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Here we go. Another entry, another sacred cow.
Don’t worry, the Star Wars Expanded Universe retrospective is on its way, along with some new characters and storylines I’ve made up for my own versions of fictional universes.
But as I was recently playing Metroid games, and I was watching some Metroid videos, I felt the need to opine on a game series that I’ve recently had some good experiences with, and what seems to be wrong with the fandom:
METROID
Yes, yes, it’s quite natural for someone like me to like Metroid. I was a fan of Star Wars, Halo, Gundam, Transformers, and many other science fiction franchises. When it came to Nintendo’s, I was no different. I played through the Star Fox games like an addict. I was first exposed to Samus from the original Smash Bros, which piqued my curiosity. I did my research on the Metroid games, and when I finally got my hands on the Metroid Prime trilogy, my first and arguably best Metroid purchase, I decided to plow through not only the trilogy, but two other games that were the most well-known outside of the Prime saga: Super Metroid and Other M.
Playing through the Metroid games was somewhat different, for my tastes. Usually, I’m dealing with games where the main bad guy has to be overcome with sheer endurance or skill. Usually, the harder parts of the games I play concern a particularly long level with very limited checkpoints and plenty of bad guys, or a boss (or a group of bosses) that won’t go down as easily as others have. Metroid, aside from Castlevania Symphony of the Night and the Zelda games, were the first to give me a true puzzle challenge. The Mario games I played didn’t give me much trouble with puzzles, but the Metroid games, along with Zelda and Castlevania SOTN, were the first to introduce me to the puzzle genre. Because while Link and Alucard swing swords, and Samus uses a gun, their games are a lot more similar than they are at first glance. Despite the fact that one’s a sci-fi game and the other two are fantasies, Metroid has more in common with Zelda and SOTN than it does with say, Star Fox. Out of all the Star Fox games, the only one to even reach a similar level of puzzles would be Star Fox Adventures, and that was the black sheep of the Star Fox family.
The puzzles sometimes irritate me, and sometimes I get so angry that I crack open a guide or search through the internet for answers, but the times when I solve the puzzles, especially on my own, were really satisfying. Even more satisfying were the boss fights. While the fights against mooks in Metroid games, especially the Prime games, rarely gets me to try hard the way I play Halo games on Legendary, Metroid combat truly shines at the boss fights. I’d say the most memorable fight I had with Metroid games are the Dark Samus fights and the Emperor Ing, especially considering that I had to lose to the latter several times before I figured out his weakness and exploited it for good measure. (protip: use light gun charged shots against his tentacles in the first form, and his mouth in his third form) Few bosses bring that out in me. The last time I was that challenged was Shadow Peach in Paper Mario 2 and Tartarus in Halo 2. Dark Samus was like other shadow enemies I’ve fought, like Shadow Mario and Dark Link, but more challenging. Shadow Mario is more like a chase enemy, and as for Dark Link, I easily cracked him when I figured out how to hit him. Dark Samus, at least in the first two fights in Prime 2, fought me pound for pound, and like the Anakin vs. Obi-Wan fight in the Star Wars Episode III game, you have to give as good as you get if you wanted to win.
As for the feel of the games themselves, Super Metroid just felt like Castlevania SOTN with a gun, which is funny, considering the main concept behind Samus was practically “Mario with a gun” when she was first developed. Other M felt more like an action game with some minor exploration thrown in for good measure, while Metroid Prime felt like an old-fashioned FPS like Duke Nukem or Doom from the old days with an added tricorder function for the Trek fans out there. It seems that Samus would work better as a military research/biotech division member rather than a bounty hunter-there is no bounty hunting at all, and it would seem that in between gutting Space Pirates and their bosses, Samus busies herself with archaeology, tech scavenging, and biological research. Out of all three Prime games, only the third made her seem like a mercenary/bounty hunter, because at least she reports to an authority and wipes out enemies, presumably for a monetary reward.
And in retrospect, I liked them all. Other M was a great action game, Super Metroid was a fun side-scrolling exploration game, and the Prime games were like Zelda mixed with Halo, which, as a fan of both, I liked. Prime 1 was a nice first step, while Prime 2 seemed to bring in the difficulty, what with the Dark World corroding your health and the bosses being harder than usual. Prime 3 has to be my favorite, because it takes everything good from Prime 1 and 2 and adds a war story to it, giving Samus an authority to report to and military targets to destroy, which felt more appropriate for a science fiction series to have consequences beyond the hero’s personal affairs. Saving the Luminoth in the second game and putting the Chozo to rest in the first felt like a minor accomplishment, but I really liked how Samus now had to interact with the military and take assignments from them on the fly on the third game. I’ve heard some fans of the 2-D Metroid titles disparage the Prime games as Halo ripoffs, and as a Halo fan, I take offense to that. Halo is a great game series, and a Metroid game moving along similar lines like Halo’s is a good step for me. It’s not like they got rid of the exploration or anything-you still can choose to go to other planets yourself, and throw away the Feddies’ timeline to pursue your own goals. I chose to do that with Prime 3, and I pursued the Nova Beam upgrade without them telling me to go for it. In fact, the fact that you go from planet to planet instead of area to area is a huge improvement-the other games had you go through the sections on foot alone, so backtracking took quite a while.
Prime 3 also had a more personal story, where you work with the Federation, get attacked by a massive Space Pirate offensive, and you have to save a planet from being colony-dropped by a Phazon-infested asteroid in the prologue. Then you wind up having to hunt down your former comrades when they get brainwashed by the bad guys/lose control of their Phazon powers, and you yourself have to deal with space cancer as the Phazon begins to eat at your body. The Federation leader Admiral Castor Dane trusts you to lead the assaults and protect his spec-ops demolition teams, and the final boss is an evil version of you that was born in Prime 1 and got stronger in Prime 2. Out of all the Prime games, Prime 3 was the one I liked best. It had the best action, the best plot, and it showed why Samus got the reputation she had when she saved the galaxy with the Feddies at her back.
And now comes the one part where most Metroid fans will disagree with me:
THE OTHER M DILEMMA
When Other M was coming out, I was enamored by this action game that took the Samus that I knew from the Prime games and Super Metroid and turned her into Rambo meets Kratos. She was more half-Sherlock Holmes, half John Matrix when I played as her in Metroid Prime, and this departure from the norm stoked me, especially since I was a fan of action games too, from Force Unleashed to Bayonetta. Looking at the combat scenes, it seemed that Samus was going to be more brutal than ever before. Yikes. Especially when it was Team Ninja on the scene making this game. I still had nightmares about Dead Or Alive 4, where I’d be doing good on a match, then the other guy gets his first punch in and suddenly I was on the defensive until I got clobbered to death.
Then I bought the game, and played the game.
Not that bad, I thought. Could have been better, could have been worse, but overall, I liked the action bits, and I at least understood what they were going for with the story. I myself would have done something different, but the story they gave, I didn’t much hate it.
Then I saw the fanbase’s reaction.
Dear Lord, this was more juicy than the Star Wars Prequels.
One condemnation after another. Reactions ran from low scores on gaming magazines, to hordes of fans bashing it, to people talking about how sexist and misogynistic it is for Samus to be so “subservient”, “emotional”, even “fearful”. Apparently, if the fanbase is to be believed, Samus went from Boba Fett with tits to being a subservient crybaby.
I believe this is an exaggeration of what Other M portrayed and what the game is. While there are times when Samus had fear and Samus acted subservient, there were also plenty of times where she’s a complete badass in the game, especially when she’s executing enemies. What I saw from the game was a very human Samus that can be ruthless in combat, but also human when interacting with other humans. While there are some times where she felt a tad moody, I never jumped at the screen to shout “betrayal!” the way many of these fans seemingly did. I was puzzled by some of their decisions, but not so much as to stop playing the game.
Now, let’s go over most of the talking points that the bashers whip out, shall we? Let’s start with the gameplay, then move on to the story.
“There’s not much exploration!”
Of course there isn’t. This is Team Ninja on the helm. I think they’d rather parade Samus naked rather than actually have puzzles and exploration like the old games. In case you haven’t noticed, this is an action game. As if the combat hadn’t clued you in on that already. This is practically a Ninja Gaiden clone with Metroid characters and settings splattered on top. If you don’t like that, then fine. Just be sure to know what you’re getting into when a studio that primarily works on action and fighting games works on a game. I mean, the only other thing they could have done was either make this a fighting game where Samus socks Ridley in the face on an even 1v1 match, or a beach volleyball game where Samus and Gandrayda try to knock each other into a pool with their butts.
