the idea of a new Metroid Prime game with Bandai Namco, restarting development entirely with Retro Studios and first releasing Metroid Prime Remastered signaled to me that this game was going to take things very safe. while i never looked at Metroid Prime Remastered (and haven’t touched the series at all for at least a decade now as such), nothing i ever heard about it indicated to me that it was anything except Metroid Prime in HD, which makes it all the more bewildering to me that anyone would expect Metroid Prime 4 to be anything but another Metroid Prime game in exactly the same vein as the previous entries.
but again, i think it’s fine to have that be the goal with this game, because these games are always good due to their timeless designs, notable aspects of which are their strong art direction and buttery‐smooth gameplay. one of the most consistent strengths of the Metroid Prime series is one that’s practically synonymous with Nintendo: having a development team where everyone understands the assignment of creating good visuals at low technical costs. and just because Metroid Prime targets a realistic style instead of something more cartoon‐y like Mario or Zelda doesn’t mean that this same approach no longer applies. i mean, the only other time in recent memory that i’ve seen a AAA studio outside of Nintendo’s influence where everyone involved, from programmers to designers to artists, knew what they needed to do in order to hit their performance targets, was with id Software’s work on Doom: The Dark Ages, also a game with a very realistic art style. (i have not played it and don’t particularly have an interest in doing so, but i respect the technical achievements of the people who worked on it nonetheless. oh my god and while i was writing this post Microsoft fucking fired half of id Software!! god i just love the video game industry it’s so normal and fine!!)
to that end, you can absolutely tell that this is a game developed to run on the Switch 1, but it still looks great even on the more powerful Switch 2, so who cares? like, you can stare at a skybox and tell that it’s mostly just a static texture, but the actual art of that texture is so good that it doesn’t really matter; it establishes the atmosphere extremely well without making the game drop any frames, which is exactly what it needs to do. there are very few instances when playing the game where i felt like graphical fidelity on anything was particularly lacking, and i played this game on a big 4K display. even though it doesn’t take any specific advantage of the Switch 2’s modern rendering features, it still felt to me like a game that wouldn’t have been possible on the Switch 1, even though it obviously is. for what is most likely Nintendo’s first‐party swan song for the OG Switch console (far as i’m aware at least), that’s pretty impressive.
most other aspects of the Switch 2 hardware are also used to their fullest extent here; it’s remarkable that this Switch 1 game has become basically the poster child for multiple Switch 2 features including 120 FPS rendering and mouse controls, but it’s also a true testament to the skill of the team behind this game that they were able to integrate these features so well. those 2 features also go together perfectly; it seems to be very common advice to use the 120 FPS “performance” mode in conjunction with the mouse controls, and that’s for good reason, as the responsiveness of this setup is unparalleled. it’s pretty crazy that this kind of setup that i’m normally used to only having on my PC is part of the experience on offer for a major first‐party Nintendo console game. granted, as i mentioned before, this was remarkably strenuous on my arm to actually use before i got a proper mouse grip + lap desk setup; i do hope that someday the Switch 2 will get some third‐party controllers that are set up something like an Azeron Cyro. (i think there’s only one set of alternative Switch 2 Joy‐Cons on the market right now, and they don’t have mouse support at all.) but i could see it being okay to only use the mouse controls in parts that benefit from it, like just during more intense combat, which would be less strenuous.
you can use the mouse controls pretty much everywhere though, including for controlling your camera while on your vehicle, and you even have separate mouse sensitivity controls for this situation. the settings for the controls are really quite extensive, totaling 6 different sections full of sliders and toggles. it’s honestly kind of overwhelming just how many there are; i feel like subsections for stick, motion, and mouse controls for the camera would’ve helped with this, rather than putting them all in the same scrolling list on each applicable settings page. as it is, each of those 3 methods of controlling the camera have their own list items for adjusting sensitivity and inversion on each axis, making things quite cluttered. i’m glad to see all of them present though; something like inverting the X axis but not the Y axis might seem totally pointless, but i do actually know someone who plays games this way! it goes a long way for accessibility to have this much control customization. there were some specific settings that i was glad to find because they made my experience way better: setting “Enable Mouse Controls” to “Always On” makes the right stick control the camera even while using mouse controls, which is great because it lets me use the stick for large sweeping motions and mousing for quicker or finer adjustments, and setting “Mouse Sensitivity Curve” to “Linear” (rather than “Default”) feels way better to me (whereas the default curve feels jittery and weird).
