Vergo, I'm all for progression; I'm all for new directions. I liked the prospect and intentions of Other M, but I don't feel that they did it with much consistency to the rest of the series. Progression is based off of expanding from one's prior experiments; a lot of the time though, there was less expansion on these successes and more of a pseudo-abandonment. People wanted to see Samus fleshed out as a character, but I felt that Team Ninja and Sakamoto decided to go opposite the direction that made Samus such an appealing character in the first place.
Samus had been a character enshrouded in mystery, and that is part of what made her what she is today. If they had been so intent on consistency and connectivity with the rest of the franchise, then why does Samus act completely different from the rest of the series? A lot of this I blame on the script. Sure, I appreciated that Samus told us how she felt about relevant issues to the plot, but chiming in on every little detail of things that were irrelevant in that monotonous voice really started to bug me. Metroid had been a series whose staple was atmosphere, and I felt that some of these monologues really dealt a big blow to the suspense and mystery of the game. That's not to say I hated them all; some of them were very enjoyable. I liked most of the flashback cut scenes, and I felt that these were great additions to the plot. Most of these fit the Samus I had grown to love; in all the flashbacks, she questioned Adam's decisions and tried to be the hero. Why is it that as soon as the events of Other M start that she decides to become entirely subservient to Adam's motives? The scene where Adam decides to head off into Sector Zero by himself and Samus tries to stop him is a good exception of this, where we see Samus remain consistent with her roots and original character (save for the fact that she is in her Zero Suit for some reason, which is a stereotypical Team Ninja decision making Samus look like a tart for actually serious and pivotal moments in the game
). I enjoyed the emotion showed in this scene, and I enjoyed the plot details and throwbacks to some of the flashbacks, and the throw (forwards?) to Metroid Fusion.
I largely enjoyed the plot, especially the fact that it turned into an Agatha Christie novel about halfway through
. I felt that a lot of the problems with the plot lie more in its execution rather than the plot itself; I like the notion that it tries to take an emotional turn, (which is great in concept) but a lot of the time it felt like they had overdone it and pushed certain parts of the game into the hokey and the melodramatic. If they had toned it down a little bit, I feel that I probably would have very little qualms with the story at all. It may just be me, but I absolutely loathe it when something becomes overly melodramatic, and others may have a higher tolerance for it. I suppose my biggest problem with the story is that certain parts of it tried a little
too hard, and started to become infused with melodrama; otherwise, I felt the story would have been absolutely brilliant, had they shown more restraint. Essentially, I take the stance that subtlety is a lot more powerful, and sometimes the game had lost that sense of subtlety.
Now, the game play. I had no qualms with the first-person to 2D perspective addition; I found that very interesting and a great addition to the game play. One thing that I didn't like about it was that it didn't allow you to fire missiles outside of that mode, which I felt reduced a lot of the 2D combat to just mashing the B button and spamming the left/right button to do the sense-move. By the end of the game, combat started to become monotonous, because I never had to resort to using the morph ball, or even those interesting little finishing moves that were so useful in the beginning. The beam would just kill everything in sight, because it could damage everything. I killed everything in a few hits, and I often killed things before I could even use the first-person mechanic, let alone morph ball or finishing moves. I feel what really exemplifies this is the last boss in the game (the boss you face after beating the game); to beat it, all I had to do was charge my beam and spam the sense-move the entire time. I beat this boss only taking about 3 energy tanks worth of damage, and I never needed to change my strategy for the entire boss fight.
However, this was not always the case. By and large, the boss fights in this game were superb. They posed a good amount of difficulty and were very epic in feel. They made me feel like I was hanging on by a thread, which is essential to the Metroid "feel." The best example of this was the Ridley boss battle. It was challenging, the cut scenes were beautiful and it added a great addition to the story. The boss required me to change my strategy several times throughout the battle, which is something I like to see. There were excellent plot developments that really added to the tense nature of the battle. Now, a lot of people have criticized this boss battle at the point where it shows Samus as a little girl cowering, saying it makes Samus look weak. This is one such instance where I felt that portraying a "weak"
side of Samus wasn't uncalled for; I'd gawk for a while too at the thing that brutally killed my parents and destroyed my home. It's not physical fear, but rather a more psychological one. I felt that that is the only kind of fear we should see in Samus, and I felt that they hit it out of the ballpark in this aspect.
