I Think I Need To Start Appealing To My Core Audience More.

Ya know, one thing I like to think of with Metroid Prime is that Samus lands on this planet full of Chozo history that she’s never seen before and starts scanning everything in site like an excited little kid at a museum. She grew up with the Chozo, learned their ways, and lost them all to the pirates. Now, she has a world full of the remains of her home culture. You can just imagine her scanning every single statue of a Chozo to find out this was, why their statue is here, and what they were like. And she wants to know what the people of Tallon IV did. What was life like there? What did the average citizen do there?

Basically, Samus getting brain rot over her own culture’s history of which she’s been deprived of information about until now.

Just a sound design concept for Raven Beak’s Hyper Beam I whipped up in CapCut.

I felt the sound of his primary weapon didn’t fit the sheer power its visuals evoked. To that end, I used the buildup noise of the BFG 10,000 from Doom Eternal plus the firing sound of the Focus Rifle from Halo Reach, pitched down to evoke a massive beam. I love the trail off of the Focus Rifle, and it fits the Hyper Beam so damn good.

I tend to go for a middle ground between the two. Someone with scars from injuries that no human being should be able to survive, but also let her care about eyeshadow and lipgloss because it’s just a fun thing she can do to express herself in a busy life of hunting down criminals and super predators. Give her absolutely chiseled abs and towering height, yes, but let her smile with the people and little critters she’s saved along the way. I’m not saying you can’t have your buff, grizzled veteran of many battles with the scars to prove it, but she’s still human, she still needs to live a little. But yes, give her a massive co-

People who draw Samus Aran as a 5 foot nothing girl with an hourglass figure, flawlessly smooth skin, perfectly applied makeup, absolutely no musculature, and a bubbleheaded smile are cowards. That woman has been put through the ringer and should look like it. Give her towering height. Give her absolutely chiseled abs. Give her terrifying scars snaking across her skin. Give her weird feathers and scales covering her body. Give her a scowl that could shatter glass. Give her a massive co-

Me realizing my promise to release my Metroid fanfic “Before Metroid Prime 4 releases” now has an actual deadline.

As Samus learned as a child, dull Chozo claws make for excellent back scratchers. I cannot be convinced otherwise.

The world needs a Metroid show where Pyonchi sounds like this

Honestly, I would love to have some game that really fleshes out how much the Space Pirates scare the galaxy. The Urtraghians especially would work great in that role of trying to literally sniff you out and discover you. Honestly, more games could do with a horror game in that sort of style to flesh out their antagonist factions. Metroid kinda lacks a bit of stakes some times. There’s vague allusions to conquering the galaxy, but I think the game to do the individual consequence aspect was Metroid Prime 3. Having a game that centers around that “human” aspect of a piratical assault would do some good to establish what Samus is saving the good people of the Galaxy from.

Additionally, I think it could have some catharsis in ending the game with Samus arriving just in the nic of time and absolutely destroying the Space Pirates. It could even help to really show how much of a hero and symbol of hope the galaxy sees her as.

what would YOUR ideal METROID spinoff look like?

funny answer: a metroid-hatching tamagotchi clone, drawing from the metroid life cycle and variants to create branching evolutionary paths. raise your own metroid! feed it x parasite snacks! try not to die horribly!

real answer: I think it's unbelievable they haven't tried to make a horror game in the metroid universe. like it would be so easy to have a full game where the power suit is completely offline, or (if nintendo was really willing to experiment) having some kind of civilian protagonist separate from samus, but still placed in similar peril. I guess I'm basically just describing alien: isolation, but GOD could you imagine how good a ridley horror chase scene would be

The Omega Metroid having the time of its life when the BSL’s gravity generators fail.

In the original Metroid 2, all stages of Metroid could fly, except the Queen, and even that example might’ve just been limited by a cramped room. The same could’ve applied to Fusion’s depiction of the Omega; But by Samus Returns (and I guess Other M), the Metroids have been retconned as losing flight capabilities past the Gamma stage. And even the Gamma’s flight has become limited; Presumably because its weight has become too cumbersome for its propulsive force, which hasn’t increased with each stage, to support.

In other words, gravity. But this makes me wonder; Could the Metroid’s method of propelling itself still exist, and it just isn’t strong enough anymore? Could the Queen still have that trait, vestigial as it is? And what if gravity was not there to tether a Metroid down to a surface?