Also, the backtracking kinda gets annoying sometimes. The Prime games were great, but the one part where the game grinded to a halt was when I had to hunt down some mcguffins to open up the final boss dungeons. Keys, power cores, whatever. You have to get some clues, then try to find the room, then try to find the damn key or power core. It just feels like padding to keep you from the final boss and force you to backtrack all over the places you’ve visited while following vague clues. That’s the part when I just crack open a guide so I can find and get all the items, so that I can go to the damn final boss that I wanted to shoot in the face with a high-powered plasma cannon.
“The missile controls are awkward! I can’t move when pointing the Wiimote forward while aiming!”
And I agree with that. It is somewhat awkward. I can get it to work, but I would have preferred working with the nunchuck and pressing a button to go to first-person mode to fire missiles. That, and add a button to fire missiles while in third-person.
“The authorization system is stupid!”
People think that the system where Adam has to authorize Samus before she can use her weapons and gadgets is stupid-and again, I agree. It would have been so much simpler had Samus been hit with one of the ever-occurring lightning bolts of Zeus that she gets struck with and be forced to search for power-ups again. Just have her deal with a power suit malfunction after some bad guy slams her on a sensitive power conduit or hits her with nondescript Force Lightning, then have General Adam or one of the marines say that the scientists who worked on the vessel they’re on were working on Chozo weapon prototypes in the ship, and Adam says that he will inform Samus if he or his team bump into any such tech while they investigate the place.
Overall, I found the gameplay stuff to be satisfying. Enough to overlook the more bizarre parts of the story. It was fun enough to keep me hooked, up until I finally beat the game. People bashing the gameplay just seem like they’re inflexible, in a way. Besides, other Metroid games did have you go from one place to another on a linear path, and only later force you to backtrack to find some items before facing the final boss. The Prime games even tell you where to go. While I still think that Prime 3 was better in gameplay, Other M was also quite fun, and I had my money’s worth playing the game.
Now, on to the juicy part-the story.
I have to admit, I had mixed feelings about the story. There were times when they had some good concepts, times that kept me guessing and tense, and times when I just sat there asking why they chose that path. While my own version of Samus is different from theirs, and believe me, I even came up with a rewrite of Other M that would change a few things, but for the story that was there, I saw some good parts, some bad parts, and some parts that had potential but needed improving.
But let’s get over the complaints, shall we?
“Samus is subservient to Adam!”
Well, of course. Samus has to be. Not only is Adam some kind of father figure that she used to work for, but General Malkovich represents the Galactic Federation, which pays her salary. And bounty hunters, unlike soldiers who get regular pay, are independent contractors that the state can hire or fire on a whim. If Samus doesn’t do everything peachy-clean for them, they stop paying her and tell her to get lost, and then she won’t be able to feed herself. It’s like with Boba Fett in Empire Strikes Back-in his dealings with Vader, it was obvious that the latter wore the pants in the relationship. Vader, like Adam, even restricts Fett’s weapons from the outset-warning him that using disintegrators against the people they’re going after is a complete no-no.
The fact that Vader had to stop and say that, instead of just leaving it at “I want them alive”, is probably because Fett and his fellow hunters have disintegration weapons, and are very liberal in using them-just like Samus. However, unlike Boba Fett, who works for anyone with a fat wallet, Samus specifically works for the good guys, the Galactic Federation. Hence why she can’t afford to look like a loose cannon-nobody else who wants to remain on the good side of the law would hire a walking death machine who goes off the rails and disobeys orders. That’s bad for business and reputation. So Samus has to keep up the facade of the obedient servant, so that she can continue getting paid, and she can keep up her good reputation. A Federation general getting angry about her not obeying orders and filing public complaints with the government and the military can easily cause trouble for her career, not to mention burn bridges with the clients that she does business with the most.
This isn’t even the first time Nintendo did this very same thing. In the Star Fox series, Fox McCloud was sent to Dinosaur Planet in Star Fox Adventures, and the first order from the commanding general, General Pepper, is to keep Fox from using personal firearms. Now, Star Fox Assault comes in later and shows that he has a lot of weapons, ranging from blasters, machine guns, gatling guns, rocket launchers, grenades, and sniper weapons. They could have been useful in helping Fox plow through the Sharpclaw army of the evil General Scales. He could have gone Rambo on them, a one-man engine of destruction against a bunch of guys with medieval weapons.
But the first thing the General orders is for Fox to leave all those fancy toys back on the ship, even the smallest blaster weapon. Down to the point where Fox has to fight with a stick against an army of angry dinosaurs. But again, just like Samus, Fox McCloud is a mercenary for the good guys. He doesn’t just go to the nearest scumbag or rich ponce with a wallet and asks for a job. He specifically works for the Cornerian government, a government that is quite squeamish to have mercs shooting up the place when they send people to help with planetary issues. So again, Fox has to play the good servant card and save the planet using a magic staff, instead of just blasting through General Scales’ army with a ton of guns as if he was John Matrix slaughtering a whole army.
Also, since this was Samus’ first superior officer after training with the Chozo, she did somehow see him as a father-figure. Keep in mind that her parents were slaughtered before her eyes at a very young age, and her only company after that were weird bird-men who did all sorts of experiments on her. She might have seen them as family after what happened to her mom and dad, but they weren’t humans. So a human like Adam would feel more relatable to Samus than some alien bird-men who were more obsessed with transcending physical form or coming up with a parasite to fight another parasite.
Granted, I would have done things differently-my version for Adam would be very supportive, while Samus is cold and distant, with an air of melancholy about her. Adam, in the game, seemed very authoritative, stubborn, and looks down on Samus as if she was beneath him. But it makes sense in a certain context-Samus is a former officer of the Federation who ran off to be a mercenary. To a man who remained with the military, a man who saw Samus quit, Adam wouldn’t have such a high opinion of her. Others like Admiral Dane from Metroid Prime 3 might, but Samus didn’t desert Dane’s unit. She deserted Adam’s unit, and I suppose that would have left some burned bridges on Adam’s side of the story. Maybe he just saw her as someone who played with pirates on the fringes of the galaxy and blew up worlds because of her reckless actions. Perhaps that’s why he’s apprehensive about her when it comes to her running around in a place that might have civilians. This wasn’t some pirate’s nest at the ass end of space where everyone is free game to be shot in the face, the Bottle Ship was a sensitive place with Federation secrets and possible survivors on board. Yes, I would have changed the authorization system so that Samus either has the power-ups from the start or she loses them and has to regain them. But Adam’s attitude isn’t necessarily out of line here.
These haters tend to see things from an audience perspective, irrespective of how the world that Samus lives in sees her. Some see her as a heroic figure. Others see her as a nonsense legend, like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. I quite literally pulled that from Metroid Prime 2 and the logs the soldiers have about Samus that Samus herself recovers from the remains of the Federation outposts in the game. The Federation soldiers in Prime 3 are at awe in Samus’ presence, but how many more billions haven’t seen her? And how many are out there that may have a negative view of her? Maybe some people think she’s wasting her time playing with pirates. Others might think she’s reckless because she leaves behind almost no survivors in her assaults and sometimes she winds up destroying the worlds she’s on. We never knew that people had negative opinions of the Jedi in Star Wars until we saw it in the Expanded Universe and the Prequels, where people questioned the Jedi ways and even voted in a guy who accused the Jedi of treason as the Emperor of the galaxy, supporting his decimation of the Jedi Order. What if there were also people who didn’t like Samus among the Federation populace?
Adam, especially, has a very negative view of Samus, considering that he’s a very by-the-book and Samus was practically out there joyriding in the galaxy and getting paid for it while his grunts get none of the glory. A by-the-books cop would not be very fond of a vigilante, no matter how impressive or effective they are, or how many accolades society gifts upon them. The by-the-book guy will always see them as either a nuisance or a threat. Batman gets shit from by-the-book cops all the time no matter how many times he saves Gotham City. For Adam, it might have been more, considering that Samus left him and his squad behind.
