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Critical Reception: Nintendo/Team Ninja's Metroid: Other M
by Danny Cowan [Console/PC]
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September 1, 2010
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This week's edition of Critical Reception examines online reaction to the Team Ninja-developed Metroid sequel Other M, which reviews describe as "a worthwhile addition to the Metroid canon." Metroid: Other M currently earns a score of 80 out of 100 at Metacritic.com.
Wired's Chris Kohler scores Metroid: Other M at 9 out of 10. "Sometime during the last generation of game consoles, everybody decided that action games had to be big cinematic to-dos stuffed with lengthy movie sequences, Hollywood actors and epic storylines," he begins. "Everybody except Nintendo, that is, who said 'No thanks, we'll just make Wii Sports forever' and then made sure that its flagship action games remained untouched by anything that might be construed as cinematic grandeur."
"Enter Metroid producer Yoshio Sakamoto, who cites Italian filmmaker Dario Argento as his strongest influence," Kohler continues. "Taking back the reins of the classic space-adventure game series that he co-created at Nintendo in the eight-bit days, Sakamoto decided to develop a Metroid game for Wii that bucked the trend, using bold movielike sequences to tell the story of the game's iconic but mostly two-dimensional main character, interstellar bounty-hunter Samus Aran."
Kohler explains that the resulting product, helmed by Ninja Gaiden series developer Team Ninja, features outstanding action, but is lacking in other areas. "Metroid: Other M turned out to be pretty darned good," he praises. "As you might imagine, its cinematic scenes aren't at all up-to-par with what the rest of the game industry is creating, but they're passable."
"Other M's game design is in great part an attempt to replicate Super Metroid with contemporary gameplay sensibilities," Kohler notes. "It must be a taxing thing for a designer to create a Metroid game. When you first start out running through a level, blasting enemies and finding power-ups, you've got to feel like you're on a linear path moving towards a goal. But as the game goes on, all these linear paths need to gradually blend together into an intricate spider-web of tunnels through which the player can travel wherever he pleases.
"Doing this in 2-D is probably quite difficult, let alone 3-D. Other M's solution is a series of tubular, linear corridors that could have been the design of a Super Nintendo game, just rendered in 3-D. The camera is fully automatic — it's always exactly where it needs to be, no player adjustment needed (or allowed)."
"Other M is full of interesting moments from unique boss battles to exceptionally well-hidden power-up items," Kohler writes. "As a cinematic game, Metroid: Other M isn't quite what a major first-party title should be. But the solid gameplay more than makes up for those imperfections."
1UP's Justin Haywald gives Metroid: Other M a grade of B-, describing its narrative as a notable weak point. "Samus Aran, the central figure in Metroid: Other M, is a stoic, independent bounty hunter," he explains. "Her latest adventure turns the unshakable warrior into a vulnerable young woman looking for direction and acceptance from male authority figures. In the hands of a great writer, this is the kind of character evolution that could work; but wrapped in a heavy-handed, meandering sci-fi tale, it just feels disingenuous."
"Other M's story fails through clumsy execution," Haywald continues. "Right after almost every battle, you get a flashback of the scene that happened moments before. Samus constantly adds her monologue to everything that's happening, but she delivers her lines in a droning monotone (which is probably meant to show her emotionless indifference to the rest of the world, but instead comes off as lifeless and boring). This narrative plods along, constantly interrupting the game's intense action and exploration moments, coming to a convoluted (but still achingly predictable) close."
Other M's core gameplay is more successful. "When I first turned my Wii Remote sideways (you don't use any analog controls for this adventure) I thought that the mix of 2D and 3D gameplay with nothing but a D-pad controller would be disastrous," Haywald admits. "But the action works because, even though you automatically target your nearest threat, you almost always want to target that nearest threat. It works because you're not just exploring a 2D world with some background and foreground enemies -- you're actually running through a fully 3D world, but from a forced perspective."
