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Kiranta In reply to Shadowstalker55 [2021-06-28 03:25:29 +0000 UTC]

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Shadowstalker55 In reply to Kiranta [2021-06-28 04:47:46 +0000 UTC]

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Arrarra In reply to Storyteller11 [2013-11-28 23:08:16 +0000 UTC]

Yes, since the Hazard Shield consists only in a very slight change of the overall design of the PED suit, I didn't consider it to be a proper suit. It's actually not called a suit : it's only a shield.

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Storyteller11 In reply to Arrarra [2013-11-28 23:17:17 +0000 UTC]

Fair enough.  I like the idea of all the suits being different besides color.

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Arrarra In reply to half-dragon [2013-05-06 16:59:00 +0000 UTC]

As a matter of fact, I didn't. Gameplay was refreshing but repetitive and, in some occasion, pretty unresponsive. But the biggest bummer was the story (How did they screw up so much what was basically a Metroid Fusion rip-off ?) and the characters (which got a lot of development, but in the wrong direction).
So no, didn't like it so much. But at least it was kinda fun to play, the first time. Also, no Metroid news since, which is worrying.

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Laharl234 In reply to Arrarra [2013-07-30 11:29:50 +0000 UTC]

I actually did like Other M. It was relentlessly hard, but the story and character development made it very much worth it. Don't really see how they could be "developed in the wrong direction" considering they can do what they want with their characters.

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Arrarra In reply to Laharl234 [2013-07-30 13:00:32 +0000 UTC]

By "in the wrong direction", I meant "in the opposite direction than the one they had been following for years".
Sure, anyone in charge of character development can do anything they want, but if the characters suddenly start behaving in a totally different way than before, then it's not okay, it's just incoherent. In every Metroid games thus far, Samus Aran has been a very though character, never showing her emotions, never speaking unless she really has to. She was cold as ice and virtually unmovable, except in very rare occasion. Those occasions when she showed a glimpse of emotion, were always very powerfull, because they were so rare.
Now scratch every last bit of this character description : in Other M, Samus talks constantly, is found helpless in many occasion, going as far as having a mental breakdown in front of Ridley (whom she met and defeated before). She's overly emotionnal and she lost most if not all of her independance. See what I mean ? The team behind Other M had every right to take Samus' character in any direction they wanted. But the one they chosed was incoherent with what had been done before, and made Samus a very blend and generic character. Them being allowed to do it doesn't mean we have to like this new characters.

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Arrarra In reply to Arrarra [2013-07-31 18:26:50 +0000 UTC]

Okay. You blocked me. You prevented me to answer your comment. You must be the most wonderful person in real life... I guess now  I'll have to accept your opinion to be true, since I have no other choice.
You know, I think I'll just copy-paste my answer here. You may not be interested in continuing this debate, but I am.

Here goes my message :
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Yes, sometimes, those vicious little things we call "debates" have an unfortunate tendancy to lead toward the sudden realization that you're -gasp !- wrong. But hey, I'll take the risk ; we started what's growing to become an interesting debate, and your point of view (notice the choice of word ?) is really interesting.

Okay. Then.

First, there's a huge difference between characters like Samus and Link. Link speaks. You (the player) simply do not hear what he says, because his words are only implied. Same goes for other silent characters like Gordon Freeman, Chronos, etc... They are silent on your screen, but in the game's universe, they do speak : other characters often answer them. Samus is different : she can speak, and she occasionnaly does so. The reason she doesn't speak for most of the games is because she really doesn't speak in the game universe. She doesn't speak to Ridley, nor to Mother Brain or other antagonists. She just shows up and blows shit up. That's why I (and most other players) considered her a badass before other M : she never showed any emotion, any mercy. And I can't stress this enough : it's not a narrative choice, it's what she really did. In Metroid fusion, she occasionnaly had inner monologue (mostly in elevators, we're all the same for this). During those inner monologues, she showed incomprehension, and a fierce resolution to take back her powers and destroy Sa-X, even if at the beginning, she acknoledges that she too weak to do so.
On this point, I don't think I'm making assumptions. You, on the other hand, consider the story from the manga to be the ultimate canon. I read it and, sincerelly, it seemed to me that it was like any other video game mangas : a rushed story, and more of an attempt to create merchandising than a real will to write a powerfull story. In my library, I have a Zelda OOC manga in which Sheik is an ally to Ganondorf, since Zelda suffered a memory loss. That's not what was in the game. And mangas does that all the time, in an attempt to surprise the reader. On a more personnal side, as I said, I read the Metroid manga : it's bad. I didn't even finish it, and I'm a die-hard Metroid fan.

