Telling a Story Silently: How Metroid Prime Conveys its Narrative

This story is about a bounty hunter invading pirate bases and stopping their devious plans while exploring a strange land. This is the basic plot of Metroid Prime, where bounty hunter Samus Aran travels to the planet Tallon IV to hunt down the devious Space Pirates she’s encountered in the past. However, all of this is just the surface of the game, and much more can be said about the game and the world it creatures, despite much of it never really being said. The game features no dialogue, all text is found through Samus’ suit AI giving hints or instructions, or through various “Scans” that can be found throughout the world of the game. Metroid Prime builds the narrative of Tallon IV and the ancient Chozo spirits through these scans and hints, using techniques known as “Environmental Storytelling” and an “Embedded Narrative.” Smith & Worch (2010) described environmental storytelling as “Staging player-space with environmental properties that can be interpreted as a meaningful whole, furthering the narrative of the game” (p. 16). This can be interpreted as telling a story by using the environment that players explore and letting them infer things based on clues in this area. This is often best used to show players the remains of something that happened in the past, such as the aftermath of a dinner party, or ruins of an ancient civilization, or even to show expansion by having strange technology scattered among a mostly natural world that eventually leads to a technologically advanced civilization. Environmental Storytelling is a way of letting players find the history of the world, without outright telling them. Henry Jenkins describes Embedded Narrative as the narrative “embedded within the mise-en-scene, awaiting discovery.”(2005) This type of narrative is one that is written out and displayed to the player through clues and hints around the game world. These techniques are what allows the game to build an entire world and history around players that they may not even pick up on when they first play. Metroid Prime crafts a living world and compelling narrative of the history of Tallon IV through a sense of isolation, small hints, and a lack of dialogue.

Metroid Prime, like many other games in the franchise, seeks to give the players the ability to project into Samus’ views, and as such, we never hear about Samus’ views on the world, even if it would absolutely affect her from a narrative standpoint. Samus keeps silent, acting as a camera for the player to view and explore this world through, without ever breaking the immersion that you are the bounty hunter on an alien planet. In a talk at the Montreal Games Summit, Mark Pacini, Game director at Retro Studios that has worked on all three Metroid Prime games, (Kumar & Alexander, 2007) stated that they wanted to hold true to the core aspects of Metroid while converting it to a 3D space. He stated the biggest thing they wanted to get right was a sense of exploration, going as far as explaining the First Person camera and the fact that no environments in the game are re-used were caused by this line of thought. This ties back into the lack of dialogue because of the core theme of the game; exploration. The game doesn’t feature anyone there to give you a hint of what you might find, or something to give you direction. The game drops you into the world of Tallon IV and lets you find your way onward. Metroid Prime goes as far as allowing the player to find their own goal, by not telling the player “why” Samus is going after the Space Pirates, or why they are on Tallon IV in the first place. The silence allows players make their own conclusions about what is really going on in the game as we play. Rather than tell the player and make them feel like there is a specific goal we have to accomplish, the game lets you piece everything together yourself and lets the player feel immersed in just wandering this new world. The eventual discovery of what the Space Pirates are doing is something that the player feels smart for finding, and it feels like something we discovered, rather than something we had been working toward all along. However, this also leads to an interesting side effect of having no dialogue; the sheer isolation one feels while wandering the world.

