What’s Next for Metroid After Prime 4? - NVC 797

This week on Nintendo Voice Chat, we're finally closing the book on Metroid Prime 4. After nearly a decade of coverage, we're going to talk about what worked, what didn't, and some very fascinating behind-the-scenes stories from Nintendo about Prime 4's trouble development. NBC starts right now. you've switched to nintendo voice chat for the week of january 26 2026 i'm your host logan plan joined today just by pear schneider hi pear i'm all alone what happened yeah we were supposed to have brian altano here he had some tech difficulties this morning so it's just the two of us here to deliver our metroid prime 4 beyond spoiler cast this whole show is going to you about Metroid. There's a lot going on right now with Nintendo. I know we have a Tomodachi Life Direct this week, but we had to record on Monday, so we're doing kind of this evergreen episode to wrap up Prime 4. Last year, we had Pear and Brian in here to do a retrospective on the trilogy, so we thought we'd follow it up here with the spoiler cast. This is your full spoiler warning. We're going to talk about everything in Prime 4, so if you're planning to finish Prime 4 and haven't yet, come back when you have this episode. We'll be here waiting for you. And Pear, I want to get started with you because you have not talked about this game on the show yet, so just overall, what you think of metroid prime 4 after such a long wait first of all big shocker that samus is a girl uh i know who who would have guessed who would have guessed no um so i had i had high hopes uh and high expectations for this game and then they were lowered a little bit because of you know some of their their early impressions um were sort of you remember we're a little worried about whether this game was too much of a departure it was too chatty and so forth um I still really liked it. And the only thing I will say is that it was sort of hard to like because when you talked about it in a public forum like on social media, the sort of negative voices would immediately descend on you. I posted some pictures and I said, oh, my God, the art design is amazing. And that thread still gets updates where somebody is like, yeah, but it doesn't have this. Or the Switch 2 is behind the PlayStation 5. It's so odd because if there's one thing you cannot say against this game, it's just gorgeous. It's very, very pretty. I liked it overall. I was surprised to see that it was more like Skyward Sword or Wind Waker and its structure and makeup. Which, you know, there's been a lot of coverage about why that is. And obviously the rise of open world games sort of happened after Metroid Prime 3. and even Metroid Prime 3 was already messing with the formula by having talking NPCs and all that. But I wasn't ready for the backtracking now to be more about exit, jump on your bike, drive to the other corner of the map, and go back in. But once I got going, I did like the setup. I never think that a game can never evolve because if people are don't like this direction change comes with the next game and hopefully there is a next game Skyward Sword was basically taking away the overworld, making it I think one of the least explorable and appealing overworlds the flight mechanics were cool but there wasn't much to look at and then the next we go a couple games later and we get Breath of the Wild, right? And so I am hopeful that there are some learnings from the setup, but I also am not ready to just say I hated the desert. I don't like that setup at all. What I think would have benefited this game is some sort of like once you go, well, there's no reason for me to drive around as much anymore. Instead of adding this sort of contrived, well, you need to drive around to collect the crystals, I wish they had just sped up fast travel in some meaningful fashion because that that metal cannon that shoots you in the capsule. That's just a really cool idea. Right. Like and they could have done more of that. Yeah. And then you do unlock that teleporter chip. But then that chip only works on the Galactic Federation. That part's not on Samus herself, which I know was a big point of contention among many. And there is a thing. So that mech quest, I want to make sure I organize my thoughts because I don't want to come across as nitpicky and not liking a lot of things. There's some really cool things. Maybe we can talk about that after this. But the mech quest is an interesting one because a lot of things in this game are similar to Wind Waker or Skyward Sword where there are these sort of menial tasks that feel like they were designed to extend the playtime but also make you go through the environments again and hopefully find some things you didn't see before. And I do think that happened. And I think that sort of find the missile upgrades and other upgrades quest is incredibly successful in this game. And some of those puzzles, I hope people go back, are really, really strong, right? But I was hoping with a mech quest, I was hoping that you could drag the pieces with your motorbike. And so you actually had a use for your motorbike. Instead, it's just I found the mech pieces early on. You couldn't do anything with it. that's always sort of a negative moment right like when you find an item you can't do anything with it and you're like i know this matters uh and then you sort of have to backtrack to it later and then it becomes a menial task so i didn't think that was a yeah i didn't think that was a very positive experience and then you know sort of the promise of assembling the mech felt a little bit like you were building yourself a drivable mech that would figure in some battle and like you don't get that that payoff for that menial quest you know it is destroyed in a cut scene just moments after you complete assembling it which is disappointing i felt similarly in the mines where there's this tank and there's this turret and you're activating this drill to drive through this wall and it's like instead of doing all that stuff armstrong does it and you just fend off waves of grievers it's like there's a couple points where it's like if you had gone the extra step here this could have been another memorable moment yeah and and to be fair to the designers they probably know all of this right like they may be a design document where they're like okay like in in star wars and now you can drive the ad at right like they they might have written that into their story and then the reality set in of this game already being in development for so long it really needs to come out and and the team needs to move on to something else right uh and so they had to make some tough choices i'm sure to sacrifice some of those design elements but what is there so first of all when i saw the reveal i i thought you know on the marketing front i think nintendo could have handled the reveals and sort of getting people excited for this game a little bit better if there had been a metroid direct and it would have shown us volt for uh what's it called volt forge and and it had shown you sort of the bike being assembled and then it had ended with samus getting on the bike and then that was the end everybody would have been pumped to play this game right like the promise of riding this bike it looks really cool in cut scenes seeing this really strong level i think that would have pumped people up instead it was sort of a cut scene it looked very mechanical with the akira slides you know like it i was i saw that i'm like i'm worried about how this handles and The desert looks empty. And so it sort of creates all these fears that then, you know, when you get to them, you kind of stick with them and you don't excuse them maybe as easily as if you had had those highs of discovery of something cool or looking forward to something cool. I agree. And in the end, I think one of Prime Force strengths, and this is something I know is very important to both of us in games, is that it controls fantastically. This game feels great to play. Even the bike. they nailed how it feels to drive that bike across that desert even if there may not be enough interesting things to do with it it all feels fantastic and the i'm obsessed with the tether morph ball i think that the puzzles and the gameplay they do with that and just slingshotting the morph ball around and then hitting the trigger to latch onto the magnet rail it feels great it feels better in this game than it ever has in metroid prime before yeah everything like game feel is really good in this game like a power slide into crystals you feel it in your