We know Metroids can survive in the vacuum of space, so imagine seeing a Zeta, Omega, and even Queen Metroid flying there. They’d still be much slower than the preceding stages, but they’d still be able to move and navigate at all, just like in the original game. and that terrifies me. Imagine the Omega Metroid in Fusion escaping the BSL through the open hangar; Though it’d probably be stranded in space and if SR388’s explosion didn’t reach it, it’d have starved before finding a food source because space is vast. But man imagine the Federation employing a Metroid space fleet…!

You like GIRLS? That’s gay 😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨😨

Wait, it is?

I think that another big part of Raven Beak’s pitch to Samus is this idea, misplaced as it may be, that the Chozo are the arbiters of morality in the universe. Under their watchful guard, the Galaxy was kept safe, prosperous, and free. They safeguarded species to carve their own path, forge their own destinies, and ascend to the stars on their own terms. We know, from various carvings, that the Mawkin have fought and defeated the Space Pirates in the past. As the Chozo receded, they left this responsibility to the Federation, a system which, in his view, has failed. They need, in effect, the last Chozo to attempt to solve all their problems. Yet, she’s just one woman. Indeed, she can do what many would think impossible. She ended both the Metroid Crisis and the Phazon crisis, defeated the unkillable Ridley, and so much more. Yet, she can’t be everywhere at once. She cannot solve the galaxy’s many injustices. To restore a golden age to the galaxy, the Chozo must return to impose it unto the dysfunctional Federation.

Is this the whole truth? No.

The Chozo were no stranger to crimes against the people they watched over. Hell, Raven Beak is known to execute members of his own Hasana. He himself is so enamored by past glories that he doesn’t see that the Chozo were never perfect. Perhaps they got a head start on the galaxy, achieved space travel a little early, had one or two less extinctions in their evolutionary development, achieved their power ahead of others, but they simply are not perfect. He doesn’t even see the crimes he commits as anything other than necessary steps on the path to a full return of the Chozo dominion. He believes in a return to the days when the Chozo fostered species to pursue their own prosperity and advancement, but he is too ambitious and self righteous to relinquish any of his power. After all,

Hadar sen Olmen.

Power is what will bring the Chozo back to prominence, power is what will dismantle the failed Galactic Federation, power is will eliminate all the threats to the good people of the Galaxy, power is what will see individual races achieve prosperity on their own. Power… is everything.

Hem ili Metroid mar Hadar.

The Project Golem mechs function quite similarly to Samus, even plugging their arm cannons into interfaces to receive data, operate devices, etc. From a Doylist perspective, the developers probably wanted to make a Metroid multiplayer based around Samus’ gameplay; But Samus is only one individual, how does this fit into the canon? So they made some Federation lookalikes to explain it. These mechs still act very Samus to appeal to the Metroid iconography.

From a Watsonian perspective, you know how one of the signs of improving technology is the ability to make it smaller, and more efficient? It could be that the Federation was a little humiliated by having to rely on one bounty hunter the whole time, and attributed a lot of her success to the tech she wore. There’s obviously so much more to what makes Samus such a great warrior than that, but still.

Project Golem was a way to ensure the Federation was prepared for any Space Pirate attack. And if the Aurora Units are any indication, the Federation has already emulated Chozo tech with their own weaker knock-offs before; More quantity to make up for a lack of quality. Because look at how enormous the mechs are, they’re Omega Pirate-sized! Both the Aurora Units and Project Golem were revealed in the Prime series, in two successive games involving an increase in Federation presence within the story and gameplay…

My point is: During the Dread arc, Raven Beak goes on a whole tirade about how the Federation is comprised of weaklings who have to depend on just one Chozo warrior to survive. Imagine how helpless they’d be against an army, surely at this point the Federation has made it clear they’ve given the reins to Samus in general; May as well just get it out of the way, take initiative but who can stop them? It was meant to be… It doesn’t matter that the Federation is trying to be more independent by making their own Samuses, because

The Federation knows it’s weak, that’s why it’s been scrambling so much to imitate its superiors, and pitifully too. Besides, they mistake the technology as the only part of Samus that matters; But Raven Beak knows the person, the Chozo training and philosophy inside, is just as important. Maybe moreso. He has no shortage of Chozo tech to work with, so what Raven Beak lacks, he’ll work with.