One of the few games decided upon by the greater game industry as being a trainwreck, it’s still largely a trainwreck for all the reasons no one cares to consider. The problem within Metroid Other M relates entirely to the strange characterization of the main character, who has continually devolved with every attempt to bring further life to her. Samus, however, was never really meant to be a character.
Samus was probably never meant to be a woman either, but that decision in relation to Metroid Other M is irrelevant. The presentation of Samus is as expected of game developers, which is to say that it’s quite likely that the writers who wrote this character are socially awkward at best. Samus was a character who was objectified from the start however, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, given that bikinis and other fanfares were shown off by Nintendo as early as the first Metroid, or Super Metroid if we formally decide that a character sprite that has some semblance of being a human being is required. But the problem is largely in giving her a voice.
The group that perhaps most respectfully captured Samus was the Retro Studios team in the first Metroid Prime, where Samus always remained a symbolic avatar. She was a character who was a rather merciless, genocidal shell that we could comfortably take on in an environment that was, while not always openly hostile, at least definitively alien. But as an avatar, her presence as a character who is almost distinctly alien has continued to diminish, and that is perhaps what is most damning about Nintendo’s evolution of her. When she’s an alien, it is easier to accept the weirdness of the experience, the uncomfortable space in which the player takes on control of a “not me” who is still a unique character themselves, who, at times, exercises judgment out of our control.
Metroid Other M takes that experience away and replaces it with a character who is not a character at all. The character is somehow below a stereotype. Due to a weird backstory that’s only ever half explained from partial segments of an earlier game, there’s always a strange discomfort with how everything now has a “reasonable” decision behind it. It’s like you’ve entered the bureaucratic hell the Chinese imagine, being shuffled hurriedly from room to room, only to find that the next room is just a room for waiting for something you might actually want to do, such that, by the time you actually can do what you want to do, you wonder why you cared in the first place. At that point, you get shuffled off into another room, only to repeat the process.
The game’s a shuffled, disgustingly designed mess, and everything that’s wrong with this game stems from the sense of never feeling alien. Everything feels familiar, but on a creepy, skin-deep level–all the while you continue to act in Sakamoto’s disturbing play.
Recommended: No