WHY?

The suit is an extension of Samus herself. She is never entirely sealed away from anything. It can be thought of as a part of her body. When the suit runs out of energy, she dies. Yet if she is separated from the suit, she is still a considerable threat. The only difference is she can’t kill space pirates as quickly. The suit was a gift to her from the Chozo race who raised her to be their representative warrior. Samus doesn’t work because of the suit, the suit works because of Samus, and she is the only person it works for. She isn’t just some Master chief-style shell character. All the misguided Freudian analysis in the world can’t change that fundamental fact.

To quote a reviewer in the Toronto Star: “Metroid Prime’s heroine is not a woman for the benefit of the sweaty/excited crowd, and neither is she a standard-bearer nor a courageous leader in the struggle for video game civil rights. She is a supremely talented action figure, and in the closeups on her helmet you can kind of see that she wears mascara, but that is all.”

Projecting themes of motherhood onto her character are similarly misplaced. She only let the baby Metroid live because she wanted to donate it to science.

So there you go. Keep writing.

whoa. whoa. whoa. Miyamoto was talking specifically about Mario not about games as a whole.

“I’ve always felt that the Mario games themselves aren’t particularly suited to having a very heavy story, whereas the Zelda series is something that lends itself more naturally to that idea.” – http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/06/shigeru-miyamoto-interview/

This is why it’s dangerous to put words in mouths of others. next thing you know Miyamoto is branded a “games aren’t art” freak and there are few crimes worse than that in the gaming press.

Games are a completely new medium for storytelling and meaning-making, and one that is poorly understood. This is why Hideo Kojima, despite his kudos for experimenting with and developing the stealth genre, continues to tell his stories through cutscenes (while ironically wondering if there’s another way of doing so). The work of ludic media artists like Jason Rohrer and Daniel Benmergui and persuasive game development from people like Ian Bogost are exploring how we can take those implied themes that emerge almost by accident from design and readily build a game specifically about expressing these.

Unfortunately, until we figure that out, story will always be secondary to gameplay. Nobody is going to read the story if the game stinks, which is why Miyamoto is quoted as saying ‘the less story, the better.’ Trying to smoothly integrate cutscenes with play is therefore a valid experiment, though one whose results and extent of ludic storytelling simply cannot be discerned from a 2 minute trailer.

I personally think no one has any right to complain or “be fearful” about Other M. Metroid is one of Nintendo’s “lower-selling” (aka <2M) franchises anyway; it’s just a matter of popularity. What I mean to say is that those who call themselves “fans” usually don’t even deserve to say they are because they have none or very little knowledge of the series. It’s a repeat of history: the game will be amazing, just like Prime was. And all the naysayers will promptly shut up and love it. Nintendo will continue to make the games and we’ll continue to buy them.

Also — there’s absolutely NOTHING wrong with writing a critical essay about games or even a particular one. They are art, no matter what anyone else says, and art is meant to be enjoyed, reflected upon and thought about, even if that wasn’t its original intention. So don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

–Infinity’s End

P.S. – I personally met Mr. Flores at an Anime Con a while back. I have a signed copy of the Samus drawing you used for your headliner image hanging on my wall.

Ideally, we talk about works like Metroid from multiple perspectives, take chances, build arguments. There is no right answer however. This isn’t math class after all. And in these types of readings, its important to remember that what I or someone else might argue is present, doesn’t mean it was intentional but quite the opposite. The ability to discover meanings that weren’t meaningfully put there are incredibly vital, because everyday we commit subconscious acts that say quite a bit about us and our relationship with the world around us.