"One of my only real problems with the 'game' portion of Other M is the way you earn new abilities," Haywald adds. "Every Metroid game finds some way to strip you of your powers, so that it can slowly reintroduce them. But Other M's seems particularly ridiculous: you don't have an authorization. Apparently, you have access to all your weapons and armor upgrades from the very beginning of the game, but because the Galactic Federation is also on this mission with you, you can't use them until they say so."
"Also," Haywald continues, "at other times, the game interrupts the action to force you into a first-person view from which to scour the environment, akin to finding clues in an adventure or Ace Attorney game. The problem is, most of the time you have to place your cursor precisely on the exact pixel the game wants you to see, even when you're not given any clue as to what you're supposed to be looking for."
"As you delve further into Other M, instead of getting more of the things that work (combat), you get more of the things you don't care about (overwrought story)," Haywald warns. "The focus on the weak narrative bogs down what is otherwise an intense, action-focused game. If you can ignore the constant cut-scene interruptions, Other M shows the white-knuckle excitement you can still feel from a single-player only side-scrolling adventure."
GamePro's Tae Kim gives Metroid: Other M 4 out of 5 stars. "A short yet memorable chapter in Samus Aran's biography, Other M does an admirable job of blending elements of her past 2D adventures with those of her more recent 3D titles," he writes. "It does misfire in several key areas, but it's still a worthwhile addition to the Metroid canon."
Kim finds that Other M's gameplay lives up to series standards. "I was initially worried about the way the devs would handle the dual-viewpoint scheme, but it works seamlessly," he praises. "I did hate the fact that you can't blindfire missiles -- frustratingly enough, you have to achieve a hard lock in the first-person view -- but the transition between the two viewpoints is smooth enough that it isn't the hassle it could have been."
However: "It's hard to overlook some of the ways it deviates from the established franchise formula. First, the game doesn't encourage exploration nearly as much as past titles; you're constrained to a single ship, and although it features a variety of interesting and well designed areas, it doesn't quite have the epic sense of scale that we're used to; there aren't as many hidden objects to find either, with missile tanks, energy tanks, and upgrades that shorten the time it takes to charge your weapon forming the bulk of the loot you find. The game's environments also contribute to some frustrating puzzles that require tedious guesswork and obsessive pixel hunting to solve."
Other M's length is another concern. "The main campaign is also relatively short," Kim notes. "I finished the core campaign in about nine hours with a surprisingly low completion percentage; the ship is opened up again for you to fully explore, but I haven't done so yet, mostly because it felt like it was only being done for the benefit of completists."
"While it isn't the 'instant classic' we're all clamoring for," Kim concludes, "it is a solid title that deserves to stand on its own merits; in other words, don't unfairly judge it against your expectations because even though it doesn't live up to the high bar that we've set for the franchise, that doesn't mean it isn't a worthwhile experience in its own right."
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The lack of scanning in this game is disappointing. It's extraordinarily difficult to figure out what you need to do now, where some sort of small crack that can only be morph-ball bombed instead of missiled to make a hole for your morph ball appear (and it's not adjacent to the ground, so you have to jump-bomb it). That and since Samus moves so (necessarily) fast, there's a lot of cases where you're running or rolling straight into an enemy, and there's no damn way you could see it coming.
I would say so far that the game is decent, which is pretty poor in Metroid terms. I'm only a few hours in, so I haven't got the full experience, but I'm not holding my breath.
I attended the GDC presentation of Yoshio Sakamoto in March and left thinking that he had a very clear vision of what he wanted to do, regardless of what other people thought of it, and I found it quite refreshing and inspiring to listen to him detail his vision and why he made some design choices that have certainly been questioned.
Kudos for trying something different and making something that polarized critics and fans.
(I kinda believe that new should polarize, and that the polarization is a testament to what was done being 'different.' If everyone had liked the game immediately it would likely be b/c the game was like everything else available, Prime was 'different' for Metroid, but it is very similar to the most popular types of games. However, when you do something new, WiiSports/WiiFit are great examples, I would kind of expect middling review scores and polarized opinions when the game is first released as things that are new often make us uncomfortable. I'm sure there is some sort of Ratatouille tie-in here ;)
No seriously, I played Metroid Prime 1-3, liked them all, highly innovative stuff, but not flawless, Echoes with it's automatic energy draining gameplay mechanism wasn't very motivating, Corruption had this endless and much to difficult bosses and Prime is a game, which you couldn't lay away for a week, cause otherwise you are completely lost, if you try to continue.
