This is not true. There were earlier semi-official comics that filled in the blanks in completely different ways. They were discarded as canon by later games in the same way Metroid Prime has been discarded recently.

Also, her characterization in Other M is not even consistent with the manga. In the manga she got over her fear of Ripley long before the events in Other M.

And this is ignoring the fact that the manga has been read by less than a percent of Metroid players and you weren't even given a hint of anything relating to Samus' relation to Ridley before the offending scene kicks the popular idea of Samus into the ground.

On topic: Nope.

So there was nothing there that you felt was metroid-like? None of the changes felt welcome whatsoever?

I'm not criticizing your opinion, but I'd love to hear a more detailed account of how you would like the next game to be... assuming it's not another prime game (ie: will still be developed internally)

We still need some definitive proof that Prime's been disregarded as canon. Prime's story was self-contained, and therefore had no relevant impact on stories that occurred after the Phazon arc had finished, but that does not make it non-canon.

Retro themselves knew they were dicking with continuity anyway, given that their story was an insert between Metroid and Metroid II, and could not fundamentally impact the story of Metroid II (even though it sorta did, because of all the Metroids that the Space Pirates cloned in the primes)

Though Other M is also a little guilty on that point, because its story alters a few of the finer points of Metroid Fusion somewhat (notably Samus' apparent shock in Fusion that the Federation had created Nightmare, or that the Federation was cloning Ridley and the Zebesian Space Pirates, or that the Federation was breeding Metroids, all of which were treated as big revelations in that game, but all of which she knew because they did all that on the Bottle Ship)

Yeah okay, I haven't said anything because I know you're funny light hearted guy, I like you and I don't want to get into an argument and to be honest I actually really did enjoy Other M even though I didn't like the story. But seriously you're counter points are getting kind of ridiculous. This is going to be a long post and I'm not ranting or angry or anything. And this isn't really meant to be entirely directed at you, I just wanted to kind of talk about my take on Other M since I only recently played it, and you're post is a good jumping off point for me.

First, factual nitpick, that image you posted is from Nintendo Power's Super Metroid Comic, not the magna that was released much later. Since it probably didn't involve anyone who worked on the game, it's probably shouldn't be considered canon. It's not even consistent with Super Metroid itself. That famous scene where the giant Metroid Hatchling saves Samus and gives her the power to beat Mother Brain? Didn't happen in that comic, instead one of the Federation minor characters kills the hatchling. (Not realizing it was the hatchling because it was big now.) Samus sees it's dead, persumes Mother Brain killed it, and just blows her the fuck up. Also, her hair is purple for some reason.

Next, your 60's Batman vs. Golden Age Batman is a poor one because those are seperate Batman's with separate universes. Like how the original Teenage Mutant Ninja's Turtle comics (Very Dark and Violent) are a separate from the 80's Show (Light Hearted Action aimed at Kids), and then the 80's show it's separate from 00's show. (Somewhere between the two.)

Other M is suppose to be the same Samus from Metroid, Metroid II, Super Metroid, Metroid Fusion, and presumably the Metroid Magna. This is all suppose to be part of the same universe. You suggest that people who don't have the "whole story" are at fault for expecting things that had already been set-up or alluded too, but a lot of the complaints about Other M's story is it being inconsistent with other parts of the Metroid series. To be fair, events in one game not matching up with others tends to happen a lot in game canons. What with players having free will an all, and game mechanics changing as a series grows, but Other M is very story heavy so these things tend to stand out more than in earilier games.

The whole Ridley PTsD scene. If you've played Metroid and Super Metroid, it's seems very strange for Samus to be paralyzed by just the sight of him considering she's fought and killed him twice already. (Four times if the Prime series is canon.) It's even more jarring that Ridley's appearance in Super Metroid seems far more frightening, he's the very first enemy you encounter, so you're without most of your suits powers and he's holding the Baby Metroid in his claws, while trying to kill you.

Skimming through the Magna (Which is set before and during the first Metroid Game) makes that scene seems like a really weird repeat of something that already happened. Here's part of Samus' first encounter with Ridley since he killed her parents. (Oh and Ridley can talk in this.)

That's Samus in the lower left corner, and this seems like it actually fits with what would happen in Other M, expect near the end of the Magna Samus get's a rematch, tells Ridley she's sick of being afraid of him and repeatedly blows him the fuck up.

