How do you feel about the (radical) changes in Metroid:Other M?

[Demotruk]

Khuutra said:
Thank you for the pointer on Metroid Zero Mission, I had no idea concerning its sales.

Again: my point remains the same, not only in that your grouping of the games is fallacious but also in that the correlation to which you refer does not really exist. Metroid 2 had a fair bit more story than did the original, roughly in keeping with the trend that lead to Super Metroid (which is probably why it sold a comparable amount).

And you can say what you like about Metroid Prime, but hte game had a rather tremendous amount of reading jsut oto get through - lik I said, the Chozo keys alone, much less all the necessary boss battle information (I could be wrong, but I think the Parasite Queen wouldn't be auto-targeted in the mouth unless you scanned her first). Its narrative explanation was far larger than that in Super Metroid, or in fact any 2-D Metroid except for Fusion.

Again, you are drawing a correlation that is only kinda-sorta there and is refuted under scrutiny.

And you're not addressing the other, more relevant points, like whether or not the opening is indicative of the pacing we can expect later on in the game. I imagine that, at worst, it will be like Fusion - and probably quite a bit better, would be my expectation.

You hardly consider verbal clues about where keys are to be 'narrative', do you? It's not about reading, it's about forcing a story I'm not interested in upon me. Having a background story can be considered narrative if you choose to define it that way, but when I talk about narrative I'm talking about when the developers direct or force me to read/listen/watch through a story I may or may not care about.

 

The opening may not be indicative of how many cut scenes there are going to be, but you know as well as I do that it will be cut scene heavy, we knew it before we knew the opening. The fact that we've seen so many, the fact that they're constantly talking about exploring Samus as a character and that they hired a cut scene studio for the project indicates there is quite a focus on narrative and especially cut scenes.

 

As far as the correlation between narrative and sales, you don't need to just look at Metroid games. Look at the top selling games of all time. Pokémon are the only comes in the top ten with any real narrative and they're not exactly narrative focussed, the first game with anything beyond that comes in at number 14, and there's nothing more in the top twenty. You have to go beyond the top 40 before narrative games become near common.