Over the weekend Reggie Fils-Aime expressed his dismay at the sales of Metroid: Other M. He says that Nintendo is doing a lot of thinking as to why this happened, but that he doesn't think the portrayal of Samus in the game is the primary reason for the failure. And maybe not, but since he's talking up the quality of the game- which more than one review I read took some issue with- I wonder if they've done enough thinking about this. I did some, and here's a few factors I think are worth considering.
4.Maybe Samus has contracted Hedghoginsons' disease?
That is to say that, like Sonic, standard Metroid gameplay simply doesn't work as well in 3D as it does in 2D. Metroid Prime would suggest otherwise, and they're excellent games, but they're not afraid to be first-person games and do what works best for that genre. But Other M by most reports tries to balance third-person gameplay and first person gameplay... and doesn't quite do it.
I've also read reviews that say that Castlevania Lords of Shadow works well but that it does so by abandoning most of what makes the 2D Castlevania games what they are- and the demo, at least, bears that out. As Castlevania is another series that has suffered at least as badly as Sonic when trying to do 3D, perhaps there's some wisdom in that. After all, with the advent of services like WiiWare/DSiWare, Xbox Live Arcade et. al, there's now a viable delivery system for 2D games again other than putting them on portable systems. Modernizing 2D games has always been tricky, and Metroid Prime worked precisely because it avoided doing what Other M tried to do. It didn't try to adapt Metroid gameplay to 3D, it adapted Metroid to 3D gameplay.
3. Potential Metroid players and potential Wii owners may not be the same people
I tend not to like the "casual" and "hardcore" gamer labels. But I understand why labels exist, and I use them all the time, sometimes without meaning to. Everybody does. They simplify things even- or especially -when simplifying things does everyone involved a great disservice. And since there seems to be a large corner of the gaming community that has decided based on these labels that the Wii is not for them, I have to wonder how much overlap that group has with the established Metroid audience. It could be a lot.
2. Maybe it is the portrayal of Samus, Reggie.
In his statement Fils-Aime says he's not sure that the primary reason for the sales of the game falling short is that "the portrayal of Samus felt different than how the player in the past had internalized the character." That's a very politic way of saying "People aren't happy that the most independent, professional, badass female character in the history of video games is shown not using her abilities without some guy's permission, and worse still is shown freaking the hell out over the same monster she's beaten single-handedly a half dozen times, and having to be SAVED by some other guy."
Here's the scene. Spoilers!
Played Metroid since the NES? I have, and I can't say any of this jibes with my image of Samus. But then, this is one of the great dangers of trying to move to a more traditional narrative style. The original Metroid is deep gameplay-wise, but the story's very loose, and the plot is expressed almost entirely in terms of that gameplay. Samus doesn't even have any lines until Super Metroid! And most of those few were expository and almost noir in their delivery. Whatever story there is in the early games you get from the manual, the pre- and post- game narration, and what you construct in your head. You're always going to prefer the version you make in your head- it's one of the reasons we play games in languages we don't understand. (You know, besides the humor value.)
If Other M Samus were in the original Metroid you could never complete the game because she would lose her shit at the sight of Ridley and, since there are no males in the area to encourage her to fight by dying, he would kill her. This is not the Samus who stood nose-to-nose with Ridley- or in some cases under him, to avoid the fireballs -and pumped missiles and Wave Beam shots into him until he exploded. Samus-in-my-head would at most say "Oh, it's you again" and proceed to kill him... what, a fifth time? Third if you don't count the Metroid Prime series? If they had made this a prequel, and this was the very first time she'd seen Ridley since her childhood, I could see it. But they didn't, and it's not, and it does a horrendous disservice to Samus' character.
1. Maybe it's the portrayal II: Ninja Gaiden Stigma
It's entirely possible that by itself this scene- and even the ludicrous permission scheme -would not have been enough to annoy gamers into not buying the game. But I don't think Nintendo really stopped to consider the reputation of Team Ninja beforehand. Yes, they did make Ninja Gaiden, a well-respected series of high-quality action games.
They also made this.
I am really not qualified to say much about Japan and feminism. Most of my view of Japan is filtered through pop culture, and this is not a good way to judge any culture realistically. But I do believe that because she was shaped by the necessities of gameplay rather than fiction, Samus Aran is a great female character, maybe the best in video games, free of the vast majority of tropes and baggage that affect female characters in video games, anime and manga. She is enjoyed by a lot of female gamers specifically because she is hyper-capable and doesn't spend the entirety of her screen time oversexualized. And Nintendo went and decided to partner with the company whose name is synonymous with "boob physics."
I'm not a female gamer but I've always liked Samus, always liked playing her, and I think the Dead or Alive Xtreme games are damn silly. There's a place for silliness but it's not in my Metroid. Personally, it's when they announced Team Ninja's involvement that my hopes for Metroid Other M began to falter, and I'm sure I'm not alone. And though the questionable character decisions were in the hands of Nintendo's Yoshio Sakamoto, those decisions might even have been shrugged off if a lot of us hadn't had that nagging fear in the back of our heads that the development team were going to screw this up royally. When you're expecting failure and you start hearing things about the story and controls that support that expectation, you don't buy the game.
I haven't, and it was one of the reasons I got a Wii.
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