Hello Malstrom,

I have been reading your thoughts on Other M and Super Metroid lately (and agreeing with most of it), and I’ve been particularly interested in your thoughts on Super Metroid’s difficulty.  You knock Super Metroid for being very easy compared to Metroid, but I don’t think that’s that important in the big picture.  The ease goes away when you’re replaying it, trying fervently to get that fastest time, and you then come to really enjoy its smooth controls and sense of freedom.  Things like the wall jump don’t become “game breakers”, per say.  They add a layer of depth that one can appreciate only on upon replaying.  To me, Super Metroid is a masterpiece for two entirely different reasons: (1) Its atmosphere and exploration create incredible immersion for the player the first (and maybe second or third) time they play it, and (2) more importantly, its solid level design and nonlinearity, as well as floaty physics and game mechanics which give the player a very satisfying sense of control and freedom; make REPLAYING the game extremely enjoyable, over and over again.  The game really has something for everyone.

If you want the game to be as hard as Metroid, you can certainly make it by omission.  This I think is one of the standout features of games like Metroid and Mega Man X, and I think why Super Metroid’s disappointing default difficulty compared to Metroid’s doesn’t matter all that much in the long run.  It really doesn’t matter how easy the game CAN be, because you can make it as difficult as you’re comfortable with without doing anything at all.  There is of course a limit, when you’re going out of your way to make a game difficult, but that’s the beauty in difficulty by omission.

Sorry if that part was a little rant-y.  I’m having a bit of trouble expressing how I feel about it just right.  And now to the real point of this e-mail…

I would very much like to know if you’ve played this ROMhack before, and if you have, what your thoughts on it are.  I’ve played quite a lot of ROMhacks in my day, and I think it’s simply the greatest ROMhack around.  It succeeds marvelously in bringing back that Metroid “feel” which the original Super Metroid was sorely lacking.  It’s ruthlessly difficult, and you really have to use your head for some of its puzzles.  And it isn’t like other hacks that merely swap the areas around to create a hodgepodge of a new game.  Core mechanics are changed and the level design is extremely creative.

There are SOME moments that are so frustrating you might suspect that they weren’t designed without save states in mind, but that’s to be expected in almost any ROMhack (the authors make them only for the most devoted of fans), but unlike, say, Kaizo Mario, it IS perfectly possible to beat it 100% without save states.  And the sense of accomplishment you get when you do beat it properly without save states is amazing.  To be perfectly honest, I think the hack’s author “gets” Metroid FAR more than Sakamoto seems to.  My fantasy would be Nintendo letting him head a new 2D Metroid.

If you haven’t played this hack before, and you’re as much a Metroid fan as I think you are, I strongly recommend it.  At least play through it a few hours sometime and let me know what you think of it.

I haven’t looked at the romhack. Aside from a Mario Bros. 3 romhack, I haven’t really looked into them. More interesting to me have been some total remakes of old games done by fans as mods to PC games (some people have spent years of their lives making an Ultima V and Ultima VI remake, which I still need to try out).

You said:

(1) Its atmosphere and exploration create incredible immersion for the player the first (and maybe second or third) time they play it, and

I agree with you about the atmosphere and all. But this has more to do with being a late era Super Nintendo game than anything else. Games like the Donkey Kong Countries, Final Fantasy 6, and Chrono Trigger also had incredible immersion and dare I say probably even better music.

(2) more importantly, its solid level design and nonlinearity, as well as floaty physics and game mechanics which give the player a very satisfying sense of control and freedom; make REPLAYING the game extremely enjoyable, over and over again.  The game really has something for everyone.

I think you are confusing ‘backtracking’ with ‘non-linearity’. Super Metroid was a very linear game. In order to go through the green door, you must get super missiles. In order to get through the yellow door, you must get power bombs. The level design seems to be like a parade of gimmicks. You got the space jump. Oh, look, there are some areas that only the space jump can reach right near the location. You got screw attack. Look. There are some areas that only the screw attack can go through near that area. I never felt like I was in command but constantly doing a ‘find X obstacle, must get X item to pass’ to ‘get X item’ to ‘pass through X obstacle’. Then you come to another obstacle and repeat the cycle over and over with each item.

