Metroid Prime 4: Beyond has at last made its debut eight years after its official teaser. Benevolent bounty hunter Samus Aran returns to the first-person format for her first such adventure in close to two decades. Centering on obstacles brought about by the egoistic Sylux, another bounty hunter introduced long ago in a DS spinoff, Metroid Prime 4 provides glimpses of his past and why he is so intent on opposing Samus and the Galactic Federation she cooperates with. The way it does this actually connects with core truths about characterization in fiction. No, it is not abysmal as some say! Reading past this point will yield significant spoilers, so do not read further if you want to find out what happens on your own—a review should be finished shortly after I complete hard mode, in which I will briefly address some of these same points along with many others.
For the most part, Sylux is in the background during the story. Samus has periodic psychic visions of a battle during the game, only in fragments, but with progressively more context. Upon completing the game with 100% of the logbook scans and 100% of all items collected, a fuller cinematic is added to the gallery in the main menu. In it we see what is by all appearances key backstory of Sylux. At first, I wondered during the first vision if it was of the future, but the game strongly implies the events have already occurred by the time more is shown. Sylux himself fought for the Galactic Federation against the space pirates in a fateful battle an unspecified amount of time before the main events of the game.
Leading a group of Federation soldiers, Sylux approaches a massive energy cannon weapon controlled by the enemy. He is instructed to not proceed and to wait for Samus and backup forces accompanying her. However, he tells his units to take the cannon. But the space pirates fire it. Sylux falls into a lower spot of the ground in time to spare him from being vaporized like numerous other people. Samus arrives, and seemingly not long after. Using only a single shot from her power suit, she renders the space pirate cannon inoperable. She later walks up to Sylux as he kneels on the ground in the midst of fire and ashes.
Sylux does not speak even when Samus extends her hand to him. He pushes it away. The cinematic shifts to his first-person perspective just before he holds up his shaking hands which are replaced by his arms in his purple armor inside a healing pod in the time of Prime 4's main story. This is the game's way of conveying that he is the very soldier we see push Samus's hand aside. We see his own hands tremble in the healing pod as if he experiences great remorse, guilt, or fury over the deaths of his troops—or anger over Samus having not arrived sooner to prevent their deaths. Whatever his exact thoughts and feelings about the incident, he is all but certainly tormented by it or its outcome.
Although Silux does express that he wants the weapon before it is activated to lethal consequences for the Galactic Federation, he did not necessarily have asinine motives, as irrational as his actions were if he truly wanted his soldiers to survive (he himself barely survived incidentally). There is neither logical proof nor indirect evidence that he wanted the weapon for nefarious purposes or that he had no concern for the lives of his fellow troopers before they were annihilated. Perhaps he was attempting a heroic capture of the cannon. Perhaps he thought he could perform better than his commander(s) expected in the immediate circumstances and even had some sort of evidence in favor of this.
Regardless, it would mirror other aspects of the game's story if Sylux rejects the offer of physical support from Samus via her open hand precisely because she did not get to the battle in time to save his troops. After all, she is teleported to the planet Viewros too late to deliver the inhabitants who desperately looked to a prophesied Chosen One for deliverance. The species perished before she ever came to their world. The great savior arrived, but there was no one left among the Lamorn for her to save. In this way, Beyond not only subverts the standard trope of the chosen one, but it also provides a thematic element that could very much match what happened with Sylux. Without necessarily doing anything wrong, Samus did appear at the battle after the cannon had already been used. If she arrived shortly beforehand, the many Federation soldiers killed by the weapon would have likely survived.
Yes, it is subtle. Yet there is a fundamental parallel between Samus arriving and destroying the weapon after soldiers die and Samus arriving on Viewros after the Lamorn die having hoped that someone would deliver them. For a franchise that has never featured antagonists with deeply personal motivations, Metroid now has put forth its most tragic, layered villain yet in a manner that aligns so very well with the direction of the broader story. There is also a parallel between Samus offering her hand to Sylux when he was a Federation leader and her holding out her hand after the final boss fight with him as if she hopes to save him from falling off of the cosmic platform. While showing more about Sylux, the game reinforces how kind Samus is. And there is nothing which requires that the contents of the special cinematic are the only reason why he has come to despise Samus and the Galactic Federation. It might be the first of several unfortunate circumstances that, even if Samus did nothing illogical, immoral, or dismissive, led to Sylux giving into a persisting emotionalistic rage.
Now, why does he eventually become a leader of the space pirates against the Galactic Federation, when it was the space pirates and not Samus who killed his soldiers? Sylux could always have his characterization depeened by subseqeuent games, including in this regard, but in isolation, he is not poorly characterized in Metroid Prime 4. Deep characterization does not have to entail some incredibly elaborate verbal explanation of someone's intentions or explicitly draw attention to every philosophical and personal reason (which is still philosophical, but in a secondary way) for a character's villainy to be valid and layered. The little that is conveyed about Sylux is enough to communicate regret, pain, and loss on his part and to touch on how they can change someone's worldview and decisions if they allow them to. That is new territory for Metroid. More importantly, the story of Sylux is rooted in the truth that devastation can stem from yielding to bitterness over loss.
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