Metroid: Other M Review/Discussion
Be warned right away this article contains spoilers, big and small, and I will only put spoiler tags for the bigger ones. (unless I forget)
This game is a bit of a mixed bag, unfortunately. It's a work of experimentation and some brave decisions, but no matter how brave, not all of the experiments net a positive result. I will say right away that I know there are a lot of differing opinions on this game, so what you regard as positive and negative is probably highly subjective. With that out of the way, I will admit it's not all bad, and for me the good parts outweighed the bad, so I did get through the game, and I did think it improved towards the end in many ways.
I do not think it was as good as any of the Prime games, or any of the other Metroid games for that matter. There are some things Other M does better, but overall it's a weaker game. It has a lot of promise though, so I am curious as to where they're taking it from here. Hopefully they will learn from the mistakes they made, keep the good parts, and make a better game all in all next time. But for now that's just wild speculation and pipe dreams. Time will tell.
Other M has a more action-focused design, with less focus on adventure, puzzles and exploration; something I'm sure will suit some people just fine. It is also a lot more linear, even more so than Metroid Fusion, and there is also a focus on (unskippable) cutscenes.
Let's dispense with the good parts first, and get to the ranting and nitpicking later. (though I can't promise the good parts will be totally free of nitpicks)
The Good
-Combat: Overall, I liked the combat system in Other M. It was fast, hectic and most often fun. It took a little getting used to I will admit, but once you got the basics down, it felt pretty natural, even though some of the finishing moves could have been better implemented. Pointing at the screen to go into first-person mode to be able to fire missiles was not always something you wanted to have to do in hectic boss-fights though, but Team Ninja have never liked to make easy games as far as I'm aware. The omission of health and missile boosts dropped by enemies did make for a harder game definitely. I died more than I'm used to in a Metroid game, but the checkpoint system meant I never lost much progress to it. And never had to rewatch a cutscene, thankfully.
-Atmosphere: When you were finally on your own and got to run around the halls of the spaceship, taking in the scenery and wondering what the devil had transpired in this place, the experience got very immersive, and time flew by as I went from room to room, trying to glean the secrets of the place. Here is where the first-person mode really came into its own, letting you at any time take a good look at your surroundings. Which leads me to...
-Exploration: While this game had less puzzles, and less secrets to find, there was still plenty to waste hours looking around for while you postpone advancing the story. The linear nature of the game did often leave you in the position of only being able to search back and forth along a single path though, but most paths had at least some sidetracks for you to explore. The most peculiar parts were the few scattered lavatories, or perhaps locker rooms, that you found around the place. You always went into over-the-shoulder mode for that, which was a sign the game gave you that nothing dangerous is gonna happen, since you can't fire your gun. I did find a powerup in one of them, but the rest were a mystery to me... maybe just to add to the authenticity of the place?
-Puzzles: Though there weren't as many or as elaborate ones as in the Prime games, they were still usually clever, if only somewhat, and required you to actually use both your eyes and your mind. I will admit to actually being stumped a few times. That could reflect poorly on me as a person.
The Bad
-Story: This is a big fat target... not all bad, just mostly. The basic premise is fine enough. Samus receives a distress call, goes to investigate space station. The rest though... fell rather flat for me, and resulted in some excruciatingly terrible to watch/comprehend scenes and scenarios during the game. The game claims to let us know what kind of person Samus actually is underneath her cold metal exterior, but I didn't find the Samus Aran they portrayed to be all that believable, not to mention her voice actor sounding a lot like she thought she was voicing a robot. Maybe that was the motivation they gave her, to make Samus sound emotionless, but honestly it sounds rather awful.
Let's do a brief history and context lesson, shall we? Yes, Samus had a dramatic childhood. Yes, it probably traumatized her. But... Other M is placed after Super Metroid. Before Fusion, Super Metroid was the timeline-chronologically latest game in the series, which makes Other M the second to last game in the timeline.
