Metroid: Other M ruined gaming's greatest heroine ? Agree or not ?

[Mr Khan]

Khuutra said:

Mr Khan said:

And on that point, it really would have broken the authorization system altogether, because the suits in the past have worked like keys.

"This room is too hot." "Don't go there."
"I can't jump or move well in here." "Don't go there."

In this game's case, they were trying to demonstrate the significance of the absence of those items (like the dash through the volcano, health steadily ticking down, or the events before and during the fight with Nightmare). If the system were followed logically, it would break the usefulness of the suits, as you wouldn't really understand what the gravity or varia suits *did* without knowing what life was like without them.

The authorization system was not a poor game mechanic, because in terms of pure gameplay, it was much the same as all Metroids before it: you encounter stuff you can't do, get the item, and suddenly you can do it, just that this game took all the discovery out of it. This game *told* you that you needed a Power Bomb to open this long before you could possibly get them, and *gave* stuff to you once you were ready for it, but the latter is something that all other games did. After giving you a taste of how much life sucks without this item, they would *give* it to you, just in previous cases, you had the sense of having discovered it.

Like with the Varia suit. Without Authorization, there would have just been a chamber near the top of the volcano with a Chozo statue or whatever where the Suit would conveniently be, then it would devolve into that boss fight. In Other M's case, it was just "oh, here it is."

I do not argue that Authorization is a bad mechanic in terms of gameplay, but in terms of narrative it is atrocious.

Mine is not a direct disagreement, rather i'm saying that they were irreconcilable (though that means they should have either changed the mechanic or changed the story). I'm saying it was impossible to have Authorization make sense *and* demonstrate the usefulness of the suits (or the grapple beam for that matter), so that he mangled the story a bit in order to justify the continued existence of those items

Which does demonstrate his poor skills as a writer. The paralells to George Lucas are unnerving, actually, given that his previous work with oversight, has been excellent, but when given total control, not so much.