controller um the sort of transition from third person elements to first person like you jump off the bike super fast right like or you jump out of the bike just like slides in under sam is ready for her to land on it every time it's super slick the the way you transition between environments and all of that it's just it feels really really good which is why it's frustrating when when you know you're you're sort of yearning for more unique um gameplay elements that ultimately don't come yeah the tether Morph Ball is really cool, but we didn't get this sort of, you know, like we didn't get an advancement of our tools in a meaningful way where something felt truly unique and new. The Zelda games have always been really good at going like, yeah, yeah, we know you like the hookshot. You get that, but look. Here's a second one. This grapple is different. Or you get a second one. That was a weird one. Or you get a vacuum cleaner or something, right? And this game sort of plays it safe. In the end, a lot of the psychic abilities feel like things that we've already done that said they feel great right like when you're when you're grabbing hold of like a node and you move it with your hand like this it feels like there's resistance like the all the actions are really really cool so um game field controls and art design are just awesome in this game and then i will say like the the other thing is the sort of atmosphere of impending doom you know metro prime games always have this done this thing where you see the metroids inside of glass jars and you're like oh they're gonna get out and you're sort of you're dreading the moment when the lights go off you're like oh no it happened right this game sort of builds towards it doesn't always pay off the same way the the older metroid games did but like that atmosphere of being in a you know in an ice station it feels like the movie the thing by john carpenter you know the environment with everything sort of iced over and then it starts dripping and you're like you're like dripping is bad right you know melting is is not good and you get this sort of this really atmospheric feel from exploring the environment that i really really liked and i will say that's true for the first three major stages you know the by the time you get to get to the the mine the mine looks awesome from the outside and like i messed around trying to get into that thing like early on in the game and i always went like can i get in now can i get in now and it's like it it you know it sort of strings you along and then when you finally get down there it feels like a different moment because you have allies fighting on your side but ultimately that level is not as interesting despite a really cool uh concept right like make noise and enemies come after you is a really cool concept if the enemies were more dangerous and could have actually killed you and posed a threat you would want to tiptoe and be silent but it's they're more of an annoyance than an actual danger which is where they missed it that's exactly it right which is that's like one of the coolest moments in aliens right is you can't use your pulse rifles uh because you know there's a generator and so like everybody goes like what and they break that rule obviously and and risk blowing up and this game tries that but then by that time the sort of the relationship with the allies has become really formulaic where they do this sort of oh no you go ahead leave me behind i'll protect you fake out where it's like you constantly the characters sacrifice themselves to for you for the greater good and it just feels like it becomes now a very video gamey element of it happening every time and then when that they're all fine when the sacrifice actually happens it's like me you know i was like i was like okay film me once you know they'll be back in the sequel whatever um so but on to the good stuff like what was your favorite stage logan yeah yeah it's it's voltforge and yeah this is going to be a really fun spoiler cast because nintendo has done a bunch of interviews and kensuke tanabe has done a ton of interviews post-launch that we know a lot about the trouble development this game we're going to talk about that in a little bit right now i do like you mentioned, Per, I want to talk about the stuff we loved. And Volt Forge is the area that just stays in my head from this game. And I think that that one comes from just a sense of relief, I felt, when I got there, because I did the preview in New York. I was not enthused with that preview. Then about a week later, I get the review code, and I wake up really early on Saturday to just plow through this whole game because it's like around Thanksgiving. It's a very, very tight review period. And I blast through the part I did in my preview again, if you're agreeing with Miles, and then I walk into Volt Forge. you lose radio signal and i'm like this is exactly what i wanted from this game and i think there's so many special moments in volt forge one the art direction is just amazing like you you're in this tunnel and it's dim and you shoot a missile at the glass to jump through you go through this morph ball tunnel and you pop out and you see lightning strike the tower in the distance and you see that establishing shot of all three towers and sam is standing there and it's just perfect like that is exactly what i think of metroid prime in my head and there's many special moments in Volt Forge, I think the first one is just when you activate the factory and it comes to life and then you're going back up and there's no way up to get back to the door that you need to leave through. And then you turn into a morph ball and let yourself be like a wheel of the motorcycle and get grabbed by the crane and lift it up to the next level. The whole, I mean, this is a retro style now. We got in Donkey Kong Country, we got the Juice Factory, right? Where it's like, they're so good at taking a level and showing you the process of something right and this one i feel like is is the just the the peak of it where you see the thing that you want being assembled which is very different from like a zelda game where like yeah maybe the monkey shows you the item in the beginning and then you get it in the end but yeah exactly but you don't get that sort of like oh man when is it finally done and then you have this very zelda like activate um you know all three towers kind of a thing like you have this sort of clear progression forward with um with constantly doing something unexpected like you know the elevators work until they don't and they get stuck halfway through and you have to activate them or uh or the sort of did you turn around in that stuck elevator when it was stuck and you see the robot fly up to the window it's great and then there's the polarization the you know the the objects flying to the ceiling and dropping on the ground depending on the charge uh getting rolling out to the towers and then getting back before the electricity gets you like that stage i mean it's like one of my favorite stages in all metroid um and it has this really cool visual design that that reminds me of the the battery farm in the matrix you know like those like dark kind of gritty gritty towers uh i like i like it all i i know a lot of people don't like the the license test being being in there um i think they could have tweaked it a little bit made it more about in order for the vehicle to be certified you have to test it for a couple of things that it takes a you know it takes a person to do that rather than a machine um but i still like that it was just it was a cool tutorial built into this level and it it sold me on the idea that it was like a soup to nuts factory for these uh these motorbikes and then at the end you get a uh get get one um that's ready for the road yeah no that is what i understand and agree with a lot of complaints about this game that The licensing test is not one of them. It is so brief. I agree, this is a hard game to like. It does a lot to get in your way of liking it. But that one was so inoffensive to me. Yeah, I didn't have a problem with that either. The combat on the bike, we're seeing it here. It actually is pretty fun when it works, but the camera isn't strong enough. When you lock onto enemies, it can be really frustrating because they go so fast and go around you. And obviously there a boss battle in the desert which I thought was a really really cool surprise to have something very different mechanically going on in the desert that because of the combat setup is not as good as it could have been But