The moment of truth has arrived. Does it deliver? Resident Samus Aran fanatic Matt Casamassina has the answer in these detailed impressions.
One of the most delightful surprises of last year's Electronics Entertainment Expo was Nintendo's revelation that it had teamed with co-developer Tecmo (and more specifically, Team Ninja, best known for the Ninja Gaiden series) to create the next installment in the beloved Metroid franchise. Called Metroid: Other M, the title would exist outside of the Prime universe and engulf players in an experience both classically traditional and new as series heroine Samus Aran forged through alien space stations and blasted enemies from the third and first-person.
At Nintendo's Media Summit this week in San Francisco, the publisher dropped two more surprises on us. First, that Metroid: Other M will ship for Wii this June -- much sooner than previously expected. Second, that a demo of the game was fully playable from the event. A religious Metroid fan to the core, I wasted no time making my way to a private room to determine once and for all if Aran's latest adventure will hold its own against all of its great predecessors.
Short answer: it does.
Admittedly, I've remained the Other M skeptic -- clinging somewhat stubbornly to the possibility that this new partnership and the game's seeming focus on action in place of traditional exploration might dilute what I've come to think of as the Metroid experience. If you've played the series through the years, you undoubtedly know the intangible quality I reference. Purists like me still label the Metroid Prime franchise first-person adventure, not shooter, and when Aran's travels are concerned, I expect nothing less than re-traversal exploration first, everything else second.
But I've played through the entirety of the Media Summit demo twice and I'm really pleased with the game that Nintendo and Tecmo have erected to replace the Prime titles -- at least, so far. Other M is a very different endeavor full of nods that harken back to the Super Nintendo days. It's incredibly fast. Action-packed. Amazingly cinematic -- offering what is easily the most revealing look at Aran as a character since her inception, which for uber-nerd-fans like me is a true gift. I found myself smiling at all of the phenomenal cut-scenes and the fact that Samus herself takes on genuine depth and layers via an inner-monologue, all of it voiced convincingly. But it's also got the exploration factor and that eerie, lingering sense of isolation that permeates the Metroid games. It's all wrapped in a beautiful graphical package that stomps all over the majority of titles filling Wii's library.
Be warned: Spoilers ahead.
The game opens with a lengthy pre-rendered cinematic, already a presentation win for Nintendo, a company too often unconcerned with such niceties. Space debris. Stars twinkling and fading in the immense darkness. Then, comets rain down on a series of ships and lumbering stations, all of which explode on impact. The outline of a little, blonde baby floats in the aftermath -- it's very 2001-esque. The baby ages, its hair growing in length, and before too long it is a full-blown girl, and then it's Samus.
The scene fades to a closeup of Aran in her trademark Varia Suit, now remade with Japanese sensibilities. Slimmer, more polished, but with all the artistic pop of the Retro games -- just very different.
"Why am I still alive?" Samus asks from inside her suit.
The camera pans backward and it becomes obvious that she's in the middle of a great battle -- the very same historic standoff between the bounty hunter and Mother Brain at the finale of 1994's Super Metroid. (Other M takes place a short while after these events in the timeline of the series.) Having just destroyed Ridley and Kraid, Aran is nearly defeated in battle by Mother Brain but is saved at the eleventh hour by a baby Metroid, which supercharges her suit. All of this is shown by way of an ultra-crisp cinematic depicting a truly enormous, hulking version of Mother Brain as its equally giant eye centers on the betrayal and then it obliterates the Metroid hatchling before Aran.
Tiny, glowing particles -- presumably the remains of the baby Metroid -- fall on Samus as Mother Brain attacks and the heroine dodges out of the way and then lands on the ground once more in a pose designed to illicit cheers.
"Mother. Time to go!" Samus shouts and then unleashes a powerful blast from her trademark weapon.
The scene fades again and Samus awakens to find herself in a hospital, dressed in her Zero Suit, her hair wrapped in a ponytail.
"Okay, Samus. Everything normal," some geek in a uniform says.
"I awoke to the familiar voice of a quarantine officer," Samus says via inner-monologue. "A dream. I had been reliving the tragic moments of my recent past. Thanks to the hyper beam, which was given to me somehow by the baby, I laid rest to Mother Brain." Of course, the explosion also took down the station, as well as everything nearby.
Other M begins at this point. The geek tells Samus to walk through a door so that training can begin. In the room, she cinematically triggers her Varia Suit -- it simply appears over her Zero Suit as energy envelops her body and it looks fantastic, of course. Now you're ready to play.