the Switch 1 experience with motion controlled aiming is probably okay, but from my brief experiments with it, i’m very glad to have been using the mouse controls instead. it’s been a long time since the Wii days, so i guess i’d forgotten how incredibly wobbly motion controls are. i guess Metroid Prime 3 mitigated this by making the cursor’s position on the screen control the turn speed of the camera rather than tying the motion inputs directly to it, which surprisingly isn’t an option in this game. you do have the option to use motion controls for some other actions like you had to in that game though, including flicking upwards for Spring Ball, which just strikes me as more hilarious than anything (they’re off by default thankfully). oh, and being able to hold ZL at any time to stop mouse movements from affecting the camera is supremely useful for repositioning the mouse without having to awkwardly lift it. i think every mouse‐controlled first‐person game needs a button that does this.
since i was always using mouse controls, i also naturally played the whole game in the 120 FPS “performance” mode. initially, it had felt like 1080p while docked was a lower graphical target than was strictly necessary for this mode, supposedly rendering a quarter of the pixels in order to double the framerate. however, as John Linneman at Digital Foundry notes, the 60 FPS mode actually targets 1440p for gameplay, only rendering at 4K for the HUD elements despite what the menu options would imply, which makes the difference much more proportional here. thankfully, despite what “graphics” and “performance” mode toggles might mean for most AAA games on other consoles, nothing else about the presentation of this game changes between these modes besides the resolution and framerate. there were only a couple cases where i could notice something in the game updating at 60 FPS instead of 120 (not including the surprisingly numerous pre‐rendered cutscenes), but a couple of those were environmental effects that only updated at 30 FPS anyway (something also notably seen in Metroid Dread). overall, it’s a far better result than using some sort of “frame generation” to boost a game’s framerate artificially, where i’ve always found the artefacting of anything that can’t be reasonably interpolated using post‐processing to be very distracting. i’m very glad that Nintendo seems properly committed to delivering native 120 FPS experiences on the (so far rare) occasions that they use that feature themselves.
i would also agree with John Linneman’s assessment that this game uses HDR flawlessly; it never feels jarring or nonsensical in how it’s applied at all, always being perfectly natural in its use to add depth to the scene. frankly, this feat is incredibly impressive for a game initially built for a fully SDR console. just about the only aspect of the game’s performance and presentation that disappointed me when it came to leveraging the strengths of the Switch 2 hardware was the loading times between areas (door loads are thankfully instant). i thought maybe they were just keeping the interstitial cutscenes in as a part of the Metroid Prime series’ identity even though they weren’t technically necessary, but eventually i discovered that you can mash A to skip them — yet it still takes much longer to be able to skip them than i’ve come to expect on Switch 2. perhaps it’s a case of hardware optimization similar to something like Breath of the Wild, which consistently loaded faster on Wii U than on Switch before Nintendo started boost clocking the Switch during loads. i mean, the Switch 2 Edition uses all the same game data as the base game (the “upgrade pack” is ≤0.1 MB in size), so it’s not like the data is repacked depending on the console it’s running on.
beyond this point, i’ll get into some spoilers as i talk specifics about the game’s structure and narrative.
the layout of Viewros seems to really grate on some people, but i didn’t have a problem with it as a player. quite the contrary, i really appreciated the curated experiences that the game had me go through, even if it ends up making for a lot of very linear areas that just kind of stretch from start to finish. Metroid Prime 4 is definitely not the only Metroid game to be very linear, after all (take Metroid Fusion for example), but even the most linear Metroid games will end up being beloved because they’re still good games. they also give you shortcuts from the end of an area back to the start if you do backtrack for more collectables, so it’s not like you have to walk all the way through every time. (it’s also funny to see criticism of this linearity right next to expressions of distaste for Sol Valley, a big and totally open‐ended area that i personally really enjoyed, as you’ll read a bit further down.)
