| DivinePaladin said: I'd argue that your definition of a joint mission is fairly incorrect in many real-world contexts. Many would call the Korean War a NATO joint mission but it was mostly American troops. In Iraq US and British troops weren't necessarily doing the same thing, which does not mean it's not a joint mission. Just two examples for the sake of discussion. Not saying anything about that canon-breaking line in Other M, mind you, I'm just making a point where I see an issue. Personally I'm of the "Samus forgot" explanation, since she sort of seems to forget a couple things about being Samus. (Zing!) Seriously, though, I do lean towards the "Sakamoto screwed up/didnt care" explanation and I pay one sentence no mind. Although now that I think about it, is the translation exactly taken from Japanese, or were there changes in that monologue? Because that could possibly explain the issue. |
I'll certainly grant that, my definition is more of one coming from how Samus seems to be coining the phrase. By the loosest term of the phrase "joint mission," one could call Samus being sent to eradicate the Metroids on SR388 a joint mission, since it was funded by the Federation, and, going by the NATO example, funding from another group can be enough to consider something joint. Obviously the game seeks to keep Metroid 2 canon, so there's some deeper level of connectivity/cooperation that Samus has in mind when terming things as a joint mission.
This whole debate has certainly dragged on long enough, though, so I suppose I'll hold my peace and end by saying that one line, especially one as vague as that, shouldn't and almost certainly wasn't meant to undermine the Prime series as canon. The dialogue, I believe, was originally written in Japanese and translated to English, so I don't know what the original phrasing as Sakamoto wrote it was or meant. Simply going off the English version, though, there just isn't enough there to undermine the Prime games as canon. Even if you accept that the Prime games contain "joint missions," so to speak, Samus as a character views things differently, and I find it much more likely that she either forgot, views the term differently, or thinks of a joint mission as something far more formal than her previous ventures than assuming that Sakamoto was plotting to take down the entire Prime series through one sneakily placed line.
