Okay, “save” is a bit hyperbolic. Metroid Prime 4 doesn’t need saving, per se. It’s honestly a pretty darn good game. I just finished my playthrough a few days ago, and I genuinely believe it’s a natural progression for the Prime series following certain trends in Prime 3 and Federation Force, but I’d also be lying if I said there weren’t a number of areas of opportunity that spring to mind. 

Some aren’t really the kinds of things that can be quickly fixed, and are just baked into the product. The desert doesn’t really work. I don’t hate it the way a lot of folks do, but it isn’t nearly as fun as it could have been. The fed troops aren’t great, but again, they’re nowhere near as bad as the internet made them out to be. In fact, I’d argue Miles, the nerdy one that everyone hated with the fiery passion of a thousand suns, is the most likable of the bunch. Him giving directions isn’t much different than the way your ship would give you hints when you were lost in Prime 1, or heck, the super hand-holdy Chozo statues in Zero Mission! 

Anyway, the point I’m getting to is, there’s one thing Prime 4 set up brilliantly and just didn’t do a darn thing with, and that’s its villain. 

Sylux is cool as heck. He’s a great design, he’s mysterious, and he reeeeeally hates Samus. The other villains of the Metroid series have always been a bit different. Samus hates Ridley, but he’s never seemed to have anything personal against Samus himself as far as I know, other than obviously being pissed about all those times she’s killed him. But Sylux? He very specifically hates Samus. And that’s kinda fun. 

But back to the mystery angle, there’s nothing wrong with a mysterious villain. In fact, his origin isn’t really what I’m after here. 

Spoilers ahead, if you care about that sort of thing.

We see repeated flashbacks to his time as a Federation trooper, and him smacking Samus’s hand away when she tries to help him up following some sort of big explodey war. That’s honestly plenty of backstory as far as I’m concerned. At least for now. No, what I want to know is what the heck this guy’s been up to since his debut in Metroid Prime Hunters. 

And I don’t just want to see it. I want to play it. 

I’ve never been all that fond of the notion of a Metroid game where you don’t play as Samus. Hunters is a different animal because it was built to be a competitive multiplayer game (to a degree, it’s also got a full on single player campaign that is probably better than you might think) Federation Force, on the other hand, was all about being a co-op action game, and playing through as generic Galactic Federation troopers just didn’t hold much luster, especially when they’re all chibi-deformed. But in this instance, a DLC campaign where we get to play as Sylux would not only be super cool on its own, but it would fill in some pretty significant blanks that make Prime 4 seem really uneven.

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Prime 4 opens with this really cool sequence where Samus is called to a Federation base to help protect some wacky artifact. Then Sylux shows up and not only is he hanging out with Space Pirates, but he’s got some very unusual Metroids with him. The introductory boss is this giant Space Pirate guy called Aberax. Before you start the fight, the game shows these Metroids actually infecting and mutating him, and it’s absolutely grotesque and bonkers. That’s not how Metroids work, and that’s not how they look either. Something weird is going on here on a number of levels. 

Following this encounter, there’s another scuffle, and Sylux accidentally shoots the artifact, and Samus, some Fed troopers, and Sylux (presumably with some Metroids) get transported across the universe to the planet Viewros, where our story begins in earnest. 

What’s wrong here is, for the rest of the game you only have exactly 3 run-ins with Sylux before the final boss battle, and 2 of them aren’t even him. They’re robots disguised as him for… reasons? You don’t actually know for sure it’s the real one during the other encounter because you never face him down. It’s this really cool action sequence where he’s trying to blow up you and your friends with a big ol spaceship. It’s a great sequence! But again, why were the other Sylux battles against robot versions of him? Why are robots impersonating him at all? Where the heck is the real Sylux? 

Then there are the other bosses. If you scan all the other major bosses, they say they’ve been infected by Metroids. Except you don’t see this happen at all. Like, ever. It just happens off camera or something and… what? Why? 

This might be the most egregious because it’s set up as a major event in the beginning of the game and then it’s literally never touched on outside of scan info for the rest of the game. What gives?

Finally, when you get to the big ultimate showdown against Sylux, he emerges from this pod thing, and he’s got all these wires sticking out of the back of his head. He rips them out and now has these insane new abilities, which are the basis of the absolutely awesome final battle against him. But again, I have to ask… WHY?!? What the heck happened in that pod? What were those wires? How did he get there in the first place? Where are the Metroids? Why were those robots impersonating him? Or better yet, how did he get hooked up with the Metroids and Space Pirates in the first place? 

And that’s what the DLC should be about. 

It should pick up at the ending of Metroid Prime Hunters. It seems to be commonly assumed that all the hunters got away at the end of the game, but I can’t say I ever really found that to be obvious. When I played it, it kinda looked to me like Gorea killed them all, and the rainbow lights that fly away at the end were colored keys (I think they were keys? It’s been years since I’ve actually played it), but maybe I’m just getting confused. Either way, showing how he got away from the Gorea battle and where he went next would be a great place to start because the next time we see Sylux is at the end of Metroid Prime 3. Samus flies away, and then the camera pans to show Sylux’s ship following her. What was he doing following Samus? Was he there the whole time? We don’t know, but this sure would be a neat way to explore that, too! 

But honestly, that could all be told in some basic cutscenes. Where the real gameplay should begin is during Metroid Prime: Federation Force. In that game’s secret ending, Sylux kidnaps a baby Metroid that the Feds were running some sort of experiments on. And my biggest question here is, how did we go from this:

To this? 

I know Federation Force took a LOT of artistic liberties, but that top image is 100% recognizable as a Metroid. That bottom one? Not so much. There’s something very different about that thing, which almost resembles a Mochtroid more than a Metroid. What’s with the brown leathery innards? Why can they infect people and mutate them now? WHAT IS THIS THING?!?

Anyway, this is all to say that a Sylux DLC for Prime 4 that explains the events of the game from his perspective would not only be incredibly cool to play through, but would lend some desperately lacking narrative to Prime 4. In the game’s 100% secret ending, you see Sylux leading a commando troop AGAINST the Space Pirates who are about to use some wacky new weapon that vaporizes the rest of Sylux’s crew (but only after ignoring orders to wait for Samus’s crew to arrive). That wacky new weapon? Looks an awful lot like Sylux’s arm cannon. 

There’s a good story here, I’m sure of it. And I very much want to know why it wasn’t a part of Prime 4. It sure seemed like it was supposed to be, but only the beginning and end were ever really touched on. 

It’s entirely possible that a Metroid Prime 5 could answer some of this stuff, but honestly, I feel like a DLC for Prime 4 is a better answer. After all, we just got a whole Metroid Prime game with almost nothing to do with Metroids at all, let alone the literal Metroid Prime. So what gives? 

Time will tell. What do you think? Would you play Sylux DLC that fills in the blanks on his weird absences in Prime 4? Let us know!