yeah, overall, I actually didn't have that much of an issue with the desert other than sort of stretching the gameplay with the crystals. Now, people had warned you, people being Logan, had warned me that I needed to collect a ton of these crystals. And so when I was exploring, I explored the map and I chased down as many crystals as I could, tried to get into the different sort of mini dungeons. And so I never had this point where I felt like I had to grind to get the crystals, which made the experience a little bit more coherent. That said, I wish, you know, Miles was located very deep inside a level, right? And from a sort of quality of life perspective, when you know what you have to do, which is literally, oh, I got this chip. I have to take it to mild, making you then drive from one end of the map to the other, going through a level, defeating all the enemies. And granted, you don't have to beat every enemy to open the door, so it doesn't slow you down that much. But you just have to do a lot of walking and get past familiar things. and there weren't that many things on the path that were new once you have a lot of powers to find. I always wish that there was a ramshackle kind of fortress in the middle of the map that our friends hang out in. And like whenever you get a chip, you just have a short way to drive. You knock on the door, they let you in, and then you upgrade. There's that save station underground in the desert right in front of Chrono Tower. That could have and maybe should have been base camp. And I agree. I got to be honest, that one totally passed me by as a complaint during the review. And I think it's a period of I played this entire game in one and a half days. And so I'm just like processing the level I just did. And I'm just kind of driving back to miles. And then for me, as someone who 100% is Metroid games, like, oh, and I know when I get the fire, there's that little temple right next to it that has the three rooms, the ice room, the fire room and the thunder room that eventually unlocks you an energy tank. I know there's the psychic platforms behind the teleporter that you can jump on to get a missile tank. I know there's that little contraption in the middle of that one room right by base camp. You need to electrify both ends. It pops open. There's a shot expansion. There's little tiny things in Fury Green you get going back. But I agree. It is total padding and probably should have been placed somewhere better. And then they do this thing, you know, the chips. They clearly wanted the game to not be so formulaic, right? Like a Zelda game always gives you an item for defeating the boss, and then you use that item to get out of the dungeon. And then you use it probably for the next dungeon to open it, right? And they try to break out from that by, you know, putting one of the chips outside a dungeon instead of making it the reward for being inside. So I appreciated that. That creates a little bit of friction. you know when when video games uh are video gamey and you know what to expect you sort of like you know what to do whereas like in a game like this you sometimes go i don't know where to go and so then they have to fix that by having somebody call you on the radio and go like did you try to go here right like which then becomes a little bit more contrived and not as organic as when something is sort of like repeats uh an established mechanical thing but like in the end like i none of that bothered me i thought the experience throughout was strong enough i think um the the the art design was such a joy it was the game is such a joy to look at and samus is such a badass throughout um that that i really liked and then i think um the the thing that many players may overlook is the end game of collecting all your upgrades is excellent because there's even a boss that's completely optional right there are these you need it for a mech part so that is the main oh that's right that's okay yeah i forgot about that but like there's there are all these sort of areas that when i was doing my um not yet end game exploration i'm like oh i have this new weapon let me go back into vault forge and see if i can use it there and the answer was always yes there was always the new layer of something that you could open you could sort of guess it from looking at the map and where the doors are that you hadn't opened yet and um and all of those all of those little extra puzzles were really fun you know when you first get to the vault forge there's that super tall sort of tubular tower with a half pipe and you're like oh i get it as somebody who played metroid before i know i get a boost ball to go up there I think some people probably tried for 20 minutes to figure out how to get up there and couldn't. The game could be a little nicer and just that's the moment somebody should call you on the phone and say, you can't do that here. No, let them figure it out. That's part of the special part, because then when you do have the boost ball, you'll remember it. That's Metroid to me. It's great. And I agree. We talked about this a lot when we were playing this pair. I think that the item cleanup is one of my favorite parts of the game. I think that going back for 100% before you go to fight Silex at the end is just a joy, and nobody ever talks to you, and none of the Federation troopers are ever with you. So it is just classic Metroid item cleanup. And when you go back in with every item you have, and you're just methodically combing through one room at a time, and the Scout Bots, which was a new addition in this game, where you can get little markers on your map for every item and then just go solve the puzzle and go to the next one. I thought it led to some really fun and memorable stuff like the in the mines. There's the one where you need to rotate the tubes that you need to morph ball in. And there's four different panels that rotate them in different patterns, just really solid Metroid stuff that is a total highlight to get to 100 percent. Yeah. And ultimately, that's the sort of stuff that stuck with me. You know, while online the sort of, you know, the complaints were all about the sort of desert stretching out, which, again, is it's a valid complaint. if you sort of ignore the crystals um early on and then suddenly you're stuck with this jar that just doesn't seem to fill uh and the other stuff was all about the you need the amoeba to unlock the music uh with lots of that was a crazy controversy that was ridiculous how big that got in the end i turned on the music for exploration once or twice but it's like it's sort of not loud enough and impactful enough to even matter and like i just stopped doing it it really isn't a big deal so for people who think they're they were missing out you're not really missing out it's such a such a minor thing it doesn't really change it it's not like the radio station in a grand theft auto that makes it feel like you're driving in a car it's just sort of it's just sort of there and i think the desert sounds are actually eerie and cool um and then the sort of the online discourse went you know when you say it's not that big of a deal people get mad at you for two way for two reasons like yes it is a big deal and and how dare you not disclose that you can earn this ability which is complete fake news it's like you cannot you can't you have to use the amiibo but like i hate having to say that because it feels like it's such an important feature to me that i need to set the set the record straight but no it was an amiibo exclusive feature probably a bad idea to make that the amiibo exclusive feature because you could have had different colors for the bikes and all of that and be done with it um as as the sole perk um but uh but but you know just sort of an example of how things get weaponized online and then these sort of the the negativity circulates and renews itself with people fighting over whether it matters or not when the real discussion should have been about how how cool it was to be in this world again like i really enjoyed going back in i had a good time with this game is it as good as metroid prime one no i haven't played two and three recently enough to make the comparison i'm looking forward to hopefully getting a remaster i don't think it's as good as those either yeah i think it is the worst one but i i gave it an eight out of ten and i stand by that score a couple months later i think prime two and three and one two and three are all nine out of ten or above and this is an eight out of ten so it is noticeably worse than them but that doesn't