The controls are surprisingly uncomplicated. You hold the Wii remote sideways (most of the time, which I'll get to) and finger the D-Pad to move Samus. Digital controls, I know -- but they work very well within the context of the game. Oftentimes, the presentation is quasi-two-dimensional, meaning that despite the fact that the levels are constructed via polygons and full 3D, the viewpoint unfolds via a 2D angle. Samus can walk in and out of the foreground even as she runs left and right. There's a lot more to it than that, though, because the structure of the world enables her the ability to run sideways at one moment and then directly forward via behind-the-back third-person the next. The camera very competently follows the action regardless of your choices or placement, although there are the occasional quirks that need management -- for instance, the character might sometimes walk into the screen as she seeks a door, which is not ideal.
The 1 button shoots her beam. Hold it down and she'll unleash a powerful charge attack. You'll quickly find that while there's no real lock-on system from third-person mode, the heroine very accurately auto-targets the nearest enemy. Simply face her into the general direction, press the 1 button and your chances of success are very high. The 2 button, meanwhile, is used for jumping. Press the A button and Aran will go into morph ball mode, at which point she can lay bombs every time you tap the 1 button. If you hold down the 1 button here, you'll drop a single power bomb, capable of burning up everything in the room in a powerful nuclear light. The controls feel very responsive and Samus moves through environments extremely fast -- an attribute of the character missing from the Prime games.
There's more, though. Yes, some pro-tips -- for example, if you charge your beam completely and then switch to morph ball, Samus will automatically lay four or five bombs circling her perimeter, which is a great way to quickly dispose of enemies. But if pyrotechnics are not your thing, you can also play defensively. When enemies shoot projectiles, you can cinematically dive out of harm's way if you tap any direction on the D-Pad just before impact. Works flawlessly and looks good, too. Time it just right and Samus can pull off reversals on alien attacks, too. And if you beat an enemy into submission, you can also perform a thrilling finishing move complete with a sweeping camera that spotlights Samus as she cinematically disposes of the poor creature in question.
Here, though, is where the gameplay mechanics take on a few distinguishing facets. At any time, and anywhere, if you point the Wii remote at the screen, the action will change to the first-person and you'll be able to take direct control over Aran's beam as you might in the Prime games. There are some differences, however. First, you can't move around in the first-person -- you can only look and shoot. Tap the A button to very rapidly shoot down foes on a static screen. Hold B-trigger and you can actually look around in a full 360-degree radius. The latter is amazingly useful for examining rooms because you will oftentimes see crevices, vents, and more that cannot be easily observed from the quasi-2D viewpoint. It's also useful because when you've got the B-trigger held, you can lock onto potential targets and fire missiles (and presumably other weapons, as you gain access to them) at objects and enemies. In the demo, I blew through cracked walls and also shot the tentacles off a frozen boss.
Utilizing the Wii remote in this dual fashion is extremely uncommon and there's certainly a very small learning curve to the process -- one more likely to seem difficult in the heat of intense battles. But I have to note, it works really well and I like it. The aim sensitivity on the Wii remote is fast and very reliable. However, I would like the ability to set my turn speed so that I could crank it up a little higher during those situations when I want to thoroughly examine all areas of a room. Right now, it's a bit slow for my liking. (I tried to access the options menu but it was completely disabled.)
As Samus finishes with her initial training, she reverts back to the topic of the Metroid which saved her life.
"Not even a fragment. None of the baby remained on me. I knew it to be true but still couldn't help looking at my palm for a sign. Never again would I encounter the baby. Never. The finality of it stuck me once again." Somehow, I get the feeling this probably isn't entirely true given the name of the game.
The bounty hunter eventually walks into a huge, circular meeting arena and reports to a packed audience: "Mission completed. The planet Zebes was annihilated and all Metroids were exterminated."
The scene fades once more and Samus is gliding through outer space in her trademark hunter-class ship. As the cinematic zooms through the glass of the ship and into her cockpit, overrun with futuristic gadgetry and interfaces, more inner-monologue drives the story.
"I don't know how much time passed. Days went by in their quiet way. People's recollections of Metroids and Space Pirates grew nebulous over time," she notes.
Then an SOS signal calls out in her cockpit, and she follows it to "a remote part of space" where a Bottle Ship lay dormant. She flies to and boards it, all the while reminiscing about the baby Metroid -- the SOS signal reminds her of a crying baby. "It was as though it was crying specifically for me," she monologues.
After you deplane your craft somewhere inside the gigantic Bottle Ship, you spot another huge vessel off within the distance of its hull. Now you're in control, but from the first-person. If you point you Wii remote at a symbol on the distant vessel, Samus reads it: Galactic Federation. Your ex-comrades. As the bounty hunter explores deeper into the Bottle Ship, she's shot at and eventually finds herself at a standoff with some Galactic Federation soldiers, all of whom immediately recognize her.
"Remember me?" says one of the soldiers. And no, I don't -- this is the same guy from the E3 trailer and the subject of much speculation by Metroid fansites ever since. Turns out, his name is Anthony Higgs and he fought alongside Aran in the Federation before she defected.
