Man, at worst I was expecting just plain ol bad for this game, but it’s so much worse than that.
Metroid Other M is a game that fails in almost every single category of being a Metroid game and even a game in general, gameplay that some potential but is disastrously tarnished by having to us just a fucking Wii remote sideways, an overall terrible area to explore with the fucking bottle ship, combat that’s extremely repetitive, any sense of exploration in discovery ruined by the stupid “authorization of items” system and of course waypoints on the map, and to top this shit cake off, a nice bit of piss icing with one of the worst stories I’ve ever seen in a video game, buckle up people, this is gonna be a long one.
Let’s talk about the controls, this is a game built to be action, a team ninja game, and to make a good action game, it requires a lot of buttons, but some fucking genius on the development team decided to have the whole game be controlled with just the Wii remote, not with the nunchuck, just the remote.
This game could’ve easily worked with the nunchuck, like going into first person by pressing Z, and you don’t have to worry about being stationary since you can move with the nunchuck, a ton of things could’ve been fixed but for some reason Sakamoto really wanted it on a Wii remote.
These problems extend to the combat and general gameplay, so let’s get to that.
Combat in this game is absolutely tedious, mostly thanks to the controls, but also cause of the general monotony of killing enemies, not only is it tedious, it’s also just pathetically easy thanks to the “dodge” you can do, which as long as you hit the move button, you’ll dodge an enemy attack, thanks to this dodge mechanic I was able to beat the game with only like 4 energy tanks in total, even fighting Phantoon was easy with the dodge.
Speaking of that, the bosses in this game are not super great, they are better than most of this game’s other stuff, Ridley is probably the only boss I really enjoyed a lot, Phantoon and Queen Metroid are alright, but the rest are just a bunch of jokes, the original bosses in this game are just pathetic, like the lava boss or the weird purple bug thing, and of course everyone’s favorite: construction equipment, and a lot of the returning bosses aren’t that great either, the game’s normal final boss is beyond pathetic considering it’s literally just shooting basic enemies with no challenge whatsoever, I would’ve been pissed if it weren’t for Phantoon being the true final boss that you can face after MB.
Easily one of the worst parts of this game is everything involving the first person camera, it’s super janky, it’s the only way you can use missiles and it makes them a pain to use in any combat scenario, and I absolutely hate every single one of those stupid parts where you’re forced to stay in first person and look for a little itty bitty detail on the screen and scan it, it was horrible every time it happened.
Well, you know, the combat is awful, but maybe the exploration and atmosphere can save the game………….HAHAHAHAHAHHAHA no.
I can just say right now that the bottle ship is easily the worst place you explore in the entire series and it’s not even close, the ship is nothing but constant hallways upon hallways upon hallways, then you reach some beautiful looking nature rooms and think this game will finally get cool and atmospheric, but it turns out these are also just disguised hallways, it’s awful, and there’s no excuse like “oh it’s on a ship and not a planet of course it’s going to be a bunch of hallways”, my answer to that is the BSL station on Fusion, in that game the station felt alive, it has that same sense of mystery and the atmosphere that the planets had while still just being a ship, there was no fake jungle or lava areas, all of it was real, so this game has no excuse feeling this boring to just look at.
Top that all off with the horrible choices with the controller and you got yourself a very bad Metroid game, and it just gets worse.
You want to know a thing I love about these games, finding cool new upgrades and using them in earlier sections you couldn’t access earlier, or just using them in general, it adds variety so things don’t get stale and you always feel like you’re getting rewarded for exploration………..and Other M completely throws that out the window, Samus has most of her items from the start, but thanks to some story and character stuff, she has to follow orders and can only use the items once authorized to by Adam……….this leads to many frustrating moments of trying to unlock something but you can’t cause Adam said you can’t, or the stupidest example is how you aren’t allowed to use the varia suit for half of the fire area, so you’ll be running through an area as fast as possible just so you don’t die from the heat, this is astronomically stupid, it doesn’t help gameplay and makes even less sense in the story, which HOLY FUCKING SHIT LET ME TALK ABOUT THAT.
