And that's not even getting into the whole theme of motherhood which, as Yahtzee put it, was woven into the narrative about as subtly as a sperm whale in an airplane luggage compartment. Why the FUCK would Samus feel such an attachment to "the baby"? It's not her baby it's just a Metroid that imprinted on her. Bearing in mind that the first thing Samus did after leaving SR388 upon discovering the infant Metroid was deliver it to a research lab so they could experiment on it. Yeah there's a devoted mother for you. Oh but all of sudden we're majorly depressed because we were unable to save "the baby."Tyrant_Valvatorez said:Yeah the gameplay was decent but flawed. It was more the extreme linearity that annoyed people.canadamus_prime said:Yeah, I got to agree with this one. The story was an atrocity. How is it for example that Samus, who although very little characterization had been done up to this point, was established to be at the very least to be a farily seasoned bounty hunter, be suddenly be breaking down and becoming this subservient little whiny *****? "Adam's words pierced my heart" What? We're talking low level fan fiction levels of bad here. Never mind that the story was shot full of holes. How is it that Adam figured he was saving Samus' life by shooting her in the back while a Metroid was hovering overhead ready to snack on a Samus sandwich? And then he gives some bullshit story about Metroids being engineered to be immune to cold and he needs to go blow up the Metroid wing to the ship with him inside. Ok, putting aside the amount of bullshit in his story, couldn't he have just shot the Metroid before going "Hey Samus, don't go in there!" instead of shooting her. What's worse is that she eats up his story without question, not even questioning why he had to shoot her to stop her going to the Metroid wing of the damn ship. ...oops sorry now I went off on a rant.Tyrant_Valvatorez said:Metroid: Other M ... people have complained about it to death but for good reason. One thing people seem to miss about the story is, even if by some miracle it had turned out to be the best story ever written it still would have ruined the game since that style of story telling is not suited for Metroid.
The best way to explain this point is to look at what is the most important aspect of the series discovery: pretty much with the exception of Fusion each game had a minimalistic plot which took a back seat as the real focus was exploring alien worlds, with the real reward being the discovery of little details or hidden items heck at times a lot of the story was told through the gameplay itself.
To cut the rant short pretty much instead of giving another game that allows us to discover and explore an alien world without being beat over the head with the story, they gave us a grand space opera that not only lacked subtly but overly relied on bringing back past enemies and ironically said plot has so much irrelevance despite it being forced on you.
Basically the only thing the story did was retroactively screw with past games and make aspects of Fusion make no sense whilst at the same time contributing nothing at all, Im even trying my hardest to not rant about screwing up Samus herself but the saddest part is this mess came from the same man who brought us Super Metroid... I guess this is what happens when he has full control.
Anyway the gameplay wasn't so bad, except for the absence of health and ammo drops and that the first person missile thing didn't really work during boss fights.
On note of the story yeah absolute train wreck that is so badly written it has extremely bad implications about Samus and Adam's relationship, never have a saw a character who the author clearly wants you to like become such an irredeemable douche and thats through bad writing alone. One thing that must be pointed out Sakamoto is to blame alone since there was 3 companies working on Other M and he ruled over everything with an iron fist. Team Ninja for example wanted to use wiimote and nunchuck controls to allow for more direct control and sakamoto essentially bitched at them until they agreed with him.
The infamous Ridley scene is not only a character destroying moment but just plain bad storytelling since even if you buy into the whole PTSD thing (which is a load of crap) even then the scene still fails as it serves no purpose other than to make Samus look weak (funnily enough a recurring theme in the game), since the scene requires you to understand Samus's backstory which has never been officially revealed except in a japan only Manga and a brief description on a Super Smash Bros. trophy. So the scene pretty much annoys fans and confuses newcomers.
I have rarely seen this mentioned but some of Sakamoto's comments about Samus before the game came out were down right creepy, such as the whole "Only I know where her beauty mark is" comment. It actually makes a lot of the unfortunate implications make a whole lot more sense, minor conspiracy theory moment Adam Malkovitch is Sakamoto's self insert perhaps ?
No, I don't blame Team Ninja for Other M, I place all the blame at the feet of Sakamoto, who seems to have been taking tips from George Lucas.