But in the original Metroid, the game felt like a very dangerous world and extremely easy to get lost in (even if you did have a map). The core gameplay was platforming and shooting. Items did help you get to other places, but the items assisted in your platforming and shooting. The ice beam, for example, made it much, much easier to get through several rooms even though you can get through those rooms without the ice beam. In Super Metroid, the core gameplay seemed to shift away from the platforming and shooting and more toward running from one room to another to get X item to get past X obstacle. The X item doesn’t become useful to assisting you in the core of the game because the game isn’t difficult to begin with and the monsters change to be difficult past item X so getting item X doesn’t really benefit your core experience.

I have this same complaint about Zelda. In early Zelda games, the core gameplay was arcade like swordplay. Items would assist you in this endeavor. Bombs and boomerangs would assist you in combat. In modern Zelda, they assist you very little in combat because the combat skeleton of the game is broken or non-existent. The purpose of the boomerang in modern Zelda is to solve the puzzle in the dungeon. After that, the boomerang becomes useless except to solve puzzles throughout the game. It is because of the collapse of the core gameplay (the swordplay combat), that Zelda is now seen as Aonuma as running from one dungeon to another to just solve puzzles and get a new item. Aonuma is bored with that. This is why we get pirates, wolves, and trains now in Zelda.

And this is why I suspect Sakamoto has strayed soooo far off course. Since the definition of Metroid stopped being about platforming and shooting and became ‘get item X to pass through obstacle X’, he has gotten very bored and seeks to ‘spice it up’ with dialogue, cutscenes, ninja style moves, etc. etc.

You needed above average platforming and shooting skills in order to beat Metroid. These skills were not as important for Super Metroid. Super Metroid still had parts of the core gameplay which is probably why the game doesn’t get old. After Super Metroid, those skills became even less important. The core gameplay skeleton slowly whittled away and Sakamoto threw in more ‘narrative’ junk to compensate.

Let me put it this way. Take away all the cutscenes, ninja moves, silly puzzles, and even some of the intentionally too numerous boss fights for Other M. Just stick to the core gameplay. Is it enough to carry the game? No. Aside from people’s complaints with the controls, it isn’t really that fun how the action gameplay was composed. It is because of this weakness which is why all the other junk (cutscenes et all) were thrown in.

A strong game has a very strong core gameplay skeleton. NES Metroid had no cutscenes, no dialogue, no ‘maternal instincts’ (you didn’t even know she was a girl), and relied almost entirely on its core gameplay. And the original was a phenomenon. Super Metroid also didn’t really have many ‘doodads’ added to it like ‘cutscenes’ and all. For the most part, Super Metroid relied on its core gameplay. As Sakamoto took over, the Metroid games have seen their core gameplay become more and more watered down with the doodads of cutscenes, ninja moves, more mini-bosses, and all increase. Now we are at the point of Other M where all we have is like 90% doodads and 10% core game.

If you have a timeline, on one side with Metroid you have the core gameplay being very much needed platforming and shooting skills. On the other side of the timeline with more recent Metroid games, the gameplay is more defined as ‘get item X to get past obstacle X’. Super Metroid is trapped in the middle as if it was a link in that evolution (or de-ev0lution). So Super Metroid is head and shoulders above other Metroid games. But to someone like me who is used to Metroid, Super Metroid feels like a decline. And games like Fusion and Zero Mission come across to me as unplayable because I fall asleep doing the ‘get item X to move past obstacle X’. Someone younger than me might think Super Metroid is ‘yay!’ and sense that Fusion and Zero Mission are ‘good’ but not as great as Super Metroid. We just have different expectations of the core gameplay.

This is also my chief complaint about Mario and Zelda. From my perspective, Zelda is about swashbuckling combat in a rich overworld where items assist you in the combat. In the most modern Zelda, the game is about puzzles, bad dialogue, and items to be used in the Puzzle-of-the-dungeon. I fall asleep playing modern Zelda games. So from those two poles of early Zelda and late Zelda, you can see a decline in the core gameplay and an increase in the doodads. In Mario, it is the same complaint. 2d Mario people didn’t transition to 3d Mario mostly because of a radical core gameplay shift from platforming to reach the end of a level to ‘use-a-gimmick-to-find-the-stupid-star’.

The reason why I think the fundamentals keep being less and less with each game incarnation is because they are ‘not fun’ for the developers. However, doodads are TONS of fun. It is so much fun for Sakamoto to make ‘cutscenes’. It is not fun for Sakamoto to make a rich maze-like world centered on platforming and jumping. Water flows through its least resistance. The willpower of game developers tend to flow towards areas where they do less work and have more personal fun. This could be a reason why Miyamoto was heavily resisting making another 2d Mario game for example. And this is why Sakamoto has no interest in making another game like Super Metroid. What you find awesome about Super Metroid, he will think is stupid and ‘repetitive’. Repetitive for whom? Why, for Sakamoto of course! Cutscenes are not repetitive for him, however. Yet, cutscenes are repetitive for the audience.

