Sex and the Zero Suit: Why Samus was Great Only in Metroid Prime

[Mr Khan]

Khuutra said:

d21lewis said:

Is it really "She's more naked the better you are" or is it "Here's her in armor", "Okay now you can see part of her face", "Okay now you can see her out of the armor". 

She went from wearing a bathing suit in Metroid I to wearing a 2-piece in Metroid II to wearing a space bikini in Metroid three and finally to covering up everything except her face.  If anything, she's gotten more conservative than ever.  I still think that (as stated in the OP), it was just a limit to the technology of the time.  That's why Mario Wears a hat and has suspenders. To show Samus as a lady on the 8-Bit NES, she either had to wear a dress like Princess Peach/Toadstool or they had to go the Sigourney Weaver in Aliens route and show her in her space underwear.  With the progression of technology, they gave us more realistic (and feminine) animation, a voice, and finally, a personality.

And I still feel that giving us a flash of her face in Metroid Prime did just as much to show us that we were controlling a female as anything else that's being criticised.  And again, I liked seeing a breif glimpse of her face.  It let me know that I wasn't just controlling a floating cannon on the arm of a robot.  It reminded me that this was a strong woman capable of solving any crisis. 

As for the super effective denoument comment:  Some games of the day gave you more story depending on how good you were at the game.  8-Eyes, Batman Returns, Axelay, and even Metroid Prime come to mind when I think of games that did this.  The thing is, I never saw the "good ending" of Batman Returns, Metroid Prime,  and 8-Eyes until youtube.  I can imagine it being frustrating for a gamer if they played 30 hours of Super Metroid and didn't get to see the Metroid attack Mother Brain or if they'd played through Metroid 2 and didn't get to see Samus run off with the Baby Metroid.  I never got to see the end of Metroid Prime until youtube.  I felt pretty shitty knowing that there was a pretty significant portion of the Metroid story (or at least that's what I thought) that I wasn't able to see the whole story.  Showing "more Samus" doesn't add or detract from the story.  It's nothing significant.  It's just a nice little bonus for speed runners or completionists.

I've lost focus.  Too many distractions.

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.

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."