i did find the “marker” system on the map to not be very useful, unfortunately. for some reason, the preset icons you get to choose from for marking a room are all based on things to acquire, rather than what ability is needed to acquire those things. you also can only mark a whole room, rather than a specific location (i would’ve been fine with just placing it down wherever Samus was), which makes it very imprecise and also doesn’t help with rooms that contain more than one item to collect. it probably would’ve been more useful for me to just take screenshots of stuff i wanted to go back for. the map marker system also ends up being entirely obsoleted by Scout Bots anyway, which reveal the locations on the map of unacquired collectables in their area after you gain the ability to activate them late in the game. the Scout Bots are great, though; i really appreciated being able to know exactly where to go for cleanup at the end of the game (i did notice most collectables on my own but wow are some very well hidden), and i also appreciated that they were completely optional for players who would rather find everything on their own (though i can’t imagine how long that would take to do…). it also feels properly “earned” as far as hint systems go, since you have to find the Scout Bots in the first place and then remember to go back to them later.
the game does have some pretty typical biomes of green forest, white arctic, and red volcano. i thought i might find those areas a bit rote, but every area is made more interesting in how you’re exploring the facilities that the Lamorn installed in them: Fury Green also houses temples from the extinct sentient race, Ice Belt contains a sprawling medical facility, and Flare Pool has a giant frikkin’ cannon and also green lava. having ice and lava areas was kind of unavoidable if Samus was going to have elemental shot types again, so it’s nice that there was plenty of work done to make them interesting. the game’s other areas are also a bit more novel: the Sol Valley desert is totally unique in its structure, the Great Mines have quite unique fauna and layouts, and of course Volt Forge is perhaps the most visually striking of them all. plus it has some of the best music! i think the soundtrack still has its fair share of highlights for this series, even if a lot of the music still tends to be more ambient and lacking in the strong melodies that gamers really latch onto.
i’ll admit i kind of scoffed at the mechanic of adding Psychic Mote properties to Psychic Bombs to throw them at stuff. the game only requires you to do it a couple of times to solve puzzles, so it’s like, what’s the point? but Psychic Bombs actually do a ton of damage to enemies, which i didn’t really realize (these have never been games to list any numbers for damage or enemy health), and it never really occurred to me how incredibly useful it would be to use this ability with Psychic Power Bombs against bosses. i watched a world record speedrun of this game after beating it and they were constantly throwing bombs at bosses and it was kind of sick. so, silly as this mechanic seemed to be, i acknowledge that it does give some real utility to Bombs outside of “this is what you have to use to attack things or solve puzzles that need Morph Ball”, which is pretty cool.
i kind of got off on the wrong foot with this mechanic though. after you get Psychic Bombs from the first boss in Fury Green, the only way to progress through the game is to throw a Psychic Bomb at an elevated bomb slot to enable the fast travel from Base Camp to Fury Green’s entrance. you can’t leave the way you came because there’s a high ledge you can’t get over without the ability to Space Jump (Samus can only grab ledges in her sidescrolling games, after all), and everywhere else is a dead end. but, at this point in the game, i had “Tutorials” disabled in the gameplay settings, because all they seemed to do was tell me what buttons to push when the game had already told me what buttons do what. however, not catching the game’s mention that “Bombs can be given Psychic Mote properties” when you obtain Psychic Bombs and understanding the implications of what this meant had me extremely stuck trying to figure out what the heck to do. the game expects the tutorial system to kick in when you enter this room and teach you how to throw Psychic Bomb, something which a shockingly complex action for a Metroid game: you have to enter Morph Ball, hold the button to drop a Mote‐like Psychic Bomb, unmorph, switch to the Psychic Visor, grab the floating Psychic Bomb by aiming at it and holding ZL, then throw it at the bomb slot by aiming at it and releasing ZL. the discoverability of this mechanic is basically nil. fortunately, this was pretty much the only time i ever got truly stuck in this game. i did keep tutorials turned on for the rest of the game following this, but unfortunately no other mechanic really warranted doing so, so it was just a bit annoying.
