Introduction

A Metroid game?!

That’s right! Metroid: Other M was released for the Nintendo Wii in North America on August 31st, 2010. It was the first Japan-made Metroid game since Zero Mission, and was developed by a group calling themselves “Project M”, consisting of members from Nintendo, Team Ninja (Dead or Alive, Ninja Gaiden), and D-Rockets (cutscenes).

It was developed, published, and written by a long-haired Japanese hippy named Yoshio Sakamoto, a man who also directed every Metroid game excluding the original NES game (I incorrectly state that he had in the first video) and Metroid II: Return of Samus. He also supervised each of the Metroid Prime games. The guy actually has a pretty extensive repertoire for Nintendo games.

Metroid: Other M was first announced at E3 2009, to much hype and high expectations. The game looked gorgeous, the audio was great, and the gameplay looked…different, but doable. We were promised an engaging storyline taking us further into Samus as a character; ground that had never been tread before. All we knew about Samus, as a character, up to that point, was that she liked to leave exotic planets by blowing them up.

Critical reception of the game was extremely polar after the game came out. Critics praised the graphics, music, atmosphere, controls, and just the whole general feel of the game. And a lot of people would agree: it looks very pretty (especially for a Wii game) and the music is very good and all that jazz. But the plot and the characterization have people split, with more people hating it than liking it.

Commercially, the game was either a raging success or a limp flop, depending on your region. It sold 50,000 copies in two weeks in Japan and was the third-best-selling game the week of its release. In America, it sold 173,000 units in September, though “less than half a million” by November of the same year, which was far below what Nintendo was anticipating.

Plot? In a Metroid game? She doesn’t just land on a planet/spaceship and then blow it to shit?

That’s right: Metroid: Other M was Metroid’s first serious attempt at storytelling since Fusion (or Prime: Echoes if you’d rather).

And depending on who you ask, they really shouldn’t have bothered. Like, they really shouldn’t have. In fact, the biggest draw to Metroid: Other M might actually be its characterization, in that people heard that it was so god-awful that they had to try it for themselves. That said, no spoilers, not even in tags, since finding out how badly they botched Samus’s character is easily one of the biggest pulls for this LP.

Vidoes

Bonus

Plot and Interviews
Characters
Fanart - Contains Spoilers!

The Let's Play Archive

Metroid: Other M

by Maple Leaf

Introduction

Vidoes

Bonus