I’ll start with the characters, all but one of them suck, and that includes Samus, let’s begin with her.
Samus is a cool silent badass, she’s badass in the early games and especially more badass with her characterization in Dread, that game makes it clear she’s not a mute protagonist, but one who just chooses not to speak, and when she does, she chooses to speak the chozo language, showing she has great respect for the ones who raised her.
Other M decided to look more in depth into Samus as a person, delve into her backstory and show how she became a badass……….instead this game decides not only to make her just look weak and pathetic, but actively ruins her character that was established in previous games, in this game Samus is almost like a clumsy soldier who gets taken down a lot by enemies way beneath her, one of the big ones is when the “mysterious creature” attacks her and pins her down, and instead of doing some kind of kick to get out or grabbing its mouth and just blasting it, she kinda just squirms under there and is only saved by one of her allies.
However, that part is no where near as egregious as the infamous scene you all know about, cause much like Puss in Boots 2 and the fucking paw patrol movie, samus has a completely devastating panic attack when she sees the Ridley clone………..do I even need to explain what’s wrong here, Samus has a panic attack seeing an enemy she’s already seen come back multiple times, and has defeated multiple times, sure Ridley killed her parents, but not once in the previous games she reacts like this, in fact, the most likely scenario that would go down here would go something like this:
Samus sees Ridley, shocked to see him alive again, she thinks of all Ridley has taken from her personally and gets enraged, turns on the plasma beam without adam’s authorization, jumps on Ridley and goes fucking apeshit on him for a few quick seconds, then the actual battle would begin, but instead we got samus passing out and being nearly killed by Ridley and only narrowly being saved by her ally……….you know, my favorite part about Samus is how she’s easily able to overcome stuff stacked very much against her, and all without help………..if I didn’t enjoy the Ridley battle I’d probably consider this the absolute worst thing I’ve seen in a video game, character writing wise at least, and it’s all horribly topped off with very wooden acting for Samus, cause silent ol Samus is a talker in thsi game, and trust me, every monologue from her is terrible and it’s not helped by the voice acting.
Now we have our little happy galactic federation bunch, and there’s only like three that have any actual plot relevance.
First is Anthony, I like Anthony, he’s so cool, plus the acting for him is pretty much the only actual good one in the game so there’s that.
Then there’s the deleter, this mysterious assassin among the group, the game builds up to who he is, he’s a side threat built up………..and then the game completely forgets about him, no joke, the game doesn’t tell you who the deleter is and after the meeting with MB, he’s never heard from again, it’s super dumb, and get this, his identity is actually revealed……….in the game’s guidebook, and only there, apparently it was the James guy or whatever, the one whos corpse you find on the way to the final part of the game.
And finally Adam, I fucking despise Adam in this game.
In Fusion, Adam was a simple posthumous character who samus deeply respected enough to make an AI reconstruction of him, and I liked what Adam was there, just a figure Samus looked up to and respected and nothing more, but Adam is in this game a lot, and he’s nowhere near the guy that Samus described in Fusion, here he’s just a generic field commander who feels like he talks down to Samus more than anything, it feels like he doesn’t respect her, he fucking shoots her at one point for whatever reason, and actively harms and halts her progress with the whole authorization thing, he’s also just a bad leader, his whole squadron dies and he just decides to kill himself, and the game tries to make you feel sad at that part but it just fails spectacularly. One last thing I hate about the English version of this game is how they handle the whole Adam calling Samus “lady” thing, it was just a one off line in Fusion but here it’s just weird, it feels like how a discord mod calls an underage girl his “kitten”, it’s super weird and kinda gross honestly (side note: I know this is different in the Japanese version where Samus actively hates the name unlike the English version where she embraces it, but it’s just super weird nonetheless).
Then there’s the game main antagonist, MB, she has almost no presence in the game, does really nothing in the game, they try to give some sappy backstory for her about how she’s an AI who gained emotions or something, like fuck no game I’m not feeling sympathy for the AI recreation of the fucking leader of a terrorist organization who tried to terrorize the entire universe with Metroids twice.
