“At E3, there was one game we introduced that left fans with some questions,” Nintendo’s Bill Trinen said today in a Nintendo Direct, which was basically an indirect way of acknowledging the backlash to the multiplayer-centric shooter that the company unveiled last June. Fans still seem upset about it.
Seconds after the game’s new trailer hit YouTube it was already mostly being down-voted.
We kept refreshing and the down-votes kept piling up.
At the time of this posting, the positive votes are 600, the negatives total 1,374.
For comparison, a new trailer for the new Star Fox is at 552 positive, 20 negative.
Also relevant is that, of all the trailers Nintendo just released, it’s the one people seem to care about the most.
YouTube votes aren’t the world’s most perfect measure of taste. And I am not going to pretend I don’t have a take on this. I interviewed long-time Metroid Prime producer Kensuke Tanabe about the game at E3 and certainly felt and expressed my puzzlement about the game. It seemed ill-timed in ending a half-decade drought of a series cherished for singleplayer sci-fi exploration not—with apologies to 2006's Metroid Prime Hunters—for multiplayer shooting.
Tanabe told me at E3 that this game was a passion project of his, and he said much the same today during the Direct video (start watching at about 50:30 to hear his thoughts). Today’s video continues to position the game as a spin-off, an adventure not starring Metroid heroine Samus Aran but still relevant to the series overall.
It’s entirely possible that Metroid fans like me are too blinded by our love of the past of the games and too eager for more of the same that we’re failing to appreciate something different. But Nintendo did seem to be setting the game up today for a re-introduction and yet emphasized the same details they showed nine months ago. As a result, they’re getting the same reaction.
Metroid Prime Federation Force is slated for a late spring release for the 3DS and it remains the only announced Metroid game on the horizon.
Update - 8:11pm: Looks like the ability to see how many up and down votes the trailer has received has been turned off.
To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter@stephentotilo.