A reader breaks down exactly why Metroid: Other M is such a disaster
Archaeological STIG
Our Special Topics In Gameology series on emptiness in games continued this week with an illustrated essay about Metroid Prime from Nick Wanserski. Nick focused on the game’s isolation as an extension of the loss suffered by its hero, orphaned bounty hunter Samus Aran. Although Samus had a personal reason to feel a little down while wandering the ruins of Talon IV—its former inhabitants, the Chozo, adopted Samus after the death of her family and later disappeared—some of our readers, like DL, expressed feeling a similar sense of loss while visiting real world ruins:
It’s only recently that I’ve started feeling a sense of loss when visiting a historical site. Previously, I’d felt curiosity. I have always imagined them as places where people lived, not places where they died. I put myself back into their active times, alive with progress, intellect, and order.
Things started to change for me a couple of years ago when my wife and I visited France. The imagery of dismantled castles, the perpetual modification and repurposing of original architecture for contemporary use, and the conversion of something that was intended as a home or fortress into a museum created this sense of disdain and lament for what I was being guided through. I imagined what the original dwellers would have thought if they were to see the world today, their way of life lost and subsequently rebuilt (by those with no connection) for the vain effort to sustain something that the future ultimately will never fully know or appreciate—something that is “decidedly alien.” Sometimes I felt compelled to reimagine a lively, bustling, and working history, but more often I was saddened by how history was almost intentionally destroyed.
stepped_pyramids had a more pragmatic take:
I think about that sometimes, but I also sometimes think that the 17th-century residents of those castles would look at them today and say, “Finally, people don’t have to live in that drafty, damp, shit-smelling hole anymore.” Every building we tear down today, even ugly mid-century Brutalist nightmares, is a lost historical site for the future.
There’s an ongoing tension between the desire to preserve the past and the desire to improve our lives, and the unavoidable result of continuing to live in the present means that some artifacts of our past will be lost. We are, at least, lucky enough to live in an era where those artifacts can be documented in immense detail, and those documents can be stored indefinitely with no loss of fidelity.
Elsewhere in the comments, conversation turned toward Metroid: Other M, the series’ much-maligned Nintendo Wii installment. After phrases like “character assassination” were brought up, dygitalninja asked if Samus ever had enough of a character to be assassinated. MerlintheTuna responded by breaking down the positive ways other Metroid games have built Samus’ persona and pointed to specific problematic scenes in Other M:
Metroid Prime has little elements, like how at Ridley’s first appearance Samus gives a quick eyebrow raise as if to say, “Oh, this again. Sure, why not.” Metroid Prime 2 ends with her saving the universe and acknowledging it only with a casual wave as she walks away. Metroid 2 and Super Metroid have moments like when she initially points her weapon at the hatching Metroid and hesitantly lowers her guard as it becomes clear it’s not going to attack her. Then she willingly gives the thing over to the Galactic Federation to study because she doesn’t care about it. In Metroid Fusion, she faces down and blitzes past the SA-X multiple times despite knowing she can’t even damage it. In Zero Mission, she loses her suit and still does her best Solid Snake impression by busting into a Space Pirate base. In Prime 3, she outclasses both the Federation and the other most talented bounty hunters in the universe. There’s a consistent through line of putting the character against impossible odds, then seeing her saddle up and calmly rock out to save the day.
Other M takes every opportunity to take the piss out of her, and it doesn’t bother to actually deepen her character in doing so. She doesn’t break down in front of Ridley and redeem herself later by overcoming her fear. She just cries, fails, and finds Ridley dead later. There’s no arc; she sucks at the beginning of the game, follows orders for a while, and sucks at the end. She doesn’t get to play the final level because Adam, the game’s real protagonist, walks away with it. She doesn’t even get the killshot on the final boss because another character has to do it in a cutscene. Does Samus accomplish a single heroic thing in the plot of Other M? I think the answer may actually be “No.”