The teaser site to Metroid: Other M is up with… soft piano music. People are emailing me and, judging by responses I am seeing on message forums and all, there are many Metroid fans that are getting scared (not scared in the good way such as a Metroid coming out of nowhere to eat them).
I tried to warn you guys.
We don’t have much information other than the teaser site and the trailer. But we do have the philosophy of the game as described by Sakamoto. That is what is worrying people.
Listen to what Sakamoto has specifically said. From the interview in Wired:
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Sakamoto: You might be aware of this, but I actually wasn’t that involved in the development of the Prime series. The goal in creating Metroid Prime was to create the ultimate first-person adventure, and I do think that Retro was able to do that. My approach, my concept, is a little bit different in terms of gameplay. And the story I want to tell with Other M can’t be achieved with that approach. So I think my take on this project is quite a bit different than Retro’s.
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So Other M will not have the gameplay of Metroid Prime (and Metroid Prime was Super Metroid in 3d. So Other M is going to be a departure from the gameplay from games like Super Metroid).
Let’s listen some more. Roll the tape:
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Wired.com: So, then, what is your vision of the ultimate Metroid game?
Sakamoto: Within the greater Metroid series, the Other M story will tie together the stories that took place in Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion. One of my goals is to present Samus as an appealing human character, and that involves explaining a little bit about what happened in her past as well as the characters that influenced her. The story will play a big part. There’s another facet to the Project M team, and they’re responsible for creating the cinematics, some of which you saw in the trailer yesterday. Of course, Metroid is a very sophisticated action game as well. So our goal is to create an experience that is seamless between the cinematics and the actual gameplay, and creating a game that anyone can play that is only playable on the Wii.
Hayashi: One of our concepts that we like to keep in mind as we’re progressing through development is to create Samus Aran as this very appealing, the ultimate female heroine in the game universe, so we’re keeping that in mind.
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Sakamoto has said in interviews in the past of his dream of melding 3d and 2d, of cinematic and gameplay. You have already gotten a taste of what he intends to do from Metroid Fusion and Zero Mission.
Let’s listen some more:
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Wired.com: There seemed to be a whole lot of gameplay going on in the trailer, from 2-D to 3-D to first-person… How’s this game actually going to play?
Sakamoto: Unfortunately, I can’t give you too much information on the controls at this time. Our ultimate goal is to create something that Metroid fans want to play, and want to see visually. In addition, we want to make it something that new users can get interested in as well and make it something that is accessible for them, and only available for the Wii.
No details on the gameplay. Alas. Let us go to another interview. This one is from 1up:
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1UP: What most people love about Metroid is that it offers a huge, open world. It’s non-linear, there’s so much to explore, and you can move about at your own pace. Is that something you’re going to be retaining for this game, or is it going to be more of a linear, level by level progression?
YS: If you think about this one as being maybe similar to Metroid Fusion, then I think you’ll have an idea of how the story will play out. It’s still linear in the sense that there’s a progression, but there are side areas that players can go into. It will retain that true, Metroid feel.
1UP: Team Ninja is known for their cinematics and storytelling. Is that something that will factor in heavily?
YS: As I mentioned before, it’s kind of similar to Fusion in that there’s an overarching story that the player will experience as they progress through the game. It is a game, but within it is a larger story that will unfold as the player progresses.
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So Other M will be Fusion 2. And Fusion was a departure from Super Metroid. Anyone saying Other M is a successor to Super Metroid is not reading anything Sakamoto is saying. Here he says it will be more like Fusion.
Now let us listen to the interview from Kotaku:
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And while we did squeeze out of them that the game wouldn’t support MotionPlus or the Wii Balance Board (they knew that was a joke question), Sakamoto and Hayashi were more eager to promote two aspects that Nintendo doesn’t often use to sell its games: stylishness and story.
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I tend to believe that there are developers at Nintendo that resent Miyamoto and his fame. This desire for stylishness and story is not so much because they think it will make a better game but to differentiate themselves from Miyamoto. There is an interview somewhere of Sakamoto saying he wants to make games that are different than what Miyamoto would have done.
