If you’re one of the many people hoping for a “proper” Metroid game on Wii U, and were dismayed by the announcement of Metroid Prime: Federation Force on 3DS, we have some bad news for you: Metroid Prime series producer, Kensuke Tanabe, has said that a true sequel is unlikely to appear until after the arrival of Nintendo’s NX console.
Speaking to Eurogamer at E3, Tanabe said that if work on a new game in the series commenced now, it would likely be another three years before the game was ready. With Nintendo’s NX console likely to be on the market by that point, it’s looking doubtful whether the Wii U will be graced with Samus’ presence in her own title.
That’s not to say that Tanabe doesn’t have plenty of ideas about what a new Metroid Prime game would be about, however. Far from it - it seems that he’s been thinking about a sequel in great detail. “Instead of broadening it to more planets I would have one and would focus on the timeline, and being able to change that,” Tanabe told Eurogamer. “That’s one interesting idea I have in mind… but I understand many people thought that [Echoes] was too difficult.”
It also seems that storylines from the original Metroid Prime trilogy won’t be revisited. “The stories of Dark Samus and Phazon are done now,” Tanabe said, before saying that the cliffhanger ending of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption was also resolved.
At the end of Corruption, Samus was shown to be tailed by another ship, its inhabitants unknown. However, according to Tanabe, the ship was being piloted by Sylux, a hunter who appeared in the DS game Metroid Prime Hunters. Tanabe even stated that he’d “like to create a story centering around Sylux and Samus.”
None of this means that another game in the series won’t contain any elements from the previous titles; Tanabe said a new Metroid Prime game would be a numbered release, and that many elements from the previous games would remain a focus - so presumably it would still be a primarily first-person adventure, and Samus may retain the ability to scan objects in the environment.
When asked by Eurogamer why there hasn’t been a new Metroid game on the Wii U, Tanabe’s answer was simple: “I haven’t been able to collect a team or the resources to do it.”
So it looks like we’ll be waiting for quite a while before experiencing another Metroid adventure on a home console. Time to dig out that copy of Metroid Prime Trilogy instead then, or download Super Metroid from the Wii U Virtual Console store.
Dale Morgan
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