Metroid Prime 4 is an incredible game when it’s focused on Samus exploring themed biomes, solving puzzles, and shooting the shit out of alien enemies. It’s a far worse game when she’s stuck on a bike popping wheelies over sand dunes. In our review, Zack Zwiezen called the desert, known as Sol Valley in the game, “the most baffling part of Prime 4,” annoyed that the desolate area seemed disconnected both mechanically and narratively from the much cooler parts of the game. In an interview with games journalist and YouTuber Kiwi Talks (via VGC), Jack Mathews, the lead technical engineer for the original Metroid Prime trilogy, gives his thoughts on why that is.
In the interview, Mathews talked about how the knowledge and toolsets used to make dungeons in the original trilogy would have been easily applied to MP4‘s dungeons—Fury Green, Volt Forge, Ice Belt, and so on—because they’re so similar. The team had tons of experience creating that kind of environment, and was plainly very capable of doing so again.
But Mathews called Sol Valley the game’s “Zelda ocean,” invoking the big open sea area from The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. He said it was the sort of thing that had not previously existed in a Metroid game and thus that needed to be built from the ground up, taking up time and developer labor that could have been focused on enhancing the core of the game.
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