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: “With Fusion, that game was very story-driven. In that game, I believe I was able to explain Samus as a character, as a person, not just somebody in armor. And I was not only explain Samus but the characters around her… with Super Metroid I showed, through her relationship with the baby Metroid, some of her maternal instincts. Between those two stories I feel I was able to explain Samus as a person. But because Metroid equals Samus, I’d like to develop her character further, as a soldier, as a human, also as a woman. That’s what they’re hoping to do with Other M.”
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The above is the most ridiculous quote I have ever seen any game developer make. Is Sakamoto so disconnected from the consumer experience to actually believe that in this scene:
…the consumers were thinking of Samus as a maternal being, as a woman? I was thinking, “Thank God that thing didn’t eat me!” And then I thought, “Whoever made this game screwed up. Metroids do not grow ‘big’. They ‘evolve’ like they did on SR-388 in Metroid II.” Since Sakamoto wasn’t part of Metroid II, I thought Super Metroid was having a ret-con but then the Omega Metroid shows up at the end of Metroid Fusion.
Super Metroid shows how poor a story teller Sakamoto is, not the opposite. Already in Super Metroid, there were contradictions which was hard to make due to how limited the story is.
The only thing Fusion demonstrated was how Sakamoto shouldn’t have any part of the Metroid series at all. Metroid Fusion essentially destroyed the Metroid storyline and Samus as a character. Samus is now running around in a bizarre suit being ‘melded’ to it. What a dumb idea. Not even the biggest Metroid fans liked the ‘new Samus’.
Above: Behold Sakamoto’s “genius”… the destruction of the Metroid storyline. It is so bad that even Sakamoto only makes prequels to Fusion now.
With Zero Mission, the game was outsold by the GBA release of NES Metroid which is funny as Zero Mission has NES Metroid as a unlockable. The market has been consistently rejecting Sakamoto’s “spin” on Metroid. To this day, Metroid Prime is the best selling Metroid. And it is the game whose direction Sakamoto disagrees with.
Man, that quote just gets me. I can’t believe the interviewer didn’t fall over laughing (but he is from Kotaku so he probably thought what he heard was “really awesome!”).
I am seeing four reactions to the Metroid: Other M teaser website. They are as follows:
People already hating it. They are convinced it will be a Manga type of crappy story. They want Metroid to stick to its sci-fi grittiness and not be an estrogen game of a soap opera.
People worried but having a wait and see attitude about it. We haven’t seen much gameplay, if at all, from it. So they are going to wait for more information.
People who are hyped up about it because they enjoy the process of hype. You know the type of people I am talking about. The way how they derive entertainment from video games is not really by experiencing them but continually bathing themselves in the hype. Usually, these people seem to be younger and have not woken up to the bait and trap trick the Industry keeps playing on them. Anyway, you will instantly spot these people when they become very hostile to anyone who does not join in the hype orgasm. If you say, “I am worried…” they will shout you down. They aren’t really for the game itself so much as they just enjoy getting high on the hype and do not want anyone to interrupt their ‘rush’.
People who think Other M will be glorious because Sakamoto is a ‘Game God’. This is the most interesting reaction to me. I believe if there is any cancer behind the making of games it is the belief of ‘Game Gods’ and their ‘magical visions’ that poison it. The only real ‘Game God’ is the customer. And customers end up being the game’s true designers. A good game designer makes the game based on consumer behavior. Not on the developers’ behavior.
The notion of ‘Game God’, i.e. the Great Artist, exists on a fallacy. In other mediums, when the notion of ‘Great Artist’ is prevalent, the medium enters decline. No exceptions. Shakespeare wrote that the secret to creating wit and imagination was that it was joint process between the speaker and the listener. In other words, Shakespeare intentionally relied and respected the audience’s imagination. He did not force his imagination onto the audience. Shakespeare’s imagination and the audience’s imagination would meet and the combination of the two ends up being the true consumer experience.
I have asked myself why the quality of gaming has been in decline for the last decade or so. This is the pattern I am noticing:
Early games were limited technologically. There were no cutscenes and all because there couldn’t have been any. The player had to use his imagination for many parts.
