Well, many of the bosses which you need to defeat with Missiles play similarly to bosses in Prime.  Such as the Rock Boss in Pontera Drifts and the Omega Pirate in the Fusion Mines.  Plus, the whole aspect of scanning objects resembled Prime greatly, although in a more limited (and annyonig) way.

Some monster desgins as well seem to be inspired more by Prime than the traditional 2D Metroids.  Some that come to mind are the Mini bosses, which all pretty much take a combination of charge beam and well-timed Missile blasts to kill.  Which is pretty much how you beat all bosses in Prime.

^ Oh ok then I agree. Thought you meant graphical similarities. Scanning, I agree, could have been better (more interactive).

No, it's having sustained sales after the opening, instead of a steady decline, which is what happened here.

Although I have never played Metroid other M, I have seen a good chunk of it on Youtube, and having played through the Metroid prime trilogy, Fusion and only played the original, but never finished, all I can say is that MOM is a pretty bad Metroid game.

The game mechanics seem iffy, cutscenes are really annoying, and the game world just seems so meh. Exploring a ship in sapce is not very exciting, unlike, say, exploring a planet in Prime. Now that was awesome. Great game in general as well, worth having a GC just for that.

Also, why does practically no one mention the original Metroid? It's a completely non-linear game, and so hard as well, yet you all seem to talk about Metroid as if it appeared with Super Metroid.

@OP: True, it might crawl it's way to 1-1.5 million sales, but when you compare the userbase sizes, it should be expected, no? And even if it did make Nintendo money, the point was to make Metroid more popular with this direction, but not only did that fail, it probably alienated quite a bit of Metroid fans, like me. They should look back to what made Metroid a hit in the beginning.

Welp hatmoza, looks like you're all alone again

Yeah, because 'lets play' videos aren't bias in any way....

I will admit, Other M is nowhere near the best Metroid game.  But the gameplay and design was still good.  Its just the story and forced real-time events that hurt the game.  If the story was handled more like Fusion, it probably would have been much better.

How can it have alienated you if you didn't play it...

And that brings up another point.  Most of the people I see say the game was horrible was people who either didn't play it or had a negative opinion about it before they did.

I won't deny the series took a backwards step from what the fanbase wants.  But that doesn't mean the entire series is crap just because you didn't like (or didn't play) one game in the series.  That's like saying all Future Zelda games are bad because of Twilight Princess or all Mario games are bad because of Mario Sunshine.  Sometimes Nintendo tries something new and it doesn't work.

Did you play Other M on hard mode?  It really boils the game down to the developers vision.  It plays nothing like the 2D games.  You spend most of your time spamming the dodge, and the fact that there are zero pick-ups really sticks out.  It forces you to play it "station-to-station", since you are just trying to get to the next save point to refill your health.  As a consequence, it makes it very clear just how linear the game is.  They really isn't very much platforming in Other M either.  It is probably about the same amount as in any of the Prime games.

True, but i didn't play it on hard mode, so i never got that impression

See my post above on the gameplay of Other M.  Yes, some items are missing from Prime.  Instead, it puts more empashis on using the right weapon at the right time.  Other M is a lot more limited when it comes to your beams.  None of the upgrades feel an different.  They get more powerful, but not much more than that.  With the 2D games and Prime, there were big differences between the beams.

I disagree that Prime forced you to explore more than the 2D games.  Super and the original, especially the original, had an even heavier focus on exploration than the Prime games had.  Many pathways, and little to no direction in the 2D games.  Other M had just about zero exploration, and always told you were to go.

Yeah, the constant dodging, zero pick ups, and little exploration ensure that the game just doesn't feel like a Metroid game.  There was so much to find in all the other Metroid games.  Not so in Other M.  Just a handful of power ups hidden in the game.

It was still pretty fun, just not "Metroid".