@pkmnfrk said:
@bisonhero said:
@torrim said:
Just don't put a dumb anime story in it. Please.
Yeah, people in this thread have differing opinions on how much story or characterization there should be, but seemingly we can all agree that Metroid doesn't need another dumb anime story after Other M. One was enough.
Here's a controversial statement: M:OM's story was actually alright. Not for Metroid, sure. But, if you pretended it wasn't Samus, then it was decent.
Oh man, let's dive in. Even were it not Metroid, Other M has got issues.
Like, I just don't think Adam is a well developed character that the player has any reason to care about at all, and the whole dynamic between Samus and him just felt unearned. We just aren't given very much to go on for why Samus has all of this admiration and respect for him and his judgment. Even if people didn't have strong opinions about the kind of mood and tone Metroid should be going for it and say this were an entirely new game, it's just lame and stereotypical that Adam is stoic commander father dude in most scenes and key story moments, and Samus is overly emotional in thinking she can save the day in those same scenes, so Adam gets to father-knows-best his way through the scenes and say "trust my judgment on this one" and that's what happens. Like, I dunno, Samus is pretty badass, and the main character, maybe she could actually do the crazy thing she thinks she should do to address the situation. If we had some flashback example of Adam telling her to trust his judgment, she ignores him, and sure enough she pushes herself too hard and he was right all along, then fine, I'd buy that maybe Adam is an exceptional leader that knows Samus' limits, but that is never shown in the story. He just comes off as a bossy asshole and then he dies.
Also, the whole thing where Adam would ask his squad whether they were OK with the plan, and they gave a thumbs up or thumbs down was just cringey and goofy looking and not believable even in a futuristic space military, as was the part where Adam always called Samus "Lady" (instead of "Miss" or "Ma'am"??????). Maybe it was just unlocalizable yet makes complete sense to a Japanese audience, but I sincerely doubt it.
Lots of other parts were really amateur hour, like the whole "deleter" subplot (which smacks of a Japanese-chosen English turn of phrase that they insisted stay in the localization despite being a really unnatural way to refer to a traitor; I honestly refuse to believe good English localizers would've left it with that dumb name). The whole subplot seems to exist as a cheap way to make you temporarily think Anthony or Adam might betray Samus, but no, it's one of the other fuckos in the squad that you know nothing about, James, and he is unceremoniously killed offscreen by MB, and Samus doesn't even acknowledge it when she comes across the guy's corpse near the end of the game, she's just like "Oh, James is dead" and the player is left to surmise on their own that (by process of elimination) he was the traitor, he failed to kill MB, and somehow she killed him instead. And like, the entire middle act of the game is focused around being spooked by who this traitor is, and then it just gets tossed away when the game is done with most of the Anthony and Adam scenes and you're pretty sure if they were the traitor they had ample opportunities to shoot or sabotage Samus but didn't.
And hey, I guess the game is about motherhood or something, but like, not really at all? The baby Metroid Samus maybe cares for has no real bearing on the story since that already played out in Super Metroid. Various objects have baby-centric names like the "baby's call" distress beacon (ya know, unlike those other types of distress beacons that aren't really trying to get your attention), and the Bottle Ship. You meet an infant Ridley which is cute for all of 5 seconds and then rapidly/nonsensically evolves from a fuzzy chicken Pokemon into a wingless pterosaur into a winged pterosaur. And then the MB story which all gets dumped on you in a like 25 minute cutscene at the very end is kinda about motherhood, but it's more like a Frankenstein's monster situation where the creator is trying to give their creation some sense of humanity.
The story is functional, but its poor writing is some real D-grade sci-fi anime stuff.
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