The Official Metroid Other M Thread

[LordTheNightKnight]

SHMUPGurus said:

MaxwellGT2000 said:

SHMUPGurus said:

I found this post on the Metroid Database forums talking about the story of Other M, and I must say that's a bit how I feel about this supposed characterization Samus got in this game:

 

''[...] What appeared to be a majority of us wanted a more fleshed out story, and had been wanting it for a long time, and he [Sakamoto] said he'd give it to us. Now just about all of the people who said they wanted a story are saying that his sucked.

It isn't even that this Samus conflicts with the one some of us imagined (it doesn't for me, both because of my next point and because I don't like speculating). It's that the one in the game doesn't have any character. 

Her constant monologue, were it gone, would leave her nearly just as fleshed out as she is in the other games. Now she... explains things. She doesn't even really offer an opinion, just explanation, that's not characterization, that's not fleshing out. [...]''

 

The whole thread in general is very interesting: http://www.metroid-database.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=3864

 

Anyways, like someone said, there's no point in complaining about all the little details. Let's just hope we'll get another Metroid game and see if they can please the crowd that liked the western Samus better than ''Sakomoto's real vision'' of Samus.

But she does offer opinions... often... she expresses her feelings... It's just irritating when people say things that just aren't true, I mean if you didn't pay attention to her opinion, that's his deal and anyone that feels that way, she expresses her feelings for many things in the game, the deleter, Adam, Anthony, the baby metroid, then she shows character in her reactions to situations, that is all characterization if you like it or not.  

Largely I feel people that were hooked by the primes and made their own idea of what Samus should be, look at Other M and ignore whatever parts don't agree with them and then their arguments form around that.

She tells us about the Deleter... but does she really care about him after that scene with MB? I mean even if they didn't introduce the Federation Troopers in that game, would it have changed anything? That's like a story in the story. About Adam, the Metroids and bioweapons development, we pretty much already knew what she thought about them in the previous games (Fusion mostly, because that's when we got inside her mind the most before Other M). They put lots of cutscenes to explain her past, but to me it felt more that they wanted to explain the Adam in this story better, not really talk about Samus, so we can than understand the decision he took in Sector Zero better.

Anyways, to be completely honest with you, the only big thing that bugged me was the ending of the game. It was just so sudden and brutal, I didn't expect that at all. About the Ridley scene, well it would have been great to at least tell us Ridley destroyed her homeworld with the Pirates a long time ago. Then it would have made a lot more sense because then she wouldn't have expected him to be alive after killing him twice or something. Also, people say she had that PTSD thing or whatever... that wasn't in the game so it can't explain it. That's backstory and if you want it to be part of the Metroid universe you have to show it to everyone at least. So many people tell me Halo has no story and when I show them the books and everything, they don't even count them in the story because it's not part of the games most of the time. Well there ya go, it applies to Metroid too.

It's how audiences think about stories they associate with a certain medium. When we see a story, we tend to think of the side stories as just side stories. Telling us they are canonical will not work, as we think of the main story as just that.

Not that you can't have side story materials be canonical, but don't depend on the audience to know about them.

Compare the new Star Trek movie with the Martian Successor Nadesico movie. They both had side story materials explaining events before the movies. The former still explained the key events from the tie in comic, through a certain scene (not sure if it's safe to spoil). The Nadesico movie did not explain the events in the tie in games. This was a huge reason fans felt the movie was just a betrayal of what the liked about the series.

This game is the latter. It's depending on us to know the manga, not the games.