Metroid Other M - What Happened?

Alien In 2003, shortly after the release of the Metroid Fusion series, Shepherd Yoshio Sakamoto said in an interview that if I can, I want the series to continue from here on out, I think I want to develop Samus as a character that I might want to create as well. a story that goes back to the past of adamant samus hey it's me matthew your husky host of an

other

episode of

what

happened

that today is being possible thanks to the big vip boss of flaphouse ian, who officially nominated the babyoid classic of nintendo wii 2010 an

other

baby ah yes, the same The latest entry not remake nor derivative of the beloved Metroid franchise that I can finally talk about on this show after a long time without talking about it, so from the beginning I'm going to be completely honest.

This might be a very different episode than

what

you're used to because in the past we've heard horror stories about meddling marketing executives, disastrous engine switches, or just plain hot jars of moldy mayonnaise disguised as people when it comes to Metroid. Things get a lot simpler, a lot more direct, but even so, it still carries that distinct whiff of what the hell

happened

, so make sure you have the proper clearance from your commanding officer because we're going to delve into the story of how the

metroid

creator almost killed

metroid

it's 2002 and nintendo brought its sci-fi action franchise back to the gamecube with metroid prime whose green light was probably reinforced by the number of little kids playing smash brother in 99 and 2000 asking which It's Samus anyway we're not going to get into the nitty-gritty of Metroid Prime here, as its development was something completely different, a very risky and experimental take on the series that shouldn't have worked at all, but became a of the reasons to own the Nintendo purple.

Along with it, perhaps as a precaution, they also accelerated a safer and less expensive bet with the aforementioned Metroid Fusion, a familiar-feeling 2D side-scroller for the Game Boy trailer, there hadn't been a new entry in the franchise since 1994 and since then the Castlevania series had become the standard bearer of the metroidvanias or, to be more precise, of the genre that from now on should be known as God of the search action. That's great. Sakamoto, a designer and artist of the original NES and director of one of the best games of all time. Metroid was tasked with handling the merger and had very little involvement in the main series overall now in terms of fan expectations and even probably internally within Nintendo it would be easy to assume that the merger was going to be the success it had a stake in. original creator at work. and stuck firmly to its 2D roots, however it was Metroid Prime that took most of the attention and the crossover was more of an afterthought in many people's minds, it's still an extremely solid game in its own right. own, but its narrative elements and characters added.

The dialogue and slightly more linear gameplay and mission structure caused some to view it as inferior when compared to the powerful Super Metroid, while the main series only continued to grow with phenomenal reviews and strong sales echoes, two years Nintendo later ushered in the Wii and ds generations with Corruption and Hunters respectively and both were made by Western studios as well as pushing first person as the dominant style of the series. Instead, Sakamoto and his team were tasked with making a simple remake of the original NES outing Missionless, an entry that Good once again found itself overshadowed, as it came out just a few months before release.

Nintendo DS, which became a big deal, which brings us back to Sakamoto's quote from 2003, where he presented his idea of ​​implementing more story into Metroid. universe and it's pretty easy to deduce why the main series kept Samus as quiet as possible and emphasized complex 3D map puzzles and new control methods. Nintendo's Metroid 2D team from Japan couldn't really compete in those areas, but what they could do was offer something different after the release of Corruption in 2007. Retro Studios Banana crashed on DK Island with the returns of Donkey Kong Country. leaving a rare gap in Metroid releases a gap that Sakamoto was quick to address, though it was that Nintendo was steadily moving forward with 3D gaming at this time, something the Metroid handheld team had no idea how to do.

It occurred to me that I could do something pretty amazing if I created a Metroid for Wii, but when it comes to the actual development process, my team to be completely honest. I didn't have the knowledge or experience to develop something for 3D and we didn't have the manpower either. I realized that I would probably need to find a partner to collaborate with to make my concepts a reality. Looking for someone who not only understood my concept but could also contribute their own experience. I was very fortunate at that time to speak with Mr. Hayashi and the team of the ninja team.

Oh yeah, Team Ninja in 2008, Captain Oatmeal Face was busy quitting. slash was fired from tecmo, leaving yosuke hayashi in charge of the ninja dojo. The bright-eyed, bushy-tailed Hiyashi felt it would be a big challenge to help Sakamoto realize his vision and also provide programmers who really understood the 3D development team. the engine, which was apparently a heavily modified version of what powered the first two ninja gaidens, as well as 3D artists and modelers, there's also a third player here, d rockets, a cgi studio with which the ninja team had worked before on previous games, they deserve a special mention. because instead of just providing an introduction and ending it and calling it a day, they would need to provide a lot more cgi animation and when I say a lot more I mean a metric ton, this is because Sakamoto is in his attempt to provide something different. of what the main series offered decided that the world should examine every boring and uninteresting hallway of samus's mind palace aaron shortly after the formal announcement of other m both sakamoto hayashi provided some hilarious quotes in retrospect the story of the other m will tie together what happened in fusion of super metroid and metroid one of my goals is to present samus as an attractive human character and that involves explaining a little about what happened in her past, as well as the characters that influenced her, the story will play an important role Of course, Metroid is also a very sophisticated action game, so our goal is to create a seamless experience between cinematics and actual gameplay.

