Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is a game with a lot of flaws, but none of them drew more attention from the gaming world than Myles MacKenzie, the character who spends much of the game's runtime bombarding Samus and the player with tutorials and hints of questionable helpfulness. The devs apparently took steps to make the character less annoying, but I'm still scratching my head over how they missed the fact that this kind of thing was always going to drive Metroid fans up the wall.
"[The characters in the hub's] personalities were decided on depending on their roles," according to a quote in Famitsu from the Nintendo side of the Metroid dev team (translated by GamesRadar+). "MacKenzie, the engineer, acts as the player's guide so we consciously gave him a bright, light-hearted vibe. We wanted him to develop items and such, so he is presented as a highly talented, technically minded person. But in order to make sure he wasn't annoying, we made his character absent-minded and kind of cowardly."
But that only addresses how the character is written – which, for me, is perfectly fine. Yes, I know, there are legions of folks out there with automatic cringe responses pointed at MacKenzie's sillier bits of dialog, but I truly don't believe he or other members of the crew are rendered meaningfully worse than any other sidekick in a major video game. Heck, I'll go a step further – I even think characters like Armstrong, with her barely-contained fangirl outbursts at meeting Samus, and Tokabi, with his religious introspection, are pretty endearing.
The problem is that I don't want any of that in a Metroid game. No characters, no dialog – just a sense of loneliness and isolation as I figure my way through a hostile alien planet. I've understood this to be the overwhelming sentiment of the Metroid fandom going back decades. While 2002's Metroid Fusion is regarded as one of the high points of the series, the chief complaint against it still haunts the series to this day – its introduction of lengthy dialog sequences that overexplain where to go and what to do.
While the rest of Fusion was good enough to overcome that issue, Other M doubled down on dialog and storytelling to become easily the most-maligned game in series history. Fans spent years lamenting Other M's choice to give Samus an array of Federation soldier pals who refuse to shut up. What a bold choice it was, then, to center Prime 4 on giving Samus an array of Federation soldier pals who refuse to shut up.
MacKenzie isn't the problem with Metroid Prime 4. Its true issue is the fact that it's an overwhelmingly directed experience, undercutting the excellence of its visual design, combat, and movement mechanics by funneling Samus through a series of tubes that don't offer any sense of exploration. MacKenzie's constant radio messages, telling you to go there or to do that, are simply an emblem of Metroid Prime 4's fundamental misunderstanding of what made the series interesting in the first place. It wouldn't matter if Shakespeare were the one on the line if this is the result.
Our Metroid Prime 4: Beyond review is less than glowing, but our list of the best Switch 2 games still offers plenty to love.