At the core of this seems to lie the difference between the East and the West. The guy who made this story was Yoshio Sakamoto, the maker of the Metroid franchise. Sakamoto is Japanese. Japan, and the East in general, does not see eye to eye with the West when it comes to women and feminism. The Japanese audience and their idea of an ideal woman is far different from the West's. So while Samus being emotional and subservient to General Adam was something Japanese fans would find no issue with, in the West, where feminism is more prevalent, they screamed "betrayal" because Samus, in their opinion, should never be that subversive; the most subversive she would be in their eyes is her taking orders from Admiral Dane, but responding to everyone with nothing but cold silence. Some of them might envision Samus as a playgirl, others see her as a cold bitch, kinda like Boba Fett with tits. In fact, the latter characterization is what most of them have for her.
In the eyes of Sakamoto, Samus was opening up, showing her true emotions, and being more of a three-dimensional character with fears and issues, making her more human and realistic. To them, it’s akin to Pinocchio becoming a real boy. In the Western fans' eyes, the hero they so lovingly worshiped turned into a subversive crybaby. It's all about differing value systems. And Japan has very different views on women compared to the West. Most of Asia does. They don't put up with "empowered women" who boast about how equal they are to men the way Westerners do. Oh, there are women with power in the East, but they know their place, and that place is to never fuck with a man unless they got backup. That whole "I'm an empowered woman and I'm equal/better than you in every way" won't fly in the East as it does in the West, hence why most characterizations of Samus by Western fans don't fit what Sakamoto sees for Samus.
Call it sexist or misogynistic all you want. The East isn’t listening, Japan isn’t listening. Have you seen how the nerd culture in Japan reacts to women? Especially famous and attractive ones that wear skintight bodysuits underneath their clothes? The fact that the most sexual they got with Samus was an ass shot with her Zero Suit is lucky. Other authors might have had her suit fail and some tentacle monster grabs her while she’s wearing nothing but that skintight suit. Some authors might have her pork one or more of the marines, maybe even Adam. Some might even go the Mass Effect route and have her engage in a lesbian sex scene with “Melissa Bergman” to calm her down in that final battle.
All these years of playing Metroid games with a silent protagonist has led many of these Metroid players to characterize Samus in their heads, to build their own character for her. It’s the same advantage Master Chief had in Halo, one that was slowly eroding away as 343 Studios made Chief more dynamic in Halo 4. I guess it’s why a Samus that narrates is something of a bad idea for them; for Sakamoto, it’s a chance to voice his opinions about his character. For these fans, it is destroying their hopes of their characterization of Samus being the canonical one. Most of them, probably feminists, saw Samus as this feminist hero who would castrate people for calling her “Princess”. My idea of Samus wouldn’t have cared, and Sakamoto’s Samus barely cared. Some saw the words “bounty hunter” attached to Samus and thought she was a female Boba Fett, except unlike Fett, I’ve never seen Samus bunk with or work for criminals and despots, so that characterization gets shot down fast.
I guess it all comes down to what the East and the West see as a strong female character. To the East, all you need is them being able to kill. They can have issues, fears, etcetera, so long as they meet the physical requirements and they kill baddies, that’s good enough. To the West, there seems to be this inferiority complex amongst feminists, that seeing a female lead be exceedingly subservient to a male and seeing her cry and act…...well…….feminine……..is almost a weakness, anathema to strength. It seems like the East has less of a problem having “strong women” act feminine, which they see as natural. While the west sees femininity as a sort of weakness, that to be strong, one must be like a man as much as possible, especially for “strong female characters”. For example, some comedy gags and fighting games have women like Princess Peach use a frying pan to hit an enemy in the face. Easterners either couldn’t care less or might even find that funny. Some Westerners, especially the feminists, will find that offensive and stereotypical. Perhaps that explains why many western men, especially whites, look for Asian brides. Women in the west have seen that being man-like is the way to be strong, and of course, many men looking for a wife don’t like that.
As for me, yes, I have my own characterization for Samus, and no, just because Other M is different from it doesn’t mean I have to cry. I just don’t care-I have my version of Samus, Sakamoto has his. Just as the official version of Revan from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is male and light side, while I find female Dark Side Revan (or a flirty trollish male one who pisses off Bastila to no end) more to my liking. It’s just one Metroid game out of many. There are many others where you can pretend that your Samus is the canonical one, because the games, aside from Other M, have her mostly be a silent blank that you can fill in.
Heck, I didn’t like how Star Wars the Old Republic ended Revan’s tale, so I’m in the process of writing my own ending and how it ties the two KOTOR games with the MMO and a future crossover story I’m planning to do. Similarly, I didn’t like how Star Wars Episode VII treated Luke Skywalker and the Original Trilogy cast, so I just stick to the Legends canon and see that as the real follow-up to Episode VI.
If it were me, I would have also made Adam more caring and understanding, perhaps be the more human anchor while Samus is the more distant and cold person, and Adam would not only be trying to keep Samus from blowing up the ship, but also try to make her more human and less closed-in. Since this takes place after Prime 3, I’d write in that Samus was close friends with the three bounty hunters she was forced to kill in that game, that they were her friends who helped her fit into the bounty hunting community after she left the military. Just as she had her old family, they became her new family, and she was ecstatic about having to work with them again in Prime 3. So when she has to kill each one of them once they lost their minds to Phazon, she dies a little inside with every kill. Their loss made her more distant and cold as Metroid 2 and Super Metroid came about. She will carry that pain all her life. Just as Ridley took her old family, so did Dark Samus and Phazon take her new one.
By the time Other M rolls in, she’d be the cynical one, opting to be a loner to keep others from getting killed by being too close to her, while Adam would be the one trying to pull her out of that depression. Adam would be the one to admit that he had feelings for Samus back when she worked under him, and that he wants her to be better and to not be a shut-in all the time. Samus would be the one to stop the ship from crashing into the capital, and she shuts the door behind her, leaving Adam and Anthony behind, and tasking Anthony to care for Adam. When Adam tells Samus that he loved her, Samus replies that she knows. She then leaves to take care of business and save the day. In the end, Samus acts tough and cold on the outside, but inside, she feels the pain of loss and remembers how she lost both her old family, her Chozo masters, and her new family, and she doesn’t want Adam to suffer the same fate, because she does have some feelings of love and admiration towards him, and she doesn’t want him to follow her parents and co-workers into an early grave.
“Samus is a crybaby!”
Really? Because there’s only one time where she seizes up with fear, and that was during the Ridley fight. And she shook it off after a few seconds, then tore the freak a new hole to breathe out of. Granted, the guy escaped, but Samus fought him off well. Again, it seems like an exaggeration, and as for me, the cutscene just weirded me out, but the ensuing boss fight was fun, so I didn’t care much. From what I saw, it seemed like the new cloned Ridley had some kind of mind-rape power that blasted Samus in the head and made her think that she was a weak little girl again, at the mercy of this cruel dragon. He is supposed to be better than the original article, after all. That’s the only explanation I have as to why she seizes up and fears him at the start, but then tears him apart efficiently during the fight. Granted, he gets away, but the fight was fun while it lasted.
But even without my mind-rape explanation, I do have a good in-universe reason why Samus feared Ridley. For us, Ridley is like Metroid’s version of Bowser and Team Rocket. The guy we pound the crap out of until we proceed to the next chapter, the iconic punching bag. It wouldn’t be a standard Metroid game if we didn’t get to shoot Ridley in the face. But there lies a wrinkle in that comparison: Ridley brutally murdered Samus’ parents, when she was a child, right in front of her. So while the rest of us sees Ridley as the town punching bag, Samus sees the sadist who ruined her childhood, her life. And in her mind, no matter how many times she kills him, he comes back. Just imagine that. This monster haunted your childhood memories, killed your family before your own eyes. Then he keeps coming back, no matter how many times you put him down. It’s like he’s immortal-no matter how many times you try, you just can’t seem to get rid of this guy. And he looks a lot more scary than Slenderman or any of those animatronic furries back in Five Nights at Freddy’s. And no matter what you do, HE JUST WON’T DIE. Now isn’t that terrifying?
