Metroid: Other M/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Alternative Character Interpretation:
    • One of the main reasons for the complaints against Samus' characterization is how it differs from what has been shown in the rare bits her character is seen.
      • Her characterization has been filled out quite a bit in comics and manga that are cannon to the series. She has always been shown as tough, calm/collected, and indipendant making her not liking to take orders from others. She has also beat ripply a good 3~5 times by the time she encounters him in the game, and she did not lose her cool in the comics or the games the first time she faced him. Team Ninja has only cast women in sexiest and often co-dependent to the hero roles and they cast the very indipendant and collected Samus' as a co-dependent overly emotional character. I'm even told the OtherM manga dose not do this to the character and remains true to her past appearances.
    • Many detractors see the relationship between Samus and Adam to be incredibly screwed up. For example.
    • And from the supporter side of things, one suggest that Samus is suffering various stages of psychological trauma.
  • And the Fandom Rejoiced: Several things; full-voice acting, back to a third-person perspective, Team Ninja's involvement.
  • Base Breaker:
    • If the message board wars, angry reviews, accusations of sexism and video blog rants are any indicator, Samus Aran has become this.
    • Adam Malkovich equally as much. To fans, he's either a BAD-ass or a JERK-ass.
  • Badass Adorable: Say what anyone will, but in a very, very odd light... "Little Birdie", was this, especially considering this Killer Rabbit grows up fast to become Ridley. The hard fact that he would have eaten any who tried aside, it almost makes him huggable... Almost.
  • Non Sequitur Scene: Phantoon.
  • Broken Base: The game either provides Samus with long-needed character development, or it turns her from an awesomely stoic Badass into a stereotypical moeblob.
    • That's not even getting into the debates on Fan reactions as to how well Samus's reaction to Ridley was handled.
    • In addition, you have a further split between fans when it comes to story presentation in Metroid games: those who want it to be more cinematic and grander versus those who prefer a minimalistic, "figure-it-out-for-yourself" approach. Although this particular debate got started with Metroid Fusion and escalated with Prime 3: Corruption, it was Other M that really showed how divisive this issue is.
  • Contested Sequel: And how.
  • Continuity Lock Out: A common complaint of the dreaded Ridley scene, as it makes no sense unless you have read a ridiculously obscure manga that has never seen release outside of Japan.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: Ridley's battle theme.
  • Critical Backlash: Believe it or not, yes. The game did get mostly decent reviews from most outlets, though it did not do nearly as well critically as the previous games, even Hunters. Fans, on the other hand, would probably reject it. It's somewhat subverted however, when places that gave it a positive review start looking into it more, and more often than not, the opinions got much more negative.
  • Dull Surprise: Samus during her monologues. Less so when she actually talks with the others, but still
  • Draco in Leather Pants / Sympathy for the Devil: Big Bad MB.
  • 8.8:
    • X-Play's review, giving it a 2...out of 5.
    • Game Informer gave it a 6.25 in the US. The Australian version (by a different reviewer), however, gave it an 8.
    • Famitsu gave the game a 35 out of 40. Really, opinions on this game are all over the place.
    • Similar to X-Play, Yahtzee Croshaw named it the second worst game he reviewed in all of 2010, stating the gameplay was almost as bad as the story/writing fiasco.
      • Of course the status for this trope is debateable, considering it's supposed to be about an acclaimed game by most accounts being slammed by one or two professional critics, where as Other M is a huge base breaker and the reviews out there that call it a horrible are about even with the ones that praise it.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Anthony Higgs. It's really not too much of a stretch to say that Anthony ended up with the best everything in the game.
    • Melissa Bergman has also gained quite a fanbase.
    • And also Little Birdie, given that the reveal of Ridley's lifecycle was one of the few well-recieved aspects of the game.
  • Fanon Discontinuity: Because of Samus' voice acting amongst other things, many Metroid fans prefer not to remember this game.
  • Fan Dumb / Hate Dumb: Many accusations of game being sexist can, and most likely will, be this and afterwards end in heavy Flame Wars.
  • Fan Nickname
    • Mysterious Black Dude or Remember Me Guy for Anthony Higgs
      • And let's not forget Manthony.
    • BSL (Blonde Scientist Lady or Bottle Ship Lady) for the important woman at the end of the trailer (Who's apparently named MB). Interestingly and coincidentally, this happens to be the same name as the space station that is the setting for Metroid Fusion.
    • "El Pollo Loco" for the chicken lizard...thing which turns out to be adolescent Ridley.
    • Ridley's infant form is a creature that looks like either a furby with legs, or a cross between a Chocobo and a Moogle. Fans have nicknamed him "Choogle" or "Choogu". It also has an in-universe nickname: Little Birdie.
  • Freud Was Right: Fans feel Samus talks about babies a little too much.
  • Goddamned Wavers
  • Goddamned Boss: The second time you fight Nightmare. It shoots a black hole that sucks ALL of your beams and missiles away from your target, and the only way to hit it is when it just happens to be in the way as it prepares to attack, making a fight or flight situation with no third option.
