Metroid: Other M (Wii) > Reviews (2)

Nintendo redistributes the keys to the Metroid universe once again and gives them to Team Ninja of Ninja Gaiden fame. Do they prove worthy replacements for Retro Studios that are leaving behind a memorable Prime Trilogy?

The Story

An indeterminate amount of years after the events of Super Metroid, our lead, Samus, keeps drifting the galaxy looking for trouble, in an effort to put her remarkable power suit and honed battle skills to good use. The galaxy has been a somewhat peaceful place ever since she systematically eradicated the most evil and dangerous life forms inhabiting it over the course of the previous games, but a distress call from a wayward station seems to promise danger and old-school action.

Typically, Samus finds the station she is about to explore infested with monsters, but this time she also finds some friendly company and a couple of familiar faces. A team of Galactic Federation Marines were first to answer the distress call and they happen to be led by Adam Malkovich

, Samus’ former superior officer.

Adam reluctantly integrates her into into his team and splits the party up to better investigate the situation. It eventually turns out, to noone’s surprise, this whole facility is yet another attempt to create an ultimate weapon using the destructive power and ludicrous resiliency of the Metroids. This is, however, the first time the shadowy villain appears to be human and that villain has managed to entrench a traitor in Adam’s team.

The traitor’s task is to ensure the safety of the project and terminate anyone that starts posing a threat, so there is a bit of that “_Alien_”-type murder-mystery going on: While you try to get to the bottom of the situation, the covert traitor and an enigmatic monster are on the loose causing trouble and picking-off teammates one by one.

The basic premise and writing is passable: it’s bad, but it’s what you’d expect from a sci-fi action/horror story. It’s probably more than what you’d expect from a series where the mythos establishes a race called Space Pirates.

But when the storyline combines with the presentation to affect the gameplay, it starts becoming difficult to bear.

The Gameplay

Other M plays like a classic 2D sidescroller: it only uses the Wii Remote: the d-pad and two buttons. You jump, you run and you shoot, with certain combinations resulting in slight variations, like charged-up shots & wall-jumps.

While it’s commendable Team Ninja tried to keep things simple, this control system quickly backfires: With Samus auto-aiming and performing canned animations at the drop of a hat, the player starts questioning his impact on the action.

The Lethal Attacks you can perform on downed enemies just about work, because they at least require you to spot the opening and go for it, so seeing their cool animations does feel like a just reward to something you’ve done correctly; although it would be nicer if there was more than one finisher for each type of enemy.

Sense Moving on the other hand, springing away from danger, is so ridiculously easy to pull of correctly it never delivers any sense of accomplishment.

It occurs when you tap the d-pad, just as an enemy is about to hit you. But, since there’s no penalty to tapping outside your window of opportunity, you’ll just find yourself tapping the d-pad continuously and avoiding every attack, without thought.

It does get kinda tricky though, when you try to do it right after a First Person Missile Attack: By pointing the Wiimote at the screen, you change to First Person View, where you can scan for clues and lock onto enemies to blast them with missiles. Since Other M doesn’t use the Nunchuck and its analogue stick, you can’t move at all while in this mode so, in order to be able to dodge again, you have to turn the remote sideways, wait for the view to switch back and then tap the d-pad.

The developers, realising the unintuitiveness of this system, have happily added as many creatures only vulnerable to missiles as they possibly could, pretty much defining the term artificial difficulty

. Of course, “artificial difficulty” could well be the name of the game here, as Other M deals with the problem with most videogame sequels in the most bonkers way possible.

That problem is that by the end of the previous game, the hero has usually become too powerful for normal enemies & obstacles to be of even the slightest hindrance. So the developers often come up with a cheap way to make the hero weak again, with the most common cop-out being an explosion or a deadly attack that messes up all of the hero’s arsenal.

Resetting the skill-set is especially important for “'''Metroidvania'''” games since they are built upon powering up your character, getting new abilities by absorbing them from a fallen enemy or a new piece of tech, then backtracking to previous areas and using your new skills to explore new paths.

So, while Team Ninja was not feeling creative enough to come-up with fresh abilities for Samus, they at least went for a creative excuse not to use her old ones until the plot called for them: This time, you start off pretty much as you were in the end of of Super Metroid, but you don’t get to use anything until Adam gives you the all clear.

This conceit is supposed to kill two birds with one stone and illustrate that Samus is hung-up on this guy and wants to look all good & professional for him by following his orders to the letter, while preventing you from being too powerful at the start of the game, but it quickly stops making sense and mostly illustrates the characters as being thick.

Because, OK, needing a permission to use the Power Bomb, the weapon with a huge radius that completely evaporates human-beings, or the Wave/Plasma Beam, that passes through walls & organics so it might hit someone that doesn’t even see it coming, makes sense.

But there is absolutely no reason for Adam to restrict the use of the armour upgrades, the Grapple Beam, the Speed Booster, all of which have no risk and actually keep Samus even safer. And, if we’re playing it like that, why is it OK to fire Super Missiles willy-nilly after Adam gives permission once?

Shouldn‘t he revoke it as soon as the threat passes and then grant it again as needed?

That would be annoying, sure, but this whole system blasted through “point annoying” when Samus started getting damaged while investigating an area with extremely high temperatures. Even though she sounded like she was about to pass out or even die, this didn’t bother her sense of self-preservation or Adam nearly enough to authorize the Varia Feature of her suit that prevents damage from extreme temperatures.

With Other M being a walk in the park overall for veteran gamers, even with the crippled controls, it’s certainly puzzling why these few sections of overcranked Artificial Difficulty exist. About as puzzling as why Team Ninja decided to subvert a video-game trope as old as getting power-ups from fallen bad guys.

