Killiana1a said:
MaxwellGT2000 said:
Killiana1a said:
jarrod said:
Killiana1a said:
jarrod said:
| Killiana1a said:
Samus has faced Ridley how many times now? Twice? So why did Sakamoto go and make her have a PTSD flashback?
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Because she thought he was dead actually. And from the manga (and implied in the cutscene flashback) Ridley terrorized her as a child, and Samus literally fears Ridley. There's an element of shock here, and element of phobia, and maybe the team could be at fault for getting that across properly... but having a character break down for 30 seconds is sexism? Inappropriately misusing the term, as it's clearly being here, fundamentally devalues it. And in an industry that is seriously rife with legitimate sexism that too often goes overlooked or unsaid, I'd say that's even doubly sinful, especially when we're talking about a series that was arguably one of the standard bearers and trailblazers for positive female characters. Even games like Tomb Raider or Street Fighter II were more exploitative than this is.
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I have yet to remember games where my male protagonist broke down in a PTSD flashback.
Yes, thanks for bringing up the history that those of us who do not read the manga, but play the games do not know. Sakamoto should have done more backstory in Metroid, Metroid 2, Super Metroid and all of Metroid Prime to show us why Samus had this breakdown.
Sakamoto's fault entirely. I don't blame Team Ninja as Metroid is Sakamoto's baby.
Tomb Raider and Street Fighter can be overlooked as just another game by the boys for the boys. Metroid: Other M tries to take Samus seriously and in doing so, it appears as if it's characterization of Samus is hitting on the core of her womanhood by having her cower.
If she faced her childhood fears twice in Ridley, then why did Sakamoto have Samus breakdown during the third time? Doesn't make sense.
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I haven't either, but PTSD doesn't exactly gel with juvenile male power fantasy, so I'm not exactly surprised. Then again, I tend to shy away from action/hero/war/fantasy games, and the games I do enjoy tend not to deal with scenarios where PTSD would be a likely element. A 30 second freakout just doesn't seem like a such a big deal to me though, and certainly not sexist. A male would fit into the exact same scene, identically as presented even, and no one would ever say that.
Also, Sakamoto didn't work on Metroid 2 or the Primes, just the original, Super, Fusion and Zero Mission. 8-16bit cartridge games don't exactly give all that much room for narrative excess, though he did consult heavily on the mangas, which Nintendo considers canon. They should probably release them here honestly, they're not bad fanservice.
'By the boys, for the boys' is probably the worst excuse I've ever heard for the permissive sexism this industry is plagued with. That sort of boys club mentality is precisely the problem.
And as far as the freakout itself, Samus thought she'd killed Ridley and blew up the planet he was on. In the manga he'd told her as a child he can escape death by consuming the flesh of others, the realization of that being true likely just heightened the shock and may have helped trigger the response. That's how PTSD works, it's not predictable, and anything could trigger it really. Plus it's also not like we really saw Samus response one way or the other in Metroid 1 or 3, though she did also inexplicably pause for several seconds when first encountering Ridley in Super Metroid , which allowed him to roid-nap the baby and take it off the space station. Perhaps that was the 16bit portrayal of shock/hesitation/panic/PTSD?
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"By the boys, for the boys" is expected. Do you expect all female characters in video games to be wearing Hillary Clinton pant suits?
Likewise, where is the backlash against male protagonists who are utterly absurd caricatures? Funny how no one bitches about Marcus Fenix having hands bigger than his head, Kratos depicting males as steroid popping psychopaths, the Mafia series pushing male Italian stereotypes, and on.
In terms of realistic depictions of the sexes, video games hasve never been kind and have a bad habit of making caricatures of both sexes.
As for the manga, there are many who could care less. Videogames are still considered a niche, nerdy hobby. Comic books the same way. Manga is an extreme niche hobby up there with ham radio operation.
Players only care about canon consistency from game-to-game. The rest is just details.
If Yoshio Sakamoto was going to introduce canon from the manga, the least he could do is let us know. Why I am so pissed and others are too is Sakamoto pulling a rabbit out of his hat with Samus having PTSD moments that none of us who played from Metroid through Metroid Prime expected.
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Sorry I'm not getting between you two but that line was just so hilarious I had to make a comment, Manga is serious business in Japan, in Japan manga, video games, and anime are all really big, hell the voice actors for anime and video games are celebs, it might be niche in the west but in Japan it's big business and that alone dwarfs ham radio operators.
For the canon bit in manga... look no further than Square Enix, there are a crap load of manga and books all canon into the stories, one being a long standing series called Kingdom Hearts, in KH if you just didn't want to play the poor games in the series like Chain of Memories you could read the manga it explains everything, otherwise Kingdom Hearts 2 makes a lot less sense, and hell that game was panned for its story too cause people didn't play Chain of Memories or read the manga 
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My point of contention is not with manga itself, rather Yoshio Sakamoto taking canon from manga and inputting it into the latest Metroid game as if everyone who plays Metroid read the manga all along.
The least he could do is warn us and take it a step further by having an introduction cutscene introduce the manga canon into the series for the players who have not read any of the manga.
Players are pissed because the use of manga canon is the equivalent of plot twist, pulling a rabbit out of the hat, or trick. Suprises are nice, but when it concerns the core of the main character's personality, then there needs to be an ingame explanation for it.
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