I'm pretty sure Sakamoto also straight up said the manga was canon. Metroid is filled with contraditions, so that doesn't disprove that it's not canon. It only proves how shitty a writer Sakamoto is.
I looked for that myself, couldn't find anything to suggest it. Link to source?
The marines were grounded in reality though. They had hopes and fears and were vulnerable and were afraid. I don't think the Hunters are characterized nearly as well or nearly as authentically. They were just generic architypes.
Let's not get too carried away there. Some of them had hopes and fears, and were grounded. Some of them were absolute nutjobs who borderlined on ridiculousness. The hunters are certainly all stereotypes, but none of them are anywhere close to being as absurd as the marines got. Rundas and Ghor are pretty grounded and serious, and Gandrayda, arguably the "silliest" of the group, cracks like one joke over the course of the entire game. Honestly we see so little of them before they're corrupted I think it's a little difficult to claim that they could possibly ruin the tone of the game.
I think it would benefit from the world being that cynical. The difference between Metroid and Souls is that at the end of Metroid, you can prove them all wrong, and there's something powerful about that. In a world of utter hopelessness and dispair, Samus can perservere and overcome it all. Samus is a much stronger character (like power level wise) than any Souls protagonist will ever be. Samus will never feel as hopeless as a Souls player because she will always be more compitent than they will ever be. She is an overpowered character, a super hero. Like literally, she's basically Nintendo's Iron Man. That contrast would keep the game from ever feeling as un-metroidly hopeless as a Souls game.
And that's precisely why Metroid can't pull off that cynical of a world. You're playing as a character who may very well be the most powerful single entity in the universe. It'd feel incredibly forced if a game repeatedly tried to tell you "oh you're hopeless, you have no chance, etc. etc." when you're playing a person as powerful as Samus. Maybe if there was a Metroid game focusing on a protagonist besides Samus, it could work, but as it stands Samus' ability to generally kill nearly anything kind of keeps an atmosphere of cynicism and despair from settling in.
Again, if the livened dialog is grounded in reality, I'm all for it. If its architype-y like in Prime 3, I'm not. Alien and Aliens both had this, but it was always remained grounded and humanized them. Also, it was there to make the characters likeable so you cared about them when they died, which I definitely don't think Prime 3 did. I like Prime 3, but definitely not for its writing.
I'd argue you're looking at the characters in the wrong way, for both Aliens and Prime 3. For the most part, the characters aren't there to make you care about them; they're there to establish the power of someone else. The hunters, and most of the marines in Aliens, exist to get possessed/killed by the antagonists of their respective universes, and very little else. None of the hunters are meant to be deeply emotional characters which you're supposed to really care about. They're used as set pieces for world building, essentially.
Think about what Corruption shows you of the hunters. You're given a brief "conversation" with each one, and then outside of that, what do we see them doing? Killing Pirates, and generally with little effort. We see Rundas destroy four pirate carriers in a matter of seconds, right after the player probably took a minute or so to kill just one. We see Ghor beat down the first boss of the game easily. We see Gandrayda dispatch a squadron of Space Pirates with relative ease. The game goes out of its way to demonstrate that these guys are actually somewhat powerful. This is all done for the purpose of demonstrating how powerful Phazon is. When you see Phazon easily corrupting the minds of these powerful beings, it heightens the player's view of how powerful Phazon is. Something that controls these beings must be worth fearing. It also ramps up the tension before their respective boss fights; if these beings were as powerful as we saw them beforehand, they must be even more powerful now. The hunters exist less as characters and more as tools to establish your antagonist and tension within the world.
Needing to stop what you're doing to read something is the definition of pace breaking. Reading is active. Listening is passive.
Not really. If you want to get the full experience out of listening to something, you generally need to be concentrating, at least to some degree. It's perhaps a bit less involved, but honestly I'd much rather read something for 5 seconds than listen to someone take 20 seconds.
Consider it this way. Suppose I clear out a room of Pirates in a theoretical Metroid game, and I see some terminals. I'd like to learn a bit more about the world, so I start scanning them. With reading, I can tell in a second, at most, whether it'll contain useful information or not, and either decide to keep reading or move to something else. With listening, that's a bit harder. Reading contains the benefit of skimming, whereas listening does not.
No it wouldn't. It would make Metroid a scary game. And it should be. It was inspired by a scary movie. That doesn't mean it would be a horror game, though. Samus is much to overpowered to ever be in a horror game.
They most definitely were meant to be scary. Everything about the way they are introduced to the player, the way they attack, the way you have to kill them, the state of vulnerability you're in when they attack you, all of it is meant to be scary. Maybe it's not scary now because we're older and 16 bit games can only do so much, but they are supposed to literally be the face huggers of that universe. So yes, making them scarier would absolutely make for a better metroid game.
...really seems like you're splitting hairs there with the definitions of scary and horror.
Regardless, no. Just because Metroid was inspired by a scary movie does not mean it should be a scary game. Metroid has never tried to be a scary game. Metroids are introduced to the player in a corridor of Tourian with no fanfare.
The rest of this is speculation, at best. It's equally likely that Nintendo simply designed Metroids differently because they needed a way to convey to the player that Metroids are a serious threat to the galaxy (as opposed to trying to scare the player). If you have an interview that states that Metroids were meant to scare the player, then I'd love to see it, but as for now this is merely conjecture. Regardless of graphical limitations, Metroids never have been scary. There'd be no reason to revamp the entire franchise now just to fit some interpretation of how something may have been meant to be perceived in the very distant past.
