Metroid: Other M
(Originally published 20/09/2010) When Metroid: Other M was first announced as a collaboration between Nintendo and Team Ninja, of Ninja Gaiden and extreme tastelessness fame, I had to grit my teeth. When the first screenshot I saw showed Samus with some sort of dragon in a headlock, I shuddered. As a long-term Metroid fan, I couldn’t picture the game being anything other than awful.
Having now played the game in its entirety, I can only conclude that while it isn’t actually awful, it is a far cry from the series historical high standard. Metroid: Other M is a mixed bag of a game, in interesting combination of concepts that don’t necessarily work well together.
The game looks pretty rough. It’s easy to slam a Wii game for poor visuals, but the issue with Other M isn’t console-specific; after all, the Wii is home to the sublime Metroid Prime Trilogy, and each of those three games looks a good deal better than Other M. Other M looks fine when constricted to spaceship corridors, but features some spectacularly awful outdoor aesthetics. The whole palette is overly bright and colourful, trying and failing to capture the vibrancy of the side-scrolling Metroid titles, and looks almost painfully garish at times.
Much has been made of Other M expanding both the story and character of Samus Aran, and it is here that game really falls down. Metroid has never been a series about people, but about worlds. Not so with Other M. Following on from the wordy-yet-restrictive Metroid Fusion, to which Other M is a prequel, the game features lengthy narrative cutscenes, which range from barely tolerable to downright awful.
The characters are flat and uninteresting, and Samus Aran has been transformed from cold bounty hunter to something more akin to a child, feeling the need to constantly verbalise like an angst-ridden adolescent. The voice acting is dreadful all-round. When Other M is trying to be a story game, you’ll spend most of your time wishing it would go away.
Team Ninja has never been renowned as great story-writers. There are two thing which they are renowned for. Once is great combat mechanics. The other is dreadful level-design. Metroid has always been a game that lives or dies by its level-design. Not so with Other M; the game is now primarily an action game, but it’s not actually as bad is it might sound.
Firstly, the controls, which I was sure I was going to hate, are actually great. You might think navigating 3D space with a d-pad sounds like a terrible idea, but it actually works, somehow. Switching into first person by pointing the Wii remote at the screen also sounds horrible and awkward, but it’s actually quite intuitive and works really well. The combat system is also pretty great, mixing up just the right amount of run-and-blast Metroid gameplay with typically Team Ninja dodge-and-counter mechanics.
The result is that the focus is now primarily on the action, and while the action is good, the level design certainly suffers for it. It’s not terrible, but it’s nowhere near as memorable as any previous Metroid game. Confining the game to a single space-station has something to do with this, but Fusion did the same thing whilst featuring vastly better level design.
The result is that for most of the game, Other M doesn’t really feel like a Metroid game. Only at the end, with most of Samus’ abilities unlocked (incidentally, the game’s reasoning for locking and unlocking your abilities is stupid, illogical and annoying) does it start to feel like Metroid. With most of the ship available, and abilities like the Speed Booster, Screw Attack and Plasma Beam enabled, the game becomes less about combat and more about the exploration/power trip that is the series’ key draw.
Other M is a game that is ultimately confused about what it wants to be. As a story game, Other M is terrible. There’s not a single likeable character, the plot smacks of the worst science-fiction, and the whole thing is delivered in such a heavy-handed and insistent manner that it’s often a struggle to sit through.
As a game about exploration, Other M is weak. There are certainly a huge number of hidden items to collect, but beyond desire for 100% completion, the game’s design gives little incentive to hunt for them. The space-station itself is utterly without charm, and forces exploration with repeated dead-ends rather than encouraging it with clever level design.
As an action game, Other M is satisfying if shallow. The combat mechanics all work well, striking a good balance between simplicity and depth. It’s not enough for the game to stand up against true combat games, but it certainly adds a facet to the game absent in any other Metroid game, and as a result, Other M features some of the series’ best, if not the most memorable, boss battles.
It’s difficult to rate Other M, as it can be frustrating, interesting, enjoyable and dull in equal measure and at any time. As a whole, the game is fun, and probably worth playing, except when taking into account any other game in the Metroid series.
Compared with the expansive and absorbing Super Metroid, the tight and balanced Fusion, or the depth and majesty of Prime, Other M falls short. Which not a bad game as such, it’s difficult to argue that this is anything but the worst in an otherwise great series of games.
