This thread makes me sad, because a very vocal minority keeps bashing a game that was one of best games of last year. First of all, let me say that this elephant-article is embarrassing and nobody should give it praise or agreement. Secondly, I think there are three parts about Other M which need to be talked about separately.
1.) The Story. It is super generic. But is it is neither good nor bad. It is a typical video game story, on par with 99,9% of video games. I feel like people that call Other M´s story bad are simply projecting their one problem with the game on all of its parts.
What might be up to opinion are Samus´ monologues, but I always wonder when people criticise "ugh, she thinks so much dumb, irrelevant stuff". Well, no shit. I guess you guys always hold deeply philosophical debates with yourself when you´re thinking so-me-thing. I found the monologues to be really fitting, as well as the voice-acting, which makes sense for a person that doesn´t have much contact to other people.
2.) The gameplay. Great. Fun. As a Metroid-game, it is lacking non-linearity, but besides that, it is so much fun to run around, fight enemies and defeat bosses. The change between third- and first-person view works perfectly fine, it just takes a bit in the beginning to get used to it. The movement of Samus Aran is exactly what a third-person 3D-Metroid-game should have been like. It feels good, feels powerful, and the further you progress in the game, the better it feel, the more powerful all of your actions become. What Other M truly excels at is combat. Evading enemy attacks by tapping the d-pad feels natural from the first time in the tutorial. Later on, it´s like dancing when you´re surrounded by several enemies. Charging her power beam and shooting it off into some space pirate´s face feels superbly satisfying. The best moments, however, are the boss battles. They combine the need of a strategy with the cruel quickness of a tense situation. You will not have to spam beam shots at your enemy for 10 minutes like in the Prime-games. Instead, you can kill most bosses in like 2 minutes and with just a few charged beam shots. However, you yourself can be killed just as quickly. The fine finishing touch is that most battles give the player optional ways of fighting their enemy, be it by choosing between close range or long range, or by incorporating different strategies alltogether.
3. Samus Aran´s portrayal. This is where the usual outrage of the very vocal minority stems from, and it is the most deluded point of criticism. I won´t even go into how ludicrous it is to call Other M "misogynistic" or sexist, it´s not.
For a lot of fans, Samus Aran was this emotionless, cold killer in space, never talking, always alone, ruthless killing all kinds of monsters. But Samus Aran never was like that. We never got a proper portrayal of this girl, because of the past consoles´ technical limitations. Or because the designers of all Metroid-games up to Super Metroid chose not to go into details. But you cannot start making up your own version of Samus, only because Nintendo hadn´t shown you firm information about her. And now, the creator of Metroid, Sakamoto, decided to show the world how Samus Aran was ... as a person. And damn, he did a fantastic job!
The complaints about the infamous/great show-down between her and Ridley in Other M stem from Samus´ reaction. When realizing who has appeared in front of her, she freezes, experiences a flashback to her past. Now, people complain about how Samus shouldnt react like that because she fought Ridley before. But that is only part of the equation. Samus fought Ridley in Metroid 1, but he survived. She then faced him again in Super Metroid, and he died ... for good, so Samus had firmly believed. Now, this is the monster that not only killed, but ate her parents. There can be no worse nightmare to any person. And in this one moment in Other M, the unfathomable monster reappears from the dead! A being, Samus thought to be dead for sure, for being dealt with. In this moment, she freezes and experiences a sting of fear. And now the important part: This never made her look weak or "weak because she´s a woman". It also didn´t change her appearance in previous games. All it did was portraying her as a more believable, more likeable person. She is not a some generic, random bald spacemarine that slays monsters. She is a human being with a real past, a tragic past, and realistic emotions. Other M managed to portray Samus Aran as who she is, and I like that Samus Aran.
Coming to an end (woah, that became a longer post than intended), I am almost 100% sure that Metroid: Other M is going to be one of those games where in five years or such A LOT of Gaffers will open topics with titles like "wth, why did nobody tell me how awesome Other M was?!" And all because of this vocal minority that keeps pressing on how crappy this game is. This great game.