mean it's not a great game And I think that a lot of people got very upset comparing Prime 4 to what it was in their heads, which is okay. There's nothing wrong with doing that. Like, Prime 4's, its map is very linear. It is a lot of hallways, and there's not many branching choices, which is what a lot of people want from Metroid. To me, Prime specifically, I think of as a series about rooms and things that happen in rooms that I remember. Yeah. And doing these puzzles to manipulate something and move some contraption. And there's plenty of that in this game that works very well. Yeah, and I will say the ability we're seeing here, the beam, right? The psychic beam. In the end, it's a little underdeveloped. We've seen this in games like Twilight Princess before, where you get a killer ability and then you feel at the end of the game it wasn't used enough. There are times, though, where you're in combat and there's an enemy who shields himself from the front and is really hard to hit. And you use this beam and fly around and hit them in the back and they become vulnerable, right? Like there are these moments where if you optionally use these abilities, they all have some sort of key use. And I thought that was really, really clever. Now, it slows down the action a bit because this is like the beetle in Zelda. But like it does make for some really memorable moments where you solve something in a different way, maybe from other players or how you've done it before. I did want to bring up that, the control beam, because it, one, is part of one of my favorite parts of the game, which we'll talk about in a second. But two, these interviews from producer Ken Skaitanabe, who's worked at Nintendo for 40 years. He's been a producer on every Metroid Prime game from the beginning and was the creative lead on Nintendo's side of Prime 4. He did an interview with Nintendo Dream in Japan and Famitsu also in Japan. And ShineSparker, the Metroid fan site, translated these. And I read through the whole interviews. and he talks about the control beam and says that in prototyping this was the main gameplay hook that they came up with and then when it went on to retro studios they said we have this psychic ability please come up with the rest and then retro was like um okay psychic bomb psychic spider ball this wasn't their idea they were handed this idea and then just kind of made all of samus's pre-existing abilities psychic which you can see that like you can totally that's what we kind of thought had happened i look i wish you could have like you know mind screwed with an enemy and turned them to your side or something that was a little bit less weapon like right like sammons has amazing weapons and abilities and a motorbike and so it's a little difficult to make destroying something with your hand as exciting as firing a giant rocket at it right and uh yeah and yeah so invisible morph ball tracks really uh really wasn't as it wasn't as killer as i think they they they hoped it would be in the end but i do like some of the sort of sonic the hedgehog or like rube goldberg moments of triggering triggering some mechanism you didn't know was there and like being shot across the entire area on some invisible track it it was it was cool stuff it had some some really neat moments there too but yeah i yeah like in the mines when you are crossing the giant chasm in the bridge and you are more falling from one side to the other and the federation troopers are like oh my god be careful samus i actually thought that worked well that was really good yeah but but i do wish like this sort of psychic ability and maybe this is more more controlling machines but being able to maybe control creatures and units like guys geist style another old game cube game But like doing something like that because you're using mental capabilities with something. And so moving a glowing ball is, you know, you can move a glowing ball with your gun is maybe not as unique. Yeah. Or like Star Wars, the Jedi games do a lot with force powers and those games take a lot from Metroid Prime. They could have borrowed back here. That's right. And those ultimately that those games were more successful in bringing those force powers to life. life yeah i do like i mean the different types of shots like you can use them as you would expect against certain enemies where you know fire is strong against cold enemies and um you can stun enemies uh all of that everything like mechanically is just really really good and it just feels natural to explore this universe um they are yeah they it's just you know we're seeing the overworld tier again i wish there were a couple more surprises along the the big boss battle and i think that's where it feels most like wind waker to me i love wind waker i think it's such a good game but when you play it you feel like there's one dungeon missing right it's like and they they already shrunk some island dungeons um you know like uh the sort of the ice water and the fire dungeon are mini dungeons and that one that remind me of the small dungeons in this game but like when you get to the sort of the final stuff Wind Waker nails it whereas like this game I was expecting to now have all these powers and the final dungeon becomes the one where you get to use them all right like it's a now you're super powerful and there's an ice door and then there's a lightning door and contraption and you get to the last temple and it's basically just uh sort of a conveyor belt to the ending at that point you know yeah yeah because you told me i'm excited to finish it i have one dungeon left and i was like yeah you're like get your hopes up too much i'm like is the last dungeon as good as the first one you're like there is no dungeon there's nothing yeah uh let's maybe we should talk about the ending but i did want to touch on that control b moment that i i mentioned just a couple minutes ago and that is in the boss fight in lava pool where you're fighting this giant reptile who's like slithering through the lava and you do it on your bike first when the bike can ride over the lava which i think is really well done actually and then it turns into kind of this on foot section where the boss is in front of you you're standing on a part of its body and you kill it and you bring it down and it's not dead and you're waiting for it to die and you scan it and it's like oh it's still alive it can only be damaged like in the back of its throat and i'm like i'm like wait what do i do and then right as i make the connection i need to control beam and guide it through this body it wakes back up and i'm like oh crap and i have to kill it again and then that is such a fantastic moment same thing happened to me and this is where my zelda knowledge got in the way i thought i had to jubble jubble this this sucker you know i thought oh you have to morph fall into it and like how do i get there and then yeah it woke up on me again that's that's really funny. But the boss battles in general were really cool. You know, like going, like chasing something on the lava. Like it mixes up the battles in many different ways where I felt like they were pretty fresh and unique. And obviously Metroid Prime has its series of memorable boss battles anyway. And each enemy just looks really cool. And then, yeah, there's your only mention of Metroids in a metroid game is uh this guy having fake metroid boobs yeah they they all do they all have one like all the bosses have their weak spot is a metroid but it's still very very weak no that's right but isn't this the only one where you see them fly in um yeah i think so yeah yeah yeah they're not really in this game i i thought you know that you know metroids were going to factor in the endgame in some fashion that, you know, they're obviously present in some form. And I thought they would be a new hybrid or they would start to take flight and be a pain in the butt. But like that, that was the other thing. It's sort of I'm not disappointed by the game I played. I'm disappointed by the sort of things that I was expecting where like this, this storytelling here shows me these enemies I fought in, you know more than half a dozen games and like then you don't actually never you don't get to fight them and the sort of inclusion feels like kludgy too you know yeah the the enemy variety could have used some space pirates also being transported to bureaus because it a lot of grievers and a lot of robots and it would have been nice to have one more type of species or something yeah in there yeah but i think the boss design overall is really strong though i think that there's some really good fights in here i like the silix battle in volt forge when you return there and he electrifies the floor so you use your grapple to hook onto the wall and wait for the floor to be safe again like there's just very very metroid prime very 3d zelda These are classic boss fights from that GameCube Wii era of games that don't always exist anymore. So many bosses these days take inspiration from how Souls or other action RPGs do things. I really enjoyed returning to this style of boss where it's a puzzle, and you need to figure out exactly what to do, expose that weak point, and beat it. Yeah, it's this sort of Star Fox shoot the blinking lights boss puzzle. And then the attacks basically usually, you know, apply to your current abilities, right? And usually use a new ability in some clever fashion here. You know, like you do your jump or you roll under a barrier being thrown at you. And there's some really cool examples later where you get to use, obviously, the grapple and other abilities. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's talk about the ending, which is another controversial part of this game. And I want to first hear from Mr. Tanabe, who talked about the ending in one of these interviews that we're citing and said, I actually don't play that many video games. I instead watch a lot of films. I majored in film production in college. Therefore, when designing a game, I rarely analyze or study other games. And rather than thinking solely about the game systems, I place the emphasis on creating as many wow moments as I can and defining the theme I want to express through that game, all from the angle of how can I create emotional ups and downs for the player. In fact, this entire game was designed starting from said theme, and that theme is, with Metroid Prime 4 Beyond, I wanted to try to make a game where at the very end, pressing the A button usually means finishing it, the player would instead hesitate and feel conflicted. I really wanted to leave the player confused, going, what? This is how it ends? As the credits roll and leave a long-lasting memory. I'm expecting some negative reactions, but I've always found films that leave you with a lingering feeling in your heart are more memorable than films with a happy ending. So I challenged myself to do that in this game. I conceived the final scene first and designed the game's overall structure around that created the Federation troopers who would fight alongside Samus and plan the gameplay. So as you progress, the bonds would deepen so that the whole game was conceived pair around the teleporter scene at the end where Sam is leaves everybody behind and presses. you have to press a to do it yourself to finish the game and warp away from bureaus and i found that shocking to learn that this was the entire conceit of the game because it did not feel like that to me when i played it it doesn't nail that that point right like the game doesn't really have a halo reach moment at least i didn't feel it um and or you know like if you think of marvel movies the the snap right where these characters that you've learned to like are fading away and you don't know what their fate is like that was powerful in the marvel movies even though you had an inkling that they would return and like they wouldn't get rid of the cash cows here i felt like i felt like the game had told you so many times that these characters are potentially disposable that i was like i didn't really take it that seriously and i also i feel like when things get really esoteric and glowy and like like space travel and warps and like uh mental powers are involved. I'm like, I don't know that what I'm doing here is actually final. Is an explosion an explosion or is it Kirk trapped in some freaking other world, like in Star Trek, and he can be rescued? It didn't quite work. And I feel like the universe's rules are just not clear enough to pull this off without a little bit more writing and exposition. And it's the same with Silex, right? Like if they had shown Silex was working for the Federation and they used him and then they kind of royally screwed him. And there's this heartbreaking moment where he realizes, you know, like he's completely disposable and then he has a grudge. Like you could have told that story in a meaningful way to make it all make sense. It's like it just isn't in there. this game feels like it was concerned with its mechanics and its exploration and its world and its and combat and puzzles and it succeeds on all of that and the storyline is sort of incidental and not like i didn't i didn't feel anything other than awe at beautiful environments right i didn't feel much um that said like the the characters actually didn't annoy me the NPCs, the supporting cast. And I like the sort of the fangirl aspect and all of that. That stuff was fine. Yeah, I actually thought they were tolerable. I think is the word I used in my review. It's still how I feel. They didn't ruin anything for me. I didn't think they were the best, which is why I think this ending doesn't fully land. And I'm very torn on this ending. And I mean, congrats to Mr. Tanabe because it worked. I sat there being one of the only people with a code to this game saying, seriously, that's how this game ends there's there's got to be something else i replayed the whole thing i waited i didn't press the a button the teleporter explodes and you have to redo the last phase of the boss fight the one-on-one in outer space like seriously and then i'm like emailing my reps at nintendo and being like hey it's two days to embargo we don't have time to play the whole thing again just want to know can you tell us if anything else happens and they're like yeah we can't tell you anything and yeah so it was it was crazy and and like talking to brendan like did you beat it on hard mode he went and got all the scans and you unlock this cut scene of the full version of silex's beef with samus and the galactic federation that basically just explains he holds this grudge because samus upstaged him and became the star of this battle that he was leading this troop of and that's kind of it's super trite i mean the and first of all yeah to unlock the hard ending to understand the main baddies entire sort of conflict is a bad choice. You know, we want that. We either want to understand what he's doing from the get-go, or you want that sort of twist and reveal at the end, but then it has to be meaningful. And it can't be, oh, Sam is upstage me, right? And that was my impression of playing this game was, I'm not quite sure what's at stake. I don't understand who we're fighting or what's going on and like it just wasn't that clear to me now granted you can read more of the scans and maybe discover more that way but just sort of organically it wasn't as clear as the old sort of samus crash landed and you need to get out story which was just super clean um and um yeah i i i think that could have they could have gone back to the drawing board like Silex sending you fake clones of Silex is such a freaking freaking Ocarina of Time sort of copy. I know it's Phantom Ganon. It's like, okay, we've done Phantom Ganon. We've done Phantom Ganon in Wind Waker. Just like, just be Metroid, just be Metroid, you know? Yeah. Um, I agree. I think that the Silex part of the story is very weak and it is a place to me that shows this game was in development somewhere else. These ideas were generated at Nintendo retro was handed them and told them to complete them. And there is a quote in these interviews about that, that Nintendo set the stage, the direction, the design, and handed it to Retro and said, here, now flesh it out. And you can tell they're not interested in telling a story about Silux. And if you think about Silux, he's not their character. He never has been. Even if it's not the same people at Retro, that company has – Silux was introduced in Metroid Prime Hunters, which was not made at Retro Studios, the DS spinoff. And then he was teased more in Federation Force, which was made by Next Level Games. So Retro's never had anything to do with this guy, and now they're tasked with completing this story, and they're clearly more interested in telling the story about the Lamorne, which I'm also torn on because I actually think it's interesting at times, and the reveal in Ice Belt that these Grievers you're fighting are the Lamorne, that's nice, that's good. But then the fact that it's please preserve our civilization and that amounts to crashing into green crystals for a couple hours. Like, oh, that that