The Other M Is for “Missing the Point”

I started out wanting to write about Super Metroid, and sometime I will, I swear, but somehow this happened instead.

In my first draft of this write-up, I had a several-paragraphs-long tirade about the unfairness of gender roles in our society today.  I talked about how it seemed unfair to me that male heroes in video games can look any way they want, because they have and exercise power in some form in the game world, and that seems like the ultimate basis for “traditional” values associated with male attractiveness.  I talked about how unfair it was that when it came to female heroines of video games, they all had to conform to a certain much narrower standard of attractiveness, governed by a “traditional” mindset regarding what makes a woman attractive, with physical beauty being a mandatory characteristic (for male heroes, it is recommended, but optional).

I want to be proven wrong, but I don’t think I will.  Find me one heroine (assuming she’s a full adult, and that we’re playing a game with relatively realistic character models, and that she is the protagonist) who lacks a respectable bustline and an hourglass figure.

While you’re at it, find me a dodo bird or two.

Actually, no, the dodo is a bad comparison.  It at least existed at some point.

I took the tirade out because it was long-winded and probably ill-informed.  I refer just to the crux of the dilemma, however, because it’s a large part, probably the largest part, of what pisses me off about Metroid: Other M.

Our heroine Samus Aran has proven herself time and again to be an absolutely professional warrior.  Her occupation in the games, overall, is that of the one-woman army.  She is the sort of person the Galactic Federation calls in to take care of a situation after more typical military solutions fail.  She has saved the galaxy more than once, with little oversight, support or backup at any given time.  This is not a secret.  This is the reputation she has earned for herself.

What I personally find remarkable about the Metroid series in general, and its heroine in particular, is that no particular issue, in the universe of the games, is made of her gender.  She is a female warrior who performs most of her missions clad in a suit of powered armor that makes her gender ambiguous.  Come to that, she doesn’t even need to be human.  Any kind of humanoid creature at all could lurk under that armor (and in fact, series lore states that it was made by a non-human race).  Nobody remarks how amazing it is that a woman is the one saving the galaxy with all this heavy firepower.  They just call on her to do a job, she does that job, and everybody just kind of rolls with it. 

To me, this is the ideal goal of feminism.  Her femininity is not an issue of any kind.  It’s neither overplayed nor underplayed – it isn’t played at all.  It doesn’t need to be.  She’s a woman; so what?

Then, in Other M, she falls in with a group of soldiers with whom she worked previously, before she began her solo career as a bounty hunter, and… they all treat her like a brash, over-eager younger sister who can probably hang with the boys, but still warrants a certain amount of looking after.  And she just kind of goes with it.  Grudgingly, sure, but with no real protests to speak of.

Now, narrative isn’t usually a big point in the Metroid games.  It normally just provides a reason for the places you’re going and the things you’re doing there, and that’s it.  It’s the kind of thing that exists mostly in the manual, or in opening and ending cut scenes.  The in-game narrative in Metroid games is often subtler.  The things you do, the way the environment changes as you progress, the new abilities you gain as you explore: that’s the story.  That’s always been part of the genius of the Metroid games.  The story is solid, but heavily understated.  Where so many other games are content to disconnect the narrative from the gameplay, and reward you with non-interactive chunks of the former after completing a certain amount of the latter, the Metroid series on the whole avoids that.  There are exceptions (Metroid Fusion and the Prime trilogy, though they try to keep their non-interactive bits brief and infrequent), but aren’t there always?  Metroid games let your exploration, your brooding sense of isolation and your unanswered questions about all the weird vistas and objects you encounter, be the story. 

Metroid: Other M does not.  It wants to tell you all about Samus’s motherhood instincts, and rather than do it subtly, as Metroid II and Super Metroid did, Other M wants to beat you over the head with it.  It wants to make sure beyond all doubt that you understand that Samus Is A Woman, and that she has a deep-seated need, despite all this galaxy-saving she does, to mother something.  This is why the game has so many terrible ideas, such a distress call being referred to as a “baby’s cry” (seriously), or the space station where the game takes place being referred to as the Bottle Ship (and it’s shaped pretty much like a baby’s bottle, with some additions which obscure this, very slightly).  It has other weird and kind of ridiculous ideas, such as trying to parlay the whole “thumbs-up, thumbs-down” gestures into something with deep meaning and symbolism, but that’s a lot less offensive.  What is offensive is how Metroid: OtherM tries to enhance the overt femininity of the heroine by giving her powered armor a wasp waist and a more pronounced chest, emphasizing the femininity of the whole thing, and by putting fucking high heels on the skin-tight Zero Suit she normally wears beneath it. 

