What bothered me about Metroid Prime 4 isn’t that it signals its ending from the beginning — that’s about all it does. It’s that the signal, much like the game itself, is more self-referential than forward-moving.

Everything in this game feels like a mirror: of past glory, of a team that once made intricate worlds, of a franchise that already had its perfect ending. Most of it works. The gameplay, pacing, atmosphere, and exploration all feel like wins. But the story — which I’m usually reluctant to critique in games — feels less like a driver for action and more like a sad stack of matryoshka dolls.

Samus goes to save a planet and finds everyone dead. She and five others teleport to another world where, again, everyone has been destroyed. The narrative then tasks her with finding five keys to return home. Along the way, she reunites with the five characters, who help her assault the next-to-last dungeon, where each appears to sacrifice themselves heroically to save her. They survive, regroup, and even join her for the final battle.

Then, after the villain is defeated, he returns one last time — and the five finally do sacrifice themselves for real.

I don’t mind a heroic death. But the narrative moves from the heroic deaths of the original planet, to the heroic deaths of the lost species, to the feigned deaths of the five, to their actual deaths. The same emotional note is struck again and again, louder each time, but never differently.

The game doesn’t tell a story so much as rehearse one.

Maybe this is accidental. Or maybe it’s a metaphor for Retro itself returning to a franchise that, for them, already ended twenty years ago. MP3 was a clean, definitive ending. What does continuation look like after that? How do you breathe life into something whose emotional arc has already resolved?

Perhaps this is the answer.

In the end, Samus carries a fruit — a seed of knowledge from the lost race — to plant in the near barren soil of another world. It’s an image so on-the-nose it almost hurts. And if you miss the metaphor early on, don’t worry. The game will tell you the same story at least four times before it’s done.

It circles endings. Deaths. Sacrifices. Lost worlds. Seeds.

Like a studio grieving its own past while trying to grow something new from the remains.