Nintendo is finally listening to their fans, Metroid Prime 4 is confirmed and releaseing this December on the 31st. The Metroid games are one of Nintendo’s earliest and most iconic series, but there weren’t any new games in almost a decade with the exeption of Metroid Dread for the Nintendo Switch. Nintendo saw how successful Metroid Dread was, and finally decided to make one of the most requested video games ever, a continuation of the Metroid Prime Series.

The Metroid games were a series of revolutionary games that, along with Castlevania, started a entire game genre called Metroidvanias. They were releasing new games for Metroid every few years. They then made, in my opinion, some of the best video games ever. These were the Metroid Prime series. The first two were for the GameCube, and the third was for the Wii. They then ruined everything with the release of Metroid Other M but before we cover that, we need some more background information.

Metroid was not only a great game, but one that took gender stereotypes and threw them out the window . Almost all appearances of women in video games in the 1980s were pretty much only as a princess or helpless maiden, so when players were now fighting aliens with a cool robot suit and cannon arm in the origional Metroid, they thought that they were a male warrior and didn’t even consider otherwise. This notion was then proven wrong with the secret end cutscene of Metroid, which was rewarded to players who managed to beat the game in under 4 hours. It showed the protagonist finally taking off their space helmet, to reveal the female bounty hunter.

Then, Metroid Other M. This completely contradicted the whole point of Metroid, because they took the tough space warrior Samus and made the whole game about how she is secretly an emotional, stereotypical, and helpless girl. The fans obviously hated this, so Nintendo decided to shut Metroid down for years. Finally, on the Nintendo Switch, they released Metroid Dread.

Fans believed that Samus would never return (except for in Super Smash Bros.) but were proven wrong when Nintendo decided to test the waters of Metroid to see if the fans would react well to another (smaller) Metroid game, Metroid Dread. The fans went wild.

Due to how much success even a small little game was, Nintendo declared that, on December 31st, they are finally going to make a fourth game to the Metroid Prime Series. It is unlikely that it will have as much of an impact as the earlier games, and will not be as dear to us as the other Metroid games due to the nostalgia that they hold, but it’s still showing that Metroid will return.