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MTZehvor on 25 September 2017
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spemanig said:
MTZehvor said:

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.

I'd encourage you to go read the interviews with him focusing on Super Metroid; it's pretty evident from his words that most of the ideas that were meant to make Metroid seem like a movie were (title screen panning across like a movie, dead bodies strewn in the background of Ceres, etc.) new to Super Metroid. Perhaps there are elements of it in M1 and M2, but I'd suspect they were less a deliberate effort to make the game like a silent movie and more just Sakamoto taking inspiration from what he happened to think was cool (back then, the Alien movies) and working them into his most recent project (or, in the case of M2, simply trying to emulate M1).

As for Super Metroid's dialogue issues, size is mentioned in an interview with I believe R&D1. At the time of its release, Super Metroid was the largest game ever made (I believe for any system, but at the very least for the SNES). Given the good but not great sales of the first two titles, Nintendo was reluctant to push funding for ways to try and fit additional memory so that the game could be bigger. And while there are plenty of RPGs for the system with lots of dialogue, Super Metroid's (for the day) variety of sprites and graphical design took up much more room than the same things did for games like Chrono Trigger.

As for the "tediousness," of scanning, I was under the impression that a relatively small amount of people consider it that tedious. Probably aren't that many people going lore hunting all over a planet, but most people I've seen play Prime who aren't immediately turned off by the slower pace of Metroid are fine with using it. At worst, I'd say keep it in for the people who do like it, and just make the story simple enough that it can be followed without scanning. Kind of like Prime 2/3 did; have the main antagonist/motivation established early on, and have scanning be pretty much entirely devoted to world building.