Granted, I knew why they did it-they wanted to explore the fear Samus felt when facing a guy who slaughtered her family. Perhaps if Other M was a prequel, this would have worked. A prequel to the original Metroid, where Samus is barely established. It would make sense that the brass distrusted her. It would make sense why she fears Ridley. It could have also shed light into her training with the Chozo and given us some time to experience that with tutorials and gameplay. But due to the timing of Other M, and its placement after Super Metroid, which places it near the Metroid timeline’s end, many die-hard fans would get pissed that their hero freezes up before the Metroid equivalent of Bowser and Team Rocket.
If it were up to me, I’d write it so that instead of fear, Samus feels intense anger. Remember that scene in Dragon Ball Super, when Future Trunks sees Present Goku, and remembers all the nasty things that Goku Black did in the future, such as killing his mother and girlfriend, and Trunks sees Present Goku as Goku Black and jumps up to punch him in the face? That would be close to what I would do. Samus takes one good look at Ridley, remembers the pain he caused her when her family died, and Samus gets angry at the fact that he’s still alive despite her best efforts. “HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO KILL THIS GUY!?” she yells. And while Anthony Higgins tells Samus that they should work together and come up with a plan, Samus would charge blindly with anger, sorrow, and yes, HATE, in her heart. The finishing moves Samus would use would show how brutal she’s become, ripping off Ridley’s arms, wings, and even grabbing him by the tail so that she can smack him around the ring.
By the time Ridley’s down, Samus points her gun at his face and prepares to charge a killing shot, then Adam gets into contact and says that they need Ridley alive to be interrogated about what’s going on in the Bottle Ship. Anthony tries to calm Samus down, telling her that by sparing Ridley, they can do a lot more good than harm. But Samus would have none of it: she responds by saying how much she hated Ridley for making her an orphan, and how she kept trying to kill him, to “send him back to the hell where he belongs”, and how he couldn’t be trusted. Something similar as to how Zaeed Massani in Mass Effect 2 talks about his rival Vido Santiago, when the main character Shepard accuses him of holding a decades-long grudge:
“A grudge!? Vido turned my men against me! He paid six of them to restrain me while he put a gun to my head and pulled the trigger! For twenty years, I’ve seen that bastard every time I closed my eyes, every time I sighted down on a target, every time I heard a gunshot! Don’t you call that a goddamn grudge!”
Samus would be talking about how she remembered the day Ridley killed her parents, how she carried that memory throughout her life, how the pain and anguish it caused her carries her through from one job to another. Every time she kills a Space Pirate, she remembers that pain. Every time she sleeps, she remembers that pain. Every time she sees Ridley, she remembers that pain. She has nightmares of reliving that day, in and out, again and again. She carried that pain all through her life. And now, she has the bastard who caused her all that pain right in her hands. To further complicate things, Ridley would have overheard Samus’ conversation with Anthony, and taunts her:
“Your friends want me alive, but your heart wants revenge. If I die, your friends won’t know what the hell happened here or the horrors that await you. If you let me live, I can escape to fight another day. So what will it be, bounty hunter? Dead, or alive?”
Samus prepares to fire and brings her gun up to Ridley’s face, shoving the gun up near his eye. Anthony says “Don’t!”, while Adam tells Samus that they need Ridley. She holds the charged shot to Ridley’s face, then she lowers it down. She then tells Anthony to take Ridley to General Adam’s command post in the ship. Adam tells Samus that she made the right choice, while Ridley taunts her and tells her that she’s too weak to get the job done. Samus tells Anthony to get that “piece of filth” away from her before she loses control. And that would bring a curtain to the Ridley-Samus fight, except he does escape later on, so that he could be used for future stories.
“The Deleter plot is unresolved!”
I agree. The Deleter, who was a Federation agent sent to silence Adam and his team from finding out more about the Feddies’ dirty secret on the Bottle Ship, should have been killed on screen, preferably by Samus herself. That would earn her Adam’s trust if she saves him from a traitorous member of his team.
The way I would have done it is similar to the SIS agent on Corellia that the Sith Warrior fights in the Old Republic MMO. In Star Wars the Old Republic, the Sith Warrior player character fights an “SIS” (Systems Intelligence Service) agent on the planet Corellia. The agent has been tracking the Warrior’s progress, citing the latter’s past accomplishments and even revealing themselves to be somewhat of a fan of the warrior. He has imagined many ways of killing the warrior, and is frothing at the mouth to try them out and see if he comes out on top. The Deleter could have a similar backstory, observing Samus throughout the years, looking at how she solves crises and defeats threats from Mother Brain, to Ridley, to the Ing and Dark Samus, and he would be frothing at the mouth to see if he can best the legendary Samus Aran who defeated all these threats.
The game spent a good portion speculating about this Deleter subplot, and the corruption of the Federation, but in the end, it all just gets swatted aside. It would have been much better if it had a good conclusion.
“The Plot is cliche and stupid!”
The plot about the government being involved in a plot to revive the Metroids and the Space Pirates is seen by many fans as stupid, a step down from Samus doing major things in the previous games like saving the planet Aether from the ruthless onslaught of the Ing and the dark reflection of itself in Prime 2, or Samus going commando in Prime 3 and leading the Federation to war while dealing with the loss of her comrades and the onrushing tide of a Phazon-induced disease. And again-I agree, however, I do think the concept itself is good-it just needed more resolution, such as with the Deleter plot.
I also think that Adam should have survived. Let the computer that bears his name in the future Metroid games be retconned into an AI modeled after his brain patterns, but in my ideal story for Other M, Adam would have survived. Then, when the corrupt Federation colonel shows up later on to clean house, a GENERAL like Adam would be able to overrule him and keep Samus out of trouble, especially if Samus just saved him from the Deleter. I would also have Adam and Samus work to give “Melissa Bergman” asylum, as that poor girl was just a Feddie experiment gone wrong. Perhaps have her be given asylum and fight against the Space Pirates in the future.
But the basic idea of the Federation being corrupt is an interesting one. Especially when juxtaposed with the Federation from Prime 3 that acted more like the Rebel Alliance or the Cornerians in terms of being a heroic force for the galaxy. It’s like the UNSC, if they were more advanced and had average soldiers wielding more advanced weapons. Perhaps the Federation has many different factions, and while Admiral Dane and his fleet were noble and heroic soldiers who fight for justice and peace, other factions within the Feds may not be so noble or pure. Adam could be someone caught between these competing factions, so he would be apprehensive about Samus getting her nose into Feddie business that Adam would be warned by his superiors to keep from outsiders like Samus at all costs. Just as the UNSC is beginning to show its corrupt side in the newer Halo games, so too does the Federation look a tad bit more sinister after this game.
Metroid games in the past have almost always been clear-cut, with good guys such as the Ancient Chozo, the Luminoth, and the Federations on one side, and the Space Pirates and whatever freaks they share the antagonist booth with as the bad guys. The most they did with grey in previous games was have the Feddies experimenting with Metroids in Fusion and Samus having to fight her Bounty Hunter coworkers in Prime 3, and that was after they lost their minds to Phazon and were captured and brainwashed by the enemy. But introducing a grey area can be a good thing. Perhaps one day the Feds might turn against Samus, and friendly Federation officers like Admiral Dane can come into play, giving her shelter while trying to figure out what’s going on?
CONCLUSION
In the end, Metroid Other M is not such a bad game. It was fun, it was entertaining, and I could see what Sakamoto was going for in the story. Of course, it wouldn’t be what I would do, since I would have taken the story and implemented the changes I talked about above onto it. As for the gameplay, I would have left it as it is, only adding in the missile controls with the nunchuck. Granted, I still think Prime 3 is the best Metroid ever, but that doesn’t subtract from Other M’s merits. But it is an action game, and therefore, a departure from the Metroidvania style that Super Metroid perfected and the exploration style that the Prime Games identify with. So while people love the shit out of the Prime games while hating Other M, I’m someone that can find the merit in both of them. I will be writing my own Metroid stories soon, and it will take elements from both Other M and the Prime games.
Don’t worry, the Star Wars Expanded Universe retrospective is on its way, along with some new characters and storylines I’ve made up for my own versions of fictional universes.