doesn't tie it together for me. It's not as exciting as maybe even finding the scans. I complain about that in Prime 1, but please find all our lore tablets and take that info with you. It's so meaningless. The green crystal thing for the memory fruit. No. And like, look, in the end, mechanically, it would be the same. but if you destroyed radioactive crystals and it brought something back to life because they're gone, that sort of progression is more meaningful than crashing through them over and over and some meter filling. And then in order to get any sort of payback, you have to, again, make your trip back to the place you've been to 15 times. There are these things that just don't work. What is really interesting about this game, though, is I would love to know more reactions from people for whom this is their first Metroid Prime or even their first Metroid game. Because my disappointment with Silex is comparative too in that we had Dark Samus who became this really menacing character who's like following you. And so when you can finally take her down, it's a meaningful moment. Whereas this is sort of the absentee bad guy who sends you clones or these robots. And, like, it's just none of it feels as meaningful. And I think people without that sort of context of Dark Samus, which, by the way, the Resident Evil games have sort of done this many, many times now where you have an unkillable or a stalking character coming after you. It's, yeah, I really want to hear what new players think without that sort of context. and maybe to them this sort of bad guy battle is really, really cool. Yeah, I agree. It would be interesting to know a first-time Metroid player. This game was clearly designed with first-time Metroid players in mind. They have said as much about this game because it has been so long since a numbered Prime entry. And with that, I think we should get into some more quotes from these interviews that are really interesting. But first, I do want to remind you that you can save the Starfall Islands with Sonic the Hedgehog or dive into classic Tomb Raider with the remastered Tomb Raider collection. Head over to Humble. Right now, you can get Humble Choice for just $14.99 and score a curated bundle of PC games for January, including Sonic Frontiers, Tomb Raider 4 through 6 Remastered, Hunt Showdown 1896, Etrian Odyssey 2 HD, Nice Day for Fishing, Metal Slug Tactics, Settlement Survival, and Wizard of Legend 2. This month's choice is available through February 3rd, so head to HumbleBundle.com and start playing today. Metroid Prime 4's development was as messy as we suspected. suspected there was a lot of talk ahead of time about this feels like multiple games glued together and retro is clearly handled some handed something unfinished and told to pick up the pieces and they did so and we have lots of info from these interviews and one that i think is interesting to kick it off is that tanabe called metroid or a spokesperson from nintendo this wasn't named in this interview i think it was tanabe though said that metroid prime 4 is pretty much divorced from the changing of times and we talked about this a little bit at the top pair that this game enter development post Breath of the Wild. And yes, they were directly inspired it as pretty much every Nintendo game right now seemingly is. We heard the same about Mario Kart World. So many games right now coming out have been inspired by Breath of the Wild. And Tanabe basically said, after Breath of the Wild came out, we got a lot of requests to make Metroid an open world game. We saw fans talking about that, but that doesn't work for Metroid because it's about unlocking the world. So we thought, how about this wide open hub in the middle that you can freely traverse and discover new secrets and unlock new things so this was directly inspired by breath of the wild that's how they came up with soul valley and the desert and the bikes you could get across this area faster it was all directly pulled from this wish to make metroid more similar to an open world game and you can obviously see that with the shrines that are peppered around peppered there's six of them that are sprinkled lightly throughout the desert that this was so obviously inspired by Zelda. And this is where they made their crucial mistake, right? Like Breath of the Wild, no matter which direction you go in the world, you can do things. It gets harder when you go up a mountain without wearing a thick jacket or something, but you can do it. And there's obviously this sort of, you know, this intro area to let you play around with the systems. Metroid Prime 4 doesn't do that. You can spend, and the distances are not so huge that it is the biggest issue, but you can wander from one corner of the map to the other and find a locked door and be told you can't do that yet or have to figure it out yourself. And then you have to go somewhere else to do it. Which they kind of set you up for in Prime 4. Like, go to any of these three areas. But no, there's only one right answer, which just feels a little bit rude when it happens that way. And so the open world just isn't an open world when the doors are locked, right? And I think that was one of the key mistakes that I think maybe the Bandai team did this and then Retro didn't correct it. But maybe you should have been able to do any of the missions except for the mine, obviously, because the support characters figure differently in that one. But they should have let you open any of the levels and do them first. now in Ocarina of Time you can go really far in the game without getting Epona you don't ever need Epona you can beat it without Epona so in this game they sort of make you get the motorbike because they know it's otherwise a pain in the ass to get around but maybe they could have hinted that maybe you should have gone there first but let you explore any of the other dungeons first and that way it would have felt a little bit more like you were in control and you weren't just going from locked dungeon to locked dungeon until one of them was open and sort of just be forced to drive or run around. Again, we're talking about the issues and the limitations and it bums me out a little bit because they are the result of maybe the game's troubled development history and art and level designs were created and then in order to get this game out on time, they kind of stuck to their guns on some of that that stuff because at its core though the presence of an open world didn't need to be such a limiting factor like they were you know like when fortnite blew up everybody was working on a battle royale or when like overwatch had all the success companies started hero shooters and like by the time those games are done after like three or four years sometimes the wheel of time has turned and gamers have moved on to other genres and like or maybe they're already too many of the genre game and they're not that interesting. And I don't think that's the case with open world. The biggest game of the decade will be an open world game releasing in November this year, Crossing Fingers with Grand Theft Auto, right? And so I don't think it's a matter of, oh, we bet on the wrong horse and everybody's tired of open worlds because you could have made it even more of an open zone setup. You know, like the Uncharted games have like smaller hubs where, you know, you traverse with a boat to get between different places. It didn't have to be that annoying if you didn't constantly send people through it if there had been some sort of way to do a shortcut, right? Yeah, it's trying to be open world, but it's still trying to be Metroid, and it lands somewhere in the middle. And what you just said about Fortnite and players' taste change is exactly what Nintendo said, basically, that this game took way longer than we thought it was going to finish. And impressions of open world games had completely changed, but it was too late. We weren't going to restart because we were already in too deep, So they moved forward with the original vision, and this is the result. And it's a really fascinating game, clearly inspired at a specific point in time that struggled along the way, but managed to still come out pretty solid because of Retro's talent in the art department and gameplay department. I think what's inherent in this project is Nintendo and Retro not wanting to disappoint their fans. And it reels its head in two ways. One is we don't want people to think this game is not worth the amount of money they're paying for. And so it has to be a certain length, right? Like oh 20 hours or