No. Nintendo did not consult with the five founders of Ravenous before announcing Samus Aran’s newest video game. Metroid Ravenous is the latest chapter in a series that dates back to 1986.
For the most part, food has been absent over the 14 Metroid games Nintendo has released. Gamers won’t find apples or legs of chicken to restore a player’s health like they would in Streets of Rage or The Legend of Zelda. There’s not even a magic elixir to sip to grant the game’s protagonist, Samus Aran, special abilities. Instead, Samus relies on power balls and protein bars. She’ll find random pieces of equipment to enhance her suit. She’s a bounty hunter who doesn’t have time to enjoy a good meal. There are many Reddit threads that speculate on Samus’s eating habits. Some believe her missions are short so she eats offscreen. Others note that her suit covers her face and allows her to eat discretely. A few fans brought up MREs and wonder if that’s Samus’s preferred way of eating. Contrast this to someone like Thor, a warrior who is clearly shown playing hard on and off the battlefield. No flagon of mead is safe from the Norse god of thunder.
(I’ve long wanted to catalog the best video game food power ups. It’s a dream project I’ve chatted about with my friend and former colleague Jesse Sparks. We’d include everything from the pizzas in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to the roast from Gauntlet to the classic mushrooms from Super Mario Bros. Let us know if you’d like us to pursue this for an upcoming Ravenous story.)
It’s a shame Samus’s traumatic childhood, watching the enemy Metroid species feed off other organisms, has stripped her of the joy of dining. She certainly explores enough, so she would have access to some of the most unique street foods across the galaxy, but she’s just not interested. There are people like this in real life, folks who don’t want to sit around a table and taste something new. They eat to sustain themselves, nothing more and nothing less. Eating well is a luxury and privilege, there’s no arguing that. But there’s also a layer of guilt as food is inherently tied to the “sin” of gluttony. No one wants to be accused of being lazy, especially when you’re an intergalactic space hero dressed in a rigid armored suit.
Nintendo’s two-minute trailer features a bit of dialogue at the end that sums up Samus’s perspective. As she battles for survival, she makes a declaration while showing off a new game mechanic where she absorbs the lifeforces or abilities of her adversaries: “I will survive, and I will make it home. Even if I have to feed on my enemies to do so. It's eat or be eaten."
We’re not sure if this makes Samus more like a zombie or if it’s more like Chew, where the protagonist has psychic abilities and gains the memories of the people he eats. And moreover, we don’t know whether or not Samus will enjoy this new power, whether she may, finally, find joy (however strange) in this form of feeding. I guess we’ll have to wait until the game is released in January. The last game in the series, 2025's Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, was a minor disappointment. But judging by the initial buzz, fandom is ravenous for Ravenous. We wouldn’t want it any other way. Just make sure you have some good snacks while playing, even if Samus couldn’t care less.
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