So yeah, seems kind of odd consideirng she'd be that afraid of just the sight of him in Other M when she already went through something worse once before. (Technically Twice since she fought him again in Super Metroid) And his appearance in the Magna is far more creepy, he gleefully points out he ate the bodies of the people he killed at Samus's colony and reminds her that one of them was probably Samus's mother. In Other M he just stares at her and growls a lot, and unlike the Magna, you don't get a rematch to show Samus overcoming her fear of him. (Or let the player enjoy finishing him off.)

Even Fusion seems to contradict Other M is some ways. You've got this bit of dialogue from Fusion for one.

For some reason, this awoke a nameless fear in my heart, and now I am being sent there to investigate. My mission on the B.S.L station will be overseen by my new ship's computer. Following the commands of this blunt, computerized CO is something I have to bear, as it was a condition of my taking the ship. For someone who dislikes taking orders, this is the second time I've found myself having to do so. It makes me recall my other CO [Adam]...The real Adam would have said the same thing about that incident, but he would have softened the blow. He was relentless in his criticism, but he always cared... He was not a machine obsessed with duty. No such compassion could exist in that computer.

In Fusion Samus says Adam "...was not a machine obsessed with duty." Yet that seems to be exactly how he acts in Other M. He almost instantly decides to let brother die for the sake of saving everyone else without batting an eye. He shoots Samus in the back (literally) so she won't (possibly) die trying to destroy Sector Zero because he still needs her to kill Ridley, something he can't do. He also doesn't come of that caring either, and he never seems to soften the blow of harsh orders either. So even Adam is different than how he was described in Fusion.

Not even talking about Samus characterization anymore, a lot story elements in Other M are just poorly done. Samus monologues about everything, often about obvious things or events that we had already just witnessed. The whole "deleter" subplot is just forgotten, you have to find out who it was yourself, but there's no reason to even bother since the deleter angle was just to give Samus a reason to distrust Adam. The whole confusing MB/Madeline thing is only revealed very late in the game with only minimal build up and it ends anticlimactically and suddenly. The game set-ups fights with unfreezable metroids and a rematch with Ridley, but you never actually get to see them happen.

Also, that whole "Invicible Robot" comment eariler. You don't really feel like that's what Samus was shown as prior to Other M? The first time I played a Metroid game was a demo of Super Metroid at my local Wal-Mart when I was kid. I didn't know anything about the series but I'm bored and I love video games so I start playing. I found my way to Kraid and start fighting him. I'm having fun but I don't really know what I'm doing so I die. And then the little robot guy I'm controlling explodes and there's brief image of woman in her underwear underneath just before the screens fades to black. (Or White I guess.) And I was wondering what the hell just happened and who was that?

That little scene that plays when you die really stuck with me. The people making the game could have more easily just have had nothing appear after Samus explodes, or just have her fall over and Game over pop on the screen. They did to make it very clearly Samus wasn't just a robot, and Super Metroid had a lot of great little moments like that help flesh out the idea that Samus is powerful, but still vulnerable. Your first fight with Ridley you're hopelessly outmatched and only survive because he simply ditches you so not to get caught in the explosion himself. You're truly helpless when attacked by the now grown up Metroid hatchinling and can't do anything to stop it from draining you're energy only for it stop when it remembers Samus. The whole Mother Brain showdown. Even things like the cystal flash move are designed to show Samus as human being in a suit of Armor.

And the other Metroid games have bits that flesh out her character as well. In Metroid II she disobeys orders because she can't bring herself to kill the final baby Metroid. You see this kind of caring again in Fusion with all the animals she saved from Zebes curled up in her ship. Metroid Prime 3 had nice way of showing her limits with her reflection in the visor becoming more and more corrupted.

A series that has used subtle nuiances and minimal storytelling for so long to suddenly drop a very heavy handed and not particularly well written story on it's fans is defintely going to feel like a slap in the face for some. I don't really care since I can just ignore bits I don't like, but still I wasn't really looking forward to this game either, so yeah I came in pretty indifferent. Still I can empahsize with the die hard fans out there who eagerly were awaiting something that both, didn't show the same level of concern for aspects of the series they found sacred, and was kind of a mess too.

