If you thin൲k I’m going to miss an opportunity to put the name Sylux in a headline, you’re sorely mistaken. I’ve been waiting so long for the reveal of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond that I’𝓰d almost lost hope it was ever going to happen.
It’s been seven years since Prime 4 was announced at E3 2017 and 17 years since the release of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. 17 years since Samus eradicated the Phazon by destroying Phaaze and Dark Samus in one ꦆfell swoop. 17 years since we last saw Sylux make their not-so-grand return in the weakest post-credit scene ever concocted until Michael Keaton’s cameo at the end of Morbius. 17 years, and producer Kensuke Tanabe’s bizarre grand design for Metroid Prime is finally happening. I can’t believe I’m writing the words: Sylux is happening.
If you have no idea who Sylux is or what I’m on about, that’s a good thing. It probably means you have a normal brain and you don’t reserve space in it for throwaway characters from forgotten side games in spin-off series that haven’t been relevant in nearly two decades. When Sylux appears in the Metroid Prime 4 trailer, flanked by an army of Metroid clones, no normal person should have any kind of reaction or feelings about that. Only a deranged individual would wake up his spouse while watching the Nintendo Direct in bed at 7 am because he couldn’t stop himself from shouting “THEY DID IT!” I’m not trying to gatekeep a fandom here, I really do think you’re best off witho꧃ut this information.
Metroid ﷽Prime 4 Beyond Revealed, Launchin🎉g In 2025
Nintendo has f𒁃inally given us another look at Metroid Prime 4, over seven years since it was fir♑st announced.
But if you made it this far, here’s the long and short on Sylux - or just the short, because there’s rea♈lly not much to say. Sylux first appears as a minor character in Metroid Prime: Hunters, the divisive DS game that came out in between Metroid Prime 2 and 3 but took place between the original and 2. I’d say stay with me here, but it’s only going to get sillier.
That entirely irrelevant story follows Samus to the Alimbic Cluster on a mission to track down “the secret to ultimate power”. Samus, along with six other bounty hunters, follow a psychic call that ends up being a trap laid by an ancient evil called Gorea. None of this matters (probably), but what does m🌼atter is that Sylux is one of those six bounty hunters. They don’t particularly stand out, we don’t learn anything about them throughout the course of the story, and at the end of the game, they flee with the other bounty hunters.
A year later, at the conclusion of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Samus destroys Phaaze and blasts off into hyperspace, the entire arc of the Prime series now complete. In a post-credit scene, Sylux ship, Delano 7, can be seen following Samus away from Phaaze. Some ♌years later, Tanabe confirmed in an interview that this was indeed Sylux, and he hoped to one day make a game about Samus and Sylux.
Sylux's final appearance before Beyond is in Metroid Prime: Federation Force, an even more divisive 3DS co-op shooter about the ongoing conflict between the Galactic Federation and the space pirates. In the final fight, the Federation Force battles Samus, who has been brainwashed and transformed into a giant. That’s not relevant info, but if I have to know about it, so do you.
The post-credit scene depicts Sylux breaking into a Galactic Federation facility and stealing a metroid egg. They seem to do some kind of hacking maneuver to the egg with a laser beam which forces it to hatch. The Prime 4 trailer seems to reveal that Sylux has figured ꧑out how to tame the metroid, and they will seemingly be using them to wage wꦆar against Samus and the Federation for yet unknown reasons.
Sylux is a blank slate. We know they’re a bounty hunter that uses stolen tech from the Galactic Federation, and that they seem to have some kind of vendetta against Samus (despite Samus saving them in Hunters), and that’s about it. I’m not excited to see Sylux again because they’re such an interesting character, I’m excited because I’ve been waiting 17 years to find out if they’re an interesting character.
It’s remarkable that Tanabe was able to see his vision become a reality all these years later. Metroid Dread had a similar trajectory, with a 19 year gap after Fusion, but it continued right where the story left off, tying up threads and making connections that brought cohesion to the entire mainline story. Though they never appeared in the mainline Prime games, it’s possible Sylux’s story in Beyond will create similar connections that strengthen the overall arc of the series. But even if they don’t and Beyond functions entirely as a stand-alone entry, I’m still bemused by the fact that such a nothing character is going to end up having such a huge legacy. We’ve waited 17 years for the Sylux pay-off, and even if the story flops, I feel like I’m getting my money's worth just by seeing them in action again after all this time.
