I’ve played my share of shit games. Metroid: Other M is one of the worst I’ve ever played on a Nintendo system. And that hurts. There isn’t a game series with more masterpieces in it than Metroid. Some day I want to properly eviscerate this game, but for now I’ll stick to the way it forces Samus on her knees in a room full of sweaty fat dudes.

Other M is nerd p_rn. But more importantly, it’s masturbatory. The creator of the original Super Metroid, Yoshio Sakamoto, is a crazy person. He’s been called the Japanese George Lucas for the worst reasons. The reason his favorite child, Super Metroid, was great seems to be in spite of his efforts, not because of him. The games he worked on, it appears, were only as great as the people preventing Sakamoto from going out of control. And like Lucas, he’s been stubbornly holding onto the series he’s reduced to driftwood — it can neither live or die unless he’s there with it.

Much like the Star Wars and Star Trek do-overs, Other M recycles much of Super Metroid (bosses, story, exactly the same set of power-ups). It’s also a prequel to Fusion, a game that had a good story but jarring asides whose point was to allude to… well, to create an excuse for the plot of Other M.

Problem one: prioritizing the story in a computer game. Problem two: that computer game is Metroid, where excess story actually reduces the fun of creating your own destiny. Problem three: the story you want to tell is one that mostly exists to prop up cameos of bosses from Super Metroid. Problem four: it’s not like Super Metroid is a work of literary genius — what can you really do besides recycle creature designs? Problem five: you are a fucking idiot and cannot create a story for shit. Problem six: your intention for the cutscenes through which the story was told is to make them unskippable. And the killer problem seven: Sakamoto is a Major Dude at Nintendo now because a game he directed was good. So no one can disagree with what he says.

If you’re not convinced by now that this man is an autofellating imbecile trying to get his and only his ejaculate onto the screen,

yeah.

This is the guy who’s directly responsible for Other M’s failure as a piece of story apparatus. So if we want to think about how pandering ruined the game that ruined this series, we have to get inside his head.

For instance, the game starts out with a long cutscene, about ten to fifteen minutes, whose whole point is to show the ending to Super Metroid in HD. Why? Because fans will eat that shit up. Supposedly.

The game re-uses bosses from all through the series’ history (Ridley, Phantoon, and Nightmare are all here… yes, as a matter of fact that does break the series’ timeline). The whole set-up for this game feels like it copied notes from Metroid Fusion, and that’s not helped by the fact that the game’s second-favorite character, Adam, got his start in Fusion… as a dickish computer who, we are assured, used to be a person, somehow. They never explained that bit. (They still haven’t.) Definitely bring back the machine that puts dots on your map, that’s what people want more of from this series. Why? Because fans will eat that shit up.

The whole point of the game’s story is to make Samus into a character. Again, two problems. First of all, Samus doesn’t fucking talk. She’s a chick in a robo-suit who’s there so you can suspend disbelief. She’s not an interesting character — she will NEVER be interesting no matter how hard you try — and she’s under Other M’s microscope. Having her blabbing, monologuing, is as ridiculous for Samus as it would be for Mario or Link.



The other problem is that the characterization she DOES get is the whiniest character I’ve ever seen in a piece of fiction. All she does is bemoan the death of an animal side-character. From a 20-year-old game. Following the murder of hundreds of animals and her personal genocide of the rest of that creature’s species.

That’s the exact right train of thinking, Sakamoto-san! “Let’s take our totally silent protagonist whose only character trait is killing aliens and turn her into a complex pussy.” Why? Because fans will eat that shit up.

Don’t take my word for it that that’s what she’s like, though.

See! So she’s a CANONICAL complex pussy!

I’ve spent enough time around degenerate Metroid fans to know that Samus is much more to them than a piece of metal. In fact, despite what you might expect, she’s not even a piece of ass. To them, Samus is a profound character.

Why? Because they need to defend Other M. The number of times I’ve had to mock idiots for praising Other M as “not bad, just different” is nothing short of Sad!. The people who primarily identify themselves as Metroid fans are real, dude, not the imaginary butt of a joke, and if Samus is a viable waifu, that really helps them sleep at night.

Of course, these are a minority. 98% of people were pissed at how shitty Other M was. It’s so obviously terrible. But, as Sakamoto himself demonstrates to us, it’s not hard to get so high off your identity-substitute (in this case, “Metroid fanatic”) that you need, for your mental well-being, for your survival, to assimilate all manner of bullshit as much, much more than it is. Hence the Stockholm-syndrome defense squad pretending Other M is a good game. In a way, nostalgic pandering taken to this extreme leads to the same symptoms as addiction. And just like addiction, most people lack the fortitude and the support network to find release from its trappings.

The question I ask you is: are fans supposed to eat this shit up? Or is Sakamoto?

The Stagnation Chronicle

Previous chapter: Shovel Knight

Conclusion