Metroid: Samus Returns is FANTASTIC so What's Next for 2D Metroid?

[MTZehvor]

Snoorlax said:

MTZehvor said:

I think to respond effectively we need to take a step back from looking at just Prime's style of storytelling and examine storytelling in games in general. Basically every video game that attempts to tell a somewhat coherent story requires the game to come to a halt; be it through cutscene, speech boxes, or dialogue trees like Fallout or Mass Effect. Gameplay gets brought to a halt regardless with any of these options, and if your concern is that you're slowing down the flow of gameplay, any of these is going to be an issue.

Then you have titles like Samus Returns and Super Metroid, which tell their stories basically entirely through environmental cues. It should be noted that, with one or two exceptions towards the end, the cutscenes in Samus Returns are entirely unrelated to the narrative; they're almost exclusively used to either introduce an enemy that you are about to fight or show that an enemy you were fighting is now dead. The reason Samus Returns can tell its story without cutscenes or basically any text is that it's a pretty simple narrative; Samus is given a mission to kill all the Metroids on SR-388, and the actual in game story basically boils down to "Samus goes ahead and kills all those Metroids." You don't need much in the way of storytelling aids like cutscenes or text boxes to help communicate that. But video games that want to tell a more complex story than that will need those storytelling aids to effectively get their narrative across. Try all you want; you're not going to be able to effectively communicate the plot of, say, Fire Emblem or Fallout simply by "showing." There has to be a degree of telling involved.

The Prime games take what is, in my opinion, a genius approach that almost serves as a compromise between these two methods of storytelling. There is a simple story on the surface of each of the Prime games that the player can follow without scanning any lore or enemies at all; in other words, you don't need to scan to understand what is happening in the main narrative. For Prime 1, it's Samus tracking a distress signal to Tallon IV, and then basically spending the rest of the game looking for Ridley and disrupting Pirate Operations wherever she finds them. For Prime 2, it's Samus trying to help save the Luminoth and destroy the Ing. For Prime 3, it's Samus destroying the Leviathans and ending the threat of Phazon. If you feel so inclined, you can totally avoid scanning and still understand the main narrative of the game without a reading a single bit of lore.

What makes the Prime approach so great, in my opinion, is that for the people who enjoy the reading, there's an entire library's worth of totally optional backstory to be found that can improve your experience with the game. The Prime Trilogy largely manages to accomplish this level of optionality by making the scan logs largely focus on backstory, while the cutscenes that the player encounters throughout the game are the real meat of the narrative. The scan logs help to supplement the game's main narrative of "Samus going to a place and killing things" by providing additional context to the location and the things she is killing, but again, it's optional. If you find it boring, go ahead and skip it. You'll be left with a story that's about as simplistic as you'll find in Samus Returns, and, hey, if that's what you want, more power to you. But for those of us who enjoy the prospect of some more complexity to things, I don't see a good reason to not have it.

In your case, if you enjoy learning about the enemies but find the lore boring, then hey, just stick to scanning the enemies. If the game's backstory isn't interesting to you, then feel free to ignore it. It's not required to enjoy the game. You don't need to stop at all if you don't want to. With the possible exception of understanding why Samus would go into the Impact Core at the end of Prime 1, everything that Samus does in the Prime series is logical and understandable with or without scanning.

I'm also going to disagree with your assessment of Prime 3, because Prime 3 has arguably the most complex lore in the Trilogy, and, at the very least, is certainly far more complex than Prime 2's. There's quite a few twists and turns in the story of the ancient Bryyonian civilization, and the story of Skytown's Elysians is very indepth on its own, to say nothing of the backstory provided by the Pirates on their homeworld. Prime 3's lore may have taken a backseat due to the heavier focus on cutscenes, but it's by no means simplistic.

The good thing about scanning in the Prime games is that it's mostly optional so you can choose to skip all this lore, story and long text if you feel like it like i always did. But if were talking about 2D Metroid scanning has never been the approach of storytelling in these games, neither did cutscenes until Fusion but that's obviously because back in the early 90's story in videogames wasn't as important as it is today especially due to hardware limitations.

If Metroid 5 is going to tell us an interesting story then the show and tell approach would be the best approach much like Metroid Fusion did but with skippable cutscenes and a good balance between tight gameplay and good narrative. 

I won't disagree with the emphasis on show vs. tell, although I'd question your holding up Fusion, by far the most "tell" heavy Metroid game besides Other M, as an example of the concept. With that said, I think it would largely depend on what story they want to tell, and, to reference this back to the original point of the conversation, if it's going to be focus on the rebel Chozo faction, then the game is probably going to require a significant amount of telling to satisfy those of us who are more interested in the series' lore. While official 2D Metroid games have never included scanning before, there's a great example of it how it can be implemented well in AM2R, and while I do prefer SR slightly to AM2R, I think the scans are a major advantage that the fan game has over the official one.

I think the ideal scenario if they choose to pursue that storyline would be a very Prime-esque approach to narrative structure, regardless of whether it's 2D or 3D. Have a game with a relative easy to follow storyline on the surface, with optional ways to sate the curiosity of those who really enjoy the series' lore and want to see it expanded upon. Scanning is the best method I've seen so far of this sort of optional storytelling, but I'd be open to different ideas if I thought they were capable of expounding upon a similar amount of backstory.