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| Forum Retrospective #5: Metroid Other M - Any objections Lady? |
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| Luigi Dude:
--- Quote from: ejamer on October 27, 2019, 08:43:12 AM ---The one thing that I was less keen on regarding controls was the quick dodge action. There is no penalty for moving at the wrong time or in the wrong direction, so you can choose to just rapidly tap any direction for movement and wait for the enemy attacks to miss before unleashing devastating counter-attacks. There is no skill here, and it saps the fun out of a combat system that is otherwise pretty decent. I'm not suggesting that should've been remove entirely - the dodge/counter system is a good addition to the game - but that it should have had some risk built in. (Think of reflecting beams with your shield in Breath of the Wild: hard to pull off correctly, but extremely satisfying when you do. Then imagine that they change the controls it so that all you had to do was rapidly tap a button and it would work 100% of the time. Would it still be as satisfying? Heck, no.) --- End quote --- This is where Hard mode improves the game. The mechanic is still really easy to pull off but you die in just a few hits since there's no powerups to expand health. So unlike Normal where you can mindless tap and brush off quit a few hits, Hard mode at least makes you worry you could die from a slip up. The Ridley fight is very intense on Hard for this reason since some of his attacks can literally take 1/3 of you entire health if they hit. So while Hard mode makes the game an even worse Metroid because it removes exploration, its a much better action game since it really forces the player to master the mechanics. This is how I learned Samus has a counterattack for most enemies and bosses. On Normal I just blasted most enemies with charged shots and missles but on Hard since I couldn't bruteforce my way, I really learned each enemies patterns and discovered so much I didn't released on Normal. Seriously, when you start killing most of the big enemies and bosses with their individual counter animations, it makes combat faster and so much more satisfying. |
| Adrock:
--- Quote from: Khushrenada on October 27, 2019, 10:41:50 PM ---How dare you try to rival me when it comes to walls of text!! That's my thing! Everyone knows that. Get your own thing. :P --- End quote --- I said I had a lot of feelingz. |
| ejamer:
--- Quote from: Luigi Dude on October 28, 2019, 03:01:00 AM ---... worse Metroid ... better action game ... --- End quote --- Even before playing on hard mode, I feel like this is a reasonable description for the game. Ignore a few pacing choices, and the problems with the story, and it's a pretty great action game. --- Quote ---... Seriously, when you start killing most of the big enemies and bosses with their individual counter animations, it makes combat faster and so much more satisfying. --- End quote --- Agreed - the combat system is a bit more nuanced than you might guess when first starting, but once you start identifying the combat patterns it both looks and feels better then when just blasting away wildly. It was mid-way through the game before I realized this, but my appreciation increased from there on. What did people think about the challenge level for combat and exploration in this game? I died a few times (sometimes sudden death triggers, sometimes during boss fights before the patterns), but the checkpoints are generous so that never felt problematic. Exploration is a mixed bag; there are secrets to look for, but most of the game has very clear hand-holding about where to go next (except for the baffling lava section that seemed to actively discourage you from going the way you needed to go). |
| Adrock:
--- Quote from: ejamer on October 28, 2019, 09:33:16 AM ---What did people think about the challenge level for combat and exploration in this game? --- End quote --- Combat should have either leaned more or less on action. As is, it’s somewhere in the middle and didn’t feel as good as I would have wanted. The enemies should have been either mostly bullet sponges like in the 2D games or far smarter thus requiring more skill and strategy. I felt like I was waiting a lot. It’s the same issue I have with Ocarina of Time. You just hold your shield up until you get an opening. In Other M, there’s an enemy you can partially freeze but Overblast doesn’t work so you just SenseMove until his glow-y eye appears then your best move is to go into Search View and fire a missile. If you miss your chance, you’re SenseMove-ing again. That wasn’t that fun to me. Personally, I would’ve leaned toward heavier action mainly in an effort to separate a mostly third person 3D Metroid from past games in the series. We would have gotten to see Samus show off exactly why she’s the most dangerous, badass woman in the galaxy. Exploration was lacking. Without, for example, the various visors like in the Prime games or the ability to “cheat” by dropping a power bomb like in the 2D games, some of the collectibles seemed unfairly hidden in Other M. To see say a floor tile-ish thing that can be destroyed, you had to go into Search View and look around. That was very unintuitive. To balance it out, the developers eventually put a dot on the map to denote an item was in the room. I thought that could have been handled better. And like I previously said, Wii was at times not powerful enough to do what the developers seemed to want to do. Additionally, as you mentioned, Other M held your hand a lot. Past games used landmarks and colored doors to hopefully make a room memorable and naturally lead you back there. While no two rooms look the same in Other M aside from Save rooms, they were less memorable. That’s more of a level/art design issue. Having to go into Search View just to see an entire wall didn’t help things either. |
| Ian Sane:
--- Quote from: Adrock on October 27, 2019, 09:48:14 PM ---Other M could have been a canon gaiden series. It would have given the developers more room to work with in almost every aspect. --- End quote --- Nintendo in general is kind of bad at this. They seem to get into a formula for their series where it's the same villain every time because that's the formula for the series. Samus is a bounty hunter (though it was later revealed that the original dev team doesn't actually know what a bounty hunter is) so she can have an endless amount of adventures that don't involve Metroids or space pirates. But they don't do that. Mario almost always is against Bowser and the exceptions to that are when another dev team is involved or they're repurposing Doki Doki Panic. In Zelda there is quite often the reveal that Ganon was the big baddie all along. But Batman doesn't fight the Joker every time - he has a whole rogues gallery and thus only faces his arch-nemesis once in a while. James Bond doesn't always fight the same villain. Spider-Man doesn't always fight the same villain. So these iconic Nintendo characters could get a lot of mileage out of some gaiden side-stories that can have the same type of gameplay but different locales and villains. But Nintendo doesn't like to do that so Samus always fights Metroids every single time. Though in Metroid's case there is the issue that the enemy is the title of the series. But then Link's Awakening was a "Legend of Zelda" game without Zelda so they can be flexible with this. |
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