Going back to NES Metroid, it is not a hard game if you take your time and go slowly. You are much less likely to slip into the lava or get caught up with enemies hitting you. But if you move fast, the probability of you dying increases greatly. This is why the ‘faster time to beat the game’ worked. It wasn’t about cutting time as it was about forcing you to risk death more.

I find replaying Super Metroid to ‘get a better time’ to be very repetitive because of the lack of surprise. The enemies might slow me down from moving from room A to room B, but the enemies still are not a threat to my life. This is Metroid, not Sonic the Hedgehog. Metroid was an extremely scary game. You would get butterflies in your stomach when approaching a boss. Metroids would scare the hell out of you. I was never scared at all in Super Metroid except maybe with Phantoon. When first playing Super Metroid, as soon as I saw a Metroid, I turned around and ran away! They scared me that much. But with how pathetically they died, it didn’t feel the same.

I think there are tons of bad design choices made in Super Metroid. Let me give you a couple of examples. In NES Metroid, what was so awesome was how the context of the game changed depending on what item you got. When you got missiles, you had to think of the game a little differently than you did before. When you got bombs or the ice beam, again, the context of the game shifted. That area at the beginning where you walked over the blocks could now be bombed. You had to re-process this with the new context. Getting slowly killed by heat? You don’t know you need the Varia Suit. But once you get it, aha!

Super Metroid did do some of it right. The grapple beam was fantastic as was the dash. However, did we really need super missiles? It is the same exact context as regular missile. All it does is open up green doors. Ooohhhh. And ditto with the power bomb. We already had bombs, so how did power bombs alter our context? It didn’t. It was just to blow up a different type of brick. But the grapple beam was very different. So was the Space Jump (but that originated from Metroid II). Some of the new items were not that good and should have been used as items that altered the context of the gameplay. Imagine how dull it would be if there was a Super Screw Attack. Well, you have one screw attack. Why do you need another? To get through some different colored bricks? This is why the Varia Suit was cool, but the Gravity Suit was overkill. We don’t need two items using the same context.

Here is another example. Entertainment is dependent on surprise. What made the finale of NES Metroid so memorable was the surprise. The final stage of the game, you expect extremely difficult level with an extremely difficult boss. This was standard in all games. But Metroid twisted it up. The final level was very, very easy, but it was the few enemies that were crazy scary (Metroids). And the final boss was extremely passive and didn’t do anything (Mother Brain just sat there). It was the room that was so hard! It was the most dangerous room in the game!

Super Metroid constantly relied on a player’s experience of NES Metroid in order to create surprise (a mistake I believe). The miniboss of Kraid resembles NES Metroid but then he fills the screen when you meet the real Kraid. (It’s like you expect the developers to jump out from the back and yell “Surprise!” like a Surprise Birthday Party). With Motherbrain, it starts off resembling NES Metroid. But then Motherbrain turns into… a gigantic T-rex! WTF! Talk about out of place! Who came up with that stupid idea? And it went against the spirit of the original by having ‘dangerous room, passive final boss’ to a more generic final boss battle.

Regardless, the only way for the Metroid series to recover is to drop the ‘doodads’ (cutscenes, other characters, etc.) and focus on the core gameplay, on the fundamentals. If you ask Sakamoto to make another Super Metriod, what you will get is Fusion 2 because “Maternal instincts, cutscenes, and ninja moves are the Metroid experience, Malstrom!” Sakamoto says.

Super Metroid has more in common with Metroid than it does with Fusion or even Zero Mission. We know Nintendo is looking to make another 2d Metroid. If we do not want to get stuck with another Fusion, we should focus Nintendo’s eyes on NES Metroid. After all, that is what the makers of Super Metroid did. If you want another game that can measure up or surpass Super Metroid, the NES Metroid has to be an important factor (we got games like Fusion because Sakamoto dismissed it as ‘repetitive’ as he shoved in dialogue, cutscenes, and ninja moves).

I used to think the reason why games as good as the classics were no longer made was because of the lack of talent. Ever since Mario 5, I know now the answer is the lack of willpower. Strong fundamentals are boring for developers to work on. Instead, we get strong doodads which is fun for developers but repetitive for the gamers.

Dear, Malstrom
.