  • Hand Wave: Adam disallows most of Samus' arsenal because it could easily injure his troops or civilians by accident. This doesn't explain why she goes without suit upgrades like the Varia suit and Gravity feature or mobility ones like the Grapple Beam, or why she continues not to activate these devices in dangerous environments.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Game Informer's April issues always have a parody mini-magazine called Game Infarcer. Their 2007 edition's cover has Team Ninja developing Metroid Prime Xtreme.
    • During Metroid Fusion, an AI asks Samus of Adam, "Did this Adam care for you? Would he sit in a safe Command Room and order you to die?" Cue this game eight years later and reviewers began voicing these exact complaints about Adam not doing things like authorizing the Varia Suit earlier.
  • Hype Backlash: Quite possibly one of the most spectacular examples in recent memory. Nintendo prepared an expensive ad campaign, and built up considerable hype for the game. However, unexpectedly bad word of mouth and middling reviews basically killed its chances of selling over a million. Even for Nintendo themselves this was quite shocking. Only around early 2012 did the game reach the million units sold mark, and it routinely sells for incredibly low prices (the lowest recorded being $5).
  • Memetic Badass: Anthony Higgs, though it's mostly justified by his having a plasma gun on his back, which would likely require some level of badassery to be allowed to use. And yes, he does know how to use it.
  • Memetic Mutation: Confession time: Anthony Higgs asking "Remember me?" in the trailer (although the actual meme part is the funny expression he has on his face after lifting up his helmet). Because of this he has become quite popular with the fanbase.
  • Most Wonderful Sound: The replacement sound effect for the missing Item Acquisition Fanfare.
  • Narm: There's plenty of stilted, awkwardly performed dialogue throughout, to the point that the Compilation Movie makes for great MST material.
  • Never Live It Down: Samus only talked about the Baby Metroid for part of the first 20 or so minutes, and the rest of the game barely mentioned it. Cue detractors proceeding to exaggerate her talk of the Baby as if it took place throughout the entire duration of the game.
  • Nightmare Retardant: The opening cutscene shows Mother Brain's One-Winged Angel form in 3D, to lessened effect.
  • Older Than They Think: Samus was characterized as emotional and with self-esteem issues in the manga. She took orders from identified-as-male authority figures in Fusion and Prime 3, and worked for the Galactic Federation in Metroid, Metroid II, Prime 3, and Fusion. A major moment in the manga was her getting over her infamous PTSD involving Ridley. Of course, the Other M also contradicts the manga's story in numerous other ways, so don't try too hard to figure this out.
    • Flipside is that, in Metroid Fusion, Samus makes it only too clear she does not enjoy taking orders from anyone, and the only reason she tolerated Adam as much as she did was because she had great personal respect for him.
    • And of course most people don't exactly have a problem with the concept; as with most things that sound cool on paper, it's the fumbled execution that rubs people the wrong way.
  • Pandering to the Base: The game was an attempt to appeal to the Japanese fanbase, as for the most part the games found greater success outside of its home country, and an entire trilogy of games were made outside of Japan to boot. The end result alienated not only the American fanbase, but the Japanese fanbase as well. Turns out the Japanese fans wanted another Super Metroid, unlike what Sakamoto thought.
  • Relationship Writing Fumble: It's established early on that Adam is seen as a platonic father figure, somewhat. It certainly didn't stop a few reviewers from calling him "Samus's boyfriend."
  • Ron the Death Eater: Count how many fans think that Adam is evil or show him to be evil all along. There's a surprising amount.
  • Ruined FOREVER: Lots of people thought this game was awful.
  • Scapegoat Creator: Yoshio Sakamoto, the co-creator Metroid series. Many people now blame him for anything that is wrong with the Metroid series, even with games he was not extensively involved in and then in turn denying his involment with games he actually was part of that people like.
    • Several fans have compared him to George Lucas, a man whose movies started out incredibly well, but they started deteriorating in quality. Compare him to Sakamoto, who created Super Metroid, one of the best games in the series, but after a long absence from the series, his return to console projects was poorly received in comparison, especially after different people successfully revitalized the series with minimal input from him.
    • Before Other M, Yoshio Sakamoto was mostly recognized as the mind behind the original Metroid, Even Better Sequel Super Metroid, Metroid Fusion, the Wario Land series and the popular Wario Ware series. After the game was released, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn't hate his guts for making Other M.
    • Even Team Ninja employees have been quick to state that all of the story was Sakamoto's doing, and they were more or less contract workers.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • Other M features the ability to enter first-person mode by turning the Wiimote to face the screen. This wouldn't have been so bad by itself, but Samus is unable to move while in a first-person view point. This hasn't been very well-received. However, Samus is still able to use the Sensemove, the game's dodge move, while in first person. This also has the effect of instantly charging the beam to max, allowing for counterattacks. This has been considerably better received, though it has yet to be seen if this will rescue it from the scrappy heap.