But as I was recently playing Metroid games, and I was watching some Metroid videos, I felt the need to opine on a game series that I’ve recently had some good experiences with, and what seems to be wrong with the fandom:
METROID
Yes, yes, it’s quite natural for someone like me to like Metroid. I was a fan of Star Wars, Halo, Gundam, Transformers, and many other science fiction franchises. When it came to Nintendo’s, I was no different. I played through the Star Fox games like an addict. I was first exposed to Samus from the original Smash Bros, which piqued my curiosity. I did my research on the Metroid games, and when I finally got my hands on the Metroid Prime trilogy, my first and arguably best Metroid purchase, I decided to plow through not only the trilogy, but two other games that were the most well-known outside of the Prime saga: Super Metroid and Other M.
Playing through the Metroid games was somewhat different, for my tastes. Usually, I’m dealing with games where the main bad guy has to be overcome with sheer endurance or skill. Usually, the harder parts of the games I play concern a particularly long level with very limited checkpoints and plenty of bad guys, or a boss (or a group of bosses) that won’t go down as easily as others have. Metroid, aside from Castlevania Symphony of the Night and the Zelda games, were the first to give me a true puzzle challenge. The Mario games I played didn’t give me much trouble with puzzles, but the Metroid games, along with Zelda and Castlevania SOTN, were the first to introduce me to the puzzle genre. Because while Link and Alucard swing swords, and Samus uses a gun, their games are a lot more similar than they are at first glance. Despite the fact that one’s a sci-fi game and the other two are fantasies, Metroid has more in common with Zelda and SOTN than it does with say, Star Fox. Out of all the Star Fox games, the only one to even reach a similar level of puzzles would be Star Fox Adventures, and that was the black sheep of the Star Fox family.
The puzzles sometimes irritate me, and sometimes I get so angry that I crack open a guide or search through the internet for answers, but the times when I solve the puzzles, especially on my own, were really satisfying. Even more satisfying were the boss fights. While the fights against mooks in Metroid games, especially the Prime games, rarely gets me to try hard the way I play Halo games on Legendary, Metroid combat truly shines at the boss fights. I’d say the most memorable fight I had with Metroid games are the Dark Samus fights and the Emperor Ing, especially considering that I had to lose to the latter several times before I figured out his weakness and exploited it for good measure. (protip: use light gun charged shots against his tentacles in the first form, and his mouth in his third form) Few bosses bring that out in me. The last time I was that challenged was Shadow Peach in Paper Mario 2 and Tartarus in Halo 2. Dark Samus was like other shadow enemies I’ve fought, like Shadow Mario and Dark Link, but more challenging. Shadow Mario is more like a chase enemy, and as for Dark Link, I easily cracked him when I figured out how to hit him. Dark Samus, at least in the first two fights in Prime 2, fought me pound for pound, and like the Anakin vs. Obi-Wan fight in the Star Wars Episode III game, you have to give as good as you get if you wanted to win.
As for the feel of the games themselves, Super Metroid just felt like Castlevania SOTN with a gun, which is funny, considering the main concept behind Samus was practically “Mario with a gun” when she was first developed. Other M felt more like an action game with some minor exploration thrown in for good measure, while Metroid Prime felt like an old-fashioned FPS like Duke Nukem or Doom from the old days with an added tricorder function for the Trek fans out there. It seems that Samus would work better as a military research/biotech division member rather than a bounty hunter-there is no bounty hunting at all, and it would seem that in between gutting Space Pirates and their bosses, Samus busies herself with archaeology, tech scavenging, and biological research. Out of all three Prime games, only the third made her seem like a mercenary/bounty hunter, because at least she reports to an authority and wipes out enemies, presumably for a monetary reward.
And in retrospect, I liked them all. Other M was a great action game, Super Metroid was a fun side-scrolling exploration game, and the Prime games were like Zelda mixed with Halo, which, as a fan of both, I liked. Prime 1 was a nice first step, while Prime 2 seemed to bring in the difficulty, what with the Dark World corroding your health and the bosses being harder than usual. Prime 3 has to be my favorite, because it takes everything good from Prime 1 and 2 and adds a war story to it, giving Samus an authority to report to and military targets to destroy, which felt more appropriate for a science fiction series to have consequences beyond the hero’s personal affairs. Saving the Luminoth in the second game and putting the Chozo to rest in the first felt like a minor accomplishment, but I really liked how Samus now had to interact with the military and take assignments from them on the fly on the third game. I’ve heard some fans of the 2-D Metroid titles disparage the Prime games as Halo ripoffs, and as a Halo fan, I take offense to that. Halo is a great game series, and a Metroid game moving along similar lines like Halo’s is a good step for me. It’s not like they got rid of the exploration or anything-you still can choose to go to other planets yourself, and throw away the Feddies’ timeline to pursue your own goals. I chose to do that with Prime 3, and I pursued the Nova Beam upgrade without them telling me to go for it. In fact, the fact that you go from planet to planet instead of area to area is a huge improvement-the other games had you go through the sections on foot alone, so backtracking took quite a while.
Prime 3 also had a more personal story, where you work with the Federation, get attacked by a massive Space Pirate offensive, and you have to save a planet from being colony-dropped by a Phazon-infested asteroid in the prologue. Then you wind up having to hunt down your former comrades when they get brainwashed by the bad guys/lose control of their Phazon powers, and you yourself have to deal with space cancer as the Phazon begins to eat at your body. The Federation leader Admiral Castor Dane trusts you to lead the assaults and protect his spec-ops demolition teams, and the final boss is an evil version of you that was born in Prime 1 and got stronger in Prime 2. Out of all the Prime games, Prime 3 was the one I liked best. It had the best action, the best plot, and it showed why Samus got the reputation she had when she saved the galaxy with the Feddies at her back.
And now comes the one part where most Metroid fans will disagree with me:
THE OTHER M DILEMMA
When Other M was coming out, I was enamored by this action game that took the Samus that I knew from the Prime games and Super Metroid and turned her into Rambo meets Kratos. She was more half-Sherlock Holmes, half John Matrix when I played as her in Metroid Prime, and this departure from the norm stoked me, especially since I was a fan of action games too, from Force Unleashed to Bayonetta. Looking at the combat scenes, it seemed that Samus was going to be more brutal than ever before. Yikes. Especially when it was Team Ninja on the scene making this game. I still had nightmares about Dead Or Alive 4, where I’d be doing good on a match, then the other guy gets his first punch in and suddenly I was on the defensive until I got clobbered to death.
Then I bought the game, and played the game.
Not that bad, I thought. Could have been better, could have been worse, but overall, I liked the action bits, and I at least understood what they were going for with the story. I myself would have done something different, but the story they gave, I didn’t much hate it.
Then I saw the fanbase’s reaction.
Dear Lord, this was more juicy than the Star Wars Prequels.
One condemnation after another. Reactions ran from low scores on gaming magazines, to hordes of fans bashing it, to people talking about how sexist and misogynistic it is for Samus to be so “subservient”, “emotional”, even “fearful”. Apparently, if the fanbase is to be believed, Samus went from Boba Fett with tits to being a subservient crybaby.
I believe this is an exaggeration of what Other M portrayed and what the game is. While there are times when Samus had fear and Samus acted subservient, there were also plenty of times where she’s a complete badass in the game, especially when she’s executing enemies. What I saw from the game was a very human Samus that can be ruthless in combat, but also human when interacting with other humans. While there are some times where she felt a tad moody, I never jumped at the screen to shout “betrayal!” the way many of these fans seemingly did. I was puzzled by some of their decisions, but not so much as to stop playing the game.
Now, let’s go over most of the talking points that the bashers whip out, shall we? Let’s start with the gameplay, then move on to the story.
“There’s not much exploration!”
Of course there isn’t. This is Team Ninja on the helm. I think they’d rather parade Samus naked rather than actually have puzzles and exploration like the old games. In case you haven’t noticed, this is an action game. As if the combat hadn’t clued you in on that already. This is practically a Ninja Gaiden clone with Metroid characters and settings splattered on top. If you don’t like that, then fine. Just be sure to know what you’re getting into when a studio that primarily works on action and fighting games works on a game. I mean, the only other thing they could have done was either make this a fighting game where Samus socks Ridley in the face on an even 1v1 match, or a beach volleyball game where Samus and Gandrayda try to knock each other into a pool with their butts.