Sean,

Great insight on Metroid. I hope that people with influence at Nintendo
and other game companies read how this whole thing played out on your blog.

I found your comments about “comfort games” to be especially
interesting. It’s a descriptive and useful term, and now that you frame
it that way, it brings lots of other games to mind. Super Mario World is
one. There is plenty of good content in that game, but no challenge. It
is not a bad game, but replaying a game like that is more about killing
time than anything else. Mario Kart is only Nintendo’s biggest cash cow
because they struck gold with a multiplayer formula. It could have been
a great single-player game too, but it’s not … it’s a comfort game in
single player, and it would have died long ago without its multiplayer
component. I am curious to know what other games you consider to be
“comfort games.”

In the early days of consoles, most games were either ports from the arcades or they were heavily influenced from the arcades. I cannot recall any comfort games on the Atari 2600. On computers, the games there were pretty taxing either because they were emulating arcade games or would hit you hard intellectually (such as strategy games or the old adventure games where you are constantly typing).

I’m trying to think up some for the NES. The only one that comes to mind is Dragon Quest. With Dragon Warrior, I remember how much of a different experience it was from other games. NES games were mostly either shmups or platformers, and they all had arcade-like gameplay. But with Dragon Warrior, you could just sit back and hit a button and ‘phase out’.

“A slime draws near!”

“Command?”

“Attack!”

“Slime attacks!”

“The slime misses! No damage hath been done!”

“Command?”

“Attack!”

“The slime has been defeated! You get 4 experience points! You are the master, Malstrom!”

While the game didn’t say that last sentence, it did sound like it though! I was once really sick, the type of really sick where you can just watch TV and can’t really play video games. However, I discovered I could play Dragon Warrior. How hard was it to just press a button and read text? The more time I put into the game, the more powerful I got! I could just walk around in circles, and I would eventually level up. The only way how you could not win in Dragon Quest is if you didn’t put in the time. The game had no real ‘skill’.

I remember having the information poster (that came with the exclusive Nintendo Power deal) that had all the stats of the monsters of the game and where they would appear in the game world. It was so much fun.

But it was fun because it was different from the other games. It was a great game to play when you were sick. Perhaps the comfort game began with the JRPG?

Final Fantasy I was no comfort game. That game was constantly taxing you and very stressful at parts.

How about Shadowgate? I guess it could be if you’ve already beaten it. But the game was scary, and you would constantly die.

The Lolo games? No way.

Tetris? Nope. That game got faster, faster, and faster on you!

Zelda I? Zelda II? No way.

Comfort games began to emerge from JRPGs and blossomed through the adventure games. Although I think many PC strategy games, when played at a low setting, could be a comfort game. Civilization, Railroad Tycoon, Sim City could be played as comfort games. Perhaps this is why the market shifted toward real time strategy as that could not be played as a comfort game (until later RTS games came out which became slower and, as such, the RTS genre got less popular).

The latter Zelda games are definitely comfort games. How can you die in Wind Waker or Twilight Princess? Link to the Past might also qualify due to how easy it is.

Clearly, JRPG games are ‘comfort games’. Final Fantasy, which was certainly not a ‘comfort game’ on the NES, became a comfort game series on the SNES. Who was challenged in Final Fantasy 4 or 6? Let me do my imitation of the final battle for Final Fantasy 6. Ahem…

“Ultima!”

“Ultima!”

“Ultima with Magic Box!”

And there it is. I’d have to replay Chrono Trigger to see if it is. It probably is.

With perhaps the exception of Ultima 7 Part I and II, the Ultima series isn’t. There is too much note taking and map making. Ultima 8 and 9 are quasi-action games (much to the disappointment of Ultima fans).

Wing Commander? Hell no.

Star Control 2? Maybe.

F-Zero GX? NO.

World of Warcraft? DEFINITELY. Holy cow, that is probably the mother of all comfort games. The loot is designed to be given out based on time invested. So raids have the best loot not because it is the hardest but because it requires the most time invested from the player.

This whole Sakamoto thing is fascinating. The whole industry is really
beginning to define itself, isn’t it? Quite possibly more through its
failures than its successes. You never used to hear about game
directors. It was all about publishing companies. If you bought a
Nintendo or Capcom or Konami game in the NES days, you were almost
guaranteed quality. The individuals working for those companies were
irrelevant. Only game geeks knew who Miyamoto or Kojima were. Nintendo
or Konami certainly never did anything to publicize them.

