Nintendo has apparently been teasing the big villain of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond for 17 years
The character in the trailer builds on a 17-year-old cliffhanger and Metroid's most controversial spin-off
Metroid Prime 4 made its big return in the public eye as part of today's Nintendo Direct, complete with plans for a 2025 launch. The brief trailer didn't give us many details, but it did confirm that the game will see the return of Sylux, a villainous bounty hunter who's been established as Metroid Prime's next big bad since 2007.
Sylux first appeared as a major antagonist in Metroid Prime Hunters, the Nintendo DS spin-off that pitted protagonist Samus Aran against a cadre of rival bounty hunters. True to series tradition, Sylux never got much backstory, and Hunters remains his only major appearance in the series - but his cameos in later games look like they're going to be very important in Prime 4.
If you 100% Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, you'll see an extra scene after the credits in which a strange ship follows Samus into parts unknown. Fans speculated for years that the pilot of that ship was Sylux, and producer Kensuke Tanabe confirmed that theory in a 2015 interview with IGN. "There’s still more I want to build around the story of Sylux and Samus," Tanabe said. "There’s something going on between them. I want to make a game that touches upon [it]."
That quote came just before the release of the multiplayer spin-off Metroid Prime: Federation Force, and clearly Tanabe was still interested in Sylux even within the plot of that controversial party game. Another hidden post-credits sequence here shows Sylux breaking into a Galactic Federation research base and recovering a newborn Metroid.
This all seems to directly set up the events we see in the Metroid Prime 4: Beyond trailer, where Samus shows up to help a Federation base under attack from Space Pirate forces. Sylux shows up at the end, flanked by a pair of seemingly tame Metroids, apparently teasing a much larger role for the character in the full game. The full story remains to be seen, but it certainly looks like Prime 4 is set to pay off some long-standing series cliffhangers.
2024 was looking pretty dry for Nintendo before today, but suddenly there are a whole lot of upcoming Switch games on the horizon.
Sign up to the 12DOVE Newsletter
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more
Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.