None of these characters are helped in any way by the dialogue, my god it’s generic, characters have no charm of any kind when they say shit, a lot of it is exposition dump like it’s a Michael bay transformers film, but at least there you got to hear badass Peter Cullen as Optimus prime saying the lines, here it’s delivered in the most wooden way imaginable, and of course, we can’t forget, THE BABY.
The plot is a boring sci fi movie, the pacing is inconsistent, a lot of it is just dull, and it doesn’t pull you in enough to make you keep playing, like seriously, this game has a loop of “I don’t want to do anymore combat or any gameplay, give me a cutscene” then you get a cutscene and realize “I don’t want this shitty ass cutscene, bring me back to the gameplay” it’s an endless that repeats until the game ends.
I could talk about more, but you’ve heard it a million times already, this game is a disaster, dare I say it’s Metroid’s Sonic 06. It’s a complete betrayal of what Metroid fundamentally is and it was so bad, it made the franchise lay dormant for years to come, but thanks to the wonderful folks at mercurystream, we got a comeback in the form of Samus Returns, and then a few years later we got Dread, the long awaited 5th entry in the 2D series, and this year we got an excellent remaster of a beloved classic, Metroid Prime, and with Metroid Prime 4 off in the distance and (hopefully) potential remasters of Prime 2 and 3, this franchise is finally looking towards a hopeful future, one where we can finally abandon this fucking travesty of a game.
Welp, at least for now that’s it with my journey through Metroid, until I get Prime 3 (fingers crossed that I get it soon) and a way to access Prime 2 or Samus Returns on legal terms, and hopefully Nintendo puts Zero Mission on the game boy online thing, until then, I have thoroughly enjoyed my time with this franchise and can now consider myself a Metroid fan.
I’m gonna go wash the awful taste of this game out of my mouth with another playthrough of Super Metroid, or hopefully Prime 3 once it gets delivered to me.
Metroid Other M is a game that fails in almost every single category of being a Metroid game and even a game in general, gameplay that some potential but is disastrously tarnished by having to us just a fucking Wii remote sideways, an overall terrible area to explore with the fucking bottle ship, combat that’s extremely repetitive, any sense of exploration in discovery ruined by the stupid “authorization of items” system and of course waypoints on the map, and to top this shit cake off, a nice bit of piss icing with one of the worst stories I’ve ever seen in a video game, buckle up people, this is gonna be a long one.
Let’s talk about the controls, this is a game built to be action, a team ninja game, and to make a good action game, it requires a lot of buttons, but some fucking genius on the development team decided to have the whole game be controlled with just the Wii remote, not with the nunchuck, just the remote.
This game could’ve easily worked with the nunchuck, like going into first person by pressing Z, and you don’t have to worry about being stationary since you can move with the nunchuck, a ton of things could’ve been fixed but for some reason Sakamoto really wanted it on a Wii remote.
These problems extend to the combat and general gameplay, so let’s get to that.
Combat in this game is absolutely tedious, mostly thanks to the controls, but also cause of the general monotony of killing enemies, not only is it tedious, it’s also just pathetically easy thanks to the “dodge” you can do, which as long as you hit the move button, you’ll dodge an enemy attack, thanks to this dodge mechanic I was able to beat the game with only like 4 energy tanks in total, even fighting Phantoon was easy with the dodge.
Speaking of that, the bosses in this game are not super great, they are better than most of this game’s other stuff, Ridley is probably the only boss I really enjoyed a lot, Phantoon and Queen Metroid are alright, but the rest are just a bunch of jokes, the original bosses in this game are just pathetic, like the lava boss or the weird purple bug thing, and of course everyone’s favorite: construction equipment, and a lot of the returning bosses aren’t that great either, the game’s normal final boss is beyond pathetic considering it’s literally just shooting basic enemies with no challenge whatsoever, I would’ve been pissed if it weren’t for Phantoon being the true final boss that you can face after MB.
