How to ruin gaming's greatest heroine.
Reviewed by Cannon Fodder on or around 22nd Oct 2010
Step 1: Make her into a subservient, submissive, emotional mess who is all too eager to follow her commander's orders, even at great personal risk to her life.
Step 2: Hint at a profoundly emotional, meaningful history between herself and her former commanding officer, only to later reveal that their falling out was nothing of consequence.
Step 3: Make her deeply regret the heroic actions she performed in the previous Metroid games. This, i...n turn, cheapens the sense of accomplishment you -- as a player -- might feel if you had played those previous games.
Step 4: Make her cower in girlish, paralyzing fear at the sight of her most persistent enemy.
Step 5: Serve it all up with too linear gameplay, conflicting control philosophies, and a purposeless duality that has no deeper meaning than egotistically brandishing an impressive new technology.
Metroid: Other M should have been awesome. Working with a talented development team, Nintendo had a chance to bring Samus back to her platforming roots in top form. Instead, Nintendo only succeeded in making me dislike a character I have loved for years. I feel like I've been betrayed by an old, dear friend.
It starts off well enough, with a fully rendered recreation of Super Metroid's surprise ending. That opening movie really got me jazzed for the game I had been cautiously looking forward to for months. "Yes!" I thought. "They get it! They're referencing back to one of the greatest games of all time!" I gripped the Wii Remote more firmly, my palms already starting to sweat in anticipation. Yes, Metroid brings out the Pavlovian dog in me.
It was all down hill from there, though. The next thing I know, I'm listening to Samus (she speaks for the first time) mourn the death of the baby metroid. She affects an uncharacteristic maternal quality.
By the way, why is it that Japanese game developers feel "strong" women must be maternal, emotional, and nauseatingly introspective? While these may be noble attributes in their own right, these qualities have little (if any) place in Samus's DNA. Yet Nintendo burdened her (and, through her, the gamer) with those traits.
But I digress. While her internal monologue mourned the loss of the baby metroid, I resolved to let that slight departure from character slide. It was only the first few minutes of the game, after all. I hadn't really started controlling her yet. I assumed it would get better.
It got worse. Shortly after landing on the Bottle Ship, Samus runs into her former commanding officer. He orders her to power down her dangerous weaponry. She inexplicably complies.
Wait. What?!
The galaxy's most famous bounty hunter -- the same bad-ass who saved the galaxy from annihilation at the hands of Space Pirates, Metroids, and Mother Brain -- yes, THAT bounty hunter has deferred to the thoughtless orders of a former commanding officer? Seriously?! What happened to her backbone?!
I realize this is the developer's contrived way to build weapon upgrades into the gameplay, but come on. There are at least a dozen ways they could have built this necessary gameplay feature into the narrative without neutering Samus's personality.
Instead, the first time I came to a door that required a Super Missile, I mentally gave that idiot commander the finger for not authorizing me to use a weapon already equipped on my suit . . . then I added another finger to Samus for following the orders of a moron. Later, when I'm drowning in lava, it might be nice to SAVE MY LIFE by turning on my Varia Suit. But no. I'm not authorized yet and Samus is a good little girl who always follows orders from the big strong man, even if it means her death.
Aside from the disappointingly unforgivable treatment of Samus's character, the gameplay wasn't bad. The boss fights were pretty good, and near the end of the game the level design presented fun diversity and challenge. I especially liked the post-credits gameplay, where Other M finally became the game it should have been all along.
Tecmo/Nintendo did some interesting things with the controls, utilizing the pointer and horizontal d-pad orientation in an imaginative way. The only problem is the combat. On one hand, you have an auto-aim system that any single-celled organism could master. You cannot miss when you fire your weapon, and the dodge ability makes you effectively invulnerable to every attack. On the other hand, you have a laggy aiming/lock-on mode in first-person view that never feels as polished as Metroid Prime's. There's no middle ground. You're either god-like or inept, depending on the view you're in.
Visually, the game was again a mixed experience. The rendered cutscenes were well constructed and visually impressive. But, in gameplay, the developers made no effort to obscure the obvious texture tiling (most easily seen on the floors in "outdoor" environments). This level of sloppiness hasn't been seen since the N64, when texture memory was at a premium.
Other M's other crime is in how it prematurely defeats my sense of exploration and eliminates the joy of discovery. Those blue dots that tell me a secret is in the area are exactly what I don't need in a Metroid game. The joy of discovering secrets is in actually finding the secret. A blue pulsating dot on my map is not secretive. It is, instead, just another chore to be completed in the same repetitive fashion: switch to first-person view, look for a morph ball hole, grab the upgrade.
If there was an option in the menu to turn off that "hint" system, I would have used it. But, such an option was not presented to me. The result is I ended the game with a 61 percent rating. This is the first time in a Metroid game where I didn't feel compelled to search out every nook and cranny for every last secret upgrade.
Anyway, these complaints pale in comparison to the pathetic character they made Samus into. In fact, if Tecmo had maintained the character's integrity, Other M would have scored much higher on the Game-O-Meter. Instead, Nintendo should be ashamed. They've allowed Tecmo to ruin gaming's greatest heroine.
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