User Blog:
Metroid Moaning

After months of eagerly anticipating the arrival of Metroid: Other M, I happily picked up my pre-order copy and played through a game which played like a very fluid 3-D representation of Metroid Fusion from the GBA. Unfortunately, this proved to be a more literal metaphor than I would have hoped; the game takes place inside a space station, separated into different environments through the means of different sectors, a la Fusion. While I was alright to let this go, I found myself particularly disappointed with the way that the story was told in Other M.
 

Billed as the game that would fill in the blanks in the story of the Metroid series, the game seemed to focus entirely on the story of the event in the game itself, bypassing for the majority of the game the stories which this game was joining together. As well as doing this, the game at times fails to tell a compelling story particularly well; for example, the emphasis of the story appears to be a creepy little bird-type...thing, which you chase through the game. Once the true nature of the bird thingy is revealed (spoilers galore), the threat from that character is expected to culminate into a big boss battle near the end, only for it to be destroyed by another threat that is revealed 5 minutes from the end.
 

The fate of Commander Adam Malkovich, a main character from Metroid Fusion, is brought to light in Other M, but I couldn't help but feel that his story came to an end too quickly, with his last moments interacting with the player being somewhat subdued, rather than what Fusion had led me to think. Metroid Fusion states that Malkovich sacrifices himself to save Samus, but his 'death' is a lot less "explosions and fire" than I had expected, with Adam choosing to undertake a mission in a hidden experimentation area which would guarantee his death, in place of Samus. I don't really know what I was expecting, but it all felt a bit rushed, and to be totally honest, didn't warrant the written soliloquies in Metroid Fusion. As well as this, I was hoping to actually be able to tackle the big bad enemies in this new area, only to be deprived this. Furthermore, the 'death' of another particular ally never really feels genuine, and you know as you play the game, that this person will eventually return, thus making their return later on a lot less climatic than what the makers would have hoped.