Now, returning to atmosphere. A lot of the original appeal of Metroid was its non-linearity and suspenseful atmosphere. Its aspect of solitude was an excellent way of reflecting Samus the character. Unfortunately, the non-linearity of Other M detracted from the suspense of being lost in a cave, of being a lone wolf; the fact that locked doors would stop Samus from completing her mission in the most effective way possible was absurd, and only exacerbated the prior feeling of subservience to Adam. Sure, Adam is meant to be shown as a taskmaster and a slave to protocol, but it is not in Samus' nature to do so, as well. All the other Metroid games have centered around the idea of non-ideal situations, in which things block your path, causing you to find an alternate route. There was little to none of this in Other M, which really detracted from the sense of Samus' willpower and drive to get things done. It was the chemistry between Samus' disregard for order and Adam's subservience to it that made their conflicting decisions so interesting in Fusion, and it befuddled me as to why they would decide to tap into this only about 2/3 into the game. Why wait? It seemed like a missed opportunity.
Now, collecting energy capsules and ammunition may seem irrelevant at first glance, but when you think about it, these have really been an integral part of the suspense and atmosphere in Metroid's past. Part of the appeal was that you had to fight for survival, and it felt like you were hanging onto a thread for most of the game, because you had to risk your life to gain more life, so you could continue to survive. The fact that I could just restore some of my health and ammunition when I was almost dead was completely anti-climactic, and it made a lot of the combat seem uninteresting because I knew that I could almost always escape death with the push of a button. The near-death experience is something truly invigorating, and it has a great adrenaline rush; why would they decide to remove the prevalence of this feature? Once again, I felt that this detracted from the atmosphere.
Lastly, in regards to gaining new abilities; my primary concern with this issue was not that it implied Samus' subservience to Adam, it was more the fact that it gave an excuse for the developers to make the game entirely linear. Having to design new challenges and make you explore and back-track, looking for a way to overcome a seemingly insurmountable obstacle was also part of Metroid; Team Ninja opted to take the easy way out, and decided that they would rather not have Samus have to work to overcome these obstacles, and merely be granted the ability to overcome them immediately upon having failing to succeed one time. This took away the necessity for exploration and discovery, and needing to use your wits to find away around a problem. You were immediately granted the answer to every solution, rather than having to use your other skill sets to improve yourself. As a result, this made a lot of the power-ups seem obsolete or unnecessary, because you rarely had to use them to acquire new abilities, and they were only really necessary for fighting certain bosses and enemies. Again, this felt very anti-climactic, because you would always run into a new area knowing that you would always overcome obstacles with relative ease. This made me feel less intimated by the game, and given that a staple of this game is its suspense, I don't think that this should be considered a good thing.
Now, don't jump to the conclusion that I felt that it was a bad game. I'm hoping that Nintendo will use this as a learning experience and realize what works for Metroid and what doesn't, and realize the importance of subtlety, so that they can gradually ease emotion into the game, and not dive head-first into melodrama unprepared. The story was excellent, but I hope that they learned that, while story and emotion are great contributions, they are for naught if they don't have a subtle or elegant implementation. Was Other M a disappointment? Perhaps. Was Other M a bad game? Not by any stretch. It is important that they experiment so that they learn to use just the right amount of certain elements, so they can further the series without seeming that they tried a little too hard.
It is certainly an important game in the franchise, and it was a step in the right direction. However, I think that it may have felt that it was more of a leap, causing them to bound over what would have otherwise been just the right level of change. Still, I very much enjoyed the game, and I hope they can use what they've learned to continue to improve the series.