As games became more technologically advanced, there is a correlation that the games became more eccentric. This has to be due to the game developer dumping more and more of his ‘vision’ into the game. In Next-Generation Gaming, the player’s imagination is not emphasized. Only the game developer’s imagination is. So games become a one way direction of imagination which leads to the narrative games.
The eccentricity has different flavors and you can see the distinct changes between Western and Japanese games. Western games have the eccentricity of bald space marine, apocalyptic landscapes, very realistic visuals, while Japanese tend to drift more towards the cute and cartoony visuals with anime inspirations. The question isn’t whether one side is right or wrong. The answer is that eccentricity is wrong on both sides as they attempt to usurp the player’s delightful imagination with their own. Can someone point to me the great best sellers who sold due to their narratives? There are few if any at all. And these people are shocked when games like Mario 5 or Wii Sports sell big.
It is my contention that older game developers (i.e. “Game Gods) do not understand why the games of the 8-bit and 16-bit generations sold in the first place. Or, rather, not all their ideas are on target. (This is understandable as gaming is a new medium.) An example of this would be Miyamoto thinking people buy Mario games because they like Mario. Yet, the market refused to accept the 3d Marios as the successor to the Super Mario Brothers series despite the same characters and game universe. The point is that there is more we do not know about gaming than what we do know. Gaming is the Unexplored Continent of entertainment.
I believe that many Nintendo developers, like Sakamoto, believe due to the success of older games like on the NES, he believes himself to be a Great Artist. His handheld Metroids were not exactly well received by the market. Fusion was totally overshadowed by Metroid Prime. The NES Classic series of Metroid on GBA had more impact than Zero Mission. But the fact of the matter is that the best selling Metroid was Prime which Sakamoto did not have much of a part in. Metroid Prime is to Metroid as Ocarina of Time is to Zelda. I can understand why people would not like the game, but it cannot be denied that it has been the peak of the series in the sales.
The use of better tools and budget in a game will become a liability. It will place Sakamoto’s eccentricity on stilts.
Have you noticed a pattern of increasing narratives in Mario, Zelda, and Metroid? Zelda has gone full blown narrative with Aonuma doing crazy things like putting trains in Zelda (getting to know Zelda’s “personality” and all). Metroid has been inching toward greater narratives but now is going full blown narrative with Other M. Mario has been inching towards narrative too as we saw with Sunshine and Galaxy but Miyamoto is wisely slapping down attempts by Nintendo developers to inject narrative into the game. We are witnessing a clear pattern by all Nintendo developers to go ‘narrative’ (which is not different from the rest of the Industry).
‘Narratives’ are not entertaining to the gamer. However, narratives are very entertaining to the developers. I would like an interviewer to ask, next time a game developer waxes on about his ‘grand narrative’, how many best selling novels has he written? How many successful plays has he penned? How many TV episodes has he written? How many movies has he directed?
A story teller is something where everyone thinks they can do it. But it is much, much harder than people imagine. It takes a life time to learn the craft of story telling. These game developers think that just because they watch some movies, watch some anime, that they know how to be a story crafter. Even in the world of fiction writing, the success rate is like 1%. Just because you have the ability to make computer animations doesn’t mean you have the talent to craft a story.
You know why other entertainment mediums laugh at video games? It is because of that reason of all these narratives. Novel writers think video games are a complete joke of a story. The games they prefer to play? Games like Civilization. Movie makers of course use ‘like a video game’ to insult mediocre movie makers.
The craft of making a video game compared to the craft of story telling is as different as making a video game compared to baking a pie. Game makers are arrogant as hell to think that their game making translate to story making skills.
You know what I want to see. I want to see movie makers and writers and musicians all decide they are going to casually make some video games. After all, using the same logic, just because they have succeeded in selling novels and records must mean they have all the skills necessary to make a video game.
Video game makers would laugh at them if that happened. Why do you think other entertainment mediums are laughing at you?
As for me, I don’t “hate” Other M. Count me in the ‘wait and see’ camp. But it is hilarious when people cannot tolerate people expressing their worry about the game. “Stop being a purist!” “Stop being a Metroid fundamentalist!” Metroid fundamentalist? That is a new one. At least the word ‘fun’ appears in “Metroid fundamentalist”.
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