And the story was just plain meh. The game is a good game, but a bad for a Metroid game.
The story itself as a whole I thought was horrific. I beat the game and sat through the two hour movie of it. @Gahars suffered through it with me, he knows what I mean.
First off, take away all the other "themes" and it's a straightforward plot. Samus goes to a space station to shoot aliens. Not gripping at all. But the story REALLY gets bad when they start incorporating themes.
The first one is the blatant and obvious sexism. I don't consider myself some femi-Nazi in anyway, but even I acknowledged the sexism here. Samus is dependent on Adam like some 50's housewife. She lives to serve the man in the relationship. Even when it comes to turning on her goddamn envirosuit to protect against heat, she still doesn't do that and waits for Adam to call him and say "Oh yeah, activate that envirosuit, will ya?" I could understand the missiles, bombs, other weapons since yeah, they could prove hazardous. But the fact that Samus would
run into a fucking fire without protection because daddy Adam didn't say so doesn't just show she has respect for Adam, it shows she's batshit crazy obsessed with him. Even in the later game, when Adam shoots her to stop her from stopping him from basically going on a suicide mission, the imagery of having her be weak and powerless over big man Adam just felt really wrong with everything else in the game. It wasn't a relationship of respect, it was a relationship of abuse, where Samus is so conditioned to please her man that she'll basically take unnecessary risks and bend over backwards for him. For any new character this would be bad. For Samus, who was shaped rather masterly in Prime to be strong, independent, and a loner, it's character assassination of the worst kind.
Then there's the Ridley thing. Samus is shaped in every other game to be a strong, fearless, independent woman. She fights Ridley like twice in other games before it. But when Other M comes around, she starts breaking down like some frail little girl with some PTSD shit that made no fucking clue. So what happens? She needs a big strong man to save her because she's a weak little girl.
This doesn't even bring up the plot holes or gameplay elements. They developed this whole murder mystery thing which they never actually told you about in the end. They dropped it completely and they never actually told you who it was. Drawing your own conclusions from evidence works when it's mysterious easter eggs in like Portal, for something they emphasize heavily as a plot arc in Other M, it's terrible writing. Also the black guy with the Spartan laser obviously gets knocked into lava, you see him falling to his death in a pit of lava. But then apparently he just landed on something that wasn't lava or something and walked it off to help you in the end.
Then there's the gameplay. Exploration was alright but combat was awful. Basically mash the D-Pad for random dodging and mash A for shooting. Changing to missiles was just a dumb decision and made almost any type of fluid missile-using combat impossible. Using a D-Pad for movement in a 3D environment is also a dumbass decision when I thought every Wii came with a nunchuck and like almost every other "hardcore" Nintendo title uses it, from Twilight Princess to Super Mario Galaxy to even the boxing game in Wii Sports.
I would easily mark it as the lowest point in the series for emphasizing on a plot that was awful and having gameplay elements that didn't feel necessary at all. It's a complete mess of a game and a giant red mark on the otherwise positive report card of Metroid.
BUT I DIGRESS.