Other M More Like Any Other Game Please

Other M is kind of notorious for being an amazingly bipolar game.  If you have read any reviews about the game, you already know what I'm talking about.  It's like they developed the gameplay and the story in two completely different areas, and then smashed them together and called it a Metroid game.

If you haven't played a Metroid game yet, let me sum them up as best I can.  The (best) Metroid games are lonely affairs; you play as bounty hunter Samus Aran, and for a large part of the series, you are the only human in the game.  You're on an alien world hunting metroids, parasites that latch onto creatures and suck away their life force.  After the first and second games, they are supposed to be destroyed, but since there are ten games with the name 'Metroid' in them, you have probably guessed that they keep unexpectedly popping up.

You can't kill 'em, they're like Space Herpes!

In five games, there are other characters, and only in three of them are they human.  Interestingly, the ones with humans are the least well-liked games of the series.  Hey, do you know which game had the most humans in it?  Metroid: Other M of course!

(Disclaimer: I actually haven't played Metroid Prime 3: Corruption yet so that one might have more humans but let's just go along with it okay?)

Other M just shoves characters at you and says "Here you go I hope you like them because Samus knows all of them and will be referring to them by name."  I'm not kidding, they even throw in these goofy character intro screens that go by way too fast to see what it is each guy does for the team.  There was one guy that was pretty cool, and that was just because he had more than 30 seconds of screen time, and for the most part I called him Token.  Guess which one he is.

Pictured: three characters I care about.  One of them is dead, just the way I met him.

Any time I was playing as Samus, shooting bad guys and exploring a space station, I was having fun.  Even with a four-directional D-pad in a 3D world, Samus was easy to control.  The shooting was fun, and the dodging-then-quick-charging a shot was really cool.  I did have a problem with the lack of health pickups (even when you could refill your health, you had to do it by standing still, not shooting, and only while you were at about 20% health), but overall it was a fun experience.

THE STORY THOUGH.  THE DAMN STORY.  You know what was great about the other Metroid games?  Even when there were other sentient beings, the action and the adventure carried the story.  The planets and space stations were fun to explore, the tension was ever-present, and even the ridiculous sci-fi power-ups made sense in that world.

You know what doesn't make sense?  An independant bounty hunter turns off her best weapons because an old commander of hers tells her that her weapons might give his men boo-boos.  They do that with Power Bombs, which actually makes sense, because they state in-game that Power Bombs can vaporize a human being. I can get behind that, you are pretty unlikely to want to instantly convert a man into gases via heat.  You know what doesn't vaporize humans?  Her missiles. Even her super-missiles don't do that.  Hell, they don't kill most enemies in one shot.  But let's give Samus the benefit of the doubt and say that yeah, she is respecting the wishes of an old friend and waiting for him to clear the use of her more dangerous weapons.

Why, then, is she keeping her armor at the weakest setting she has?  In the most ridiculous way to get an armor power-up I have ever seen, Samus fights a radioactively-corrupted Space Pirate giant.  She kills it and it falls on her, corrupting her suit and protecting it from radiation.  That happened in Metroid Prime, and I loved it.  Didn't care how ridiculous it is, it was still sweet and the suit looked cool.

More of this, please!

In Other M, you don't fight monsters for stronger armor.  You don't explore ancient Chozo ruins and find things they built for your suit.  Some guy Samus had a crush on a while ago tells her she can go ahead and activate the upgrades.  That's it.  "Oh thanks Adam, for letting me activate my heat-resistant armor after I am THREE-QUARTERS OF THE WAY THROUGH THE FREAKING VOLCANO LEVEL!!!"  I get that they wanted to address the resetting-powers problem that people have with Metroid (and God of War, and Zelda, Saint's Row, Mass Effect, and any series about building power in any way), but this is not the right way to do it.  At best, you make Samus an obedient little girl, and at worst, you make her legendarily stupid.

A lot of people like to cite this game in their arguments for sexism in games, and I don't know if I fully agree with that.  The common targets are Samus's dependence on a man to issue her orders and the fact that the mother overtones are just shoved into your face in this game (don't even get me started on how much they call back that damn baby metroid from Super Metroid). I can understand where those arguments are coming from, and they might have some merit to them.  But to me this isn't sexism, it's just bad writing.  The sexism arguments imply that the game is pointing at Samus's gender and making fun of how weak it is, and how she has to wait for male approval to use her weaponry.  But really, all I see is a poor handling of story progression and an attempt to shove a motherly theme into the game.  Adam could have easily been a respected female CO and the game would have been just as stupid.  If anything, Other M implies that Samus is just antisocial and is better at going by herself than trying to work with others.

The game's story is way too bad to be taken as seriously as to call it sexist.  At one point, Ripley appears (because he's almost as persistent as the damn metroids) and Samus just freezes as if she is scared out of her wits.  She almost dies, and that almost kills Token, the only other likeable character in the game, and possibly the only one with a fully-functional brain.  Note that she has fought Ridley about a half dozen times at this point, and that every other time she sprang into action without a thought that didn't involve shooting Ridley until he dies.

They tried something different with Other M, but they failed to capitalize on what makes a good Metroid game.  Rather than explore what made the series great, they succeeded in creating the worst case of fixing what isn't broken.  They fleshed out the world in ways no one really cared about, and created what actually turned out to be kind of an offensive game.  If you weren't offended by the game's take on Samus as a woman, then you sure were offended by it's take on Samus as a character you wanted to play as.