You say that a typical bounty hunter type character is generic. It would be, if Samus was a guy. But to me, making her overly emotionnal, entirely dependent of the male figure ("Samus, you have my permission to wear you fire-repelent armor !"), and throwing in that a mother complex on top of that make her, basically, no different from every female character, ever. I don't want Samus to be a male with boobs ; but no one so affected by her surrounding would ever be able to do everything she did. To survive every mission, to defeat everyone of her opponent. Her personnality in other M just doesn't fit with the brutal determination her actions showed in every episode of the Metroid saga.

All of this is my opinion. You liked other M ? Great ! But I did not. My problem with it is not that it broke what I thought was canon. The writing was just bland, the scenario uninteresting, the characters very cliché, and overall, I felt the game was not nearly as good as any of the previous ones, in any aspect.


(Sorry if those huge blocks of text are not too easy to read. I'm still struggling with english.)

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Demon242 In reply to Arrarra [2014-07-10 06:24:27 +0000 UTC]

No apologies necessary, Arrarra. And I agree with you that the manga and comics put out are more-or-less just ways to boost sales, including the stuff that comes out nowadays. I have the Nintendo comics that came out back during the NES era, where they were, indeed, a way to pad the profits, but is where most of the personalities for otherwise silent characters like Link and Samus got their real personalities displayed. How they interacted with the other characters of their worlds. What kind of relationships did they have. And I agree that Other M just goes completely the opposite way in how Samus' character was made. She was confident, passionate, empathetic, sometimes cocky. In one comic, she learned Mother Brain hired another bounty hunter to capture her and pretended to lose a battle and surrender a sidearm energy pistol so she could be brought to the Pirate station before Mother Brain, then trigger the pistol to overlord and explode so she could get away and sabotage the station (doing so with a smirk on her face).

Badass? Absolutely. Cold and apathetic like what is generic? Never. Emotionally fixated on a single issue that she can't get past? That's not just anti-Samus, but an ugly stereotype for women. And I'm a guy saying this. I've always had respect for Samus, for long before the modern age where any attractive female game character is turned into a sexual icon as a given, and I still do. I dislike Other M so much I refuse to believe it is canon because everything up until that showed the opposite of what it did. It's more a massive fumble and f*ck-up with her character for reasons I just can't fathom. They did everything wrong in Other M. It was a test in something new; and it bombed more than the Virtual Boy. 

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Arrarra In reply to Demon242 [2014-07-10 13:46:46 +0000 UTC]

My last message was an answer to Laharl234 ; he/she blocked me, apparently, so I wasn't able to directly answer his/her message.
As for the your last answer, I wasn't notified that you wrote it, so I had not seen it before (I'm not very familiar with DA, so the error might have been on my side). But I agree with your opinion. In fact, you're right when you say that Samus isn't cold ; a badass, yes, but not emotionless. Usually, a lack of emotions isn't the sign of a great character...

We can only hope that future Metroid games will handle Samus' character in a better way. Even if for now, Samus is only set to appear in the next Smash Bros, where her general appearence doesn't exactly scream "strong space warrior". :-|

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Laharl234 In reply to Arrarra [2013-07-30 13:13:13 +0000 UTC]

Yep, same shit I usually get. "Samus was always a cold badass". That's cause she didn't talk, not how they depicted her. You ASSUMED she was cold as ice. Other M was strongly influenced by the manga (the breakdown is taken directly from it) and it was mentioned Samus was more vulnerable in Other M than usual due to various circumstances (mother complex, loss of her homeplanet by her own hand). See the problem you, and every person who doesn't like Other M, has is that you assumed the character was like a typical bounty hunter (which is far more bland and generic), while the development team felt she was more emotional and vulnerable and puts up a tough front. It's not indicative of bad writing, it's a good example of the dangers of giving voice and personality to a silent protagonist. It's the same reason Link will never talk. And I'm sure Nintendo was aware they were taking a risk by removing Samus' silent protagonist status. But the fact is the character is not what you assumed her to be.

And I really have no interest in arguing this. That's my piece, and I'm now done.

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Demon242 In reply to Laharl234 [2014-07-10 06:04:06 +0000 UTC]

To counter your argument and partly support Arrarra, I don't like Other M in the least, but I never considered Samus to be the ice-cold badass like you suggest. More accurately, Samus is a very passionate character, but has the mental discipline and training to maintain a professional composure. Take a look at any of the comics released by Nintendo during the NES days and you'll see she's not emotionless and apathetic. If that was any part of her core personality, she would never respond to any SOS signals that call her to action; nothing about an SOS says "I need help and I can pay you if you save me"; they just say "I need help", so she's far from ice-cold. a badass, absolutely, but not ice-cold. To have her break down in Other M like she does in the manga is essentially saying everything she received from the Chozo can be forgotten or disappear at a moment's notice. I can agree that she would be more emotional after the events of Super Metroid, making her vulnerable, but there would clearly need to be a lot of time passed between after her suit gets cleaned and for the metroids and Ridley to be cloned and grown for Other M; more than enough for her to be able to deal with the issues and be able to push them down. Seeing new metroids would be confusing, but having Ridley come back from the dead yet AGAIN causing her to suddenly go PSTD? Not a chance. 