Also, the backtracking kinda gets annoying sometimes. The Prime games were great, but the one part where the game grinded to a halt was when I had to hunt down some mcguffins to open up the final boss dungeons. Keys, power cores, whatever. You have to get some clues, then try to find the room, then try to find the damn key or power core. It just feels like padding to keep you from the final boss and force you to backtrack all over the places you’ve visited while following vague clues. That’s the part when I just crack open a guide so I can find and get all the items, so that I can go to the damn final boss that I wanted to shoot in the face with a high-powered plasma cannon.
“The missile controls are awkward! I can’t move when pointing the Wiimote forward while aiming!”
And I agree with that. It is somewhat awkward. I can get it to work, but I would have preferred working with the nunchuck and pressing a button to go to first-person mode to fire missiles. That, and add a button to fire missiles while in third-person.
“The authorization system is stupid!”
People think that the system where Adam has to authorize Samus before she can use her weapons and gadgets is stupid-and again, I agree. It would have been so much simpler had Samus been hit with one of the ever-occurring lightning bolts of Zeus that she gets struck with and be forced to search for power-ups again. Just have her deal with a power suit malfunction after some bad guy slams her on a sensitive power conduit or hits her with nondescript Force Lightning, then have General Adam or one of the marines say that the scientists who worked on the vessel they’re on were working on Chozo weapon prototypes in the ship, and Adam says that he will inform Samus if he or his team bump into any such tech while they investigate the place.
Overall, I found the gameplay stuff to be satisfying. Enough to overlook the more bizarre parts of the story. It was fun enough to keep me hooked, up until I finally beat the game. People bashing the gameplay just seem like they’re inflexible, in a way. Besides, other Metroid games did have you go from one place to another on a linear path, and only later force you to backtrack to find some items before facing the final boss. The Prime games even tell you where to go. While I still think that Prime 3 was better in gameplay, Other M was also quite fun, and I had my money’s worth playing the game.
Now, on to the juicy part-the story.
I have to admit, I had mixed feelings about the story. There were times when they had some good concepts, times that kept me guessing and tense, and times when I just sat there asking why they chose that path. While my own version of Samus is different from theirs, and believe me, I even came up with a rewrite of Other M that would change a few things, but for the story that was there, I saw some good parts, some bad parts, and some parts that had potential but needed improving.
But let’s get over the complaints, shall we?
“Samus is subservient to Adam!”
Well, of course. Samus has to be. Not only is Adam some kind of father figure that she used to work for, but General Malkovich represents the Galactic Federation, which pays her salary. And bounty hunters, unlike soldiers who get regular pay, are independent contractors that the state can hire or fire on a whim. If Samus doesn’t do everything peachy-clean for them, they stop paying her and tell her to get lost, and then she won’t be able to feed herself. It’s like with Boba Fett in Empire Strikes Back-in his dealings with Vader, it was obvious that the latter wore the pants in the relationship. Vader, like Adam, even restricts Fett’s weapons from the outset-warning him that using disintegrators against the people they’re going after is a complete no-no.
The fact that Vader had to stop and say that, instead of just leaving it at “I want them alive”, is probably because Fett and his fellow hunters have disintegration weapons, and are very liberal in using them-just like Samus. However, unlike Boba Fett, who works for anyone with a fat wallet, Samus specifically works for the good guys, the Galactic Federation. Hence why she can’t afford to look like a loose cannon-nobody else who wants to remain on the good side of the law would hire a walking death machine who goes off the rails and disobeys orders. That’s bad for business and reputation. So Samus has to keep up the facade of the obedient servant, so that she can continue getting paid, and she can keep up her good reputation. A Federation general getting angry about her not obeying orders and filing public complaints with the government and the military can easily cause trouble for her career, not to mention burn bridges with the clients that she does business with the most.
This isn’t even the first time Nintendo did this very same thing. In the Star Fox series, Fox McCloud was sent to Dinosaur Planet in Star Fox Adventures, and the first order from the commanding general, General Pepper, is to keep Fox from using personal firearms. Now, Star Fox Assault comes in later and shows that he has a lot of weapons, ranging from blasters, machine guns, gatling guns, rocket launchers, grenades, and sniper weapons. They could have been useful in helping Fox plow through the Sharpclaw army of the evil General Scales. He could have gone Rambo on them, a one-man engine of destruction against a bunch of guys with medieval weapons.
But the first thing the General orders is for Fox to leave all those fancy toys back on the ship, even the smallest blaster weapon. Down to the point where Fox has to fight with a stick against an army of angry dinosaurs. But again, just like Samus, Fox McCloud is a mercenary for the good guys. He doesn’t just go to the nearest scumbag or rich ponce with a wallet and asks for a job. He specifically works for the Cornerian government, a government that is quite squeamish to have mercs shooting up the place when they send people to help with planetary issues. So again, Fox has to play the good servant card and save the planet using a magic staff, instead of just blasting through General Scales’ army with a ton of guns as if he was John Matrix slaughtering a whole army.
Also, since this was Samus’ first superior officer after training with the Chozo, she did somehow see him as a father-figure. Keep in mind that her parents were slaughtered before her eyes at a very young age, and her only company after that were weird bird-men who did all sorts of experiments on her. She might have seen them as family after what happened to her mom and dad, but they weren’t humans. So a human like Adam would feel more relatable to Samus than some alien bird-men who were more obsessed with transcending physical form or coming up with a parasite to fight another parasite.
Granted, I would have done things differently-my version for Adam would be very supportive, while Samus is cold and distant, with an air of melancholy about her. Adam, in the game, seemed very authoritative, stubborn, and looks down on Samus as if she was beneath him. But it makes sense in a certain context-Samus is a former officer of the Federation who ran off to be a mercenary. To a man who remained with the military, a man who saw Samus quit, Adam wouldn’t have such a high opinion of her. Others like Admiral Dane from Metroid Prime 3 might, but Samus didn’t desert Dane’s unit. She deserted Adam’s unit, and I suppose that would have left some burned bridges on Adam’s side of the story. Maybe he just saw her as someone who played with pirates on the fringes of the galaxy and blew up worlds because of her reckless actions. Perhaps that’s why he’s apprehensive about her when it comes to her running around in a place that might have civilians. This wasn’t some pirate’s nest at the ass end of space where everyone is free game to be shot in the face, the Bottle Ship was a sensitive place with Federation secrets and possible survivors on board. Yes, I would have changed the authorization system so that Samus either has the power-ups from the start or she loses them and has to regain them. But Adam’s attitude isn’t necessarily out of line here.
These haters tend to see things from an audience perspective, irrespective of how the world that Samus lives in sees her. Some see her as a heroic figure. Others see her as a nonsense legend, like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. I quite literally pulled that from Metroid Prime 2 and the logs the soldiers have about Samus that Samus herself recovers from the remains of the Federation outposts in the game. The Federation soldiers in Prime 3 are at awe in Samus’ presence, but how many more billions haven’t seen her? And how many are out there that may have a negative view of her? Maybe some people think she’s wasting her time playing with pirates. Others might think she’s reckless because she leaves behind almost no survivors in her assaults and sometimes she winds up destroying the worlds she’s on. We never knew that people had negative opinions of the Jedi in Star Wars until we saw it in the Expanded Universe and the Prequels, where people questioned the Jedi ways and even voted in a guy who accused the Jedi of treason as the Emperor of the galaxy, supporting his decimation of the Jedi Order. What if there were also people who didn’t like Samus among the Federation populace?
Adam, especially, has a very negative view of Samus, considering that he’s a very by-the-book and Samus was practically out there joyriding in the galaxy and getting paid for it while his grunts get none of the glory. A by-the-books cop would not be very fond of a vigilante, no matter how impressive or effective they are, or how many accolades society gifts upon them. The by-the-book guy will always see them as either a nuisance or a threat. Batman gets shit from by-the-book cops all the time no matter how many times he saves Gotham City. For Adam, it might have been more, considering that Samus left him and his squad behind.
At the core of this seems to lie the difference between the East and the West. The guy who made this story was Yoshio Sakamoto, the maker of the Metroid franchise. Sakamoto is Japanese. Japan, and the East in general, does not see eye to eye with the West when it comes to women and feminism. The Japanese audience and their idea of an ideal woman is far different from the West's. So while Samus being emotional and subservient to General Adam was something Japanese fans would find no issue with, in the West, where feminism is more prevalent, they screamed "betrayal" because Samus, in their opinion, should never be that subversive; the most subversive she would be in their eyes is her taking orders from Admiral Dane, but responding to everyone with nothing but cold silence. Some of them might envision Samus as a playgirl, others see her as a cold bitch, kinda like Boba Fett with tits. In fact, the latter characterization is what most of them have for her.