    • The one game mechanic that has been universally reviled is the method of "gaining" powerups. Basically, Samus has them from the beginning, but she refrains from using any of them without Adam's authorization. This gets a little silly when Samus takes damage from the heat in the lava area because Adam hasn't allowed her to utilize her Varia Suit. Nintendo Power even set aside a whole sidebar in their review to highlight this as absurd.
    • Samus adopts a cannon-holding slow-walking stance in areas that contain no enemies and are heavy on plot. While it is more realistic and adds to the suspense, moving around at such a slow speed (you can't even ball up) is bound to annoy anyone who enjoys the classic Metroid goal of beating the game as quickly as possible.
    • The game also occasionally decides to lock Samus into the first person view point (thus disabling movement) and stop the game until the player points the targeting cursor at some detail of the scenery that the game had decided is important enough that you should see, but not important enough to put directly in a cut scene.
    • Concentration doesn't refill health to full (except on Hard Mode, where you can completely restore your measly 99 health), and requires that Samus have a very small amount of health before it can be used. It's much more generous with regards to missiles, however, as it refills them faster and can be used to refill them at any time. And in Hard Mode, hooooo boy...
    • The NES-like control scheme wouldn't be so bad if it weren't basically forced upon the player. Sakamoto apparently thought that the public were scared off by the nunchuk(despite the fact that the thing has been used for years up to this point, and it is always packed with the system), and Team Ninja members questioned his logic. Many times.
  • Tear Jerker: Adam going to destroy Sector Zero and when Samus mourns over Adam's helmet in the epilogue. Done without any monologue, either.
    • Earlier than that, there's Madeline's utter devastation over Melissa's death.
    • Anthony's "death", even though he turns out to be okay.
  • That One Boss: Queen Metroid due to how the Metroids she spawns can (and will) gang up on you.
    • Rhedogian is not much easier. It has a long reach, difficult to avoid attacks, and can dodge damn near everything thrown at it.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks: Even ignoring the apparent shift in Samus' personality, many fans object to elements like Samus having fully voiced dialogue (she did have text-based dialogue in Super Metroid, Fusion, and Zero Mission, but not nearly as much), Samus' relationships with other human characters becoming a major element, Samus' internal monologue, focusing to recharge health and missiles instead of enemies dropping items, taking out the classic "item acquired"-jingle...
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Really, they wasted at least three perfectly good plots. Samus' backstory and connection with Adam, the conspericy with the Deleter and corruption within the Federation, and the disaster around MB. Any one of those plots could have supported a whole game narrative in their own right, but the way the game spreads them all throughout means none are given the attention they deserve to fully develop.
  • Ugly Cute: Little Birdie, aka Choogle, who looks like a cross between a Mini-Totoro and Stitch. Turns out it's baby Ridley.
  • Unfortunate Implications: See Broken Base above. Or better yet, see it detailed here.
  • Values Dissonance: The big deal raised in the West about Samus relying on Adam for authorization and support doesn't so much as raise an eyebrow in Japan, where submission to authority figures is considered a fact of life. It's also similar to real life military protocol.
    • On the other hand, real life military protocol still allows individual soldiers sufficient autonomy that they wouldn't need to get authorization to protect themselves from immediately life-threatening situations (the notorious "refusing to turn on the Varia suit despite being in the volcanic segment of the ship" and "trapped in a box surrounded by Wave Beam-equipped enemies" scenes). Plus, there is the fact that Samus is not formally under Adam's command—she's under no compulsion whatsoever to listen to his orders, as she is not only an independent agent, not one of his soldiers, he hasn't even hired her services. They just happen to be investigating the same case, and she chooses to listen to his advice out of politeness; she doesn't have to obey him.
    • Most western audiences tend to view bounty hunters in fiction as fierce, independent, and often anti-authoritarian. Her creators at Nintendo were a good bit more fuzzy on the concept, applying it in a more general sense of "cool space hero." Early in development of Metroid Prime 3, Retro Studios suggested a series of "side quests" that involved Samus hunting down bounty heads in order to collect the reward. Nintendo was aghast, saying a good, upstanding person like Samus would never do something like that. Also, many western fans see Samus as a Knight Errant (shiny armour, fights a dragon), who are also viewed as fierce, independent, and often anti-authoritarian mostly because of Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right.
    • Even so, in all those missions she's carried out for the GF, she is given her orders at the start and then given complete freedom in how she carries out the mission and which suit upgrades she may or may not use (read: she's free to use all of them, as and when they're acquired).
  • Visual Effects of Awesome: Though fans are very sharply split over the content of the cutscenes, they all pretty much agree that they were very well animated.
  • Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Even Samus finds MB saddening.
    • Given her backstory, Samus herself easily qualifies. She also gets bonus points for having actually destroyed a few worlds.
  • What the Hell, Casting Agency?: So, for Samus's first ever speaking role, instead of getting veteran voice actress Jennifer Hale (who "voice acted" Samus for three games straight) for the role, you cast a complete unknown who has never played a Metroid game before, and she sounds duller than a brick? Granted, she actually was a good, theatrically trained actress, but even they squandered that by forcing her to sound so dull.
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