Game:

Metroid: Other M (2010)

Duration: 12:46

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Samus’s Log: “Our time in the Bottle Ship been brief, but was already wrought with danger. A new enemy approached, a sickening mass of insects, their “body” convulsing as the individual bugs skittered about and struggled to maintain form. It was oddly inspiring to see so many individual organisms working together for a common goal, even if that goal was our annihilation. Clearly, Adam, the rest of his squad and myself would have to do the same to survive. I-, oh Adam’s first order. ‘Let’s split up, gang!’ Somehow I feel this isn’t the best course of action…”

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Before we keep going, let’s have a look at the various pause screens, eh? We get some info on all of Samus’s various powers, a nice little summary of our adventures so far and even a section on character bios. This updates as the game goes on and I admit I’m impressed by it’s consistency. We might learn the names of Adam’s group shortly after this point, but the game makes a point of leaving their names as “Identity Unknown” since Samus herself doesn’t know that yet. See?! I can complement this game sometimes!

Boss time! You might have noticed some gross purple bugs scurrying around here and there as we entered the ship…and now we see the root of it all! Meet…uh…the Brug Mass. No, not “bug,” “Brug!” Controlled by the Emperor Brug, mimicking a giant eye, this thing is…admittedly a decent starter boss. It demonstrates that boss encounters are often fast, brutal and require quick reflexes. The Mass here specializes in sweeping strikes with it’s limbs, and it hits HARD. Most enemies hit pretty hard, in-fact. I…did not anticipate taking so much damage here, I’ll say that much.
The first “phase” of this fight is a hopeless boss fight, all weapons having no effect. You have to lock onto the boss’ eye to trigger a cutscene where Adam authorizes Missiles for Samus and ice beams for his squad. You CAN dodge that attack right before the cutscene, but honestly the dodging in first-person seems a little finicky. You have to move the cursor off-screen and I THINK you have to flick the remote or hit a button or something to actually trigger a dodge. The game doesn’t exactly tell you this, at least not in the tutorial. Whenever the visor is green that’s when you can dodge.

At least I get to show Concentration in action with health. You only restore one energy tank of health with this move at the start, and it takes a long while to do, leaving you quite vulnerable, so try to not rely on it. Adam’s squad freeze the thing and Samus can take it down with Missiles from there on, and this boss is done. But uh…Adam, you know Samus has an Ice Beam too, right? Oh, but then you’d all have nothing to do. Gotcha!

Now time for more cutscenes. Samus is a brat, apparently. That’s what I glean from this, anyway. Or a twisted jumble of contradictory behavior. She hated other soldiers treating her differently because of her gender, but liked it when Adam called her “lady?” Despite saying like a minute later that the other soldiers were supportive of her. Which is it? Not to mention the HUGELY clunky exposition bomb of how Adam was her father figure and she’s an orphan. Slow down a sec, Samus!

I don’t have the description space to rant here, but seriously…WAY too much telling going on, not enough showing. HOW is Adam so close to you, Samus? WHY were you so angry and bitter? Why were you scared? How about you give us some context instead of just saying it? For a game all about fleshing out Samus’s story, the game doesn’t really show a whole lot of it. Not to mention that the Chozo race that took Samus in get no mention when she mentions paternal figures. What about Old Bird, Samus?!

One last, admittedly minor, gripe. Samus is like six feet tall even without being in her suit and yet every other male in this game TOWERS over her. And it’s not that they forgot that she’s tall either; we’ll see a scene later that’ll illustrate her height…it’s just that every other male is also a freak of nature who’s like eight feet tall. Can’t stand to have a lady one head taller than you, huh, Japan? OK, that’s outta line…

Everyone gets their mission and departs (remember all those names, cuz I sure won’t! I will note that K.G is actually named Keiji, but uh…not sure why that got changed here). So everyone’s comm systems are useless huh? That’s suspicious…and makes it all the more dumb to split everyone up AND to send the one person armed to the teeth and equipped to deal with any and all threats to turn the power back on…I’d appreciate if this game had given you the option to tag along with the other squad members, making things a bit more open-ended and letting you maybe learn more about them, but we can’t have that!

Onwards!

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