Samus explored because she has to, not because she enjoys doing it. It's her job, not her joy. Horror absolutely does not discourage exploration. If it did, Bloodborne wouldn't have succeeded as a game. Again, Samus is way too overpowered for her to be in an actual horror game. Most enemies in Metroid are just wild life, meaning most of the time, the player won't be very scared. The wild life aren't meant to look horrific. Just alien. That's what makes the contrast with Metroids so effective. They are scary, and they're likely the reason you're there in the first place. The fear may be intense, but its fleating, again like in Bioshock with Big Daddies. Only with the imagery of the aliens from Alien. Scary because they're difficult and relentless.
...Bloodborne is not horror. Not even close. The only thing remotely scary about that game is its obsession with blood.
Anyway, Samus explores because she has to, certainly. But the point is the player. Why does the player explore in a Metroid game? The player certainly doesn't have to. It's because they want to. Metroid games are designed to encourage the player to explore. It encourages the player to backtrack by teasing them with items they can't reach yet and then giving those items to the player in an area later on. That's kind of the gist of Metroid.
Horror, meanwhile (actual horror games, not action/adventure games with weird looking enemies) does discourage exploration. I don't want to explore any more of Amnesia's creepy castle than I absolutely have to because I don't want to get scared and devoured by the sausage gravy monster. I hate exploring the Sevastapol in Alien Isolation because it means sticking my neck out to get gnawed off by the Xenomorph unnecessarily. Horror (or scary, if that's the word you want to use) feed off the player's fear of the unknown. Exploration based games feed off of the player's curiosity of the unknown. The two are fundamentally at odds.
There's honestly too many inconsistancies to list here, so I'll just let you have this one. But it's been a mess since before Other M, and especially after, since it completely invalidates the Prime trilogy from the canon
...Other M really does nothing of the sort, and I say that as an open detractor of Other M who strongly dislikes its story. I assume this is based off the much maligned "it was my first joint mission since becoming a freelance bounty hunter" line at the start, and there's a number of explanations behind that besides it being an attempt to undermine the Prime series. Samus may simply not have considered what she did during Corruption as a joint mission (I certainly didn't), or that may have slipped her mind, or she may have simply been thinking about it in context with serving directly within a Federation unit, etc. There are plenty far more reasonable explanations than this was all an attempt by the directors to take out the Prime series sneakily.
Metroid was never a franchise about a galactic federation being "pissed." Metroid is a game where you explore caverns, and the longer the series goes on, the stupider the excuses get because of how much of a corner they've been written into. Now they have to address the stupid "government is evil" plot line and they have to address Adam and they have to come up with another stupid reason Samus lost her powers and they have to come up with a reason for the Metroids to appear even thought they were all exterminated multiple times in the franchise. It's stupid.
Metroid's never been a franchise about the Federation being pissed, sure. It's been a franchise about the Pirates being pissed, up until now. All this does is change who the main evil organization is, which I'd argue is an interesting theme for any story. Having an organization you've been working with for so long switch to being one that's actively trying to hunt you down is certainly engaging, if done right.
As for all that addressing, they don't really have to do anything of the sort; that can simply run as a theme in the background. As an example; Samus flees the galaxy to avoid the Federation, and winds up taking bounties from another civilization elsewhere. She gets a bounty to explore some planet. Done. Maybe bring the Federation back in a future game. Arguably one of the best things about Metroid's story is that since Samus is such a loner, she can disappear from the overarching plot and not really leave any inconsistencies. There's no requirement for why the Federation, or Metroids, or any other element from past stories has to appear.
Metal Gear is convoluted, but mostly consistent and has direction. Everything has a good reason for happening and leads to something else. Metroid does not have that, at all. Exterminating the entire race of monsters from which your entire franchise is based off of over and over since the second game has to be the stupidest example of bad writing I've ever scene. The Metroids were back, again, in Fusion. So WHY exterminate them? Why put yourself in the position again where you have to come up with another lame exuse for why the Metroids "aren't really extinct?"
...the exact same thing you're condemning Metroid for happens in Metal Gear with Liquid's "death" and attachment of hand to Ocelot. Killing the villain who will be the bad guy for the entire rest of the Solid series post MGS1 sounds like an equally stupid idea, and having him return through being grafted onto someone else's body via method of hand is a far more convoluted and silly excuse than anything done in Metroid. And there's plenty more incidents of similar things in MGS; pretty much the entirety of Portable Ops falls under this category.
As for the second half of this, the reason's simple; it lends itself to a different type of storytelling. If the writers want to make a universe in which the government is the bad guy, then exterminating the Metroids (and thus, having room for a conspiracy) is the way to go. If you want to bring Metroids back in full capacity, set your game before the extinction. Other M's a piece of garbage regardless, but I'd argue Fusion did it fine because Fusion was the first (and probably meant to be the only) example where this sort of thing happened.
I'm definitely not okay with a Metroid game without Metroids. It wouldn't make sense. The only Zelda games without Zelda are direct sequels to Zelda games with Zelda.
...which works fine, since a theoretical game set after Fusion would be a direct sequel to Metroid games with Metroids in them.