the complexity of the controls when riding the Vi‐O‐La also surprised me, but those are all pretty straightforward on their own. it’s just that controlling acceleration, drift, steering, its projectile, and the camera all at once while moving at high speed can be quite a lot. it’s fun though! i really enjoyed my time using the Vi‐O‐La through the whole game, and would spend long stretches just riding around the desert grabbing green energy crystals and stuff because the fundamentals of controlling the Vi‐O‐La are just so good. i could tell that a lot of people were gonna complain about the desert area in this game, but for what it is i think it was executed so well. the layout of the gorgeous Sol Valley being full of varied little hills and dips made it way more engaging, as you had to plan your movement around the shape of the terrain to best do what you needed to (which was fun to do because the physics are so intuitive with how they’re implemented), whether that was grabbing green energy crystals or fighting enemies or often both. having shrines and wreckages and other destinations all across the area made it interesting to route my way around, with me sometimes taking more circuitous routes if it meant covering areas i hadn’t been through yet and taking little detours to grab green energy crystals or stop at newly‐discovered destinations.
unfortunately, my fun times riding around in the desert would be frequently interrupted by a man telling me what to do next.
so, for reasons i’ll get into in a bit, i understand that the 5 companions in this game are vital to the game’s narrative, and for that reason i am much happier to have this version of the game with them present than one without them. but that doesn’t mean i didn’t find them annoying because of one of the main mechanical functions they serve.
i guess there were a lot of people worried when previews showed the section where Myles MacKenzie accompanies you across Fury Green, but these one‐off gameplay segments don’t really have the big problems that “escort missions” in games have a bad reputation for. i found them to be adequately justified both mechanically and narratively, and not frustrating to do. even speedruns aren’t waiting on or otherwise manipulating the companions very much; they almost always keep up with Samus using off‐camera magic no matter how fast she Boost Balls ahead of them. you might think this is what i would’ve found to be annoying about the companion characters in this game, but i really didn’t have a problem with this aspect of it. the only time a companion’s behaviour got in my way was when i was scanning a new Dartwing variant — a familiar enemy type that flies at you when shot or approached — and Nora ran ahead of me, causing them to attack when i didn’t want them to yet.
no, Myles MacKenzie sucks because he keeps coming in on the radio unprompted to tell you where to go next, pushing you to engage exclusively with the game’s pure progression when Metroid games are so famous for letting players explore to find optional upgrades that the most widely‐used term in the industry to describe this kind of design uses the series’ name. and every time he tells famous bounty hunter Samus Aran what she should be doing, a prompt to open the map appears on‐screen which stays there until the next time you open the menu for any reason, forcing you to watch the map pan and zoom to where it wants you to go for 10 seconds before letting you do anything else. i had it where i was literally walking onto the elevator to go to Ice Belt when he hailed me over the radio telling me to go to Ice Belt. when combining this functionality with his “helpless and talks too much” personality, it’s especially miserable and makes him very easy to detest, even if his dialogue is actually funny at times. and since he’s the very first person you meet, as the game obviously wants to set up its primary “helper character” before opening up the game world, it puts the worst taste in your mouth for every subsequent companion that you meet. which isn’t helped by how, to varying degrees, they all do this, saying super obvious stuff for the mechanical sake of guiding the player which they realistically would never feel the need to say to the face of the legendary Samus Aran. just let the characters be themselves instead of a mechanical crutch! if you’re gonna make me divert some of my attention away from the gameplay to listen to characters talk, i’d really rather them be interesting instead of tell me stuff i already know, you know? i thought this would stay out of my way with how you can radio Myles MacKenzie for your current objective from the map screen, but he just radios you unprompted anyway, including to remind you that you can reach him using the radio command on the map.
and just… why did 4 of these 5 people have to be men? why did the robot have to be explicitly gendered male?? to quote my own shitpost: “my god it’s called Metroid not MENtroid 🙄🙄🙄 ugh”. it’s just disappointing for a series with a strong female lead to add more main characters, but only have 1 of them be another woman… and then for that woman to be given the role of “fangirl” (at least initially). even the Lamorn, these beings unified in their goal of pursuing utopia, only had 1 priest who was a woman. like, why?? can we never have more than 1 token woman in this series??