In the eyes of Sakamoto, Samus was opening up, showing her true emotions, and being more of a three-dimensional character with fears and issues, making her more human and realistic. To them, it’s akin to Pinocchio becoming a real boy. In the Western fans' eyes, the hero they so lovingly worshiped turned into a subversive crybaby. It's all about differing value systems. And Japan has very different views on women compared to the West. Most of Asia does. They don't put up with "empowered women" who boast about how equal they are to men the way Westerners do. Oh, there are women with power in the East, but they know their place, and that place is to never fuck with a man unless they got backup. That whole "I'm an empowered woman and I'm equal/better than you in every way" won't fly in the East as it does in the West, hence why most characterizations of Samus by Western fans don't fit what Sakamoto sees for Samus.
Call it sexist or misogynistic all you want. The East isn’t listening, Japan isn’t listening. Have you seen how the nerd culture in Japan reacts to women? Especially famous and attractive ones that wear skintight bodysuits underneath their clothes? The fact that the most sexual they got with Samus was an ass shot with her Zero Suit is lucky. Other authors might have had her suit fail and some tentacle monster grabs her while she’s wearing nothing but that skintight suit. Some authors might have her pork one or more of the marines, maybe even Adam. Some might even go the Mass Effect route and have her engage in a lesbian sex scene with “Melissa Bergman” to calm her down in that final battle.
All these years of playing Metroid games with a silent protagonist has led many of these Metroid players to characterize Samus in their heads, to build their own character for her. It’s the same advantage Master Chief had in Halo, one that was slowly eroding away as 343 Studios made Chief more dynamic in Halo 4. I guess it’s why a Samus that narrates is something of a bad idea for them; for Sakamoto, it’s a chance to voice his opinions about his character. For these fans, it is destroying their hopes of their characterization of Samus being the canonical one. Most of them, probably feminists, saw Samus as this feminist hero who would castrate people for calling her “Princess”. My idea of Samus wouldn’t have cared, and Sakamoto’s Samus barely cared. Some saw the words “bounty hunter” attached to Samus and thought she was a female Boba Fett, except unlike Fett, I’ve never seen Samus bunk with or work for criminals and despots, so that characterization gets shot down fast.
I guess it all comes down to what the East and the West see as a strong female character. To the East, all you need is them being able to kill. They can have issues, fears, etcetera, so long as they meet the physical requirements and they kill baddies, that’s good enough. To the West, there seems to be this inferiority complex amongst feminists, that seeing a female lead be exceedingly subservient to a male and seeing her cry and act…...well…….feminine……..is almost a weakness, anathema to strength. It seems like the East has less of a problem having “strong women” act feminine, which they see as natural. While the west sees femininity as a sort of weakness, that to be strong, one must be like a man as much as possible, especially for “strong female characters”. For example, some comedy gags and fighting games have women like Princess Peach use a frying pan to hit an enemy in the face. Easterners either couldn’t care less or might even find that funny. Some Westerners, especially the feminists, will find that offensive and stereotypical. Perhaps that explains why many western men, especially whites, look for Asian brides. Women in the west have seen that being man-like is the way to be strong, and of course, many men looking for a wife don’t like that.
As for me, yes, I have my own characterization for Samus, and no, just because Other M is different from it doesn’t mean I have to cry. I just don’t care-I have my version of Samus, Sakamoto has his. Just as the official version of Revan from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is male and light side, while I find female Dark Side Revan (or a flirty trollish male one who pisses off Bastila to no end) more to my liking. It’s just one Metroid game out of many. There are many others where you can pretend that your Samus is the canonical one, because the games, aside from Other M, have her mostly be a silent blank that you can fill in.
Heck, I didn’t like how Star Wars the Old Republic ended Revan’s tale, so I’m in the process of writing my own ending and how it ties the two KOTOR games with the MMO and a future crossover story I’m planning to do. Similarly, I didn’t like how Star Wars Episode VII treated Luke Skywalker and the Original Trilogy cast, so I just stick to the Legends canon and see that as the real follow-up to Episode VI.
If it were me, I would have also made Adam more caring and understanding, perhaps be the more human anchor while Samus is the more distant and cold person, and Adam would not only be trying to keep Samus from blowing up the ship, but also try to make her more human and less closed-in. Since this takes place after Prime 3, I’d write in that Samus was close friends with the three bounty hunters she was forced to kill in that game, that they were her friends who helped her fit into the bounty hunting community after she left the military. Just as she had her old family, they became her new family, and she was ecstatic about having to work with them again in Prime 3. So when she has to kill each one of them once they lost their minds to Phazon, she dies a little inside with every kill. Their loss made her more distant and cold as Metroid 2 and Super Metroid came about. She will carry that pain all her life. Just as Ridley took her old family, so did Dark Samus and Phazon take her new one.
By the time Other M rolls in, she’d be the cynical one, opting to be a loner to keep others from getting killed by being too close to her, while Adam would be the one trying to pull her out of that depression. Adam would be the one to admit that he had feelings for Samus back when she worked under him, and that he wants her to be better and to not be a shut-in all the time. Samus would be the one to stop the ship from crashing into the capital, and she shuts the door behind her, leaving Adam and Anthony behind, and tasking Anthony to care for Adam. When Adam tells Samus that he loved her, Samus replies that she knows. She then leaves to take care of business and save the day. In the end, Samus acts tough and cold on the outside, but inside, she feels the pain of loss and remembers how she lost both her old family, her Chozo masters, and her new family, and she doesn’t want Adam to suffer the same fate, because she does have some feelings of love and admiration towards him, and she doesn’t want him to follow her parents and co-workers into an early grave.
“Samus is a crybaby!”
Really? Because there’s only one time where she seizes up with fear, and that was during the Ridley fight. And she shook it off after a few seconds, then tore the freak a new hole to breathe out of. Granted, the guy escaped, but Samus fought him off well. Again, it seems like an exaggeration, and as for me, the cutscene just weirded me out, but the ensuing boss fight was fun, so I didn’t care much. From what I saw, it seemed like the new cloned Ridley had some kind of mind-rape power that blasted Samus in the head and made her think that she was a weak little girl again, at the mercy of this cruel dragon. He is supposed to be better than the original article, after all. That’s the only explanation I have as to why she seizes up and fears him at the start, but then tears him apart efficiently during the fight. Granted, he gets away, but the fight was fun while it lasted.
But even without my mind-rape explanation, I do have a good in-universe reason why Samus feared Ridley. For us, Ridley is like Metroid’s version of Bowser and Team Rocket. The guy we pound the crap out of until we proceed to the next chapter, the iconic punching bag. It wouldn’t be a standard Metroid game if we didn’t get to shoot Ridley in the face. But there lies a wrinkle in that comparison: Ridley brutally murdered Samus’ parents, when she was a child, right in front of her. So while the rest of us sees Ridley as the town punching bag, Samus sees the sadist who ruined her childhood, her life. And in her mind, no matter how many times she kills him, he comes back. Just imagine that. This monster haunted your childhood memories, killed your family before your own eyes. Then he keeps coming back, no matter how many times you put him down. It’s like he’s immortal-no matter how many times you try, you just can’t seem to get rid of this guy. And he looks a lot more scary than Slenderman or any of those animatronic furries back in Five Nights at Freddy’s. And no matter what you do, HE JUST WON’T DIE. Now isn’t that terrifying?
Granted, I knew why they did it-they wanted to explore the fear Samus felt when facing a guy who slaughtered her family. Perhaps if Other M was a prequel, this would have worked. A prequel to the original Metroid, where Samus is barely established. It would make sense that the brass distrusted her. It would make sense why she fears Ridley. It could have also shed light into her training with the Chozo and given us some time to experience that with tutorials and gameplay. But due to the timing of Other M, and its placement after Super Metroid, which places it near the Metroid timeline’s end, many die-hard fans would get pissed that their hero freezes up before the Metroid equivalent of Bowser and Team Rocket.
