By Ishaan . August 23, 2010 . 10:28am

Most Wii games come on a regular 4.7 GB DVD. There are a few exceptions, however, like Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Metroid Prime Trilogy. In the case of those games, dual-layered DVDs were required due to the amount of content in them.

You can add Metroid: Other M to that list as well. Due to the sheer amount of content — largely due to the game’s cutscenes — Other M comes on a dual-layered disc. In a second Iwata Asks segment, this time with members of Team Ninja, we discover that even while using a dual-layered DVD, the development team barely managed to squeeze all the content in.

Team Ninja tell Iwata that they were literally shaving mere seconds off movies in places in order to be able to squeeze the game’s data onto the disc without any noticeable visual inconsistencies during the cutscenes.

We also discover that the purple Gravity Suit may not be in the game.

During development, Team Ninja assumed that Samus would go through her usual colour changes throughout the course of the game as she upgraded her Power Suit, and they modeled the iconic Gravity Suit as well. The Gravity Suit is the last major suit change Samus goes through in Zero Mission, Super Metroid and Metroid Prime. It lets Samus travel at her regular speeds underwater and increases her defense.

We already know the Varia Suit is in the game because we’ve seen Samus go from pale yellow to orange. However, Father Brain of the Metroid franchise, Yoshio Sakamoto, felt that the Gravity Suit, with its purple theme, looked odd and out of place during a series of serious events toward the end of the game. Subsequently, he requested the development team to get rid of it and find another way to indicate to the player that they had the Gravity upgrades equipped.

This was the result:

Instead of the purple add-ons to the Varia Suit, the lights on the chest will now glow purple to indicate that the Gravity upgrade is in effect.

Eh, I'm fine with that.

On some level I'm confused by people complaining about orders being what unlocks suit features - it's functionally the same as finding it in a room. What is the deal?

Because the idea is that she *could* be doing it, but is choosing not to. Certainly on a gameplay level its all the same (find this room and Adam will authorize this power being the same as just finding the power in that room), but it really wrecks the idea of Metroid as a survival game, of Samus finding these things that help her overcome the hostile environments.

Though i've yet to see evidence that such authorizations endure beyond the early phase of the game.

I'm only concerned with the mechanics.

Isn't the narrative justification that if she used all of the power she has stored up after killing Mother Brain, she'd blow up the facility and kill everyone inside?

I had thought the collateral damage thing extended only to her use of missiles in the presence of the soldiers. I would certainly hope so, anyway, as i would quite hate for that to be the model for the entire game.

But why? Metroid hasn't really been a survival game so much as a "go in and kill everything" game since the SNES.

Like i said before, part of the appeal of the game to me is the idea of finding these things that help you survive and navigate through a world that's trying to kill you. Part of what was harmful to Metroid Fusion was that they randomly unlocked power-ups that they just gave you.

Randomly unlocked powerups? Didn't we have to kill X parasites to get them?

More, though

You do remember that Fusion outsold Super, right? If sales are any indicator of consumer satisfaction, that mode of Metroid is a-okay