Entry 018: "Metroid: Other M" Pt. 3

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.

The game did tell me, an hour after the mentioned boss fight.

Entry 017: "Metroid: Other M" Pt 2

Dear Internet,

                "Metroid: Other M" does not fail my further continued expectations.  What I mean by that is the story continues to get worse.  The character of Samus continues to spiral down into mediocrity, or even worse stupidity.  Two quick examples occur that paint her as such.  One occurs when she meets a larva Metroid to her surprise, not ours.  There was enough foreshadowing to paint a barn, so it really comes as no shock.  What does come as a shock is Adam firing at Samus just as the Metroid is about to attack her.  When asked why he says, "You can't destroy these Metroids."  He says it like it is an excuse for attacking Samus, which really just paints him further as a jerk as I have told you about, Internet.  If he really is playing as a double-agent, which is yet uncertain since this story likes to pull 180s sometimes right after another, then at least an ulterior motive would make more sense than half cooked up reasons.  What makes it worse is that Samus accepts this as an answer.  She could have killed the small Metroid with ease, which is shown by how Adam kills it.  Adam could still have told Samus about the new breed of Metroid without making her suit power down.  Instead, what happens is he forced her suit to power down so he could go on an apparent suicide mission.  But the story is not done, so he might turn out OK.

He shot her on a hunch?

                The other thing that marks a flaw against the "Other M" Samus is her hesitation against the reborn Ridley, a space dragon for all intents and purposes.  When he appears, Samus recalls a moment in her childhood when the creature attacked her people.  What makes this all around silly is that she has already  fought him two to three times depending if you count a robot version.  Making her still trying to overcome a childhood trauma that she has already faced numerous times discounts the personal growth that would have already occurred.  Pushing character development and personal growth is something that this game bleeds of.  However, by not taking Samus as she had already been presented before causes the game to cherry pick what it wants out of her.  "Other M" wants Samus to be both frail and hardened, but it fails in its delivery.  A character cannot display bravery without having fear.  Samus takes a step back because she allows her fear to seep back despite repeatedly confronting it already.   

                Internet, perhaps I have been overly negative so far with this game.  I have only been talking about the story and how it comes across as a poor man's fan-fiction.  The game play is something completely different.  The basic controls are simple but stress highly upon the skill of the player.  Third person perspective segments have a fixed camera for each room and mostly prevent awkward camera angles.  First person segments are entered with a twist of the wrist by pointing to the screen, which makes Samus stay still while firing which creates an awkward transition.  The platforming is well done with only a few questionable jumps presented.  There are a few puzzles whose solutions are less obvious mostly due to little to no hints given and really dark rooms, but the latter might be my brightness settings set too low.  The enemies are merciless.  I found myself time and time again having to retry bosses in this game, but they never once felt broken.  Instead, they were based upon the tested and true pattern formula.  The player has to learn how to fight them, in my case through trial and error.  

                "Other M" will continue for at least one day more.   That means more whiney Samus, more terrible narration, and more terrible plot.  Is everything going to be a clone?  Metroids get cloned.  Ridley gets cloned.  Space pirates get cloned.  This better be a cloned Samus if the story wants to redeem itself with its liberal use of a overly emotional bounty hunter.  Oh, yes, internet, before I forget.  Let us keep to a minimal Samus' decision to nickname the mysterious assassin "the Deleter."  Was being an assassin not good enough?  Traitor is a strong enough word already.  Why give a nickname that sounds like a ten year old would make?  Frankly, Internet, I do not care.

                Also, crappy story prediction, Madeline is the AI program Mother Brain.  Why do I say this?  She has the same initials.  I hope I'm wrong.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

Entry 016: "Metroid: Other M"

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