Dear Internet,
I was
right, sadly. The girl turned out to be
the AI Mother Brain copy/clone/android.
I am so lost when it comes to this game's story that I do not care
anymore. That is not such a bad thing
considering that it is over, so I do not have to suffer through it
anymore. It is difficult for me to touch
upon this game any more than I have, especially
since I have already discussed the major flaws and there was only about two
hours of gameplay since yesterday.
The
gameplay continued to be enjoyable mostly until the end, but there were two
major annoyances. In a boss fight against
the Queen Metroid, the game has an annoying hole in its presentation. It completely forgets to inform you that you
have access to Power Bombs. The sequence
of the fight gets to the point where the player has to enter the monster's
throat and plant the bomb in the beast's stomach. Since the entirety of the game handles power
ups in the same manner by alerting the player of their activation, the absence of
a notification makes the player unaware of their fighting option. So instead of using the Power Bomb, I and
others, I am sure, believed that the game wanted us to lay as many bombs as
possible. After the fifth death, I was
forced to look up the solution. If this
game was smarter in its presentation, I might think it was being clever. On one hand if it was purposefully portraying
the protagonist as a fool waiting to be told to when and where to start using
her suit's features, it would be a stroke of genius to create a trap for the
player by making them also forget to use a suit feature that they already had
access to. The player could then be
sympathetic to the protagonist because they too were waiting to be told to use
a weapon they already had. However on
the other hand, this game is not near clever enough to try to pull this
stunt. This is something that I might
expect from Hideo Kojima or Suda Goichi of "Metal Gear Solid" and "No
More Heroes" fame, respectively. Those
two are able to make their games break the forth wall and even criticize the
player for something.
The
other thing that annoyed me was the final boss fight. The player is forced into another first
person perspective. Meanwhile, four or
five giant beetle creatures are hopping around attacking other space
marines. What would be the obvious thing
to do? Shoot the bugs of course. What does the game want you to do? Aim at MB, the android girl. I was not even trying to do this. It was an accident when it happened. In hindsight it might have been the obvious
choice, go after the one controlling the creatures instead of the beasts
themselves, but MB was a small smudge on the screen blending into the
background at the time. The game also
treats MB sympathetically, trying to make her grief of being cast aside
understandable. So, why does the game
expect you to be willing or thinking about shooting her? I have no answer. Maybe it has something to do with the
underlining, over layering, strike though theme that the game wants to smack in
the player.
 |
| It's like a game of Where's Waldo but with something trying to rip off your face. |
On top
of the whole game is the theme of motherhood.
The game is practically a cradle for it.
I would rather not go over how many things point to this especially with
the title's acronym, the excessive use of the word baby at times, the crumbling
female relationships present and so on.
A quick search will give endless analysis and discussion for the theme. What the game fails to do is do anything more
with the theme than present it to the player.
Is the game supposed to discuss the relationship of the Queen Metroid
with its offspring and how Samus has killed numerous of her offspring? Does the game wish to point out how Madeline hesitated to aid MB when she was
going to be reprogrammed and try to state
that surrogate motherhood is weaker than biological? Perhaps the game is trying to touch upon
Samus' desire to have children and realization that her biological clock is
ticking down like the self destruct timer at the end of most of her games? I do not know, and I do not care. The problem with dancing around a theme like
this and never making a concrete statement is akin to creating a committee which
spends all day bouncing around ideas and never making a choice. Both get us nowhere and at the end are considered
wasted time.
"Metroid: Other M" is
an average game. It might have been a
good game. The game mechanics are very
enjoyable and there is a lot of satisfaction in blowing up giant alien bugs,
but the heavy handed, idiotic, poorly made story and terrible first person
narration using a rather listless voice actor makes the parts that the player
has to slug through annoying at best, and hitting-your-head-on-a-wall at
worst. The game took me about eleven and
a half hours to get through. Two hours
of that is the story. I know this
because the game unlocks a theater mode once you beat it which can play every
cinematic the game has. Subtracting the
time that I had to play over due to dying, the game is one fifth movie
non-interactive. At this point, some
game creators should just go and make films instead of making video games. But alas, hopefully this will not happen
again anytime soon. Me playing a bad
game, I mean. There is no doubt video games
that are more interested in being crappy movies will continue for a while yet.
Yours in digital,
BeepBoop
P.S. Tomorrow's
review will be..."King Kong Lives" 1986.
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| The game did tell me, an hour after the mentioned boss fight. |
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