Metroid Prime Remastered Released

Arguably, one of the biggest surprises of yesterday's Nintendo Direct was Metroid Prime Remastered, which got shadow-dropped right after the event, on the Nintendo eShop. A retail version will be available in a couple of weeks, February 22nd in North America, March 3rd in Europe.

Since I prefer to get my Nintendo Switch games as cards, you will have to wait until then to hear about my impressions. But there is already a ton of footage of this game available and it looks really good. In fact, it puts the Zelda HD remasters to shame here in many different ways. All the assets have been redone, so we're not just getting some prettier / upscaled textures and there are new models for everything: Samus, the environment, the enemies, everything.

It looks more like a full-blown remake than a remaster, where they have been rebuilding the entire game in a new engine (maybe Unreal, or a modernized RUDE Engine). It's very faithful to the original game, however, where it's akin to Ocarina of Time 3D. It also runs completely fluid in 60FPS, where we have seen much uglier games with a much worse performance on the Nintendo Switch. It's very impressive overall.

The control options are also superb. You get four different control schemes: classic, dual-stick, pointer, and hybrid. In addition to what they have shown in the Direct, you can use the Joy-Cons for the same controls as on the Wii, or you can go for the best of both worlds with the hybrid settings. The game even supports the GameCube controller for the classic control scheme – they have thought of everything here!

At the same time they release this out of the blue and it only costs 40€. Compare this to Skyward Sword HD, which was full price and got a full marketing campaign, while its graphics are mostly just upscaled and the game doesn't even offer a hybrid control scheme. This here feels very uncharacteristic of Nintendo, who have been treating all their ports and remasters on the Nintendo Switch as if they were completely new games.

So, what has made them reconsider? What gave them this change of heart? Is Nintendo finally listening to all the complaints? Well, a likely explanation is that many fans were hoping for a remaster of the entire Metroid Prime Trilogy. If they had gone the full price route with each single Metroid Prime game, then this would have caused quite some backlash and disappointment. This way they get away with selling each title individually again and still make more profit than having the Trilogy at full price.

And this also gives fans at least something at the moment, where Nintendo certainly wants to distract from the fact that Metroid Prime 4 is still hiding in the shadows after four years of development, since it got taken over by Retro Studios. Now the fans will first expect Metroid Prime 2: Echoes Remastered and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption Remastered before anything else. They may even have the second game finished already and are working on the third as we speak, we don't know, but rest assured that a full Trilogy release probably wasn't ready yet, or else we would be getting that instead.

To my understanding this remaster was actually developed at Retro Studios, where they haven't released anything since Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, which was nine years ago. So, they also probably had to create some sort of output that makes Nintendo some money, while this is to prove that the series is still in capable hands... And it makes me feel very confident about the future of Metroid Prime, whenever that may be.