This is a good point. I don’t know when or how the ‘game god developer’ started. I stopped playing console games around near the end of the 16-bit Era and reappeared with the Wii. It wasn’t around at the end of the 16-bit Era. But was prevalent when I returned to gaming. So something changed.

Now there is a complete reversal. Not sure if you ever watch videos on
Wii’s Nintendo Channel (heaven knows why I do considering they rarely
talk about games that aren’t already out). But there is tons of footage
of Sakamoto talking about Other M. Recently they published a special
that was something like ten minutes of Sakamoto and some other guy
giving subtitled talks about the most inane crap you could imagine. And
the Iwata Asks things are great to watch if you don’t like yourself very
much.

Good thing I don’t have the Nintendo Channel. I’m one of those people who aligns his habits to avoid advertising. For example, I don’t watch TV, and I haven’t for around a decade now. If I need to watch something, I have Netflix. Screw the advertisers!

And the Nintendo Channel seems like just one big huge commercial. People say “So was Nintendo Power!” But Nintendo Power didn’t have advertising unlike other game magazines. Nintendo Power cleverly excited people about Nintendo games by educating them about the games. I would see pages filled with wonderful maps, level layouts, and tips. I would find out detailed information about a game I had never played. It was these strategy guides that got me interested in playing games I had never played before. It was like, “Since I read this feature, I feel as if I can already beat this game. So I might as well rent/buy it and see if I can!”

Come to think of it, the strategy features gave me a taste of how the game design was and how the game worked. For example, if I knew beating Metal Man would give me a weapon to shoot from any angle and would be useful against killing Wood Man, this told me much about how the game played. In order to figure out if I should try out a new game, I would read the strategy feature on it. Today, we get crappy reviews and fake previews. For a real life example, people got more interested in Starcraft 2 after watching pro games and listening to tips from Day[9] or someone else.

I much prefer this than the developer interview. Who the hell cares about the developers? What they should be doing is interviewing the customers. Let customers say how the game adds to their life, how they play with the game, and perhaps even have me watch them play the game.

Would you rather watch Miyamoto blabber about Mario 5 or watch someone from the street play Mario 5? I always chose the latter. I can relate to the customer, and I want to find out about the game experience. Developer interviews do not tell me anything about the game experience.

Although I do find Sakamoto interviews very entertaining because I find myself just sitting there, with my mouth hanging open, in complete shock everytime he has an interview. He says something insane like ‘Metroid is about maternal instincts’ to ‘Other M is a NES game’.

It is bizarre! Why are we seeing this? Does everyone at Nintendo have
hopes of becoming famous? I think it is indicative of the shift in focus
that you have been talking about–from player to developer. They seem to
think we are fascinated by the process of creating video games. If their
collective egos inflate any more, that whole place is going to explode
like Chernobyl.

I think this is the fault of the marketing. Many of the developers probably don’t even want to be there. I can guarantee book authors don’t want to do ‘book signings’. Authors hate being in public which is why they are authors in the first place. But publishers make them do it because they think it will sell books. Movie stars will appear on late night comedy shows to talk about their latest movie. You know they don’t really want to be there, but it is believed it will sell more movie tickets.

So what will happen is that directors will create games, not studios. It
will be just like the film industry. My friends and I went to see
Inception because Chris Nolan directed it. And just like the film
industry, developers will see the disadvantage of all this individual
attention–consumers have zero loyalty to individuals. When things go
bad, organizations get off much more easily than individuals do. Sega
has released so much utter garbage that it is shocking that their decent
games sell at all. Meanwhile John Romero had one big failure and
completely lost any respect that anyone had for him.

I am sure Sakamoto will regret all of the time he spent blabbing in
front of a camera with his stupid hair. I can guarantee Nintendo won’t
be using him to promote Metroid next time. Hopefully it goes beyond that
into a wake up call to everyone there–we don’t give a crap about the
innards of your company, Nintendo.

You make a great point that people root behind companies and not individuals. People will root behind Nintendo, even buy a game because it is Nintendo made, but you don’t see them root behind Miyamoto. I still don’t see anyone say, “I am buying this game because Miyamoto made it.” Instead, I see, “I am buying this game because Nintendo made it.”

PC games tried with individuals like Lord British or Sid Mier. But Origin ended up becoming more well known than Lord British (who became known more for the fictional character), and people talk about Firaxis or Microprose more than they ever talked about Sid Mier. This is probably a good thing since video games are a group effort. The only times when a name stuck and the company didn’t was if the game was just made by one person. Randy Glover and Jumpman or Andrew Braybrook and Paradroid.

