Metroid's Sonic 2006.

Other M has been on my radar for a while. The indisputable black sheep of the Metroid series, so known for the hate it gets that you'd be forgiven for not knowing it was positively received by critics upon release. I don't think I would've been able to appreciate what this game meant to Metroid fans circa 2010 as I would not have classified myself as one. In fact, my familiarity with the series was limited to Metroid Prime, a game I did not really care for, and which kept me from playing other Metroid games until only a few years ago. Being more familiar with the franchise now than I was, Other M has become a festering curiosity, always existing in the periphery while I play good Metroid games. It is not enough to be told it's bad, I need to know. I even began to gaslight myself into thinking the game is likely just mediocre, that all the derision and vitriol it gets is a classic case of people globbing onto a popular narrative and continuing to blow it all out of proportion.

Yeah, I'm an idiot. So what?

I don't even know where to begin with this game. Everything Other M sets out to accomplish - even on levels that are very fundamental to gaming as a whole - ends in spectacular failure. Its problems are so great, reviewing this game feels like walking into the home of a hoarder and being asked to sort everything out. I can't do that. You have to call in a professional, and apparently if you brought in any critic from 2010 they'd think it's just fine. GameSpot's Tom McShea looking at the wall-to-wall junk, shrugging, and going "I don't see any problem with this."

Like, do I start with the controls? That's a pretty important part of any game! There is only one controller setup for Other M: holding the Wiimote horizontally. I find this orientation to be inherently uncomfortable, and navigating Samus around in 3D using the Wiimote's gag D-Pad caused my hand to cramp horribly if I played for longer than an hour. Favoring uniqueness over ergonomics is an immutable element of Nintendo's greater design ethos, so... Whatever.

You can switch from third to first person perspectives by pointing the Wiimote at the TV, which you'll need to do frequently as it's the only way to fire your missiles. This locks Samus in place, making it very easy for her to eat shit while you're trying to line a shot up, but even more frustrating is how often the game drops you back out to third person. I started to worry something was wrong with my Wiimote or sensor bar, or that perhaps I was sitting too close to the TV, but everything seems to work fine in other games. It's just Other M that I'm having this problem with and given the overall poor quality of the rest of the game, I'm going to just go with it being either poorly implemented or outright bugged. Even if it was more reliable, I think this is a lousy way to play the game and would have vastly preferred they picked one perspective and just stuck with it. At one point in time, Other M was being designed as a purely 2D game, and I will lament to my dying days the fact that some bozo decided it ought to be this monstrosity instead.

Right, so, we've got a whole lot of garbage boxed up and taken out to the curb now, but oh no a whole fucking god damn muscle rack of SHIT has just fallen on me, and apparently it broke under the strain of Metroid's genre defining elements. All this crap about open-ended design and backtracking with new powers is all over the floor and I hate it here!!

Haha just kidding, because none of that stuff is in this game. Other M is less search-action and more action-platformer. All of your major suit upgrades are given to you at various points in the story, making them no longer feel earned, and most of the backtracking you'll be doing simply comes in the form of your objective marker arbitrarily moving around the Bottle Ship and it's three sectors. There's no satisfying sense of exploration here, and though E-Tanks and missile upgrades can still be collected, their presence is only to satisfy some sense of obligation to Metroid's identifiable pieces. You can just recharge your health or missiles when you're low by tilting the Wiimote vertically and holding down the A button, and because ammo is infinitely recoverable, enemies no longer drop health or missiles, giving you little reason to actually engage in skirmishes. In tacit recognition of the fact that nothing is worth interacting with, Other M frequently locks you into forced combat encounters and god do they drag. Most of them are spongy and have brief windows where they can actually be damaged. There's a handful against multiple enemies that like to zip around and collide with Samus, which causes her to bounce around like Brad Pitt in Meet Joe Black. I swear this game was either designed from a place of contempt for its players or Metroid. Maybe both.

However, I suspect the focus of people's dislike for Other M is its story, or more specifically its bizarre, borderline fetishistic portrayal of Samus Aran. Even if you get past the "male gaze" camera shots she's often framed in, her character is totally butchered. The story starts when Samus is called to the Bottle Ship after responding to a "baby's cry" distress signal... Baby's cry...? You mean, like the baby? Wait a minute, if I move the M in Other M it spells... Othmer!! Ah, it's all coming together now.

She's not the only one on the ship, however. The Galactic Federation has sent their own unit to investigate the disturbance, and it happens to be Samus' old squad, still led by her former CO, Adam. Samus has complicated feelings for Adam, which she articulates in very overwrought narration delivered by actor Jessica Erin Martin, whose delivery sounds like she's being stirred periodically from a medically induced coma. The way these feelings manifest in Samus is through utter submission to his authority. Like I said, you don't earn your upgrades, they're given to you through the story, and I mean they are literally given through Adam's permission. Oh, Samus is authorized to use her Varia suit now that she's been forced to run through several extremely hot areas that caused her physical damage? Well, I guess it's a good thing she acquiesced her autonomy to some asshole at the expense of her well-being.

It's all so out of character, to the point where I just assumed this was written by someone at Team Ninja who didn't care for the source material at best and at worst had some very problematic views on women, but uh nope, this is all on Sakamoto. This is a character who has always been portrayed stoically, hardened by her experiences as a bounty hunter and being orphaned. I never got the sense she'd have a panic attack seeing Ridley, someone she's canonically murdered four times prior to Other M, but she starts hyperventilating at the sight of him and it nearly gets someone else killed. Someone who, by the way, has a habit of calling Samus "princess," which should get both his arms broken. She's cool with it, though, and within the context of the game's narrative she finds it exhilarating to take orders from someone.

It is such a rancid depiction, and at several points it feels like she's just being written by a creep. It is also very heavy-handed in its themes about maternity, and it never has anything interesting to say about it. It's all surface level, superficial crap that's no more deep than the title of the game abbreviating to MOM. Even the more emotional beats feel hollow, partly due to how wooden everyone is, and partly because nothing feels earned within the story. Adam sacrifices himself to eliminate the sector the Metroids are propagating in, but like whatever. Get fucked, loser, you wouldn't let me power bomb.

Other M is legitimately one of the worst major franchise releases I have ever played. When I started this review a hundred years ago, I made a comparison to Sonic 2006 that might just seem snide, but I honestly don't think it's that off-base. It may not be broken in the same way as Sonic, but I think it's equally poor in terms of gameplay and how it feels in-hand. They're also responsible for nearly killing their respective franchises on the spot. There really isn't much else I can say about it, Other M fails to get even one thing right and that's astonishing.