So I like the idea of a fresh approach, cause it's clear Retro Studios wasn't interested in doing another 3D Metroid and every other american developer, would have turned the game into a boring FPS anyway.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkNVPWHaEPw
I've not really played any metroid including this one so I am not very qualified to comment but I will do so anyway. It doesn't seem like they are doing "something different" with metroid. It seems to me like metroid was already something different, and now they are turning it into a tightly guided, cut-scene littered game like so many others.
Note that in the video the player is prodded to "use your super-missile!". Then instead of fighting you get a whole lot of bullshit melodrama. It is just so horribly poor it's not even funny. This is definitely one of those "geeks and otakus" games that is eating away at the industry from the inside. Lots of people on the internet will lavish it with praise. Few people will play it.
"Note that in the video the player is prodded to "use your super-missile!". Then instead of fighting you get a whole lot of bullshit melodrama. It is just so horribly poor it's not even funny."
I think it wasn't supposed to be funny, and I really don't see the problem, that the cutscene seems to interrupt the game to give you a little bit of story and characterization, great games like Soul Reaver, MGS, Silent Hill or Max Payne used this exact formula successfully in the past.
"This is definitely one of those "geeks and otakus" games that is eating away at the industry from the inside"
It's the ninth Metroid game (if I count correct), the only series of Nintendo's major franchises that has a chronology and a main character, that develops within the games. I think the basic idea behind the title is to use this chronology and characterization to tell a story in a cinematic way, which is something Nintendo doesn't did often in the past. Why you label this approach as a "geeks and otakus" game is beyond me, much more, when I read, that you never really played any of the other titles. Maybe your dislike of the game is more based on the fact, that it is clearly aimed at people who played previous parts.
"Lots of people on the internet will lavish it with praise. Few people will play it. "
Just like any other Metroid, the series never sold in big numbers (with the exception of Metroid Prime in the USA) and was always highly praised by critics and fans worldwide.
The core of super metroid was 2 main gameplay tenants:
1) Exploration, you had to explore and re-explore to continually discover secrets, solve old secrets and find new and interesting areas.
2) Earning your progress, when you found the (insert weapon here eg fire armor) you felt that you really earnt that armor and being able to progress into the fire area was because you "actively" made that happen.
Neither of these tenants seem to appear in Other M, or if they do they are severely scaled back. There appears to be "some" exploration but reviewers say it's not at all on the scale of old metroid games. As for earning progress there just isn't any. You get given weapons when you need them. This is imho not Metroid at all, and people who say this is a return to Super Metroid roots do not imo remember what Super Metroid was all about.
"Just like any other Metroid, the series never sold in big numbers (with the exception of Metroid Prime in the USA) and was always highly praised by critics and fans worldwide."
I thought it did pretty well on the NES? Not sure how to verify that.
Goku could've fired one-third of a fireball in the time THAT took. Geez.
"I thought it did pretty well on the NES? Not sure how to verify that. "
Hard to find numbers for the NES era, IGN says it sold a million units in north america, but because they don't give any source, I wouldn't believe this number.
For japan some sources indicate it sold a million units on the Famicom Disc System, making it a lesser successful title for this platform, if theses numbers are correct and you sum them up and add europe to them, a territory, where the NES never was right, you end up with 3 million copies max, which would make it one of the lesser successful Nintendo titles.
But all this number magic is based on the assumption that the numbers out there are correct, and because none of the numbers I dug out gave any reliable source, they are pretty useless. Maybe somebody else can find better numbers.
It looks like they have made Samus into a moron by making her talk. Why is she scared of Ridley? She has killed him, what, three times before? This makes no sense. How sad.
I also don't like what you people are saying about the changes to the gameplay either. Equally as sad. Nintendo messed up on this one. At least to me is sounds like it.