Talking about othr M reminds me the way she "upgrads" to gravity suit... I don't think sex or characterisation is a problem, since Fusion is a great game while other M is only good, as Samus speaks in both.

I am trying my very best not to marginalize and dismiss your arguments based on these outmoded gender roles but you are making it more difficult than it should be. THis is a very sexist way to look at the world, and interacting with fan communities at large on the internet, at least the English-speaking segments, should tell you how wrong you are about this.

Women enjoy sci-fi. They're the largest consumers of science fiction books, just like they're the largest consumers of all genre fiction. They completely dominate the fanworks community: if you see a Metroid fan fiction or fan art, chances are better than even that it's being made by a woman. Nearly all of my personal female friends are into science fiction in some capacity, just like nearly all of my male friends. Christ, women are the majority purchasers and consumers of technology, now.

But it runs in the other direction, too; just like women are not repelled by technology and the aesthetic trappings of science fiction (the opposite, really) men are not repelled by character interaction or development. In trying to pigeon-hole the genders into these understands of the genre, into these methods of consumption, you seeriously narrow and shorten your own understanding, both of the genre itself and how it is consumed.

Lots of women love Samus. Lots of women love Samus for different reasons; very rarely will any two women give the same answer to the question of what makes her effective.

This does not change the fact that leveraging her sex as a reward is problematic. It wouldn't matter if women didn't like sci-fi (though they do) because that isn't an existent justification for piling on sex-oriented reward after sex-oriented reward that simultaneously serves to objectify the hero and remove the player from the sense of intertwined agency that makes the Metroid experience so powerful.

You are making a stunning number of assumptions about the reasons that people have for consuming different media without the backgrounds or arguments necesary to make those assumptions stick.

Different people approach Samus differently. Thi topici s about Samus as the ultimate personification of the faceless hero, and how Metroid Prime is the best game in the series at presenting her as such.

There is nothing wrong with this interpretation or this viewpoint, because it's very true. Samus happens to be a woman underneath the faceless hero we all identify with, which is great because it subverts the idea that faceless heroes in video games are necessarily men. There is no different interpretation going on here. Your conflict is with the idea that using Samus's sexuality as a reward, objectifying the character, is problematic. Don't misunderstand the misunderstanding, here.

Oh I see what this is about.

Nothing in this topic should be taken as an indictment of people who enjoy the sex reward system in Metroid. There is nothing wrong with liking titties. Similarly, there is nothing wrong with being part of a group that is specifically catered to, or who operates in an arena of privilege. There is nothing wrong with finding Samus sexually attractive; there is nothing wrong with enjoying the sight of her with her clothes off.

This topic is not about shaming people for liking sex, and it's not about shaming people for being catered to.

It is about analyzing the specific strengths of Samus's character, and how those are undermined by a sexual reward system in various ways. It is about how Nintendo needs to return to the razor's edge philosophy that gave us Metroid Prime, and move away from the idea of using Samus's gender as a primary defining characteristic as a woman.

That Samus's character is a woman is great. It is also, appropriately, ancillary to what makes her engaging (which is part of why her being a woman is great, you see).

But, as with everything Nintendo does, it is not a coincidence that the best iteration of their work appeals equally to both genders.

Damn right there's nothing wrong with liking titties.

Man I look at the picture of Metroid 2 Samus and I'm pretty sure she's just in a tank top and her underwear. But we can't really claim that area of skin revealed is directly equal to how sexy the outfit is either, though. We see more of Samus's booty in the Zero Suit than we did when she was in a bikini.

I think long hair, at the time, probably did enough to communicate that Samus was female.

But all of that is beside the point!

I agree that being reminded, every once in a while, that Samus is a woman is a good thing. It reaffirms that the strength of the character does not rely on her gender, and her gender is not an essential part of what makes her (and, by extension, any faceless hero) strong. Strength is strength, and Samus has that shit in spades even though she is a sexy lady.

Again: it is okay to like that Samus is a sexy lady. I like that she is a sexy lady. It's also okay to like seeing her in her underwear, or her latex catsuit. I like latex catsuits.

I'm just saying that Samus is at her most effective, her most powerful, her most immersive, and her most appealing when she isn't used as a reward for the player.  Showing her under her armor is fine, in a lot of ways. It's just that the specific way they do it serves to remove us from Samus as a character, and detracts from her primary strength, which is that for the vast majority of the game, her gender doesn't matter. With her power suit on, she coudl kick the shit out of anybody: Master Chief, Commander Shepard, Isaac Clarke, Sam Gideon, you name it.

Samus is an ass-kicker first. That's what makes her great. The showing off of her sex is beside the point.

