Stumbling through Super Metroid - Part 10

[davidn]

Celebrating ten parts! But this is, without a shadow of a doubt, the dullest video to produce that I've done in this entire project. After making what I thought was great progress for the last few videos, here I was reduced to running around the entire game in a very big circle for just shy of two hours, after which I asked Kjorteo to give me a pointer and through him I remembered about the giant scary face in the rock that had scared me off several videos ago.

This video is mostly me hoovering up secrets, messing about and getting frustrated. Once again, over two hours of gameplay have been compressed down into exactly fifteen minutes.

http://youtu.be/Fh2_50_qgFw

Comments

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

*This post contains Metroid: Fusion and Metroid: Other M spoilers*

Honestly, I don't remember the game as well as I make out, including just how bad the linearity was. I've finished it once. I found it disappointing but I did ultimately decide it was enjoyable. It is unfortunate that the linearity directly flies in the face of what so many people love about the series, and, the gameplay structure that its name has come to exemplify. That's the main problem, I think.

But, many of the individual pieces are there. The setting is compelling and rich with Metroid/metroid lore. It has continuity with previous games. There are nifty powerups that give a sense of progression - if not as much as they should, with exploration so tightly regulated - and are tied plotwise to the continuing struggle against the X.

Adam's problems aside, a voice in your ear is an interesting, not-too-intrusive way to support the plot. At this stage the series remained committed to showing, instead of just having Samus clumsily narrate everything. And again the lift-shaft monologues were a nice, short (I think?) and well-timed window into Samus' thoughts. Even if Adam was too prevalent in them.

I'd forgotten how heavily his interference was tied to the game's linearity. It's doubly unfortunate that his debut had him not just as an (unprecedented) bureaucratic authority figure, but actually, physically limiting the player. He went on to be, by all accounts, even worse in Other M - the most ridiculous example being him "authorising" her to use the Varia suit, which she already possesses, after a considerable time spent taking damage in a super-heated area!

Coupled with the well-crafted atmosphere of the game, the AI - "Adam" - with its ability to control and obstruct your progress, had the potential to be a very chilling villain, and it certainly seemed to be going that way. But then he calls you "Lady" and suddenly you're supposed to forgive the fact that he's an obnoxious twat and more than a little creepy.

The navigation rooms - I'm starting to remember how badly they boxed you in. Yes, that definitely was a bad design decision. But I still think there's some merit to the game, even with the linearity. But you say Zero Mission is much better? I'll give that a shot.

(I didn't mind the doors in Maridia because it was a one-off instance. It was really just tying several powers to one boss. You get the space jump directly after beating him, then you get to collect the plasma beam too. And whatever was through the other door. The rest of the game is so clever with its sequencing and rewarding exploration that I didn't think it was lazy to put a couple of items behind boss-locked doors. It's a bit of a mix-up and brings variety.)

As for Samus being vulnerable, I'm all for that. I and seemingly everyone else in the world didn't like how it was handled. I don't think its quite as character-wrecking as many suggest, but wasn't very good. Vulnerability is supposed to make a character human and sympathetic, and in an action game, facing the projected fears by blasting the crap out of them cathartically tends to be a nice metaphor for character-development. But when introducing vulnerability you need to respect the character and her prior characterisation, not just shove in whatever emotional state you think makes for good drama.

Paralysing Samus in the face of a foe she's canonically killed god-knows how many times and then having the nearest man rescue her (this part would be fine if done better) is not really doing her characterisation any favours. Not at such a late point in the supposed timeline, when she's (by implication) gone through all this catharsis and development already.

Add in all the heavy-handed "THE BABY THE BABY THE BABY" whining and the eager-to-please, near-suicidal adherance to power-up "authorisations", and damn, I can see why so many fans despise the game To accept it as canon forces us to completely reinterpret the character we thought we knew, and canon additions that involve heavy retconning - even if it's only implied - are not usually a good idea. From what I've seen it also seems to be about as linear as Fusion and nowhere near as interesting.

[kjorteo]

I never said paralyze Samus in the face of Ridley to the point where someone has to rescue her; that's just stupid. It's not like she hasn't killed him pretty much every time she's ever been on any mission anywhere or anything.

What I'm thinking runs deeper than that. Ridley, remember, is the bastard who killed Samus' parents. And yeah, "you killed my parents" is actually kind of a cliche in storytelling, but Ridley gets some points back just for how diabolically far he takes it. Take this passage, from the Metroid wiki, talking about events in the manga:

"[Ridley] has also frequently displayed a very sadistic sense of humor, evidenced by his various comments against Samus upon their first meeting since K2-L. Ridley even goes so far as to taunt her by saying that he may have eaten and incorporated the cells of her mother's corpse into his body, and sardonically wonders what part her cells reside in. He then proceeds to bring his foot down on Samus, angrily saying "At least pay your respects!"; referring to her dead mother, showing just how much joy he takes in the suffering of others."

