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Frogger on 25 September 2017
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MTZehvor said:
spemanig said:

Metroid's original design philosophy was to be like a silent movie. That's why "environmental storytelling" is such a treasured aspect of the series, a description I still don't like btw. Either way, it was never meant to be a literal communication of story, and Prime is not understandable at all without scanning. As much as i hate scanning, Prime is a demonstrably worse game without knowing whats going on. It has terrible narrative conveyance.

At all. Something like Ori, Teslagrad, or even Hyperlight Drifter are more in tune with the way metroid tells its stories ideally. It's not just environment. It's dialog-free action and motion unobstructed by cutscenes. I think Limbo and Inside are the same, but i haven't played those or seen gameplay.

Sort of. The original Metroid and Metroid II had no such design intentions, and it wasn't until Super Metroid where the philosophy of being like a silent movie came into play, at least according to interview with Yoshio Sakamoto. And even then the ideal wasn't to create a movie-esque experience without talking because that makes for a good video game, the decision was made because Super Metroid was barely able to fit into an SNES cartridge at the time and just about any text outside of the opening monologue and the item descriptions would have been impossible to fit into the game. It's telling that the first game Sakamoto directed after Super Metroid was dialogue heavy by series standards.

Prime is very understandable without scanning, provided you've played the series beforehand. Samus receives the distress signal to frigate Orpheon, encounters Ridley, blows the station up, and tracks him to the ground below. Samus' main motivation from that point forward is to find Ridley, at least until she finds the Space Pirate operation in Phendrana, at which point it expands to destroying the Pirates there. It's only at the end of the game where things would potentially become more difficult to understand with the Artifact Temple and Metroid Prime, which is certainly an issue, but the vast majority of the game up to that point is understandable and enjoyable without scanning.

Is it a lesser experience if you don't scan? Sure, I'll agree 100% with that. But then again, any game where you just skip through the cutscenes and utterly ignore the story is going to be a worse experience, as was the proposition in the post I was replying to. The question is, can the game still be enjoyed without it? And with Prime, the answer is a solid yes.

I think you're misinterpreting the first interview where the silent movie thing is brought up for the first time where the idea was actually put to use. It's definitely there in M2, and id argue it's even in M1. Also, where has it ever been implied that SM was too big for dialog? The system that popularized huge, "open world" RPGs. I doubt it was too big to fit any more dialog. I think Sakamoto just changed the direction for the series. That's it.

My speculation has always been that SM was supposed to end the series, but then he read that manga and got a bunch of ideas that, naturally, ran counter to the universe he and Yokoi previously built. Now Metroid is trying to be a shitty shonen story with a shitty shonen protagonist who now has shitty shonen abilities with a shitty shonen presentation. (that I'll admit was toned down in SR). That's where Fusion's crappy plot/linearity, Zero Mission's Zero Suit and canonization of the manga at the end, Other M's everything, and SR's focus on showmanship and flashy action instead of actual substance come from. I think.

I mean, you can ignore cutscenes in most games and enjoy them. That being said, I cant really argue with your points on prime. Like, yopu got me there. Better conveyance than I remember. I still dont think that something so tedious that most players want to ignore belongs in any game, let along Metroid.