Contrary to archetypal videogames such as Mario and Zelda, in Other M you don’t get anything from the random enemies you kill: no health, no ammo, no “high-score”; nothing. You recover energy using the Navigation Booths / Save Points which are scattered everywhere and you can replenish your missiles at any time using a special ability labelled Concentration. This also recovers some energy if you’ve reached critical levels, but it takes quite some time to charge, so deciding to go for it during a boss fight is a double-edged sword.

But all this just means you have no incentive whatsoever to fight the enemies that, of course, magically respawn when you leave the room. After you beat them once to magically unlock the door, you are free to bypass them altogether. In fact, you should bypass them because dealing with them will only waste your time and energy!

Similarly, Team Ninja does away with the inexplicable but beneficiary inertia video-game heroes typically enjoy. When you fire a charged-up shot Samus is pushed back, which will dramatically mess up your jump. This will certainly annoy veteran gamers until they adjust, but it also heavily diminishes the usefulness of charging up in general... Especially once you start using your more powerful beams.

These little tweaks are tried and tested to rack up to an enjoyable gameplay experience and if Team Ninja opted against them in favour of some semblance of realism, what about the invisible, insurmountable walls? Successful “Metroidvania” games manage to obfuscate your constraints and make the backtracking wet your sense of discovery. Badly designed “Metroidvania” games, however, warrant extra cheese to keep you on the railroads.

So, here, doors become locked for no reason whatsoever, enemies appear out of thin air, missile-proof glass suddenly becomes breakable... and of course, invisible walls keep you from jumping from one ledge to the next.

Another staple of the Metroid franchise Team Ninja manage to botch are the speed-runs: After going through it normally, you try and complete the game as fast as possible. Finishing a Metroid title once is usually satisfying enough, but this adds a ton of replay value, if you’re looking for it.

But you can’t really enjoy a speed-run in Other M because, instead of complimenting it, the Presentation is out to hamper the Gameplay as much as possible.
===The Presentation===

Besides featuring hours of unskippable cutscenes of remarkably bad conversations, Other M also breaks up the pace by often switching up to a slow, over-the-shoulder prespective where Samus is only capable of moving forward cautiously. This kinda helps with the “murder-mystery” atmosphere, but it has nothing on Prime’s excellent and, most-importantly, optional scan-logs.

It is also pretty hard to believe that you don’t get the normal controls when revisiting an “atmospheric” segment; it doesn’t take much common sense to realise the “slow” perspective can’t possibly work when you know what’s coming up.

But it’s even harder to stomach that even though the visuals are nowhere near the level of those in the Prime Trilogy, the framerate manages to stutter. The art direction in general is uninspiring, with everything being so bland, so colorless, even the classic humongous bosses just feel... depressing to look at. It’s like someone took the art from Super Metroid and sucked all the joy out of it.

And what’s most depressing is the voice acting, with Jessica Martin, voicing Samus, easily taking the crown for most atrociously delivered dialogue in a video-game, with acting coaches everywhere undoubtedly having aneurysms every time she opens her mouth. That doesn’t mean she is a bad actress, mind, as she was explicitly directed to talk like that, in order to bring home the Melodrama that utterly destroys Other M.

The Melodrama

You see, the worst thing about Other M and its portrayal of Samus is that... it kinda makes sense.

Samus is an orphan, raised by bird-like aliens to be their savior. This already makes her people skills problematic, but she does manage to show some emotion during her years in the Galactic Federation Police. However, the people she loves keep dying and she decides to become a self-exiled bounty hunter, with her terrifying solo missions in extremely vast planets inhabited solely by hostile aliens stripping away those few last strands of humanity that were left.

But this isn’t the stuff legends are made of and I can’t possibly believe anyone playing Metroid didn’t imagine a confident, courageous, action-hero-type person behind that helmet! Other M’s version of Samus is a patently awful protagonist. She is dehumanized to the point of being unrelatable and is also impressively stupid. She disagrees with superior officers just for the sake of being rebellious, she can’t quip and she can’t put two & two together.

She has trouble dealing with the titular Metroids, even though an encounter with them should be like Casual Friday for her by and is even surprised to see her arch-nemesis Ridley, who has come back from the dead so often he must have a frequent-flyer deal going on.

And when I say surprised, I mean petrified with fear! I was always excited to play Super Metroid, it’s one of my favourite SNES games of all time, but going through it, knowing that it is Other M’s version of Samus behind that helmet...

just depresses me to no end. So, yeah, Other M is so bad, it retroactively messes up a pretty great game.

Even more so than movies, video-games are a form of escapism. That certainly doesn’t mean they should all be light-hearted and aloof, but they should all be entertaining, you should always take something from them.

In Other M, Samus, that is, your avatar, that is, you, doesn’t do anything useful over the course of the entire game. You can safely extract her from the story and not change a thing and she only succeeds in being totally useless. How’s that supposed to make you feel?

OVERALL

I guess Team Ninja was going for an M for Melodrama, but they ended up with an M for Monotone. We do get to learn more about Samus, and she does have a dramatic past, but she’s such a disaster of a protagonist, all that’s really left is the monotone she speaks in.

Even if you could just focus on the gameplay, it doesn’t rise above M for Mediocre. It’s not horrible in that context, but still firmly below-par. It’s Metroidvania: you get to play with some cool weapons (all borrowed from other titles), you get to tear a sprawling enemy base apart for collectibles (made too easy because everything is highlighted for the portion after the end credits), but it’s badly designed and soulless.

Even if you are a die-hard fan of the series, you’ll be much better served writing this one off and spending your time playing, or replaying, much better games, such as the Prime Trilogy & Super Metroid, Fusion & Zero Mission, most Castlevania: X of Y titles, Shadow Complex and Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Precise Score: 6.5/10