If it were up to me, I’d write it so that instead of fear, Samus feels intense anger. Remember that scene in Dragon Ball Super, when Future Trunks sees Present Goku, and remembers all the nasty things that Goku Black did in the future, such as killing his mother and girlfriend, and Trunks sees Present Goku as Goku Black and jumps up to punch him in the face? That would be close to what I would do. Samus takes one good look at Ridley, remembers the pain he caused her when her family died, and Samus gets angry at the fact that he’s still alive despite her best efforts. “HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO KILL THIS GUY!?” she yells. And while Anthony Higgins tells Samus that they should work together and come up with a plan, Samus would charge blindly with anger, sorrow, and yes, HATE, in her heart. The finishing moves Samus would use would show how brutal she’s become, ripping off Ridley’s arms, wings, and even grabbing him by the tail so that she can smack him around the ring.
By the time Ridley’s down, Samus points her gun at his face and prepares to charge a killing shot, then Adam gets into contact and says that they need Ridley alive to be interrogated about what’s going on in the Bottle Ship. Anthony tries to calm Samus down, telling her that by sparing Ridley, they can do a lot more good than harm. But Samus would have none of it: she responds by saying how much she hated Ridley for making her an orphan, and how she kept trying to kill him, to “send him back to the hell where he belongs”, and how he couldn’t be trusted. Something similar as to how Zaeed Massani in Mass Effect 2 talks about his rival Vido Santiago, when the main character Shepard accuses him of holding a decades-long grudge:
“A grudge!? Vido turned my men against me! He paid six of them to restrain me while he put a gun to my head and pulled the trigger! For twenty years, I’ve seen that bastard every time I closed my eyes, every time I sighted down on a target, every time I heard a gunshot! Don’t you call that a goddamn grudge!”
Samus would be talking about how she remembered the day Ridley killed her parents, how she carried that memory throughout her life, how the pain and anguish it caused her carries her through from one job to another. Every time she kills a Space Pirate, she remembers that pain. Every time she sleeps, she remembers that pain. Every time she sees Ridley, she remembers that pain. She has nightmares of reliving that day, in and out, again and again. She carried that pain all through her life. And now, she has the bastard who caused her all that pain right in her hands. To further complicate things, Ridley would have overheard Samus’ conversation with Anthony, and taunts her:
“Your friends want me alive, but your heart wants revenge. If I die, your friends won’t know what the hell happened here or the horrors that await you. If you let me live, I can escape to fight another day. So what will it be, bounty hunter? Dead, or alive?”
Samus prepares to fire and brings her gun up to Ridley’s face, shoving the gun up near his eye. Anthony says “Don’t!”, while Adam tells Samus that they need Ridley. She holds the charged shot to Ridley’s face, then she lowers it down. She then tells Anthony to take Ridley to General Adam’s command post in the ship. Adam tells Samus that she made the right choice, while Ridley taunts her and tells her that she’s too weak to get the job done. Samus tells Anthony to get that “piece of filth” away from her before she loses control. And that would bring a curtain to the Ridley-Samus fight, except he does escape later on, so that he could be used for future stories.
“The Deleter plot is unresolved!”
I agree. The Deleter, who was a Federation agent sent to silence Adam and his team from finding out more about the Feddies’ dirty secret on the Bottle Ship, should have been killed on screen, preferably by Samus herself. That would earn her Adam’s trust if she saves him from a traitorous member of his team.
The way I would have done it is similar to the SIS agent on Corellia that the Sith Warrior fights in the Old Republic MMO. In Star Wars the Old Republic, the Sith Warrior player character fights an “SIS” (Systems Intelligence Service) agent on the planet Corellia. The agent has been tracking the Warrior’s progress, citing the latter’s past accomplishments and even revealing themselves to be somewhat of a fan of the warrior. He has imagined many ways of killing the warrior, and is frothing at the mouth to try them out and see if he comes out on top. The Deleter could have a similar backstory, observing Samus throughout the years, looking at how she solves crises and defeats threats from Mother Brain, to Ridley, to the Ing and Dark Samus, and he would be frothing at the mouth to see if he can best the legendary Samus Aran who defeated all these threats.
The game spent a good portion speculating about this Deleter subplot, and the corruption of the Federation, but in the end, it all just gets swatted aside. It would have been much better if it had a good conclusion.
“The Plot is cliche and stupid!”
The plot about the government being involved in a plot to revive the Metroids and the Space Pirates is seen by many fans as stupid, a step down from Samus doing major things in the previous games like saving the planet Aether from the ruthless onslaught of the Ing and the dark reflection of itself in Prime 2, or Samus going commando in Prime 3 and leading the Federation to war while dealing with the loss of her comrades and the onrushing tide of a Phazon-induced disease. And again-I agree, however, I do think the concept itself is good-it just needed more resolution, such as with the Deleter plot.
I also think that Adam should have survived. Let the computer that bears his name in the future Metroid games be retconned into an AI modeled after his brain patterns, but in my ideal story for Other M, Adam would have survived. Then, when the corrupt Federation colonel shows up later on to clean house, a GENERAL like Adam would be able to overrule him and keep Samus out of trouble, especially if Samus just saved him from the Deleter. I would also have Adam and Samus work to give “Melissa Bergman” asylum, as that poor girl was just a Feddie experiment gone wrong. Perhaps have her be given asylum and fight against the Space Pirates in the future.
But the basic idea of the Federation being corrupt is an interesting one. Especially when juxtaposed with the Federation from Prime 3 that acted more like the Rebel Alliance or the Cornerians in terms of being a heroic force for the galaxy. It’s like the UNSC, if they were more advanced and had average soldiers wielding more advanced weapons. Perhaps the Federation has many different factions, and while Admiral Dane and his fleet were noble and heroic soldiers who fight for justice and peace, other factions within the Feds may not be so noble or pure. Adam could be someone caught between these competing factions, so he would be apprehensive about Samus getting her nose into Feddie business that Adam would be warned by his superiors to keep from outsiders like Samus at all costs. Just as the UNSC is beginning to show its corrupt side in the newer Halo games, so too does the Federation look a tad bit more sinister after this game.
Metroid games in the past have almost always been clear-cut, with good guys such as the Ancient Chozo, the Luminoth, and the Federations on one side, and the Space Pirates and whatever freaks they share the antagonist booth with as the bad guys. The most they did with grey in previous games was have the Feddies experimenting with Metroids in Fusion and Samus having to fight her Bounty Hunter coworkers in Prime 3, and that was after they lost their minds to Phazon and were captured and brainwashed by the enemy. But introducing a grey area can be a good thing. Perhaps one day the Feds might turn against Samus, and friendly Federation officers like Admiral Dane can come into play, giving her shelter while trying to figure out what’s going on?
CONCLUSION
In the end, Metroid Other M is not such a bad game. It was fun, it was entertaining, and I could see what Sakamoto was going for in the story. Of course, it wouldn’t be what I would do, since I would have taken the story and implemented the changes I talked about above onto it. As for the gameplay, I would have left it as it is, only adding in the missile controls with the nunchuck. Granted, I still think Prime 3 is the best Metroid ever, but that doesn’t subtract from Other M’s merits. But it is an action game, and therefore, a departure from the Metroidvania style that Super Metroid perfected and the exploration style that the Prime Games identify with. So while people love the shit out of the Prime games while hating Other M, I’m someone that can find the merit in both of them. I will be writing my own Metroid stories soon, and it will take elements from both Other M and the Prime games.
Here I take an overview of the Metroid series, and my two cents on the whole debate between Metroid Prime fans and Other M.
© 2017 - 2024 Vader999
Comments14
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I don't much care for Other M (Major reason not being Samus' character), mostly because the serious lack of alien and monstrous creature I have grown to love, save for Ridley and Metroid Queen. Though I must say, Little Birdie Ridley is a rather creepy cute character, and I give Team Ninja kudos for that.
But even if Other M isn't my cup of tea, I still respect people's opinions on the game. If they want to like it, fine by me. If we all loved the same thing, this would be one boring world.
Also, do you think that I am crazy for shipping Samus with Chozo or Chozo related creatures, regardless if that creature is male or female? Because (heh heh), in my headcanon, since Samus had to sacrifice her humanity to survive, it sort of makes sense to me that not only would her inner anatomy evolve differently from humans, but also, what type of affectionate attraction she has to various creatures. I know that sounds rather crazy, but I do ship them for much more than just "doin' the nasty" reason alone, so there is that.