Now, if you're me ... well, okay, if you're me, you zero in on the part about Ridley bringing his foot down on her BUT NEVER MIND THAT. AHEM. If you're like me only normal, this strikes me as very strong fuel for Ridley's very continued existence getting under Samus' skin later. The first Metroid Prime has a great example of this, which it paints with all the masterfully minimalistic wordless subtlety as we saw in David's Super Metroid run. Observe Samus' reaction to Ridley's appearance at the end of the intro stage. Samus immediately freezes (despite being in the middle of yet another self-destruct countdown escape sequence) and quickly looks around, gun pointing everywhere, the second she hears that sound. The "oh fuck, it's him" sound. They have an intense staredown, at which point I personally like to imagine some sort of hateful "YOU!!" declaration on Samus' end (though obviously we don't hear anything.) He then flies away, and she makes a very obviously frustrated gesture, which that look in her eyes seals.

This is a good scene. It's like ten seconds long but it still managed to tell all that. Hell, it probably told a better story in those wordless ten seconds than the dialogue-heavy Other M did in its entirety. (Then again, I have quite literally seen some Samus/Ridley 34 that does a better job exploring their traumatic connection than Other M did, so that might not be saying much.)

Samus is clearly rattled by Ridley, which is honestly the way it should be given their past. Rattled, not helpless. She is strong enough to overcome it and be a beam-toting badass, but it leaves some opening for interesting characterization moments in that she has this obviously sore subject to contend with, especially if he's a walking reminder of past trauma that just will not leave her alone no matter how many times she kills him. Something like Ridley making Samus lose her cool when she's supposed to be calmly concentrating on whatever the task at hand is a neat and very believable idea, Other M just took it way too far. I was thinking more like Sergeant Calhoun from Wreck-It Ralph only played completely seriously. It could work!

That's how you can show characterization without neutering her, I think. There's a certain bit of subtlety in how to make someone a strong female character without making them a Strong Female Character, of course, and they obviously missed the mark with Fusion and Other M. But the potential is there!

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

"I never said paralyze Samus in the face of Ridley to the point where someone has to rescue her; that's just stupid. It's not like she hasn't killed him pretty much every time she's ever been on any mission anywhere or anything."

Sorry, I wasn't trying to suggest that you were in support of that. I was just saying that, in my complaints about Other M I wasn't against the idea of her being vulnerable, and then I just pompously went on to detail my own opinions about the game.

There's always a certain amount of preamble that I feel the compulsive need to give when complaining about something like this, because there are a lot of fans out there who just hate EVERYTHING and will have an explosive reaction to the slightest things, and there are just as many people out there who will cry "sexist!" because of a perfectly, statistically normal situation that happens to have a man in a position of power over a woman or complaining about a woman or something. I don't like feeding the inherent mistrust of all males (or white people) by giving disclaimers about everything and acting like I have something to be defensive about, but it's just so easy to be misconstrued that I find myself making my excuses even among people that I know know better.

Anyway, as I understand it they've been trying to incorporate more from the manga and that's where we get all this Adam stuff and Samus going to pieces against Ridley. Even if the manga is a popular version of things, I think it's terrible that they're just shoving it in and completely ignoring the years of characterisation the games have built up in the absence of a heavily-narrated story. There are certainly ways to take nods in its direction and make Samus human and vulnerable without going ridiculously over-the-top as they did; most notably in the ways that you've described.

There certainly is an art to creating a strong female character without going overboard. Even though they're different mediums, you really just have to look at some of the ongoing stereotypes in cinema to see why video games have so few workable heroines. And so few workable heroes that aren't just testosterone-filled stereotypes, come to think of it.

I was going to comment on the differences between western and eastern culture and how that plays a part, but while I think there really is something to that I'd rather be a bit more sure on my research before launching into it. But I will still get on America's case for its tendency to put everyone in a bikini (because developers apparently can't get through coding sessions without something jiggly to look at and publishers think all gamers are stupid - and are probably, judging by modern trends, almost right) and turn them into a superpowerful uberbitches. Strong Female Characters indeed.

[kjorteo]

Hey, I remember this discussion, sort of!

Anyway, I just wanted to drop http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/learning-from-other-m off here now that I'm finally getting around to cleaning out my inbox.