Lara Croft is not universally liked by women; women do not universally like things any more than men do. Many women see Croft as being a problematic heroine.

The ones who like her (especially the older incarnations of her) like her because she is, in the context of the games, very sexy and very empowered. She's a sexual creature who will flirt with men and knows what she likes, but she also kicks a lot of ass and never debases herself. She is all woman, and she gets the treasure and stops the bad guys while never losing that sense of femininity.

In a sense she is the polar opposite of Samus; that is why some women prefer the one, and some prefer the other, or some like both but for different reasons (usually).

Objectification of heroines is still a problem, but it's often (as the case is with Lara Croft) a problem of the way the character is presented, rather than of the character herself. It used to be that Eidos used Croft's sexuality to sell the game. This is mostly okay, for osme people, because Croft's sexuality is very much a part of her character and doesn't get in the way of her ass kicking.

A lot of women (and a lot of men, including you on some level) don't like the current direction of Samus because sexuality isn't an intrinsic part of her character, and trying to play her up that way is dishonest, pandering, and going against the original spirit of the games. Lara Croft flirting with a guy is fine because she's attracted to men and that's who she is; Samus doing the same thing would be egregious, because why the Hell aren't we traveling underground and shooting aliens?

The idea behind Samus is that she isn't intrinsically female, or she wasn't ten years ago.

That's what i liked about Samus in the Captain N issue I read as a kid.  She seemed like she fit the armor

Of course, the downside of her, was that her character motivation was more or less "Steal Kevin away from the Princess so we can fight aliens together and make out."

Though hey, for the 80's...

Twenty people isn't really that many. The women he talked to just weren't fans. If he used their response to say that Samus wasn't liked by women on the whole, then he went much too far in doing so - only two of the women polled were actually quoted, so it's difficult to say how many of them even really knew who Samus is.

It likely doesn't have anything to do with developer biases, and probably everything to do with that he just talked to ladies who don't happen to like Samus. It's likely nothing more sinister than that.

Men and women have larger trends in what they like, but using those gender-wide trends to try to predict the interests of individuals or even small groups is where the problem of sexism (or most similar prejudices) comes from. We're all different in our interests, and that's pretty great.

Yeah, that's one of the things I miss about the older designs, too. The armor in theory is much bigger than Samus

In Super Metroid Samus is a big woman, but she's dwarfed by the armor she's wearing. She looks like a person wearing a high-powered battle suit, which lends to the sense of power that she has. The suit had similar proportions in Metroid Prime, and it looks like it did in Captain N, too. One of the biggest problems I have with Other M's design is how the Power Armor (once she goes all Sailor Moon and puts it on BLAAAAAAAGH) is very nearly skin-tight, which doesn't leave a lot of room, visually speaking, for the kind of power the armor is supposed to grant.

I admit I never watched or read Captain N, but that sounds really amusing

Long hair wouldn't really have done enough, though. It was the 80s, the age of Conan the Barbarian among other things, long haired he-heroes were in vogue.

I still think you're making mountains out of mole-hills, here (and that Rol is kicking your ass quite thoroughly in this engagement). One especially valid point of his is that how many gamers even see that suit, or know that she's a girl? In the age before the internet was around to spoil all this, it was probably enough to know from your friends that beating the game quickly or thoroughly enough revealed who it was under the armor, and that was probably cool enough on its own. I sincerely doubt very many people went around saying "dude, you get a chick in pixellated black-and-white panties if you clear out Metroid II quick enough."

"All of that is beside the point," I said.

These discussions are not fights, and they are not competitions whereby eahc participant is awarded points to build up toward a "victory." They are free exchanges of ideas where, ideally, we are made to look at our assumptions about the topics at hand and reconsider our positions in light of the perspectives provided by other people. I started this thread and wrote the OP specifically because what the women quoted in that article said about Samus made me consider why I thought of her as an effective character. Just above these posts, Rol steps back and reconsiders his assumptions about gender in a few key ways, and I am immensely proud to have been part of that exchange, even though he could only come to those conclusions on his own.

Whether or not the reward was widespread is not material to the discussion. It's the fact that it exists, as incentive for high-level play, that is at issue.

The further Nintendo moves away from the core of what makes Samus engaging (she is the ultimate solitary ass-kicker who just happens to have lady bits) the more people are removed from being able to identify with her, and the worse the games become as a result, or at least the less Metroid-like they become.

Samus is not a great female character, she is a great character period in that she is the ultimate embodiment of the faceless hero who anyone can identify with. The more Nintendo loses sight of that, the more it erodes at what made her great in the past.