bust And the reality is people can beat Super Metroid in you know like an hour or something or under an hour and they don feel cheated because you know in order to explore everything in that game like in the case of super metroid it's under 10 hours but like there there was enough in metroid prime that even if it didn't force you to collect all the crystals or traverse the desert multiple times to get back to inside a level to get a chip installed in your arm like The game would still be long and meaty enough, I think, but I think they were a little bit misguided by making sure that the audience understood, oh, no, there's so much. This game is long enough. And then the second thing where this rears its head is silent Samus, right? The audience, Nintendo fans are always so vocal on Link not speaking and Samus not speaking. And everybody was pissed with Team Ninja Samus just yapping away, right? that I think Nintendo sort of over-indexed on the, oh, let's make sure she doesn't say a word in this one, right? And, like, they sort of killed the cut scenes. They insisted on having conversations, but then Sam is not responding, and that was another one of those sort of misguided decisions where somebody should have said no. You know, she needs to give, like, a one-word answer. Like a Master Chief. Like, there is nothing wrong with if she was soft-spoken, soft spoke or like didn't speak much but spoke when it was needed she even does that in dread she speaks in chozo and it's amazing and they didn't do it here yeah it's a terminator too i mean the terminator has a goofy ass accent it's austrian it's not german uh and and you know and so uh if if arnie talked too much the character would not be as impactful or as scary and so they wisely had him just say a couple of iconic lines in the in the first one and then obviously expand in the second one. And Sam should be this way where it's like, yeah, if she had just good, well written, one-liner reactions it would have felt more natural instead of taking you out of the game. But again, I think it all comes from them wanting to do right by their fan base. And like in the end, I hope it's a learning experience. The other thing that I feel like maybe the first person perspective has stayed its welcome because i i understand that they wanted the first metroid prime game to be different and then you know team ninja's game didn't exactly nail third person gameplay but we've had so many awesome third person games that work just fine i think maybe since the original trilogy exists this could have been the starting point of making a third-person metroid um and it probably would have felt differently you're already in third person for morph ball and motorbikes and all of that they could have they could have nailed platforming and and shooting in third person as well so that's what i mean there's sort of things where they felt stuck not just by virtue of the design being done by namco before and it being handed off and they needed to save time it's sort of you know they're beholden to what came before and they didn't want to depart too far from it yeah totally and another interesting note is that this project started as a request from nintendo of america so nintendo asked ncl in japan we need to make a new mainline numbered entry in the metroid prime series and that is how this ball got rolling in like 2016 so that's back when when reggie was still in charge at noa and And that's when the request came through and it took nearly a decade for it to come to fruition. And another interesting note is that Retro was also in part of these interviews and they talked about the linear structure of the game. And they said that they wanted to motivate the player through a familiar narrative structure. While there are still opportunities to backtrack and explore when you first visit an area, the game structure is not as intricately woven as the original Metroid Prime. But if the player returns to these zones later in the game, they can have new experiences and make small discoveries with new abilities. This is meant to reward players with curiosity, players who want more freedom to explore or wonder what could be happening there now that the main plot is over. And Pair, that's exactly what we highlighted that they nailed and did really well in this game. Yeah, to those listening to this who finished the game but didn't 100% the items, go back and do it. There's one thing is a little odd where if you get the ability to see where the items are, you get a marker in the desert and you go there and there's nothing there and it's tied to... Such a pain. It's sort of like, that's something that i think they probably wanted to fix before release as well it's sort of misleading but that's like the only one that that doesn't land everything else every hidden item is just a joy to uncover and like you'll find new things you just didn't know were there they're great puzzles um it's really good whereas the the sort of the quest for 100 scans is is punitive and not awesome it's you know one boss has three different phases you can scan if you miss one of them you know you're already screwed for the rest of the game it's over and the only way to get it is to is to go back obviously um so uh the scan quest is not fun and like and that's why i hope maybe future metroid games take a cue from that um they may again misguided thinking they may think some fans really like this sort of missable moment stuff but like what if everything that was important had just a little digital overlay like little red dot lines when you first see them and it goes not scanned yet or something like that to give you a hint without annoying you and it would also prevent what i call the detective vision conundrum which is batman arkham asylum is gorgeous but most people play the entire game in black and white because they don't want to miss anything in detective vision and like you can solve that by having some simple overlays that are present when you're in regular vision as well yeah no i agree i really recommend going back and getting everything it's just really cool it's like oh i can boost ball from one tower to the other i don't need to climb all the way back up and go down to the next one it's just they have smart shortcuts in there that are really fun to discover and then i guess you're already touching on it a little bit but with the time we have left pair let's talk about what's next for metroid or metroid prime 3d metroid the series in general i think it's really interesting because this as we mentioned is tanabe's final game and nintendo he is 65 and this is the final game he will have worked on They are passing it on to Tabata-san, who has been working under Tanabe for decades on the Metroid Prime series as well. Tanabe conceived Prime 4 as the start of the Silex saga. It was meant to end on a cliffhanger, and this threat was meant to be looming that Samus will return to again in a future game. That may never happen. Per, where do you think Metroid goes from here? Silex is super boring. Yeah, I don't care about him at all. You know, our friend Marshall listens to every one of these episodes, I think is a big fan. To me, Silex never resonated with me. If you love this character, more power to you. I just think it's time for a new threat. It's a little bit like, it is like the MCU, right? Where once Thanos is gone, there are all these villains and none of them really stick with you. And I think Nintendo needs time to build up a new one. If it's not the threat of the Metroids and whatever abomination they create by binding with something else, and it's not a corrupted Samus, we need something new and memorable whose sort of motivation and threat and danger we understand. so I would hope that they can build Silex in as an entry boss and wrap it up but for the story to center around that character I don't think he's been established well enough and he's just not awesome enough give me something with creepier powers or abilities than Silex and then yeah I would love this Metroid Prime 4 almost felt like it was the fourth game in the series. It did not feel to me like the start of a new trilogy. It felt very much rooted in the games we've already played. Just like Metroid Dread sort of followed what was before and created the Dark Samus moment with other enemy characters, this felt like a stepping stone. I would love to see something new. And that's why ultimately we have amazing 3d art and 3d artists they've shown how good they can be with third person action with the bike and with the morph ball i feel like it's time to