Olimar is still silent, though. I depart from the mainstream of video game appreciation at this point, but I generally agree with that developer who called narratives and video games like combining chocolate and tuna fish.
http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2012/02/10/david-jaffe-video-games-and-movies-go-together-like-chocolate-and-tuna-fish/As much as reviewers bitch about movies feeling like video games nowadays, I think video games trying to feel like movies is a much bigger aesthetic crisis. The protagonist of a video
should be a mostly silent avatar for the most part, excepting adventure-type games like Monkey Island and Layton. People who identify with Master Chief or Marcus Fenix's "personality" are fooling themselves or have issues with emotional stuntedness.
Other M screwed the pooch by trying to make Samus into a fleshed-out character in the first place, though it certainly didn't help its case by taking the worst tack possible. (Also didn't help that it sucked as a game). I forget the term the guy used, but I read an essay about the strange place LA Noir occupied in the video/game narrative spread, and though the writer ultimately endorses the game, he brought up what to me is the salient problem with narrativized games: the disjunction between narrative portrayal and character actions. In LA Noir, your character is presented as an upright lawman, but in the game you're free to run over pedestrians and cause unlimited property damage. Nathan Drake is a presented as a likable rogue in the narrative, but in the game he's a mass murderer. Ezio is an honorable assassin who will stab innocent pedestrian's in between the ribs. There's fundamental disjunction that can only be resolved by making the gameplay so restrictive as to be moot, making the narrative so flippant and crass as to be repugnant, or by reducing the avatar's character so as to be a blank occupied by the player.
I favor the latter approach. I would point to Half Life 2 as an example of a good balance between narrative framing/incentive and player perspective, and one that a future Metroid title could emulate to breath more life into the game world while leaving Samus inscrutable. In Other M, we were fed awful cutscenes with Samus acting deferential, scared, crying, paralyzed, but during the actual game she runs through any assortment of terrible monsters and aliens without blinking, and we have past knowledge of her stoically facing down scenarios in past games that she now reacts to in a traumatized fashion. Not to mention the ridiculous narrative justification of the weapon restrictions.
Found the article, worth a read, though I fundamentally disagree with Bissell about video games as the next step in the evolution of story telling.
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6625747/la-noire