It also makes no sense that Samus, who left the Federation Military, would submit herself to the command of any of their officers, even Adam. Acknowledge that she was somewhat reckless in the past? Won't deny that. Even with her training, she was young and passionate, wanting to use her skills and abilities to save people; the whole reason she joined the military. But after all these years of working as a hunter, there is nothing that would cause her to follow their judgement over her own. Not using one feature or function of her suit would be at her discretion only, and being told by a military officer, even Adam, not to use one of them or telling her that she needs their permission would either cause her to ignore them or leave. At most, she'd agree to be given directions on where to go and what to do in regards to getting the station secure and functional again. But need permission to use her own gear? Not a chance. 

And I don't see how you can compare Samus to Link in the same way as this off the fact that neither of them talk alone; which itself isn't true. Link does talk; he did it in the original Nintendo comic books, just like Samus did. The reason they kept Samus and Link silent in the games is because Nintendo didn't want to risk giving them voices that were inconsistent with their character's behavior. And when they attempted to do just this in Other M, they f*cked up on a colossal scale. Instead of a mature and professional woman who was in her high-twenties to low-thirties, they made her sound like a low-twenties emo chick without any signs of her career or, because of that god-awful monotone, any passion or positive emotion. Nintendo did it right when they gave Link just a bunch of grunts, huffs, and wordless yells, but with Samus, they just messed up completely. Other M was indicative of bad writing because the writing kept returning to the same issue repeatedly all the time, causing her to give off a very one-dimensional personality. I'll agree it was an example of negative outcomes with giving otherwise silent characters voices, but the writing contributed to its terribleness equally. 

Assumptions and expectations may not always equal realities, but you still need to check your facts before you give the last word and declare yourself the victor as you walk off, because all you've done here if show you're just as much an a$$ as you think the rest of us are, and not even smart enough to make sure you have all the facts to properly argue your case. You have a few points, but you, just like Nintendo with Other M, have failed miserably. 

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WSilvermane In reply to Demon242 [2015-07-04 17:30:03 +0000 UTC]

At least someone here is actually smart, I thank you for this post. You know how character design and progress, creation and keeping works. You know the facts and read, as well as listen.

You know how to read and think without failing and screaming like a little kid, or I.E blocking and ignoring other people that don't agree with you...

Good game design doesn't mean the character design is good, or works, and vice verse. Hell, half the time it never does and both are bad anyway.

Other M, as a game on it's own; was meh, it's was okay. Looked good, felt alright, could have been more free with the controls and not a hallway-based game/on rails game. But good on it's own.
But as a Metroid game? As anything NEAR that idea or thought? Terrible, might as well have put a whiny 14 year old from a poorly written anime into it and called it a day. At least for me, it's an insult to both the manga and older games. To Samus. It was a murder to character design. It's like if you made Link unable to read or able to use a weapon... What's the point of it existing, besides being a terribly written "re-boot" of a game. And then we got this new Metroid game... which isn't even a Metroid game. It's Skylanders. But I digress.

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half-dragon In reply to Arrarra [2013-05-07 02:59:47 +0000 UTC]

Yes it was not so good. But that is to be expected after Retro Studios did the prime series. Its hard to match that kind of game design.

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Arrarra In reply to ZoeMariePaige [2012-06-12 17:03:22 +0000 UTC]

Your comment left me with both joice and fear. Joice for the sudden realization that I'm one of the few possessors of a rare gem. Fear because yes, Metroid is a serie on the verge of destruction. Let's hope Nintendo kills our concern instead of one of its stonger serie in a not too distant future.

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ZoeMariePaige In reply to Arrarra [2012-06-12 18:21:47 +0000 UTC]

I thought Other M was great, a little too much of a fusion reboot, but I liked it. But I was hoping Metroid 5 (Dread) was gonna be at E3. It was just Nintendo slinging their new system, and a ass load of Mario games for it and the handheld. Even Zelda didn't get a notice. They can only milk the Mario and Pokemon franchises so long.

Potential R.I.P. Metroid eh?

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Phz-Enh-Dvc In reply to Phz-Enh-Dvc [2011-12-21 05:18:17 +0000 UTC]

fusion, dark and phazon too

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