-So before she gets to this point, she has invaded Zebes with nothing more than a simple version of the power suit and short-range blaster, and came away from it with a new and improved power suit, and a space pirate base destroyed. Ridley was fought and defeated in the process.
-Then came the Prime games, where she discovered Phazon, battled and defeated Ridley another 2 times, fought and defeated a dark version of herself, took on entire planets, battled an invasion from another dimension, and many other things before finally destroying the source of Phazon itself, which somehow made the substance disappear from the entire universe.
-Then there was Metroid 2, the gameboy game which is the only Metroid I've never actually played, but I gathered she took on a whole planet of Metroids and won (under Malkovich's command?) before sparing the last Metroid because it was just a baby that thought she was its mother.
-Then at the beginning of Super Metroid, she hands the baby over to GalFed scientists for research. It is quickly stolen by space pirates, and she invades Zebes once again, battles and defeats Ridley a 4th time, before taking on the new and improved Mother Brain and finally blowing up the entire planet just to be sure they can't rebuild a 3rd time.
-And then we get to Other M, a game which wants us to believe that after all Samus has gone through, she is an insecure little girl with daddy issues who craves the approval of big strong men, and need them to hold her hand and tell her what to do. Even if this is how Nintendo have thought of her all along, I just don't buy it.
How it could have been made more believable: If they had rewritten the story to make it fit after the first game, like a sort of inbetween of her first mission and the first Prime game, I could have bought this stumbling, insecure character they were trying to sell more easily, even if I still wouldn't have been totally happy about it, at least I could have believed it. As it is; the character we play is so different from the one they're portraying in the cutscenes, that it creates quite the schism.
Three moments from the game that were of particular frustration to me, hidden in spoiler tags:
-The Power-up mechanic: While the explanations for stripping Samus of her powers have often been cliche and contrived in the past, this is the worst one they've come up with yet. It wasn't long before I was longing for one of those cliche explanations. Samus has all her abilities from the get-go, and doesn't lose them, she just agrees to lock them away until Adam authorizes their use. Now I was willing to swallow that to a certain degree, finding it fairly reasonable to ask her to not use her stronger weapons on a space station with several friendlies on it, and that she might agree to such a limitation out of respect of her old commander. Everything she has that's not a weapon, though? That I don't get... but it really only grated on me from spoiled moment #1 up there.
How it could have been done better: Even if we disregard the whole idea about a cliched accident, just going through the little extra effort of making something up like how her powers are a big drain on the suit's energy reserves, and she prefers having them turned off until they're needed, would have made it all more believable. As it is, it just feels like another instance of lazy or downright stupid writing.
(Note for all you nitpickers out there, I removed the ´ in cliche because it seemed to screw up the formatting, like this: cliché )
-The Map (and minimap): This is a rather small nitpick compared to the others, but one I'd like to make since I can't recall seeing anyone else mentioning it. After the maps in the Prime games, I was rather disappointed by the map in this game, which go too much back towards the old 2D game maps, though it felt less useful than those too. And the minimap adds to the trouble by not always showing north as up, making it rather confusing to figure out where you should be going at times, or at least where you want to go. I only got a handle on it towards the very end of the game, which did help me backtrack for a few upgrades.
-Nothing new in the suit: Most other Metroid games have had some bit of new or tweaked upgrade to Samus's systems, but Other M contains nothing new in that department. Aside from the acrobatics, she doesn't have a single power that wasn't in Super Metroid. Understandable with how they built the game, but still a shame.
The Okay
-The story does contain a murder mystery that takes up most of the middle act, but isn't truly resolved and sorta gets forgotten in the last act. Considering how much attention they paid to that up until then, it was a little weird that they seemingly decided to just let us figure out the solution for ourselves in the end. It was intriguing while it lasted, though.
-The controls aren't perfect, and probably could have benefited from adding the nunchuk, but once you get used to them they do work pretty well.
