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This Week in Games - Metroid's Saddest Birthday Ever

Panoptican wrote:

I only played a bit of Other M at a friend's place, but the biggest problem with the game seemed to be the writing and characterization. From what I read that was all handled by Nintendo. Otherwise Team Ninja made a pretty decent game..

The only thing "wrong" with the writing in Other M is some people think their head canon means more than what official sources said about Samus as a character. Nothing in the game should come as a surprise to anyone if they've been following the franchise since the beginning, especially if they've read the manga which Zero Mission, Fusion, and Other M are all based on. I imagine they overlap a lot with the kind of people who complain about the zero-suit as well.

Entitled fans are common problem in the industry though. More and more people want games to be owned by the community rather than a company. Whether it's Lets Players, fan games, or something like all the people who got pissed off at Nintendo for not doing a Robin Williams tribute when he passed away, based solely on the fact he named his daughter Zelda as if that somehow bequeaths entitlement. People getting upset at a company over things like this is extremely petty, and shutting down a fan game is not going to hurt them in the slightest bit. People said the same thing about their YouTube policies and nothing ended up happening after that.

-Stuart Smith

It's not just insisting on some kind of "head canon," but picking out genuine flaws like the monotonous delivery and poor translation.

So seeing a character who is pretty much the ur-example of strong, empowered female game protagonists reduced to a (literal!) sniveling child is just a "head canon" issue? Or how about said character not using equipment she already has access to for no other reason than a man (who isn't even her commander anymore!) not giving her permission yet?

How about that traitor plot that goes on for about half the game and is just dropped and forgotten?

they're straight-up bad on the old stuff.

It's head canon if you built her up to be the "ur-example of strong, empowered female game protagonists" when she never said she was. If you didn't play the game I guess I can understand, but it's established Adam only let Samus stay on the ship if she followed his orders like his troops since she had no jurisdiction being there in the first place. Not to mention she would have done it anyway given their history together and him being her mentor. That's like getting mad Luke listened to Obi-Wan and turned off his targeting computer.

The games don't need the manga to tell a narrative but the issue is people don't like the narrative that was told. People don't not like Samus cries or having PTSD because it comes out of nowhere (it's the first thing you see in the game) they don't like it because "That's not my Samus". Which always seemed weird because it was established she cries and has PTSD years before Other M even came out, so it shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone and no one complained about it back then.

So seeing a character who is pretty much the ur-example of strong, empowered female game protagonists reduced to a (literal!) sniveling child is just a "head canon" issue?

It was dropped because once he died his role in the story was over. He wasn't the main antagonist of the game. I don't really understand this complaint.

-Stuart Smith

. It's been beaten to death by this point, but that moment in the original game when Samus removes her helmet and reveals her identity is a truly seminal one in the history of gaming: there flat-out hadn't been a female protagonist in a game like that before. Throughout every game since she's carried herself as a strong, confident warrior who was capable of meeting every challenge thrown at her, and that's what fans around the world grew to love about her. So yes, throwing that entire history away with a badly-misguided narrative choice is a big deal.

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As I noted above, the manga is an ancillary work to the actual game franchise, and Samus having PTSD was absolutely NOT established anywhere in the games prior to Other M. Obviously that sort of storytelling was outside the purview of an NES-era title, but if it was intended as part of Samus's character, it could have potentially come up by Super Metroid, and it most definitely would/should have been incorporated into Zero Mission or Fusion. Except...it never was, and for good reason.

The faster you beat the original Metroid, the less clothing she'd be wearing at the end. At what point did you convince yourself that the Metroid franchise was some paragon of female media empowerment? I'll never understand why Samus Aran and Lara Croft got to be the poster-girls for female empowerment instead of Carmen Sandiego or Claire Redfield.

What good is history if it doesn't have a story that explains it? Which was a big problem with a lot of the games that came out during the 8 and 16 bit eras.

Which reason was that besides the designers being solely focused on gameplay and level design and not enough on deep storytelling or characterization? Which isn't something I'd call "good reason".

Why was any such story necessary?

Also, much of what makes the best games of that era so timeless is that they didn't get bogged down in trying to deliver deep, engrossing stories, and instead focused on their core gameplay mechanics.

You're a bounty hunter exploring a labyrinthine world, trying to take down an evil alien menace...what more do you need?

Shockingly enough, most good games historically didn't require "deep storytelling or characterization" because...gasp...they're games. It's right there in the name of the medium: game development should be above all else focused on the fundamental mechanics and design of the experience.

The faster you beat the original Metroid, the less clothing she'd be wearing at the end. At what point did you convince yourself that the Metroid franchise was some paragon of female media empowerment? I'll never understand why Samus Aran and Lara Croft got to be the poster-girls for female empowerment instead of Carmen Sandiego or Claire Redfield.

I kind of wish they had reached out to the AM2R guy and tried to work something out so that it could be put on official Nintendo systems instead of just rolling out the DMCA like they did.