Hey there Malstrom,

though I’d send you an email showing my MOM (Metroid: Other M, really liked this acronym the reader from the “Thank you Malstrom” email) impressions. I played through the game this weekend, my friend got an early copy of it. I knew the game would be bad, but thought “what the hell… I’m not even paying for it!” so went for it.

Is the story bad? Oh yes, it’s awful, but to me this is the smallest fault of the whole package. Had this game been NES Metroid or Super Metroid, albeit with a bad story, I’d be thrilled. However, nothing could be further from the truth: I’ll break my points in topics to make an easier reading:

• Linearity: to me, this is the worst mistake of the game. Sure, in your last posts you said Super Metroid is linear and I agree with you (face X obstacle, find X item, go through X obstacle, rinse and repeat), but MOM takes this to unbeliavable levels. Doors closing up right behind you are commonplace in this game, and a yellow square ALWAYS shows up telling you where to go. It’s absolutely impossible to get lost, unless you are unexperienced with this kind of game — even so, you never spend more than 5 or 10 minutes to get back in track.
• No exploration: all items are shown in the map as blue flashing dots. This essentialy negates any exploration, since you can blast through each and every room (not even bothering with the enemies, which I’ll mention later) only stopping when these dots pop up. When it happens, finding the item is usually just a matter of searching the nearest vent or quickly peeking the room in first-person view.
• Lame items: this sides with the previous complaint to make exploration completely pointless in this game. First, all items are shown on the map for you, and second, they’re incredibly lame: all you can find are missile expansions, energy tanks, energy parts (these are like “heart pieces” from Zelda), concentration stuff (which make you recover an additional e-tank when you “concentrate”) and accel chargers (which make you charge beams and missiles faster). Since enemies are very easy, all the energy and damage-related items are redundant — you don’t need them at all. The missile expansions, while somewhat useful, are not that desperately needed as well.
• Useless “key” items: significant items (like the Grapple Beam, Super Missiles or the only-authorized-in-the-final-boss-battle Power Bombs) are nothing but “keys” to solve puzzles, much like the newer Zelda games. The Grapple Beam, for instance, can’t be selected by any means, and is only triggered when you point to suitable objects in first-person view — therefore, you only get to use it while “platforming” around or in two very specific moments in boss battles.
• Easy enemies: some people may say this game has “medium difficulty” or that it is generally easy with some hard parts here and there, but I myself feel it is a very easy game. Don’t even try comparing it with NES Metroid or anything similar — even Super Metroid is harder. Once you get used to the games’ controls it’s all a breeze: all you’ve got to do is run around, jumping and charging, turning fast into the enemy and shooting: repeat, repeat, repeat. The “dodge and charge” move takes cheapness to amazing levels: simply tap any direction on the Wiimote while holding the ’1′ button, and Samus will dodge any attacks AND fully charge a shot. Again, repeat indefinitely. If you’re not feeling like going through all that trouble, simple blast through the room spamming the shot button and jumping to dodge any attacks… you’ll only come to a halt when the doors lock around you for a boss battle.
• No backtracking: any items you happen to be “authorized” to use don’t change gameplay at all. Since all doors but the ones that’ll make the story progress are closed behind you, it isn’t really possible to backtrack once you’ve got, say, the Super Missiles, and blast open the doors you couldn’t access before. Only AFTER finishing the game you return to the Bottle Ship and can “explore” freely — come on, now that I’ve already beaten everyone, what’s the point?
• “Creative” areas: you guessed it — sector 1 is jungle, sector 2 is ice and sector 3 is the fire area. Seems familiar?

Like I said, the story is bad but it is far from being the worst point of the game, in my opinion. I finished the game out of curiosity and will never touch it again, simply because there aren’t any compelling reasons for me to do so. On a sidenote, I was reading the Gamespot forums and a lot of people were saying the game takes somewhere around 10~15 hours to finish (yeah, unfortunately today’s games are mesured in time units). I took 8:20 in my first (and only) playthrough, dying quite a few times and goofing around looking for items until I realized they were utterly unnecessary — what’s going on, are these guys only playing Mario Galaxy or what?

Best regards and keep up the great work, Malstrom!

Clearly, emailer, you are in the wrong. You must strive to understand Sakamoto’s imagination. I suggest you read the manga immediately. Oh, and read and reread Sakamoto’s interviews for the past six years until you truly understand his vision. And only read MOM reviews from approved reviewers. And… what else? Anyone saying anything bad about MOM is a secret spy working for Retro Studios.