Let me repeat that, because it’s so fundamentally ridiculous that it really should be highlighted.  A woman who is known for single-handedly succeeding where armies fail for some idiotic reason goes into combat with high heels.

It also tries to downplay her known and oft-demonstrated strengths in order to play up her insecurities, with the stated goal of making her a more well-rounded, fully realized and interesting character.  Except she was already interesting and well realized.  The games prior to this mostly took the ancient maxim of storytelling – “show, don’t tell” – to an aggressive extreme and in so doing gave us ideas about the character that we could interpret along certain general lines.  And it did this without getting in the way of the game itself, for the most part.  So few games do this well, or at all.  The ones I can think of offhand are Another World, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. 

Metroid: Other M says that’s not good enough.

It starts off well enough, giving us an early view of Samus’s life as a green recruit in the Galactic Federation army under her commander and mentor Adam Malkovich.  We get to see her as a raw, idealistic young warrior who finds herself at odds with the cold, hard facts of military responsibility.  We can guess this fiery temperament cools into a more level-headed perspective with time and experience, but here we would be wrong, despite everything the rest of the Metroid series seems to imply.  Part of the problem is that Other M has a short list of issues in the larger Metroid story that it wants to tackle, and is hell-bent on doing exactly that, however stupid the method might be.

Let’s talk about the military presence in Other M for a minute.

The story of Metroid: Other M proper starts with Samus responding to a distress call (I’m sorry, a “baby’s cry”; God, that’s a terrible idea) originating from a space station called a Bottle Ship.  Arriving on the scene, she runs across a group of soldiers who have also been dispatched to the Bottle Ship.  They are very familiar to her, as they should be.  They are the Galactic Federation 07^th Platoon, her old unit, still led by Adam Malkovich.  Adam is now a general.  He orders her to shut off her power suit’s many functions and weapons in order to avoid undue damage to the Bottle Ship until his unit’s operation is complete, and she willingly complies

The game has hardly started, and already, we have problems.

Platoons are not led by generals.  Generals are usually in charge of much larger units of soldiers – brigades, whole armies, etc.  They never, ever go to the front lines, and they certainly never take point I sensitive, secret operations with low survival odds.  This isn’t because they’re fundamentally cowardly, lead-from-the-rear sorts.  It is because military regulations prevent it.  The loss of strategic expertise and the compromise of sensitive information should a general be killed or captured is not acceptable.  A general would design and authorize a mission like this, sure.  And then he would send it to a captain or a major under his command to actually execute it.  He certainly wouldn’t go along on the operation and he especially wouldn’t be suiting up in armor to go with his men on the ground.

So why did General Adam Malkovich do exactly that?

Well, the first, most tempting answer is that series director Yoshio Sakamoto is an idiot who lost sight of his creative vision.  And this is probably to some extent true.  After all, despite the known predilections of Team Ninja (famous for the Dead or Alive series of fighting games, as well as Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball, and the Ninja Gaiden reboot), with whom Nintendo partnered to make this game, Sakamoto has gone on record as saying most of the story ideas came from him anyway.  But there’s another reason as well.  Sakamoto is hobbled by the overall story of the series.

Samus has a personal history with General Malkovich.  As explained in Metroid Fusion (chronologically the last game in the series, but the one where Adam is first named and his relationship with Samus explained), Adam was Samus’s commanding officer, back when she was still a soldier in the Galactic Federation army.  It’s clear from what she says and implies in Fusion that she cared for him, admired him and respected him.  It’s also clear that the feeling was mutual.  He often referred to her as “Lady”, a title that was both sardonic and fond; it served as a reminder of his authority, but was always delivered in a way that also acknowledged her autonomy and conveyed his respect.  This was my reading of it, anyway.  Unfortunately, Adam is dead in Metroid Fusion, and has been for some time.  Other M, however, seeks to explore the relationship between Adam and Samus.  Which is fine, in and of itself.  So Adam having that distant-yet-also-paternal authority, where Samus is impulsive, rebellious and brash makes sense.  Other M hams it up a bit for drama’s sake, but the relationship operates along the basic lines described by Samus in Fusion.  Placed where it is in the timeline of the series, though, it makes very little sense. 