Point of curiousity:
Conclusion
A bold step in a new direction for the franchise, that sadly stumbles a bit. All in all I'd say it was a positive step though, so long as they learn from what didn't work and do better the next time, since there was a lot of potential and good ideas in here. It is probably the first Metroid title I'd hesitate to replay though. I've played through all the others at least twice. (with the exception of Return of Samus)
Recommendation
If you are a Metroid fan, it is probably worth at least renting or borrowing it to try it out, and could well be worth a purchase. After you're done you might feel the need to replay older titles to reaffirm your vision of who Samus is though. I was lucky and got Metroid Prime Trilogy for my birthday. If you're not a fan, it could still be worth checking out considering how different it is from the other games.
Be warned right away this article contains spoilers, big and small, and I will only put spoiler tags for the bigger ones. (unless I forget)
This game is a bit of a mixed bag, unfortunately. It's a work of experimentation and some brave decisions, but no matter how brave, not all of the experiments net a positive result. I will say right away that I know there are a lot of differing opinions on this game, so what you regard as positive and negative is probably highly subjective. With that out of the way, I will admit it's not all bad, and for me the good parts outweighed the bad, so I did get through the game, and I did think it improved towards the end in many ways.
I do not think it was as good as any of the Prime games, or any of the other Metroid games for that matter. There are some things Other M does better, but overall it's a weaker game. It has a lot of promise though, so I am curious as to where they're taking it from here. Hopefully they will learn from the mistakes they made, keep the good parts, and make a better game all in all next time. But for now that's just wild speculation and pipe dreams. Time will tell.
Other M has a more action-focused design, with less focus on adventure, puzzles and exploration; something I'm sure will suit some people just fine. It is also a lot more linear, even more so than Metroid Fusion, and there is also a focus on (unskippable) cutscenes.
Let's dispense with the good parts first, and get to the ranting and nitpicking later. (though I can't promise the good parts will be totally free of nitpicks)
The Good
-Combat: Overall, I liked the combat system in Other M. It was fast, hectic and most often fun. It took a little getting used to I will admit, but once you got the basics down, it felt pretty natural, even though some of the finishing moves could have been better implemented. Pointing at the screen to go into first-person mode to be able to fire missiles was not always something you wanted to have to do in hectic boss-fights though, but Team Ninja have never liked to make easy games as far as I'm aware. The omission of health and missile boosts dropped by enemies did make for a harder game definitely. I died more than I'm used to in a Metroid game, but the checkpoint system meant I never lost much progress to it. And never had to rewatch a cutscene, thankfully.
-Atmosphere: When you were finally on your own and got to run around the halls of the spaceship, taking in the scenery and wondering what the devil had transpired in this place, the experience got very immersive, and time flew by as I went from room to room, trying to glean the secrets of the place. Here is where the first-person mode really came into its own, letting you at any time take a good look at your surroundings. Which leads me to...
-Exploration: While this game had less puzzles, and less secrets to find, there was still plenty to waste hours looking around for while you postpone advancing the story. The linear nature of the game did often leave you in the position of only being able to search back and forth along a single path though, but most paths had at least some sidetracks for you to explore. The most peculiar parts were the few scattered lavatories, or perhaps locker rooms, that you found around the place. You always went into over-the-shoulder mode for that, which was a sign the game gave you that nothing dangerous is gonna happen, since you can't fire your gun. I did find a powerup in one of them, but the rest were a mystery to me... maybe just to add to the authenticity of the place?
-Puzzles: Though there weren't as many or as elaborate ones as in the Prime games, they were still usually clever, if only somewhat, and required you to actually use both your eyes and your mind. I will admit to actually being stumped a few times. That could reflect poorly on me as a person.
The Bad
-Story: This is a big fat target... not all bad, just mostly. The basic premise is fine enough. Samus receives a distress call, goes to investigate space station. The rest though... fell rather flat for me, and resulted in some excruciatingly terrible to watch/comprehend scenes and scenarios during the game. The game claims to let us know what kind of person Samus actually is underneath her cold metal exterior, but I didn't find the Samus Aran they portrayed to be all that believable, not to mention her voice actor sounding a lot like she thought she was voicing a robot. Maybe that was the motivation they gave her, to make Samus sound emotionless, but honestly it sounds rather awful.