Easily one of the worst parts of this game is everything involving the first person camera, it’s super janky, it’s the only way you can use missiles and it makes them a pain to use in any combat scenario, and I absolutely hate every single one of those stupid parts where you’re forced to stay in first person and look for a little itty bitty detail on the screen and scan it, it was horrible every time it happened.
Well, you know, the combat is awful, but maybe the exploration and atmosphere can save the game………….HAHAHAHAHAHHAHA no.
I can just say right now that the bottle ship is easily the worst place you explore in the entire series and it’s not even close, the ship is nothing but constant hallways upon hallways upon hallways, then you reach some beautiful looking nature rooms and think this game will finally get cool and atmospheric, but it turns out these are also just disguised hallways, it’s awful, and there’s no excuse like “oh it’s on a ship and not a planet of course it’s going to be a bunch of hallways”, my answer to that is the BSL station on Fusion, in that game the station felt alive, it has that same sense of mystery and the atmosphere that the planets had while still just being a ship, there was no fake jungle or lava areas, all of it was real, so this game has no excuse feeling this boring to just look at.
Top that all off with the horrible choices with the controller and you got yourself a very bad Metroid game, and it just gets worse.
You want to know a thing I love about these games, finding cool new upgrades and using them in earlier sections you couldn’t access earlier, or just using them in general, it adds variety so things don’t get stale and you always feel like you’re getting rewarded for exploration………..and Other M completely throws that out the window, Samus has most of her items from the start, but thanks to some story and character stuff, she has to follow orders and can only use the items once authorized to by Adam……….this leads to many frustrating moments of trying to unlock something but you can’t cause Adam said you can’t, or the stupidest example is how you aren’t allowed to use the varia suit for half of the fire area, so you’ll be running through an area as fast as possible just so you don’t die from the heat, this is astronomically stupid, it doesn’t help gameplay and makes even less sense in the story, which HOLY FUCKING SHIT LET ME TALK ABOUT THAT.
I’ll start with the characters, all but one of them suck, and that includes Samus, let’s begin with her.
Samus is a cool silent badass, she’s badass in the early games and especially more badass with her characterization in Dread, that game makes it clear she’s not a mute protagonist, but one who just chooses not to speak, and when she does, she chooses to speak the chozo language, showing she has great respect for the ones who raised her.
Other M decided to look more in depth into Samus as a person, delve into her backstory and show how she became a badass……….instead this game decides not only to make her just look weak and pathetic, but actively ruins her character that was established in previous games, in this game Samus is almost like a clumsy soldier who gets taken down a lot by enemies way beneath her, one of the big ones is when the “mysterious creature” attacks her and pins her down, and instead of doing some kind of kick to get out or grabbing its mouth and just blasting it, she kinda just squirms under there and is only saved by one of her allies.
However, that part is no where near as egregious as the infamous scene you all know about, cause much like Puss in Boots 2 and the fucking paw patrol movie, samus has a completely devastating panic attack when she sees the Ridley clone………..do I even need to explain what’s wrong here, Samus has a panic attack seeing an enemy she’s already seen come back multiple times, and has defeated multiple times, sure Ridley killed her parents, but not once in the previous games she reacts like this, in fact, the most likely scenario that would go down here would go something like this:
Samus sees Ridley, shocked to see him alive again, she thinks of all Ridley has taken from her personally and gets enraged, turns on the plasma beam without adam’s authorization, jumps on Ridley and goes fucking apeshit on him for a few quick seconds, then the actual battle would begin, but instead we got samus passing out and being nearly killed by Ridley and only narrowly being saved by her ally……….you know, my favorite part about Samus is how she’s easily able to overcome stuff stacked very much against her, and all without help………..if I didn’t enjoy the Ridley battle I’d probably consider this the absolute worst thing I’ve seen in a video game, character writing wise at least, and it’s all horribly topped off with very wooden acting for Samus, cause silent ol Samus is a talker in thsi game, and trust me, every monologue from her is terrible and it’s not helped by the voice acting.