P.S. Please don't think of this as an attack against you or me trying to tell you that you're wrong about something, you're post just seemed to spark my interest enough to write something I've been kicking around in my head for a while.

P.P.S. That whole Power Bomb thing with the Metroid Queen? I instantly knew what to do, but died several times anyways. Why? Because I was holding the charge button on the way down, but the game ignores that and you have to press the button again after you're in the stomach, but even then there's a delay before the Power Bomb actually starts charging (Which your Power Beam doesn't have) and since I was low on health I kept dying tapping the charge button wondering why it never showed starting a charge.

So yeah, nice callback, but poorly executed. =P

"A little guilty"? Metroid Prime was a remarkably light touch on Metroid canon in terms of inconsistencies. However what they did expand upon, such as the canon for Space Pirates, the Federation, Ridley and of course Samus' personal history, Metroid Other M explicitly throws them out the window and a Nintendo press release calls Prime a "separate collection of games". What more do you need?

Just because you're fans of a franchise doesn't mean that your every whim and view is the end all change has to happen for things to carry on, listening to fans can be a death trap because most of the time they're unsure of want they want and everyone in a fanbase doesn't share the same views Zelda being a prime example.

I'll grant there certainly was a conflicting message between Prime's portrayal of the Space Pirates and Other M's, given that the ones in Prime were intelligent creatures with their own culture independent from Mother Brain and Zebes, but then they also radically altered the appearance of the Space Pirates from Super's, so it could very well be that the Zebesian Space Pirates are a seperate breed that functioned differently (directly mentally enslaved to Mother Brain rather than a tight-knit group of sentient beings)

But as i said, Prime being a seperate series is more or less true, but saying that does not disregard their significance as part of the story, rather the Prime series does that itself by introducing its own overarching plot element (Phazon) that is resolved through the course of the sub-series. Indeed, Prime also resolved the problem of independent space pirates, because the independent pirates, centered on the homeworld from Prime 3, had their homeworld discovered and occupied by the Federation, so would no longer be a likely threat outside of the Zebesians who returned in Super

This careless handling of Metroid continuity is likely to continue anyway, all the moreso because of Other M's underperformance, and because the continuity's merely been a tool for the games themselves or the associated media. Other M clung to the manga because they were trying to build on something that the Japanese would likely remember and increase the game's appeal accordingly. Super Metroid had the highly incredulous plot device of the Space Pirates rebuilding even though their base self-destructed last time because they just kinda wanted to remake Metroid. Retro wanted Metroids for Prime, so the Space Pirates cloned them in spite of established canon of the species extinction by Return of Samus, and Other M aped Fusion's story because many of Fusion's plot elements (the twist of Federation experimentation on Metroids, Space Pirates, and Ridley) made for some neat plot twists to work for a more story-intensive game

The more interesting question will be where they take the story after Fusion at this point.

I would agree with all of that, except that control options are unlikely to be an issue because my money's on the next Metroid being a 2013 game on 3DS. My other concern is nonlinearity, because only the original Metroid had that level of nonlinearity. The franchise at its best (Super and Prime) has had "hidden linearity," where, outside of unintentional sequence breaking tricks, everything had to be found in a certain order, but finding it in that order felt organic and not forced. "Oh, now i have the grapple beam that i can grapple these little nodes, i remember these little nodes back in that room, now i can go that way," sort of thing.

I agree with this 100%.  Playing through the game the first time it felt like something was just off.  I'm currently playing though on Hard Mode, and the intentions of the designers really come through strong.  Without the collectibles to find and virtually no health and missiles, the only thing to focus on is the fighting and where to go next to advance the story.  I have to say, when this game gets torn down to its roots like that, it just does not feel like a Metroid game.  Not at all.  I actually revised my score down after playing on Hard Mode because of this little revelation.

I thought the story started off weak, but got a little better toward the end.  What really turned me off of the story, aside from Samus's awful characterization, were its inconsistencies, both internal to the story and external to other games.

As a side note, Ridley on Hard Mode is BS.  I may be quiting there.

I know what to do and have been very close to beating him, the problem is just those damn one hit kills.  Especially, the one where he flies on in the air and tries to repeatedly stab you with his tail.  I swear it has hit me while in the middle of a sense dodge several times now.

I actually didn't realize that you could do an overblast on him while he was on the ground.  I just watched a video of it.