Even after years of rumors, reports, and predictions from professionals in games media, Switch re-releases for the second and third Metroid Prime still haven’t publicly materialized. At this point, Metroid Prime Trilogy on Switch is Nintendo’s Bigfoot.
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The September 2025 Nintendo Direct, which finally revealed the release date of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, would have been the perfect time to set the hype machine in motion with an announcement of Metroid Prime 2 and Metroid Prime 3 getting a fresh coat of paint, but the best that fans could get was an art book relating to the acclaimed trilogy.
So, what gives? While Nintendo released an excellent remaster of the first game in 2023, there’s been no visible movement of the subsequent games getting a similar treatment. Has Nintendo been sitting on ports for too long, or did they scrap the project? Or has the story been misreported? Whatever the case is, Nintendo has missed a prime opportunity, pun intended.
A Full Trilogy Remaster Has Been Talked About For Too Long
The Metroid Prime Trilogy for Nintendo Switch is either the worst-kept secret from Nintendo or a shared delusion between insiders, reporters, and fans. Reports of the trilogy getting an official remaster go all the way back to 2019. To save you the time of counting with your fingers, that’s six years ago, more than half a decade, and before the COVID pandemic.
Not only that, but the earliest reports claimed that the remaster work had been long done, and the collection was just awaiting release. I can only imagine how many pre-written drafts there have been at gaming outlets about how Metroid Prime Trilogy was officially announced at a Nintendo Direct, only to remain unpublished in the CMS forever when the news doesn’t come to pass (yes, I wrote one of those back in 2019 for a different site).
The news rears its head what feels like every couple of years, primarily by Giant Bomb’s Jeff Grubb, who also claimed that the trilogy remaster was done and waiting back in 2021. Heck, the man got an uncharacteristic haircut after losing a bet that it would release in 2022 (ironically, Metroid Prime Remastered would get announced and shadow-dropped about two months after).
Reports claim that Metroid Prime 2: Echoes and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption won’t receive the same facelift that the first game received, and even after the release of Metroid Prime Remastered, claims about one or both of the other games coming to Switch were still popping up. The wait is getting tiring, almost approaching the point where an actual announcement in the future could be met with disinterest and a feeling of anticlimax.
The Only Hope Left Might Be A Surprise Drop Around Prime 4’s Launch
During the last Direct, when Nintendo outlined the other releases surrounding Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, which includes the aforementioned retrospective book and a few new Amiibos, the video framed these goodies with the phrase: “The Journey to Launch Begins.” A generous read of that sentence could mean that there are additional releases that Nintendo will announce in the future in the lead-up to Beyond‘s release.
Even with a glimmer of hope based on that narrow interpretation, the question is when remasters for Echoes and Corruption would even come out. September would’ve been an amazing time to release them — Nintendo doesn’t have any releases this month, unless you count the overpriced Donkey Kong Bananza DLC, and giving about three months for players to catch up by playing the middle two chapters of the saga would serve the launch of Beyond well.
There’s always the possibility that Nintendo would release them at the same time or very near Beyond, but that doesn’t seem like Nintendo. It runs the risk of sales self-cannibalization and taking the buzz away from the new title: the company wouldn’t dare to release a remaster of Kirby Air Ride around the same time as the new Kirby Air Riders, for example.
Maybe the full remaster will come sometime after Beyond, or perhaps we’ll only get to play Echoes through the GameCube Nintendo Classics app on Switch 2. But at this point, it matters very little how Nintendo plans to approach this. I’ll certainly install any remasters of these games on day one, but it may come from a place of annoyance and impatience rather than excitement, given how extended this silly saga has been.
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