Hayashi's statement has aged even worse. One of our concepts that we like to keep in mind as we move forward in development is creating samus as this very attractive character, the ultimate heroine in the game universe, so we keep that in mind, yeah, well, now you failed. Nintendo generally avoids delving too deeply into the personal stories of its characters and instead opts to immerse you. more into the worlds themselves through clever level design and PC dialogue, fun challenges or simply through the sheer atmosphere. The main draw of Metroid, however, was how mysterious everything was outside of some obscure comics, you never learn much about Samus's past, the motivations of the space pirates besides them. being evil, of course, because the previous games always prioritized gameplay first and foremost while playing Super Metroid.

Have you ever looked at Samus while she was making the bright spark and said man, what's going on inside her head? No, you didn't, but Sakumoto thought you did. It was made by others, loaded not with super missiles or energy bombs, but with hours of cutscenes featuring a multitude of characters that some people might have been familiar with, but many others weren't. Remember that the main point of contention was the characterization of Samus and her relationship with Adam Malkovich, a general of the Galactic Federation, when a character has remained silent and mysterious for literally decades, you are setting yourself up for disaster if you don't handle him properly. perfection and luckily baby Samus wasn't.

Handled childishly and the baby perfectly, if something like this happened again I would hold on to that ray of hope and attempt redemption in a combination of perhaps wrong voice direction, poor translation or poor script interpretation or just having a horrible script in many fans. her eyes are the scene of a crime, the crime of character murder in other m, she is presented as whiny and overly emotional and, at the same time, rigid and unassuming, and these are the impressions that most had of samus a through the various trailers and previews leading up to the release of other m. and we only got exponentially worse when people actually played the game.

I was known to give the thumbs up during the briefing and we haven't even talked about the actual game yet because, aside from the bloated and divisive story, there was a completely different set. of problems when it comes to mechanics, sakamoto wanted to force the concept of art out of adversity, which is something you should never force if you have a choice that he wanted to make and I quote it here as a metroid game that anyone can play so he decided that samus would be controlled by a single wii remote, forcing the developers to think outside the box about how to make all of this work, how to make a complicated search action game work with a limited set of buttons, I mean, you know, thank goodness because in 2010, everyone was sick of that terribly complicated nunchuck, so, yeah, what is this?

The solution was to play about 85 parts of the game via the NES style of holding the Wii remote and the remaining 15 by assigning the player clumsy tasks. Move the remote control forward to switch to a first-person mode that will allow you to attack in first person. This is mainly used for boss fights and the really awkward and awkward point-and-click investigation sections, which again was something many felt they didn't. It really worked, it was trying to be both a 2.5d fast action platformer and a first person shooter. At times, that fast-paced 2.5d action was the only thing the ninja team brought to the table that at least felt a little refreshing.

The game was gorgeous for the Wii - it ran at a silky frame rate and had some incredible fight animations for the finishing moves that weren't too over the top for the franchise, but fit comfortably just below the top because of all this, without However, Samus was too incredibly overpowered by her new dodge. This movement gave him total invincibility against enemy attack. You could regain both health and missiles with the simple push of a button and the sense of fear and isolation that Metroid was known for certainly didn't feel very scary or isolating, you were absolutely attacking bosses and beating them up while doing it wrong with the John Malkovich platoon of soldiers. and a bunch of nerds throughout the entire story in terms of gameplay, probably the most egregious change and part of Sakamoto's mantra, a metroid, anyone can play, was that exploration had been greatly reduced, you acquired the least amount.

Of new items in any Metroid up to that point there was also like an extra suit that barely looked different and since Adam needed to give Samus permission to use ninety percent of it, you didn't need to explore to find ninety percent of it. I just need to progress the story, simply put, almost every core aspect of the series was streamlined or removed entirely. You know why have exploration or power-ups or a heavy atmosphere when you can just have the baby, the erase, the baby, the baby, erase. delete delete then another m was um received much more savagely by fans rather than critics, but even positive reviews would mention the game's flaws and, due to every other factor, ended up being a sales disappointment for Nintendo, the Former NOA president Reggie Philzmay stated as such, shortly after its release, we believe Metroid Other M should be a million unit title, we're not going to get there over the holidays and we're thinking a lot about why, because it's a great game, consumer reaction because The quality has been solid, I think the marketing was solid, the advertising was very good and the social media we did was very positive.

Well, Nintendo certainly took their time to think because over the next decade they released only two other titles starring the fitting intergalactic bounty hunter. inside a small metal ball, those games were, of course, the 3ds-derived Federation Force and the remake of the return of Samus's Game Boy title, and both had minimal involvement from Sakamoto, in fact, since than others, Sakamoto has been relegated to producing rhythmic skies ofwarioware. the life of tamadachi and some other dark things now here is everything I just described about others m the story the gameplay the controls everything went exactly as I planned it was a textbook nintendo did not interfere or try to dilute the director's vision no There were significant problems with the engine.

The three teams had enough manpower and budget and the entire project lasted a lean three years. Since then, Sakamoto has stated that if he did Metroid Other M again he wouldn't change anything and that he absolutely regretted it. no decisions were made on the project, he also felt that there really wasn't any aspect that could have been done better and that he saw his entire vision from start to finish, which I guess is pretty admirable to stick to your guns despite many, many. many opinions to the contrary, fortunately metroid prime 4 was announced in 2017 in development by a mysterious as yet unnamed studio based perhaps in Japan or China, then canceled and then development restarted from scratch at retro studios that They were working on their own without prior notice. title until then which may or may not be cancelled, okay so I guess in the next few years we could get back into various costumes here about what happened, thanks once again to ian for nominating the baby for this week's episode and Yes 'dI would like to do the same spider ball to enter the Flaphouse vip patreon to force me to address the game or movie you would like to see in the future.

See you next time and thanks for watching.