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Frogger on 25 September 2017
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MTZehvor said:
spemanig said:

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.

I've literally read the interviews you're referring to. They're on Metroid Database. I don't think any the story stuff started as a new idea for Super. I just think that the advent of new tech naturally made more possible.

I'm not saying size wasn't an issue. I just don't think it stopped dialog from happening. There were a lot of big games in that day.

I definitely wasn't. My impression was always that people who find it tedious are fine with just ignoring it, but i honestly don't think it should exist at all. But I'll just be repeating point's I already brought up in my The Super in Metroid Prime 4 article. (Actually the article didn't go in depth on this particular issue - i just love plugging my own work)

AM2R does something that may be a compromise I'd be more fine with. Scan Logs that you don't actively scans. Since you can turn off the notifications, it's essentially just a wiki. I still think that the game should rest solely on it's "silent story telling" especially when there are so many untapped avenues for the franchise to explore in this regard, that is at least a compromise i'm not against. It's the stopping, pointing, waiting, reading loop that I hate, especially when it actively feels like you're missing out by not essentially doing busy work, an element that doesn't exist in the 3D games.

I also don't think the story in the prime games benefit from it. The ending of M2/SR, Super, and Fusion hit so hard because nothing needs to be explicitely told to you. There isn't a story beat in the trilogy, aside from maybe samus waving at the end of Prime 2, that comes close to hitting as hard, and that is still just a cutscene, wrather than something that is actively happening to the player/something that the player is stumbling upon.