"There's only one person who calls me Princess and that person is Anthony Higgs of the Galactic Army," Samus monologues.
Then she sees Adam Malkovich, her former commanding officer.
"Yes, there was a time when I was enrolled in the Galactic Federation army. And then I.. well, I was young and inexperienced," Aran monologues. And as the result of a "certain incident," she left the armed forces -- whatever happened, it didn't end well. Malkovich is standoffish and guarded. He tells his men not to reveal details of their mission to an outsider.
"The word he so obviously chose -- outsider -- pierced my heart," says Samus. "I can still feel it there today."
The group discovers a dead scientist forever sleeping on a grated walkway on the ship and as it approaches a little, green bug crawls out from underneath the body and scurries off. One of the soldiers shoots it and it splatters. Then, more of the same bugs appear on the wall -- not just one or two, but hundreds and then thousands. They form together into one enormous boss with flailing tentacles, and that's when the the demo boss fight begins.
Malkovich authorizes the use of ice weaponry to attack the creature. So far at least, Nintendo and Tecmo seem to have relied upon the commander as the logic of the weapon system. In the demo, Aran doesn't really upgrade her weapons, but she will only utilize certain ones with permission of Malkovich. It's an interesting change that explains the enhancement system without following the traditional formula.
The boss fight is best played in third and first-person, the former to move out of harm's way, cinematically sidestep deadly tentacle attacks and more and the latter to target its tentacles after the group has frozen them, lock on, and then blow them off one-by-one. It's a very satisfying, atmospheric sequence and if it's indicative of encounters to come, Metroid fans are definitely in for a treat.
After this encounter, Samus is accepted as part of the team, which disperses into different quadrants of the huge, sprawling ship so that it might discover exactly what is going on and ultimately stop the threat. Samus ventures off through a series of fabulous super-futuristic rooms and hallways illuminated by dazzling shades of high-tech lighting in all colors of the rainbow from red and green to blue and pink. A very advanced lighting system is in place to render realistic glows, and the particle effects are every bit as detailed. There are also niceties such as specularity on shiny objects and structures, giving a certain sheen to environments.
When Samus encounters a slim shaft leading straight up, she's able to kick-climb to its very top -- simply tap the 2 button to jump as you shift from the left to the right and back again on the D-Pad. When enemies come pouring out of a vent system in the floor, she can change to morph ball and drop into the crevice, where missile or energy tank upgrades await. The design of the world -- stretching in every direction, separated by doorways (some of which are locked), multi-tiered -- facilitates exploration, which was a previous point of skepticism for me. Nintendo reps on hand said that the demo only represents the very beginning of the game -- by comparison, the first 45 minutes of Metroid Prime, at which time exploration has only just begun. Based on that, I do indeed expect a grand adventure worthy of the series. My feeling now so far is that Other M plays a lot like a Super Metroid reborn with 3D elements -- there's really no way to criticize that.
I was skeptic, but now I'm a believer. People, this works. It's fresh. It's fun. It's stunning. We've waited decades for a few tasty morsels about Aran's history and now we'll get to watch it all unfold in cinematic glory as we take out the Space Pirate trash and explore an immense, lush world -- all with blazing fast controls. I will be counting the days until June because Other M has leaped to the top of my must-have list.
Don't forget to check out our new Metroid: Other M media below.
Second Take from Craig Harris:
I don't know what else I can add to Matt's impressions that haven't already been said already, but I'll try.
I'm impressed with Metroid: Other M. Very impressed. I was nervous about the project after seeing the trailer at E3 since it wasn't exactly clear what direction Team Ninja was taking the new game. But after playing through the somewhat short demo, I'm really jazzed for the final product.
I think the one thing that surprised me most about the game is the control scheme: you play Metroid: Other M in the classic orientation on the Wii remote…no nunchuk. The downside is that Samus is in a persistent run as you explore the environments without any analog control, so that looks a little goofy. But it's really interesting how they use the pointer for on-the-fly first person view. Need to look down at the hallway you're running through in a side-scrolling? Simply point at the sensor bar and you see it through your visor.
I am a bit worried about this control scheme since there was one area where you had to fight off enemies in the third person but then target specific areas in the first person, so swapping back and forth got a little clunky. But hopefully the designers keep the viewpoint swapping for the exploration and not for the combat in the later missions.
The voice acting for non playable characters is not so good, but at least Samus' first speaking role is well cast and well read.
I'm glad that the introduction irons out exactly where this sits in the Metroid canon: it's a "sequel" to Super Metroid. It was awesome to see the ending to that game recreated in a well-rendered and directed cinematic, and I'm sure the demise of Mother Brain isn't the last time you'll see that creature…they modeled it for more than the cutscene, I'm sure.
It's coming in June? What a great summer this will be.
http://wii.ign.com/articles/107/1071925p1.html
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