15 Years Later, One Failed Metroid Game Felt Like A Vital Lesson For Nintendo

Metroid might not be one of Nintendo’s top-selling franchises, but it’s easily regarded as one of the most influential. Super Metroid helped create an entire genre while influencing everything from Dark Souls to Hollow Knight, and then Metroid Prime did the exact same thing years later with shooters. But amidst that hallowed ground, there are a couple of bizarre outliers, games where Nintendo tried to get extremely experimental with Metroid, and fell flat on its face. Nowhere is that more clear than with Metroid: Other M, a mostly fine action game with an utterly abysmal story. It’s one of the rare Nintendo duds, and haunted the franchise for years. Luckily, Metroid clearly overcame Other M, but fifteen years later, it’s still a reminder of how far Nintendo has come, especially in how it lets third-party developers tackle its cherished series.

Other M falls in an interesting place in the series. It’s the first attempt at a new mainline Metroid game after the finish of the Prime Trilogy. Unfortunately, it would also remain the only Metroid game for a good six years, in large part due to the lackluster reception.

Primarily developed by Team Ninja, the studio behind Ninja Gaiden, Other M’s biggest problem is that it feels like both an origin story for Samus and a sequel, all at once. Because this is the first Team Ninja title, it very clearly feels like the first chapter of a larger story, and mainly focuses on Samus’ relationship with her commanding officer Adam Malkovich.

While Other M has plenty of narrative ambition, and even does some interesting things as a sequel to Super Metroid — its embellishment on Samus as a character feels a bit off. By this point, Samus should be a battle-hardened bounty hunter who has taken on entire planets, but the whole tone and style of the story make her feel like a rookie, an origin story. That leads to some narrative dissonance that really dragged the entire experience down, especially in a series so often known for its understated and cryptic storytelling.

But the other thing Other M really had working against it was the fact that it had to follow the Prime trilogy, one of the most beloved game trilogies ever seen. Metroid Prime revolutionized how exploration and world-building can work in a shooter, weaving in brilliant puzzling and storytelling on top of all that.

Other M is very decidedly not that kind of game, opting instead for a more linear high-intensity action experience. There’s still a small degree of exploration and the series’ cryptic tendencies, but Team Ninja clearly leaned into what it did best: action.

And in that regard, Other M is a competent action game, with a smart blend of mechanics and some truly memorable boss battles. You actually play the game in both third-person and first-person perspectives. As you make your way through the platforming levels, it’s largely in third-person, forcing you to contend with enemies along the way, but by pointing the Wii remote at the screen you can swap to first-person, giving you a new perspective to solve puzzles, scan enemies, or blast away.

The flip-flopping between viewpoints is actually quite a novel idea and initially feels exciting, but Other M fails to evolve it in a meaningful way as the experience goes on. That leads to combat encounters starting to feel too similar and sluggish, which is a problem compounded by some abysmal story pacing.

But perhaps Other M’s biggest problem is a lack of confidence, as it tried to embrace elements of both classic Metroid and the Prime trilogy. The Prime games were so successful because they branched off in a wild new direction, while still maintaining the spirit of Metroid. Other M nails Metroid’s eerie atmosphere, but the core of its writing and storytelling just doesn’t feel in line with the series’ legacy. Meanwhile, the action-focused combat starts strong, but lacks the crucial elements of satisfying progression, of the game building its mechanics and elements alongside your narrative experience.

Other M doesn’t feel like a bad game, but more of a misguided one. In more recent years, it seems like Nintendo has given third-party developers more leeway to bring truly unique takes on major franchises, from the musou games like Hyrule Warriors to the wildly experimental Mario+Rabbids. And in a roundabout way, we might never have gotten those games without the lessons learned from Other M.