Plotting Points by Tan(x)
Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher
Game: Metroid Other M
Platform: Wii
Played For: 8 hrs
Welcome to my review of Metroid: Other M, or mmetroid, as I dolefully like to intone in my head (to pronounce it properly you should stretch out the “m” sound until your voice has lost all enthusiasm.) In reading a review of the newest reboot of this very successful and popular series of classic Nintendo games, you may be expecting reports of innovation, enhancement, new wonders and ground-breaking special effects. Sadly, if you would like to retain this sense of optimism about Metroid, remakes and life in general, it would be best to stop reading now, never purchase the game and take up tennis or perhaps racquetball instead. Even a glancing interaction with the world of mmetroid has been known to induce depression and malaise in the happiest of gamers. I suppose playing mmetroid is not half-bad, as long as you can deal with the continual, soul-wrenching sighs it will draw forth.
So, the last three Metroid games never happened, and Samus suddenly has a voice. Unfortunately, it is the kind of voice that is flat, detached, pedantic and subdued. Samus is not a deep thinker, and her observations never proceed past summarizing events you have just experienced. Listening to her is like reading a Dan Brown novel… “the cat ate some food because it was hungry.”… riveting. The mood this sad expository drone creates is echoed in every aspect of the game, as it develops that Samus is an estranged loner with Mommy-Daddy issues and unfathomable motivations. Even the traditionally triumphant music that used to begin each session of the game has been toned down and muted, as if to dampen your enthusiasm before you can get too excited by the possibility of heroics.
Rather than being alone in her adventure, mmetroid has Samus join a small cadre of armed soldiers, one of whom was her previous commander. He was also possibly a former romantic interest except that everything we learn about their mutual past is weird and creepy. The idea here is to show that Samus is alone even when accompanied by people she likes, I think. But it also enables the writers to catapult the game from the merely bad to the level of tragic stupidity.
I’m speaking, of course, of the notorious “authorization” system used to inhibit Samus from utilizing her full arsenal from the beginning of the game. In a typical Metroid adventure part of the fun is wandering around maze-like levels being tantalized by power-ups that are just out of reach. You’ll encounter a missile upgrade in some seemingly impossible to reach location like up on a ledge or frozen in ice or stuffed in a monster’s esophagus or the like. This fills the player with interest and speculation on how Samus will somehow access the treasure down the road. In subsequent exploration Samus finds the new ability she needs, and the player experiences a little thrill in realizing the new locations to which they’ve just gained access.
Mmetroid has much of the same technique in placing tantalizing objects throughout the various levels (and it is still fun to chase them down later in the game), but rather than finding power-ups in other hard to reach locations, Samus already has all of her abilities this time around. She just can’t use them because she doesn’t have permission yet. Yes, the great and independent bounty-hunter Samus has lost her spine completely. In deciding to join up with her former commander’s team, she strikes an infernal bargain with him that she will only use the weapons and armor that he allows at any given point. What seems to be an incredibly large concession on Samus’s part (would you agree to run around a monster-infested space station without the use of the weapons you’re carrying?) quickly becomes completely absurd.
For example, Samus runs through an entire lava-covered level, taking continual damage from the heat, without activating the heat shielding her suit is already equipped with because this commander guy hasn’t authorized its use!! When he does suddenly allow Samus to stop dying from heat, she is already at the rim of a freaking volcano fighting a boss monster that literally lives in magma. What the heck was he waiting for all this time?!? Either there is some kind of really weird anti-feminist SM relationship between Samus and her father figure/ ex-boyfriend / generic male influence, or the two of them are both inconceivably dumb… you can decide. But either way, the fun of finding new weapons is drained away when you know that Samus already has them on her and is just stupidly refusing to use them. Don’t expect to find any new weapons to add to her arsenal either… what Samus brings to the table from previous games is what you get in this one.
Which brings up the question of innovation. There is almost nothing new to be seen in mmetroid. Sure, you now switch between 1st and 3rd person views whenever you want to use missiles, but this system is cumbersome to use in the midst of a battle, making missiles an unwise choice most of the time. Normal movement requires holding the Wii-mote sideways, which does not play to the strengths of this controller. As to the generally murky visuals… the Wii is not technically a current generation platform, but were these graphics really the best the game could really do? Almost every location on the “bottle ship” Samus explores is dark, fuzzy and ugly, and mini-game moments where Samus is supposed to locate something by looking around her surroundings proudly show off just how unrefined her environment truly is. I think the last Metroid game on the Gamecube looked better… or at least the same.
Last but certainly not least, news has come through that mmetroid has a game-crippling bug, that can destroy all of your save games and make it impossible to proceed forward. After fighting a certain crazy-armed monster critter for the third time in Sector Three, it is absolutely important to proceed forward right away, using the grapple beam to swing across a room and proceed through a door. If the player decides to return to the previous room to save the game and restore health before doing this, the aforementioned door locks forever, and the game cannot proceed. The only cure at this point is to start the game over from scratch, or better yet, give it away to someone you really dislike.
Video games have a proud tradition of derelict space station narratives. Some crisis has caused wholesale disaster, and the protagonists arrive after the fact to patch things back together again. I recall such greats in this genre as the text adventures Planetfall and Stationfall. There is System Shock 2, and the truly overlooked Dinocrisis 3 (zombie dinosaurs in outer space), followed more recently by the excellent and creepy Dead Space. Mmetroid continues this same tradition but manages to be both less inventive and sillier than any of the previous games mentioned (sillier than Dinocrisis 3 is a major achievement). The strength of the basic Metroid mechanics are here, but they are buried under a heaping pile of extra Muck, Mumbling and Malaise (maybe we should be hoping for Etroid: missing M next time!) Even without the other issues, the presence of a crippling bug forces my recommendation to be boycott this game at all cost, for no game should be allowed to ship with such a deficiency.