it’s just unfortunate that these circumstances surrounding the companions get in the way of actually appreciating them as characters, because there is stuff to appreciate there. Reger Tokabi i found to be a particularly refreshing inclusion. he seems to go through some personal growth while stranded on Viewros, even though i didn’t have a great grasp of what exactly that growth was admittedly. but an explicitly religious character is a new addition for this series (even full of “prophecies” as it may be), and his story is deliberately evocative of an Indigenous American experience: someone who felt compelled to leave his traditional way of life behind and become a cog of the dominant industrialized society in order to support his family, and then struggled with how that decision was at odds with the values of the culture he was raised in. this is not a kind of character that you get very often in video games, and i found it was executed well. Indigenous peoples do not have particularly strong representation within video games to say the least, so i was really quite pleased to see this from a big Nintendo game.
regardless of how much you enjoy the companion characters on their own, though, there’s no question that their true value is the impact they have on Samus. i think it’s interesting to take a series that is normally rooted in the isolation of Samus’s journey and then ask, “but what if there were other people?” it might seem antithetical to the series to do this, but i find Metroid Prime 4 actually asks this question in a meaningful way, in contrast to the other Metroid games that do feature other people but don’t really use that to explore Samus’s character. i haven’t played Other M, but needless to say i have it on good authority that that game didn’t approach pretty much anything well from a writing perspective. and Metroid Prime 3’s approach of keeping you in constant contact with the massive entity that is the Galactic Federation certainly didn’t usually maintain the feeling of isolation in quite the way that 4 still does. being stranded on a planet is not a new situation for Samus to be in, but it is when you make her work cooperatively with others in order to leave. having long‐range communications tend not to work in most areas besides Sol Valley and Fury Green also means she keeps getting forced into working with new people without being able to delegate those interactions to the people she already knows.
it’s standard for Samus as a character to be very cold and guarded. she never speaks during the whole game, instead communicating through non‐verbal gestures, data transfers, and actions. we know she can speak, as the VFX when taking damage confirm that her vocal cords do work in this game. we’ve also seen her own words several times in other games, but usually just in the form of narration for the player’s sake. when she does speak to another person in other games (barring Other M probably but let’s continue to ignore that it exists), it’s very meaningful and occurs at a climactic point in the story. it’s my belief, then, that not having her speak in this game was a very intentional decision that stretches beyond just making her mute to better serve as a stand‐in for the player. she’s a solo bounty hunter; talking and working with others isn’t something she’s choosing to be part of her job description outside of receiving orders. while she absolutely possesses compassion as a self‐assigned protector of the galaxy, that doesn’t mean she’s good at opening up or showing affection, especially given that she doesn’t do a ton of socializing in the first place.
that’s why all the little changes in her behaviour that you see over the course of the game are that much more meaningful. Dan Root covers a lot of the details in Samus’s animations during the game’s really quite good cutscenes. some i didn’t even notice myself, like the little wave she does when everyone leaves the Great Mines to return to Base Camp. that one almost feels like she’s holding back an impulse to raise her arm and wave more normally, which would make sense; she of all people knows that letting yourself get attached to others when you’re in this line of work is very risky. but she can’t stop herself from feeling the things she does for the people she’s stranded on this planet with, and of course it’s not really possible to keep herself from getting close to them in the first place when she has to work with them to get off this planet. when she’s at her most impulsive and emotional in this game, like when she disagrees with Nora’s decision in the mines to endanger herself and buy Samus some time, Samus’s body language is much less restrained: she freezes up only for a moment while shaking her head in disapproval and fear, before running back towards Nora. (she’s too late to do anything here, though.)
her interactions with Reger Tokabi when she finds him playing his harmonica at his temporary camps across Sol Valley are similarly representative of how her attitude towards her companions ends up shifting over time. there are 4 cutscenes with him where he and Samus rest around his small fire while he tells her a bit about himself before giving her a gift (1 of which is necessary to complete the game). initially, Tokabi asks Samus to join him and she stands a little distance from him while he sits by his fire, but as her respect for him and her investment in his story grows, she later stays without his prompting and kneels right by him next to the fire while facing her whole body towards him and giving him her undivided attention. her behaviour really does say a lot about her thoughts even if she’s not actually doing or saying much! these indications are naturally going to be very subtle with how closed off she is, but the game’s creators absolutely knew what they were doing here and did think all this stuff through. (in that video linked above, Dan Root words things pretty delicately, but the underlying message of his response to the common complaints surrounding Samus’s portrayal in this game really reads to me as “gamers are bad at media literacy”, and i wouldn’t disagree with that.)