The Scan logs, translations of computer screens and wall hieroglyphs, as well as information about creatures and structures in the world, are the primary way that players are given information in Metroid Prime, and the source of the embedded narrative that can be found throughout the game. These are special, relatively hidden sets of text that give pieces to the puzzle of what the Space Pirates are doing, as well as the Chozo’s history with Tallon IV. It is through these that the deeper plot is slowly revealed, including the cause of the Impact Crater, an area you can enter very early in the game, but do not get to fully explore until the very end. These logs are treated as a large part of the puzzle of Tallon IV and the fall of the Chozo. In his GDC talk, Randy Smith (2009) notes that puzzles can encourage players to explore and make them feel smart, but can also make players feel dumb, and halt progression for players. Metroid Prime presents its narrative as a sort of puzzle, presenting details to players out of order and making them search to find all the clues. The game solves this problem with puzzles by giving players hints at times that they will think will mean one thing, but in the end, mean something entirely different. For example, one of the earliest scans in the game talks of a “Great Poison” killing the planet, and at the time the Chozo Ruins are the only area the player can enter. It’s through this that players can quickly assume that what they’re working toward, what’s poisoning the water, is this Great Poison. However, after defeating Flaaghra, you can find entries that say that the Great Poison originates from the Impact Crater, not these ruins. The game leaves it’s hints very subtly so players can always feel like they’re working out the puzzle, but leads them on just enough to leave them confused until more and more of the pieces are found. It’s also notable, however, that the company didn’t originally plan to leave this embedded narrative in the game. Retro Studios president and CEO Michael Kelbaugh notes that late in development for Metroid Prime, Nintendo pitched the Scan Visor to them, stating that it felt like something was missing from the game. (Kumar & Alexander, 2007). It’s interesting to think the mechanic that the development team considered “Boring” is a major part of the intrigue and mystery of Metroid Prime, but it’s not the only thing that drives that intrigue.

Isolation is something that has been a standard of most Metroid games since the series’ introduction, and Prime follows this trend expertly. The game begins with Samus, a lone bounty hunter, invading a Space Pirate Frigate in orbit around Tallon IV, and immediately the isolation is made aware to the player. You are in your enemy’s base, with no back-up and only your own capabilities to keep yourself going. Haggis (2017) suggested using this sort of “tutorial mission” to introduce your players to the characters and potential motivations, rather than thrusting them into the plot with no context. Imagine for a moment, that rather than wandering the Pirate Frigate, the game began with Samus landing on Tallon IV without any explanation for what she might be doing there. It would leave the player’s lost, what am I doing here? What am I supposed to be doing? By quickly setting up motivations for the player and Samus, it gets them motivated to explore this planet, and allows them to adapt to the lonely nature of the game before the mass scale of isolation and loss that Tallon IV represents is thrust upon them. The tutorial mission is crafted to make the players feel strong while making them understand that they are alone in this quest. Following this setup, Tallon IV in it’s whole is a living manifestation of that isolation. The ruins left in disarray, the strange technology and writings that players can find, the monsters making their nests deep within these structures; all of these things serve to make Tallon IV feel empty and alone. The cutscenes that the player encounter through the game also serve to emphasize this. Whenever Samus enters a new area of the game, there is a cutscene that shows off the environment and notable things one can see in this section of the map. These often serve primarily to show off the new place, but also help give a much-needed sense of scope to the planet, and tend to highlight some of the decaying portions of the world, such as the crumbling rocks and platforms of Magmoor Caverns, or the frozen over structures of the beautiful Phendrana Drifts. The cutscenes for bosses are often a display of power for the creature you are about to fight and sometimes serve as a hint as to how to combat the beast. These cutscenes are used to exemplify play and are relatively scarce as to not take away from the exploration. The cutscenes serve not only as a means to guide the player toward certain places and actions, but also to highlight the contrast between various areas. The cutscenes often show the biggest points of interest, and by showing off the towers and technology of the Space Pirates, and the devastation and crumbling ruins of the Chozo, it makes players take note of the stark difference between the two creatures and their values.Though the planet acts as a representation of themes, it also helps solidify the narrative the game is trying to tell. The idea of a dying planet and the last haven of the Chozo people would be far less effective if the area looked pristine. This devastation is what makes the Space Pirate bases seem so oppressing and out of place on this abandoned planet. These cutscenes are also the only times we get to see Samus reacting or interacting with the world outside of our gameplay. This aligns with Smith and Worch’s third point on what environment does for players; “The environment shapes and reinforces player identity”(2010). By making the player feel alone, and making the planet appear to be abandoned outside of the Pirates, serves to make the players see the aftermath of the fall of the Chozo and identify with Samus Aran. Yet, there are still other ways the game shapes the narrative before the player.