If Samus was a rookie bounty hunter, fresh out of the army and stumbling into her old comrades during an early solo mission, then the relationship dynamic would make sense.  Samus would still be making her way in her new life, feasibly shaky enough on her own still that she could easily fall back into old habits of obedience when in proximity to (and under the nominal oversight of) her old commander.  It would also explain her abject terror at encountering the series recurring villain Ridley, who is responsible for the loss of her family and her entire way of life, because this would be her first encounter with a truly vicious, powerful and serious enemy who has also provided her with one of her life’s great turning points.

But Metroid: Other M occurs next to last in the Metroid timeline.  Samus is a big girl now.  She’s defeated the Space Pirates on four separate occasions by this point, and has destroyed her nemesis Ridley as many times.  She has committed practical genocide on a parasitical species whose use as a biological weapon also threatened the galaxy.  She was also indirectly responsible for the detonation of an entire planet.  She is a consummate warrior, a skilled veteran, and her quick thinking and determination have saved the galaxy time and again.  If Queen Badass of the Galaxy was a real title, it would be hers.

And yet, unaccountably, she obeys Adam’s commands with little question (and much figurative hand-wringing over what he might think), including arbitrary commands to deactivate most of the useful functions of her power suit.  Her encounter with Ridley, whom she has destroyed four times now (and whose reappearance after “death” should no longer come as a surprise to anyone, least of all Samus), has her inexplicably paralyzed with fear.

So the writing is terrible.  Both on the level of execution (some of the dialogue is pretty cringe-worthy) and on the conceptual, story level, it’s bad.  So, so bad.

So how’s the actual game?

It’s okay.  Probably the largest problem with Metroid: Other M from a purely gameplay standpoint is that it feels like a Metroid game made by people who enjoy the series thoroughly, but have trouble articulating what makes it great.  And since they can’t explain it, they’re unable to really create it.  There’s exploration, to an extent, but you are limited.  Previous titles in the series mostly feature a fairly open environment, allowing you to go wherever your abilities can take you.  Metroid and Super Metroid have become famous over the years for the sheer number of ways clever players have been able to exploit the heroine’s abilities to reach locations in the gameworld which they were not meant to be able to reach until much later in the game.  Metroid: Other M, on the other hand, has definite ideas concerning where it wants you to go, and when, and its structure allows for very little player freedom.  Platforms you might be able to reach with new abilities remain inaccessible due to invisible barriers; the only available entrance or exit to these areas is the one the game designers intended, even if your abilities should by rights allow you other means of access.  This flies in the face of the very essence of the Metroid experience.

Even the process of gaining new weapons and abilities is robbed of much of its savor.  In previous Metroid games, Samus gathers various upgrades in order to better explore the game’s world.  She empowers herself through resourcefulness, diligent exploration, and the competent application of existing skills and abilities.  You have to go out and find the items that empower you, and the ability to use them and apply them in other areas of the game is its own reward.  In Other M, Samus gains new weapons and abilities because… a man told her to activate them.  The sense of discovery is completely absent, and in fact no real discovery actually happens.  The abilities just become available to you at set points throughout the story, no finding required.  And the narrative framework makes this even more galling by specifically denying you these abilities that you always had, and in at least one memorable case only activating an ability after it would have been most useful. 

The story’s given excuse for this may be weak, but it can be made to work.  Samus’s weapons are deactivated so as to avoid collateral damage, okay, fine, I get it.  It’s stupid, but I can work with it.  But her armor abilities being turned off?  Is Adam really afraid that she could potentially damage something by, I don’t know, being immune to high temperatures at it?  And then, when all of Samus’s abilities are activated by the endgame anyway and fail to do any real damage to the Bottle Ship, the whole “authorization” business falls apart like the lazy fucking gimmickry that it is.

The game itself is all right and actually can be pretty consistently fun (I did manage to finish it, after all), if a disappointing low point in its series and a frustrating exercise in missing the point of what makes Metroid games interesting and fun in the first place.  But it’s saddled with some awful game design decisions and this frankly embarrassing plot that tries hard to be deep, and sacrifices no small measure of consistency with the greater series story in the attempt.  That it fails so miserably only makes the sacrifice all the more aggravating.