it’s notable that Samus’s visor is kept opaque from the outside throughout the whole game. i don’t think this was a technical limitation or an oversight or something, but a very deliberate choice once again. i figure it’s meant to represent how she’s trying to stay closed off to the people around her, and since she has other people around her a lot in this game, it naturally persists throughout. as we’ve seen though, this doesn’t stop her emotions from coming through in her actions and behaviour despite her attempts to keep those close to her chest. i believe it’s also been demonstrated in other Metroid games that she can control whether or not the visor is transparent from the outside? which would make the opaque visor not just an artistic choice, but one that actually represents a decision her character has consciously made here.
the game really beats you over the head with its themes of loss at times. i mean, the now‐extinct sentient race on Viewros, the Lamorn, just about have “mourn” in the name, to say nothing about the Grievers that they unwittingly transformed themselves into. it comes as a surprise to me, then, that anyone would be themselves taken by surprise at how Samus loses all 5 of her companions in the end. but i thought the game’s ending was very well executed precisely because it manages to make the player feel an approximation of what Samus feels in the game’s final moments. by requiring the player to press A to teleport while staring at her companions holding back Sylux mere metres away, you feel that internal conflict, the pangs that come with the thoughts of “but is this really how this has to end?” the answer is “yes”, of course; multiple prior bosses demonstrate to the player that if they don’t act quickly enough to do what they have to do at the very end, they’ll be thrown right back into an earlier phase of the boss fight as punishment. as soon as the red lights and alarm sound went off, i mashed that A button, myself, understanding that the game was pushing me towards making the correct decision despite my hesitation. Samus wasn’t able to prevent her companions from putting themselves in harm’s way to help her before, and there was no reason to think that would change now.
i believe some people have criticized this canonical action from Samus as lacking compassion, but i don’t think that’s it at all. she understood the reality of the situation she was in and what her companions were willing to sacrifice for her sake. going against their wishes would’ve not only been impractical, but disrespectful. from the facial expressions we see in the version of the final cutscene where she removes her helmet, it’s clear that Samus is sad about losing her companions, but she also doesn’t regret the decision she made; if she did, i think we’d see her brow furrow and eyes shut in frustration or something. instead she gives herself a moment to silently grieve, while also appreciating the tree growing from the Memory Fruit, reassuring her that she did all she could for at least the Lamorn. (it did strike me as weird that the Memory Fruit, literally described as a “database” of all Lamorn knowledge, is just planted in the middle of a barren field rather than brought to data archivists or something. i guess the imagery is the important part here though, and to the game’s credit, it is pretty striking.)
i’ll admit to looking up online if there was an alternate ending if i didn’t press A, the speed at which the ending wrapped up after that point making me curious if i had somehow chosen incorrectly or if there were multiple valid options here. what i read is that the game makes you redo some of the Sylux fight if you don’t, which i think is the best choice as the one that’s most consistent with how the other bosses in the game worked. it did confuse me to read about a cutscene that you supposedly get for beating the game with 100% items and scans which i didn’t see despite doing this, but i guess it was just unlocked in the gallery? a pop‐up at the end of the game mentioning that i unlocked something so significant in the gallery would’ve been nice. i’m also really glad i copied my save file before triggering the game’s point of no return so that i could easily go back and find 100% of the green energy crystals to unlock like 6 more things in the gallery. it surprised me that i apparently hadn’t met that criteria since i believed that i had, but you know how many of them i was missing? one. literally a single one, a tiny piece of a larger cluster that i somehow missed. thank goodness i didn’t lock myself out of finishing that up so i didn’t have to replay the whole game if i wanted to unlock those gallery items.
i did unlock hard mode, but i don’t intend to replay the game with it to unlock a few more things in the gallery, at least right now. i do think there were a lot of mechanics to combat that i didn’t really end up interacting with, like using Mote‐like Bombs or the charge shots for the elemental beams, and that making combat more difficult might’ve forced me to do so and so made the game more engaging. if i’d had the option, i would’ve chosen the hard difficulty at the outset of my first playthrough, but Nintendo more than anyone else likes to hide the hard stuff behind playing the whole rest of the game first, which i’ve never liked.
y’know, come to think of it, i still don’t really know why the game’s subtitle is “Beyond”! oh well.