You know I never watched this Nintendo-made Metroid retrospective before.

I think it fair to say that Other M pretends that the Prime games never happened, or - at best - ignores the Hell out of them.

The former. The explanation of both space pirates and Ridley are totally inconsistent with the Prime series, and at one point she says that "this is the first time I've worked under a CO since becoming an independent bounty hunter", a denial of the existence of Prime 3.

Oh right, I had forgotten that line.

WELP.

Sakamoto: pretending my favorite games never happened.

He will rue this day. He better start ruing.

However I'm not sure it was a deliberate denial of Prime, because there are many aspects of the game that are blatantly inconsistent with Super Metroid and even Metroid Fusion.

Inconsistent with Super and Fusion? I am embarrassed to admit it but I don't know what you mean; I suppose I need to brush up on my Metroid lore.

Well the most obvious ones are with Metroid Fusion since I did a playthrough recently enough. Samus' extensive monologues in Fusion make her seem totally unaware of any sort of corrupt activities the Federation could be doing involving Metroids, even though almost the exact same thing happens in both Other M and Fusion. Then there's Nightmare, which was secretly developed on BSL and corrupted by the X parasites (and seemed to have taken the gravity ability from Samus' suit fitting in with the themes of the bosses), which Samus is completely shocked by, yet there it is on the Bottle Ship in the same form (complete with gravity abilities) which is supposed to happen prior to Fusion. It makes Samus' monologues in Fusion make no sense, unless she got amnesia or something. Then, if Metroids have been cloned by federation scientists and genetically enhanced to resist ice, why in Fusion do they need to use DNA from the baby specifically to save Samus when they could have used DNA from the superior and abundant Metroids. Also, why is the Omega Metroid still vulnerable to ice?

This can be explained if Sakamoto wanted it to be a 'reimagining' of Fusion, which it seems to be, but if so they could have presented it that way from the start instead of saying it fits between Super Metroid and Fusion.

You're right on the first one, at least. The "surprise" that the Federation was developing Metroids loses all of its luster.

But given the total destruction of the bottle ship, perhaps they no longer had any Metroid DNA outside of that which they originally gleaned from the Baby to create the Bottle Ship Metroids in the first place.

wfz brought up a good point that the whole "but they're invulnerable to ice" thing was probably a lie that Adam made up, an excuse for shooting Samus, when his real purpose was merely to make Samus unable to stop him from sacrificing himself, especially given that they weren't invulnerable to ice anyway.

Really, that part of her characterization is right in line with how she was portrayed previously. The Samus that jumped down a shaft to her apparent doom just to stop Meta Ridley is really much the same as the Samus that was willing to go into Sector 0 and try to activate the self-destruct on it herself.

Now as for Prime having happened or not, I still stand by my idea that Sakamoto's treating them as a side-series isn't all that bad, given that the events of Prime were inconsequential to the Metroid-II-Super-Other-Fusion line. The one point where Prime could have helped might be explaining Ridley's survival between Metroid and Super, though he seems to be pretty conclusively dead at the end of Corruption, but Prime complicates the question of Metroid II, given the seemingly endless supply of Metroids that the Space Pirates bred across multiple worlds.

"wfz brought up a good point that the whole "but they're invulnerable to ice" thing was probably a lie that Adam made up, an excuse for shooting Samus, when his real purpose was merely to make Samus unable to stop him from sacrificing himself, especially given that they weren't invulnerable to ice anyway."

It's one thing to assume a character is lying, which would be plausible enough on it's own but not great writing if it is never shown to the player. However, it's another thing to assume he's lying while the game shows you imagery of Metroids being genetically enhanced . In that case you are not simply assuming that Adam is lying, but that the game is deliberately deceiving the player with cheap tricks, which is not only a bigger assumption but one that doesn't exactly help the Other M narrative argument.

The "endless supply of Metroids" could be an issue in Prime for plot continuity though it has a lot less problems than Fusion or Other M, though I don't think they really presented that. In all three Prime games Metroids still ended up being something you found relatively late in the game, and only once you had gotten deep into the Space Pirate's laboratories. Their presence is always tied to the presence of Phazon, which is probably the real plot hole as Metroids seem linked to Phazon in the Prime series while in the manual for Metroid Fusion it's claimed they were 'created' by the Chozo.

In fairness, the Metroids in Prime were all on one frigate, which is the one that crashed on Tallon IV. They were the ones that were evacuated from Zebes before Samus tore the whole place a new ass.

I kind of forget where they were supposed to come from in the other two games but I believe Dark Samus had something to do with it - since Dark Samus was a Metroid that had become a Leviathan Guardian, it makes sense that she could spawn Phazon-based Metroids.

I'VE READ TOO MUCH!  I'VE READ TOO MUCH!!

*flees thread in terror!*