Metroid Other M: I'm Authorizing Use Of The Gameplay Beam

(I'm sorry, kind of. Also this is your spoiler warning. There are spoilers for this video game. You hath been warned.)

I'm going to do it. I'm going to talk about Metroid: Other M. Not in the way you might expect, though. I have no titanic wall of words to take down every single facet of what I think the game did wrong. Someone's done that for me. I don't need to look at the story of the game and mock it without relent. Someone's done that for me, too. It's been almost five years. The thing's been torn apart in analysis, re-assembled, and then shredded again. There's almost nothing new to add, except this here post which is a preamble to a point I wanted to make. A point that I discovered only last week and now feel terribly clever about, enough so to bother writing about this video game that I played four and a half goddamned years ago and won't shut up about to my friends online. It's not my fault this time, someone else brought it up and told me about a video this other guy did. This dude called Moviebob defended the game, kind of. In two videos. One here and then a rebuttal here. I watched them because even though I keep harping on this game for all it did wrong, it's good to look at the other side of critical analysis sometimes. I don't think this fellow made a very good defense of Other M, though. He made a case for one or two points, but the problem with Other M is that it's flawed on just about every level. You can't just rebuke the claims about Samus Aran having no characterization and then go "okay I'm done, game's good, stop hating". There is so much more wrong with it, and those other things I linked delve very well into them. This? This is just a preamble to one of my bullshit mythical ideology clashes I write so much about.

All you folks out there who like Other M, who thought it was fine, who have to deal with their darling being hated on every day by assholes like me? I understand, okay? In the first place, I'm a critical booster of Zelda 2, a Nintendo game which gets its fair share of hate for being too different. Other M changes things up a lot from something like Super Metroid, and it can be seen as too different too. I think the best way to illustrate the clashing ideologies thesis this entire writeup is about is to just come out and say it; I liked Other M. I was having a general good time with it, up to a certain point. Then it just lost me, and then I read the critical analyses against it and the game really lost me. As I was playing it, I fell back on the usual defense for the game. The story, I felt, was a total miss in its presentation. You know all the usual beats. Monotone Samus. THE BABY. The blandness of Adam's squad, minus Anthony. I was ignoring that, for the most part, because of the usual defense. Hey, that gameplay sure is neat! Flippin' around, blastin' monsters, jumpin' on their heads and SHOOTIN' EM IN THE HEAD YEAH YEAH HOW COOL IS THAT? There were a few niggling issues, of course. The weird pointy thing you had to do for missiles. Those godawful "highlight the pixel" segments. It wasn't perfect, but it was kind of fun. If the game stayed on that level, I could have been fine with it.

The moment Other M's story actually got a positive reaction out of me came when the Deleter (yes, I'm groaning too) tried to kill Samus with a forklift. Ignoring the clunky name for a second... holy shit. I was stoked. Something interesting was happening. We had a traitor on board the Bottle Ship, and he was actively out for our blood! He was bumping off the bland squaddies too, but still! I was excited, do you understand? This was new and cool and I wanted to know who it was and have this amazing confrontation. The game let me down here, and it let me down in a way I almost didn't even realize until it was over. James Pierce, the Deleter, sent by the Galactic Federation to clean up the mess on the Bottle Ship fuss-free. This plot point I was so psyched up about, and the fucker dies offscreen. As it turns out, this became a trend in the endgame of Other M, and it's the point I want to make. Other M is a game about two clashing ideologies; Gameplay and Narrative. The reason why it fell flat for me, personally? Instead of the two complimenting each other, the endgame of Other M sees Narrative brutally beating the everloving shit out of Gameplay, and winning out at Gameplay's expense. In the name of Narrative, several parts of Gameplay are actively taken away from you, and in my opinion they sour the whole thing. Really, we should have seen it coming. The game already proved that Gameplay and Narrative don't play friendly in this world, and that was all thanks to the authorization mechanic.

