What is Metroid: Other M?
The boldest and most divisive Metroid: a Team Ninja action game that wanted NES simplicity and a novel’s worth of story.
Metroid: Other M (2010) paired Sakamoto with Team Ninja. His stated aim was a game controlled like an NES title, one Wii Remote, nothing more, carrying the heaviest story load the series had ever attempted. It sold under a million copies, split the audience down the middle, and the series went quiet for seven years behind it.
THE ARGUMENT
Why it divides people
The cover tells the pitch
Helmet in front, the woman and her commander behind it. No Metroid box before or since has put the people ahead of the mission.
The Samus question
The criticism that stuck was characterisation: this Samus, voiced and narrated, struck many players as timid and deferential where the silent hunter of the earlier games read as unshakeable. The manga and Fusion had humanised her too; Other M’s version of that project is what the argument is about.
The craft
Under the argument sits a fast, strange action game: third-person, missile-firing in first person by pointing at the screen, regenerating health by concentration instead of drops. Almost every system is an experiment, which is why the game remains interesting even to its critics.
The cost
Polygon’s series retrospective calls Other M a misfire that "practically killed the series". The seven-year silence that followed, broken only by Federation Force, is the fact underneath the rhetoric.