Let's do a brief history and context lesson, shall we? Yes, Samus had a dramatic childhood. Yes, it probably traumatized her. But... Other M is placed after Super Metroid. Before Fusion, Super Metroid was the timeline-chronologically latest game in the series, which makes Other M the second to last game in the timeline.
-So before she gets to this point, she has invaded Zebes with nothing more than a simple version of the power suit and short-range blaster, and came away from it with a new and improved power suit, and a space pirate base destroyed. Ridley was fought and defeated in the process.
-Then came the Prime games, where she discovered Phazon, battled and defeated Ridley another 2 times, fought and defeated a dark version of herself, took on entire planets, battled an invasion from another dimension, and many other things before finally destroying the source of Phazon itself, which somehow made the substance disappear from the entire universe.
-Then there was Metroid 2, the gameboy game which is the only Metroid I've never actually played, but I gathered she took on a whole planet of Metroids and won (under Malkovich's command?) before sparing the last Metroid because it was just a baby that thought she was its mother.
-Then at the beginning of Super Metroid, she hands the baby over to GalFed scientists for research. It is quickly stolen by space pirates, and she invades Zebes once again, battles and defeats Ridley a 4th time, before taking on the new and improved Mother Brain and finally blowing up the entire planet just to be sure they can't rebuild a 3rd time.
-And then we get to Other M, a game which wants us to believe that after all Samus has gone through, she is an insecure little girl with daddy issues who craves the approval of big strong men, and need them to hold her hand and tell her what to do. Even if this is how Nintendo have thought of her all along, I just don't buy it.
How it could have been made more believable: If they had rewritten the story to make it fit after the first game, like a sort of inbetween of her first mission and the first Prime game, I could have bought this stumbling, insecure character they were trying to sell more easily, even if I still wouldn't have been totally happy about it, at least I could have believed it. As it is; the character we play is so different from the one they're portraying in the cutscenes, that it creates quite the schism.
Three moments from the game that were of particular frustration to me, hidden in spoiler tags:
The first was as I entered the lava stage. ?Oh, I'm taking damage,? I thought, ?I must need to find the Varia upgrade.? But no... she had it all along, she was just waiting for Adam to specifically tell her to activate it. That went so far beyond all sense that my only conclusion was that the developers thought that because she has blond hair, she must be stupid. Or even worse, that because she's a woman, she must be stupid.
The second moment was about halfway through the game, I believe, when she gets pinned on her back by a big boss monster. Now normally I would expect her to roll into morph ball, drop a few bombs, and roll away full speed until she's clear then flip back and fire all she got at the thing. But no... she lays there, pinned and helpless, and has to try to shoot away the tail that the monster uses to try to turn her brain into swiss cheese for long enough for one of her big, strong marine buddies to come to her rescue and scare the monster off. That went well beyond my ability to believe. Also, why couldn't I just fire into the big slavering mouth of the thing?
Thirdly, she encounters Ridley. Again. For the fifth time (at least) in her career. But all of a sudden it's different. The game takes away our control to show a cutscene where Samus panics, freezes, literally turns into a little sobbing girl and loses control of her powersuit as Ridley then picks her up and carries her around the room. Like he's been known to do before without causing such a reaction from her... until her big, strong marine buddy can once again save her from the big, bad monster. Luckily she regains her wits after that and we are given control again. After that scene I felt both insulted and angry that they wanted me to believe this crap. The righteous pounding I was able to give Ridley afterwards lightened my mood somewhat.
The second moment was about halfway through the game, I believe, when she gets pinned on her back by a big boss monster. Now normally I would expect her to roll into morph ball, drop a few bombs, and roll away full speed until she's clear then flip back and fire all she got at the thing. But no... she lays there, pinned and helpless, and has to try to shoot away the tail that the monster uses to try to turn her brain into swiss cheese for long enough for one of her big, strong marine buddies to come to her rescue and scare the monster off. That went well beyond my ability to believe. Also, why couldn't I just fire into the big slavering mouth of the thing?