see samus and her suit in action and maybe unlocks unlock some new abilities that are only possible in the third person because you see where the enemies are with in relation to your character rather than seeing everything through the first person yeah i agree with you i think that i want third person to be the way forward for this branch of the metroid series i mean i want mercury steam to make metroid six and make a follow-up to metroid dread and leave that alone but in terms of 3d third person it's time and this is kind of a weird comparison but i played ghost of yote last year on playstation 5 and the way that game handles bounties and weapon discovery and saying there's a new weapon here you can go and complete this quest line and get it if you want and it might help you with some of these bounties or some of these other quests how cool would that be for metroid and just to see kind of an open world setup but still not fully open world maybe in this case but here's these bosses you're actually a bounty hunter here's craig here's ridley this is where they are these are the temples they reside in you can try to go now or you can go and get the grapple beam and then this dungeon becomes way easier and you can find more in it i think that would still feel like metroid but be more widely appealing and leave more of the classic metroidvania elements to dread and the dread sequel which has always worked better in 2d to me which is why it never bothered me that prime four is not as much of a metroidvania as the 2d ones it's because i don't think it works as well in 3d yeah and there are other limitations in uh in the first person perspective that you know require a solution like i i played i played almost a hundred hours of Assassin's Creed Shadows. I thought it was a really good game. I hear that the Switch 2 version is really good. So if you haven't played it yet, Nintendo voice chat listeners, give it a shot. It's a really lovely game. But what it does have is a lot of open exploration, a lot of parkour, a lot of samurai beheading characters, like cool combat. And then it has some puzzle dungeon exploration. And when you're playing those with Yasuke, who is a tank character, he's in your field of vision. It's really difficult to explore these narrow, dark corridors with this big character, and that could be an issue with a Metroid game unless you design the dungeons around it or you design her abilities around it. When Samus rolls around as a ball in tight corridors, it's perfect. It's so well done. And if she was full-size with her cannons blazing and everything, it might be harder to see the enemies and the environment, but maybe instead of a Morph Ball or in addition to a Morph Ball, she's got a tank mode where she compacts and, like, she sort of becomes lower and crawls and she can do sort of has limited abilities, can't jump and all of that stuff to allow you to explore these dungeons and tight corridors in a third person, which, you know, works so freaking well in first person here. Or, you know, maybe whenever you're in a tight dungeon, it does the thing like some third-person games do, like Splinter Cell, where the character sort of goes behind, like it's a little over-the-shoulder view, like Gears of War style, or they become transparent. Anyway, I think there are solutions to it, and I think Nintendo was early on scared of doing Metroid in third-person, in 3D, with this sort of exploration corridor game, and other companies have found solutions for it. I hope they're courageous and take that step and give us a new experience so that we don't just play the next Metroid Prime game and compare it to one of the best games ever created, Metroid Prime 1, right? And that's sort of an unfair bar to meet because the world of video games has evolved and moved on since then. And other games obviously have arrived on the scene that are fantastic. Yeah, no, totally agree. I want Metroid to continue. I want it to go new places. I think that I really like Prime 4. I'm glad it made it through hell and back to come out and exist in a competent form. I think that's very impressive. It sounds amazing. We haven't talked about the soundtrack. It's so good. It is so fantastic in this game. Like, there's lots to love here. At the same time, I don't want Prime 5 to just be the same thing again. Like, I want, I think it is time to reinvent this. And don't, Breath of the Wild's not the only way to reinvent something. There's more ways to do it. I know. I think, you know, like when Breath of the Wild came out, I'm like, oh, here it goes. Every game now lets you climb everything. And like, yes, a small fence that you can't jump over is dumb in a video game. But, you know, when there's a cliffside without any holes in it, like I understand that I might not be able to scale that. And so games can have organic environments with limitations. again like I yeah I hope we can do something slightly different and we don't just continue the threat of Metroid Prime the other thing that I read a lot about Logan I don't know if you saw it as well like people were really upset that when Samus fires a beam through a hallway it doesn't light up the hallway yeah right which was something that was it wasn't it was faked but it was done in the original Metroid Prime on GameCube and then was omitted from the remaster and it's like our experience is not tarnished by what the game looks like. Our experience is tarnished by a comparison to what we remember it to be like. It's really funny in Metroid Prime 4, if you shoot a beam down a hallway, you actually see it light up the hallway when it's farther away from the camera. So they either did it to not be distracting or to keep the frame rate high, but it does have real-time lighting effects like that. And so instead of it being a, ooh, that's cool moment, it becomes a limitation and a disappointment for returning players. So that's what I'm saying. Let's just do something different. Give us something new so we don't have that comparison anymore. Yeah, no more green crystals. Don't do it again, guys. Yeah, they surely know that, though. No game except for Superman should have green crystals in it anymore, ever. Yeah, and Donkey Kong did it, too, with its DLC, and Pokemon Legends EA had crystals to smash. Like, four Nintendo games last year made us smash crystals. It was very bizarre. This is really interesting because, like, in the early days of Nintendo, we always like rare we like certain things happen like you collect a star and then a rare game comes out and you collect a puzzle piece and then another one comes out and you collect moons right like nintendo goes through these waves where they're sort of the teams inspire each other and and their similarities between the mario zelda kirby metroid games uh and you know just generally in gaming we go through these phases where if one game is successful others sort of borrow from it but the crystals are not something that should persist please no more crystals well Per I know you have a meeting to get to so we'll call it there that is another episode of Nintendo Voice Chat oh you gotta go is it time or do we have more time I could spend another 10 minutes max yeah we can call it there I don't have much more to say we can wrap it up that is another episode of NVC we're here every Friday with audio on your favorite podcast app and a video on Spotify or the IGN Games channel on YouTube. If you like the show, tell a friend, leave us a review, rating, or nice comment. Wherever you're listening, it's the best way to support us. Next week, it's everyone's favorite time of the quarter. Nintendo's next financial report will be here, so come on back. And there's way more than that, too. We're gonna have a lot to talk about next week. Tomodachi Life, Mario Movie Trailer, and way more we can't talk about just yet, so be sure to come back. Thanks so much, Pear. Anything that you want to shout out? No, I'm having a lot of fun with Fire Emblem right now. Path of Radiance. Went back to it since you can play it on your Switch, too. and man, Logan, that game is so good. You got to play it. Awesome. Yeah, I'm planning to, and yeah, we'll have you back on maybe when we both finish it, and we can talk more about that one. Thank you so much for Toyota for working behind the scenes this week, and thank you so much for listening, but for now, that is all the time I've got. I've got to get back to playing Metroid Prime Federation Force on my Nintendo 3DS. Have a great week. We'll be back next time with more Nintendo Voice Chat, the only place you can get the crystal.