Metroid Prime goes out of its way to make the player feel like the world around them existed before they arrived and has its own history that can be uncovered. It’s easy to drop a player into a world and tell them to go deal with the pirates, but this game goes far beyond that by showing the player something much bigger than themselves and their struggles. The first area of the game is the Chozo ruins, which contains magnificent creatures that are scary, but entirely manageable. The War Wasp hive, the first “boss” of the game, is a strange living totem that these wasps have inhabited. This fight is terrifying, wasps flying around you at speeds faster than you can track, and a strange mechanical head that releases more each time you dispatch a group. This is obviously not natural and immediately sets the player to wonder what this planet really is. The Flame defense turret you find later that you cause to malfunction and permanently destroy the wasp nest is another example. It is an ancient piece of technology, and evidently outdated compared to Samus’ own weaponry, but it leads to the question of what all this was left here for. All of this technology, as well as upgrades for Samus’ Chozo-developed power suit, tell the player that this place was important to the Chozo in the past, even if they don’t seek out more information than this.  These environments, including tree-roots forming bridges and floating platforms powered by an unknown energy, as well as the general disarray all of these things are in, most technology showing signs of age and decay, the bridges partially collapsed, tell a story of a once advanced civilization that has since fallen. The environment gives the player many clues to piece together the history of the world, even if they do not seek out or actively read the biggest narrative point of the game, but it also allows them to feel like they have a real impact on the world. Reece (2016, June 27) described the first time the players enter the Chozo Ruins by noting the murky and poisoned waters of the area. There’s no reason for players to believe the area should be any different, but once the players encounter the large monster “Flaaghra” in the depths of the ruins, it’s discovered through scans that this beast is what is poisoning the waters. After defeating the monster, the waters are cleansed throughout the ruins, and it makes the player feel like they have a real impact on the fate of this world, when they initial may have felt like nothing they do here will matter. Reece also notes that this encounter is a direct parallel to the over-arching plot of Tallon IV as a whole, and how it helps envelop the player in a desire to learn more about the planet. This overarching plot is the last thing that the game hides from players through a clever form of exploration and discovery.

All of these aspects can do wonders for any game by themselves, but together they craft something incredible and engaging. The story of a planet that is slowly dying and a race that was lost to the ages due to it’s influence, the idea of a strange energy created by this poison that the enemies are trying to harness, the tale of a lone bounty hunter out to stop pirates and cease the destruction of an entire world. These aspects all come together to form a story seeped in Isolation and Loss. Metroid Prime uses its logs and environments, as well as its focus on exploration, to forge a large-scale mystery that players can find and figure out at their own pace, while not forcing it upon the players. The player has the choice to discover more of the secrets of Tallon IV, or to continue marching onward, stopping the pirates and destroying the Phazon energy they seek once and for all. This is the core of Environmental Storytelling, letting the players discover things as they go along and at their own pace. Metroid Prime, as well as the planet of Tallon IV as a whole, is a mystery wrapped in exploration and personal discovery, that lets the player feel smart while crafting a living world, although one that is on it’s last legs and dying before the player’s eyes.

References

Haggis, M. H. (2017) Storytelling Tools to Boost Your Indie Game's Narrative and Gameplay. Retrieved from: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024157/Storytelling-Tools-to-Boost-Your

Jenkins, H. J. (2005, September, 21) Game Design as Narrative Architecture. Retrieved from: http://homes.lmc.gatech.edu/~bogost/courses/spring07/lcc3710/readings/jenkins_game-design.pdf

Kumar, M. K. & Alexander, L. A. (2007, November 27) MIGS 2007: Retro Studios On The Journey Of Metroid Prime. Retrieved from: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/107340/MIGS_2007_Retro_Studios_On_The_Journey_Of_Metroid_Prime.php

Reece, D. R. (2016, June 27). Metroid Prime and Player Agency in Narrative. Retrieved From: https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DamonReece/20160627/275826/Metroid_Prime_and_Player_Agency_in_Narrative.php

Smith, R. S. (2009, March) Helping Your Players Feel Smart; Puzzles as User Interface. Retrieved from: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1333/Helping-Your-Players-Feel-Smart

Worch, M. W. & Smith, H. S. (2010) “What Happened Here?” Environmental Storytelling [PowerPoint Slides].  Retrieved from GDC Vault website: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012647/What-Happened-Here-Environmental