Thirdly, she encounters Ridley. Again. For the fifth time (at least) in her career. But all of a sudden it's different. The game takes away our control to show a cutscene where Samus panics, freezes, literally turns into a little sobbing girl and loses control of her powersuit as Ridley then picks her up and carries her around the room. Like he's been known to do before without causing such a reaction from her... until her big, strong marine buddy can once again save her from the big, bad monster. Luckily she regains her wits after that and we are given control again. After that scene I felt both insulted and angry that they wanted me to believe this crap. The righteous pounding I was able to give Ridley afterwards lightened my mood somewhat.
-The Power-up mechanic: While the explanations for stripping Samus of her powers have often been cliche and contrived in the past, this is the worst one they've come up with yet. It wasn't long before I was longing for one of those cliche explanations. Samus has all her abilities from the get-go, and doesn't lose them, she just agrees to lock them away until Adam authorizes their use. Now I was willing to swallow that to a certain degree, finding it fairly reasonable to ask her to not use her stronger weapons on a space station with several friendlies on it, and that she might agree to such a limitation out of respect of her old commander. Everything she has that's not a weapon, though? That I don't get... but it really only grated on me from spoiled moment #1 up there.
How it could have been done better: Even if we disregard the whole idea about a cliched accident, just going through the little extra effort of making something up like how her powers are a big drain on the suit's energy reserves, and she prefers having them turned off until they're needed, would have made it all more believable. As it is, it just feels like another instance of lazy or downright stupid writing.
(Note for all you nitpickers out there, I removed the ´ in cliche because it seemed to screw up the formatting, like this: cliché )
-The Map (and minimap): This is a rather small nitpick compared to the others, but one I'd like to make since I can't recall seeing anyone else mentioning it. After the maps in the Prime games, I was rather disappointed by the map in this game, which go too much back towards the old 2D game maps, though it felt less useful than those too. And the minimap adds to the trouble by not always showing north as up, making it rather confusing to figure out where you should be going at times, or at least where you want to go. I only got a handle on it towards the very end of the game, which did help me backtrack for a few upgrades.
-Nothing new in the suit: Most other Metroid games have had some bit of new or tweaked upgrade to Samus's systems, but Other M contains nothing new in that department. Aside from the acrobatics, she doesn't have a single power that wasn't in Super Metroid. Understandable with how they built the game, but still a shame.
The Okay
-The story does contain a murder mystery that takes up most of the middle act, but isn't truly resolved and sorta gets forgotten in the last act. Considering how much attention they paid to that up until then, it was a little weird that they seemingly decided to just let us figure out the solution for ourselves in the end. It was intriguing while it lasted, though.
-The controls aren't perfect, and probably could have benefited from adding the nunchuk, but once you get used to them they do work pretty well.
Point of curiousity:
How did Nightmare get into the game? How did they get away with stealing him from Metroid Fusion? If I recall correctly, in Fusion they stated he was developed on that space ship specifically. Has that been retconned so that all GalFed space stations/ships have one of them now? The fight was interesting though, I'll give them that.
Conclusion
A bold step in a new direction for the franchise, that sadly stumbles a bit. All in all I'd say it was a positive step though, so long as they learn from what didn't work and do better the next time, since there was a lot of potential and good ideas in here. It is probably the first Metroid title I'd hesitate to replay though. I've played through all the others at least twice. (with the exception of Return of Samus)
Recommendation
If you are a Metroid fan, it is probably worth at least renting or borrowing it to try it out, and could well be worth a purchase. After you're done you might feel the need to replay older titles to reaffirm your vision of who Samus is though. I was lucky and got Metroid Prime Trilogy for my birthday. If you're not a fan, it could still be worth checking out considering how different it is from the other games.