Okay, look, it's been harped on so goddamned much already that I'm beating a dead horse when I criticize it at this point, but I'll say this; the authorization mechanic almost works. I get it. You want a reason for Samus to not start with all her cool toys, and earn them via progression as you go along. You come up with this in-universe thing where she willingly puts herself under Adam's command, and he advises her on when to use her weaponry. Hell, you even covered yourselves by adding in a line about how you shouldn't be firing off Power Bombs willy-nilly because there might be survivors and you could fucking atomize them, OKAY! That's good, that's justification. I can buy that, I really can. The problem is that you then restricted all of the movement and defense-based powers of Samus's Power Suit, but without coming up with any narrative explanation. Narrative just decks Gameplay in the face, takes away the Varia Suit and the Space Jump and who knows what else, and holds it over Gameplay's head. The main sticking point for many was that bit where Samus ran through the damaging fire area, burning alive until Adam was like "hey yo turn on that Varia Suit". That Moviebob fellow states that there's no difference between this sequence of events, and something like Super Metroid where you run through the burny area until you just find the magic heat-resistant suit. Bullshit! The difference is narrative! This is a game about narrative, and Samus just sort of runs in there for no explained reason! You could pull any justification out of your ass for this. The suit's malfunctioning because of the end of Super Metroid. The Deleter fucked with temperature control and you have to go in there and risk your life to turn it back before the station boils. I came up with those in two seconds, and Yoshio Sakamoto was making money off of this. There could have been a narrative reason that played nice with the gameplay. Instead it just happens, gameplay be damned.

That's nothing compared to the brutal assault the Narrative makes near the end of the game. It took away movement abilities for the sake of fiddling with the Gameplay. Now it just straight up takes away the Gameplay's potential. Any and every possible exciting climactic gameplay moment that Other M could have had in its third act is taken away from the player to serve the narrative. Let's start with Ridley. I'm not going to talk about the bit where Samus has a panic attack over seeing him again. After Anthony bites it, she gets to fight Ridley in a cool battle. She does not defeat him here, though. He flies off deeper into the space station. Keep that in mind. We already mentioned the Deleter, and how the exciting confrontation with him is removed by him dying offscreen to MB. The same thing happens to Ridley. He dies offscreen to the Metroid Queen. You are actively denied any revenge against him for killing Anthony, because the narrative takes him away from you before that can happen. There is no catharsis. How about Sector Zero? An entire section of gameplay, a part of the space station brimming with Metroids, possibly reminiscent of Tourian? The narrative strikes back in the cruelest way possible. Adam Malkovich, the poster boy for this game's story, literally shoots Samus Aran, the player avatar, in the back. Then, still in the narrative form of cutscene, he sacrifices himself. In doing so, the narrative takes away the climactic final area of the game from you. Samus, still stuck in her cutscene form, can do nothing but cry and thank Adam for this. The narrative fucking hates you, man. Next comes the Metroid Queen, and in a stroke of luck you actually get to fight the godforsaken thing. Even though it comes out of nowhere. What should be a cool fight gets all sorts of fucked up near the end, when you have to do the old Metroid 2 trick of morph balling into its mouth. Then you use a Power Bomb. You know. Those things that you haven't been allowed to use for the entire game, thanks to narrative. Those things that the narrative doesn't even tell you TO use, so you just die six times until you figure it out. Jesus Christ. After all of that, then is the confrontation with MB. You only get to point at her. The final enemy of the game is in your sights, you have her targeted, you're ready to fire, and WHAM! Narrative double-decker dropkicks you in the face and lets the cutscene take over! Game over, haha, thanks for the 50 bucks now go WATCH THE THEATER MODE YOU CLOD.

I have a hard time thinking of any other game where the plot actively hates you playing it this much. That's what it feels like. They developed the plot first, then fit the game around it as an afterthought. So much of what could have been an exciting game is just stolen from you by the narrative, for the sake of drama and monotone voice acting that most people don't give two shits about because they bought this game to shoot monsters. Here's something for all y'all to mull over; would Other M have been better if they developed it as a CG movie, like Advent Children or Resident Evil Degeneration? If they just used the time they would have spent coding a game on making more cutscenes to bridge the gaps between the ones we already have? Would there really be a difference? You wouldn't be able to play it, sure, but I've made the case that Sakamoto doesn't want you to play this. If he did, he wouldn't have compromised so much of the bloody gameplay in the name of story. This is why Other M flopped for me. It took a game that was kind of fun but had a dumb story, and then totally doubled down on that dumb story to the detriment of the game part. Which, you know, is why people plopped down their money for Other M in the first place. They wanted a game, a game that played hand in hand with narrative. Not something that goes and kicks the game part in the balls out of sheer spite.

Alright. I think I'm done harping on Other M. That is, until that goddamned madman makes good on his threat and gives me his copy in July. The very copy he lent me, the very copy I played to form these opinions. The Silver Nemesis returns, I suppose. For now, until some other nonsense comes along, I think I got out all my dirty laundry about Other M. If you liked it, I almost understand.