Now we have our little happy galactic federation bunch, and there’s only like three that have any actual plot relevance.
First is Anthony, I like Anthony, he’s so cool, plus the acting for him is pretty much the only actual good one in the game so there’s that.
Then there’s the deleter, this mysterious assassin among the group, the game builds up to who he is, he’s a side threat built up………..and then the game completely forgets about him, no joke, the game doesn’t tell you who the deleter is and after the meeting with MB, he’s never heard from again, it’s super dumb, and get this, his identity is actually revealed……….in the game’s guidebook, and only there, apparently it was the James guy or whatever, the one whos corpse you find on the way to the final part of the game.
And finally Adam, I fucking despise Adam in this game.
In Fusion, Adam was a simple posthumous character who samus deeply respected enough to make an AI reconstruction of him, and I liked what Adam was there, just a figure Samus looked up to and respected and nothing more, but Adam is in this game a lot, and he’s nowhere near the guy that Samus described in Fusion, here he’s just a generic field commander who feels like he talks down to Samus more than anything, it feels like he doesn’t respect her, he fucking shoots her at one point for whatever reason, and actively harms and halts her progress with the whole authorization thing, he’s also just a bad leader, his whole squadron dies and he just decides to kill himself, and the game tries to make you feel sad at that part but it just fails spectacularly. One last thing I hate about the English version of this game is how they handle the whole Adam calling Samus “lady” thing, it was just a one off line in Fusion but here it’s just weird, it feels like how a discord mod calls an underage girl his “kitten”, it’s super weird and kinda gross honestly (side note: I know this is different in the Japanese version where Samus actively hates the name unlike the English version where she embraces it, but it’s just super weird nonetheless).
Then there’s the game main antagonist, MB, she has almost no presence in the game, does really nothing in the game, they try to give some sappy backstory for her about how she’s an AI who gained emotions or something, like fuck no game I’m not feeling sympathy for the AI recreation of the fucking leader of a terrorist organization who tried to terrorize the entire universe with Metroids twice.
None of these characters are helped in any way by the dialogue, my god it’s generic, characters have no charm of any kind when they say shit, a lot of it is exposition dump like it’s a Michael bay transformers film, but at least there you got to hear badass Peter Cullen as Optimus prime saying the lines, here it’s delivered in the most wooden way imaginable, and of course, we can’t forget, THE BABY.
The plot is a boring sci fi movie, the pacing is inconsistent, a lot of it is just dull, and it doesn’t pull you in enough to make you keep playing, like seriously, this game has a loop of “I don’t want to do anymore combat or any gameplay, give me a cutscene” then you get a cutscene and realize “I don’t want this shitty ass cutscene, bring me back to the gameplay” it’s an endless that repeats until the game ends.
I could talk about more, but you’ve heard it a million times already, this game is a disaster, dare I say it’s Metroid’s Sonic 06. It’s a complete betrayal of what Metroid fundamentally is and it was so bad, it made the franchise lay dormant for years to come, but thanks to the wonderful folks at mercurystream, we got a comeback in the form of Samus Returns, and then a few years later we got Dread, the long awaited 5th entry in the 2D series, and this year we got an excellent remaster of a beloved classic, Metroid Prime, and with Metroid Prime 4 off in the distance and (hopefully) potential remasters of Prime 2 and 3, this franchise is finally looking towards a hopeful future, one where we can finally abandon this fucking travesty of a game.
Welp, at least for now that’s it with my journey through Metroid, until I get Prime 3 (fingers crossed that I get it soon) and a way to access Prime 2 or Samus Returns on legal terms, and hopefully Nintendo puts Zero Mission on the game boy online thing, until then, I have thoroughly enjoyed my time with this franchise and can now consider myself a Metroid fan.
I’m gonna go wash the awful taste of this game out of my mouth with another playthrough of Super Metroid, or hopefully Prime 3 once it gets delivered to me.