I haven’t been playing a lot of video games lately, which made me feel a little bit better about my life in general, but I’ve never been able to say ‘no’ to a Metroid game, and this one looked pretty cool. So, a few weeks ago I went out and bought Metroid: Other M, brought it home, and put it in the console, and it didn’t work. I tried it quite a few times, until I finally went to Nintendo’s website to find that there was a common problem with this game, that the older Wii’s lasers weren’t reading the disk. The solution to the problem was that I had to send my Wii off to Nintendo to get the laser cleaned, which Nintendo kindly paid for in full. I eventually got my system back, and the game worked correctly, and my life somehow kept moving throughout the process despite some preconceived notions that it wouldn’t. (In my defense, my hospital laid me off pending a malpractice hearing, so I’m unemployed. In my secondary defense, It’s not easy to transplant a liver while sky diving.) Anyway, on with the review!

Metroid: Other M, (Which is a title I seldom say correctly) is the newest in the Metroid series, and without doing any sort of research, I assume it takes place right after the events of Super Metroid. It’s a first and third person shooter, but for all intents and purposes, it might as well only be a third person shooter because you don’t use the first person all that much. It was hard to tell what they were trying to do with this new system, but I’ll pretentiously do my best to interpret. The third person makes the game feel a lot more like the 2-d Metroid games, and since your weapons auto-target you are practically lacking an entire dimension anyway. Although, I think the third person view is put to good use based purely on how good the Samus model looks. It’s often visually stimulating just to watch her run across the screen. I think it was a good choice.

Which brings me arbitrarily to the story of the game. In my opinion, one of the best parts of the Metroid series is the old school Nintendo story. Therefore it’s not due to the fact that it’s very complex, or even very good, but in virtue of the fact that it’s included. The stories have always been really superficial to me, and told in broad strokes so that you can usually sum up an entire game with only a sentence or two. (Metroid II: Samus goes to the metroid’s home world, kills the queen, and then a baby metroid thinks she’s it’s mother. The end.) This game changed that formula a bit. For the first time taking a little closer look at the character element of the story, but at the same time hitting a lot of the hallmarks of the series. It felt like watching the new Star Trek movie where they manufactured the story to get the whole crew on the deck at the same time, saying their lines, for the sake of gathering die hard fans ejaculate. For example, on the spaceship the story takes place on, they still have a lava world, and the very last thing you do in the game is an escape run as the ship is self-destructing. Though it’s easy to be sarcastic about the story, it actually felt like a really cool science fiction film. The story sequences were engaging, and the cinematics were some of the best Nintendo has ever done.

Next I want to bring up the weapon system. They introduced a new system, where you don’t find most of your upgrades, but that you simply decide not to use them until you get permission from a superior officer. It’s hard to say where I sit on this element, because I think they were going for being more “realistic” because it would seem daffy to have random upgrades to her chozo suit found on a spaceship that has nothing to do with the chozo. (The chozo are the ancient race of aliens that raised Samus.) The dilemma, is that it would be equally ridiculous to not use weapons and armor that would be life-saving at times, just because you were trying to follow orders. I’m not going to paint a clear picture of the paradoxes of this element, but I assure you that they are there. Putting that aside though, I will complement the map layout, and the placement of the weapon upgrades, because they were both really well thought out, something that constantly impresses me throughout all of the Metroid games. I’d also like to mention that the upgrades themselves are pretty awesome.

The mix between third and first person gameplay was definitely interesting, at first I didn’t think I was going to like it because it seemed confusing and awkward to switch how you were holding the controller in the middle of combat, or even just to look around a room, but I have to admit that it was actually very comprehensible. After only about an hour of gameplay I felt I had a real solid grasp of the controls. Which is a pet peeve of mine, I hate playing games that I feel inhibited by complicated controls. Though I didn’t have that problem with this game, I did have a problem that everything felt too easy. I can barely remember any of the bosses, simply because I didn’t have any trouble with any of them. Although, in the games defense, I am a pretty amazing. Basically, I spent the entire time through the game hoping there would be a hard mode, and there wasn’t… though, there is plenty of other things to keep you busy, like hunting for 100% of the items, or giving yourself a time limit to run through the game. There might even be secret modes that I don’t know about! Who knows…

Overall, I think this game was really fun, and worth playing though… Especially if you are a Metroid fan. It’s hardly a disgrace to the series at all, 8 out of 10.

If you don’t already own the game, you should pick it up at amazon, through this link here!
While you’re at it, you should also take the time to pre-order the new Legend of Zelda game that’s coming out for the Wii, Skyward Sword!