Dear Internet,
How was
the stream for you? Was it more like a
trickle? I cannot help it if it
was. That was your department not
mine. Either way, "Metroid: Other M,"
so far, has been a unique experience. Developed
by staff from Nintendo and Team Ninja, of "Ninja Gaiden" fame,
"Other M" is an action adventure game set in deep space where lasers
and plasma guns are the new norm. Everyone
has a space suit and horrible abominations that are counter to nature or beauty
are all in a day's work. Enter Samus
Aran, a bounty hunter who the player acts through, who once was a soldier in
the Galactic Federation, something that the game wants to remind you of
constantly. There is also Adam
Malkovich, Samus' former commanding officer who is a bit of a regulations nut,
something else that the game wants to constantly remind the player. So far, after five hours I feel like I have
too much to say, so let me begin.
Samus narrates
the bulk of the story in "Other M."
She begins by telling the events of "Super Metroid" for the
SNES, which act as a backdrop for players new to the series, such as myself. One of the most annoying things that hit me
within the first hour was the sheer number of times she uses the word
"baby." This is mainly due to
her recalling a character called "Baby Metroid, a sort of space jellyfish
with claws." I was tempted to keep
a tally of how many times she used the word, but it was well over 10 by the
time I thought to start counting. The
game decides that it is not enough to have Samus explicitly state that she is
thinking of the little Metroid, but also decides to name a special type of distress
call coming from a space ship "Baby's
Cry." There are also a number of
times where the phrase "I never thought I would [something] again,"
which it might as well say that it is going to happen. Subtlety is not a strong point of this game,
at all.
There
is the Commanding Officer Adam Malkovich, a stick in the mud by the book kind
of guy. The only problem is that for all
intents and purposes in this game, he makes the book. Every "Metroid" game has Samus start
off as a powerhouse of space gadgetry, then strips her of her most awesome
weapons and armor, and slowly has her reclaim them or replace them. In this game, she never loses them. Instead, Adam plays space bureaucrat, telling
you when you are authorized to activate a feature you already have. The game attempts to make sense of this by
having Samus agree to Adam's terms because otherwise she would not be allowed
onto the abandoned ship to assist in finding out what occurred there. It only makes sense that her Power Bomb is
limited because of its great danger to the others near her, but other locked
facets of her power suit are not logical.
Samus has her Varia upgrade locked, which prevents damage due to extremely
heated environments. Adam does not at first
allow her the upgrade despite having to run on top of hot lava rock numerous
times. From a game play standpoint, it
creates levels where the player has limited time to progress through, lest
Samus have her health points reduced slowly due to the heat. The game gives no explanation as to why Adam
does not allow her to activate the upgrade.
Even a simple lost of communication signal between the two could have
explained why Adam let Samus pointlessly risk her life running through a
volcanic setting. Instead, he comes
across as a jerk who is not paying attention to what Samus is doing despite
that being the only thing he does in the story so far.
On a
side note are the other Galactic Federation soldiers that accompany Adam. They are apparently Samus's old squad
members. Well, strike that apparently. This narrative does not allow "apparently"s,
with telling the player the same thing over and over again. There are five of them at first, and by the
end of this five hour session, four.
When the group discovers the dead teammate, they are rather apathetic about
his demise, noting that his body was torn to shreds. They are not shaken by his mauled corpse and
say no solemn words. Instead, the game
throws a mandatory first person scan at the player. These scan points are a nuisance and are
similar to looking for a penny amongst a pile of brown leaves. The player is given no clue about what they
are looking for and no indication if they are even looking in the right
direction.
So far,
"Metroid: Other M" has an abysmal story that is so bad and filled
with excessive narration that it might as well be a book. Video games are not books, especially games
that have the use of a visual medium to present the story. There is no point in having the main character
say directly to the player that they were disgusted by what they saw. Instead show that the character was disgusted
by their actions. Show them retract
away, flinch, throw a hand into their line of sight , even make them puke if it
was bad enough. The amount of internal
monolog is akin to books like "Red Badge of Courage," where the
protagonist goes on and on boring the reader with annoying drivel. The only difference with "Red Badge of Courage"
was that it did so to illustrate the eventual maturity of the character by the
end of the novel. I hope "Other
M" can at least pull that around for its story.
Yours in digital,
BeepBoop
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