Do you like Samus from Metroid: Other M?

[PrimeTime90]

After all the "OMG Ridley" discussions, voice acting debates, gameplay changes, slight suit redesigns, character motivations and what have...when you get right down to it, do you like the Samus that is the star of Metroid Other M?

I have to say yes, although its mostly because of what a badass she is gameplay-wise, since I found the storytelling barely above the level of Saturday morning cartoons.

[Outlaw]

Yes.

Regardless of all other crap. It doesn't faze me a bit.

[KumaOso]

The Samus I saw in Other M is not all that much different from how I always interpreted her to be.

[AuroraUnitComplex]

Overall answers? Ok. When I played the game for the first time. Yes. After thinking about it for a long time and after going back through Fusion. Yes.

[ph00tbag]

Aside from her goin PTSD after fighting him just fine in ZM and Super, I really liked Samus's characterization. No wilting flower, but still approachable on a human level.

[Zeruel21]

Yes, but I feel the story underutilized her. [spoiler]Adam taking out the biggest threat on the ship, Anthony being the one to sort things out in the end, and MB not being handled by her specifically[/spoiler] made me wonder if she was only in the plot to do the legwork to move the game along and react to other characters. All she really did was assist other people and explore.

I think people overfocused on her scenes of weakness and ignored where she showed incredible courage and ability, like handling ridiculous amounts of Zebesians and walking away like it was nothing. I especially saw that in the [spoiler]Queen Metroid encounter.[/spoiler]

[Outlaw]

Aside from her goin PTSD after fighting him just fine in ZM and Super, I really liked Samus's characterization. No wilting flower, but still approachable on a human level.

Don't forget Prime.

I don't mind her freaking out over Ridley. But not in Other M. Maybe one of the first 2 times she fought him but the fourth.. It was just out of place.

[Xemnas89]

Yeah I thought she was fine in Other M. When it comes to the Ridley scene the whole PTSD moment samus goes through is perfectly understandable if you know how PTSD works. It could hit on the 20th time after the last 17 times were fine. Then not hit for 9 more times, then hit again.

[Redwing]

Plus, consider how she consistently fought Ridley before out of revenge. She was confident that she'd exacted that revenge on Zebes in Super. Now he's completely reincarnated. At that point, he probably seemed like an undefeatable shadow of her past...

Ok, I played the game too long, now I'm starting to sound like it.

[AuroraUnitComplex]

I've got to point this out, but Samus was incredibly ashamed of herself also, but nobody seems to mention that, or give her credit for saying that.

Unbearable thoughts welled up in me, making me want to get as far away as I could. I regretted not being able to protect him...

She was ashamed of herself. It’s not what she wanted to show. It happens to all of us. She is human. I think people really need to cut her some slack, and give her credit where credit is due.

[Maetch]

I didn't mind this Samus. Most of her dialogue was from a "looking-back" standpoint. In the context of the actual mission, she was as I always expected: blunt and to-the-point in her dialogue, preferring action to words.

The Ridley scene was rough, but in all the past fights, there was always that margin of doubt that Ridley would survive his "death", but there was absolutely no doubt when he died with Zebes. Given a few years, Samus would've forgotten all about him, so when he comes back completely out-of-the-blue, she would understandably relapse.

Personally, all the talk about bioweapons brings up a line in the manga, where Mother Brain claims that Samus was raised and trained to be a Chozo bioweapon and nothing else. Perhaps that's why she's so against bioweapons, because she dislikes being treated as one herself.

[Schrau]

Samus freaking over Ridley is sorta foreshadowed in the first damn cutscene. Consider his deaths (Not counting the Manga, in which he apparently explains how he can regenerate).

Metroid 1/ZM: Killed on Zebes, in the middle of a Space Pirate base, where Space Pirate support is expected to scoop his remains off the walls and piece him back together. Metal Ted is completely unexplained.
Metroid Prime: Not actually killed at all. Just knocked off a high cliff (Which, as we all know, is fatal for winged flying crea- Ohwait.) by ancient Chozo technology THAT TOTALLY COULD HAVE DONE THAT RIGHT FROM THE BLOODY START OF THE FUCKING FIGHT. FUCK YOU LAZY CHOZO IDIOTS.
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption: Killed on the Pirate Homeworld, in the middle of a Space Pirate base, where Space Pirate support is expected to scoop his remains off the walls and piece him back together. The fact that he did this in the middle of a Leviathan Seed which promptly collapses only raises further questions, but I'll let this pass by saying that Phazon did it, lol.
Super Metroid: Killed on Zebes again, which was promptly exploded roughly twenty minutes later (depending on how fast you can complete the game) purely out of spite in order to kill one woman who, uh, wasn't actually killed in the explosion. Incidentally, if you have a self-destruct system on your planet, why not trigger it while the one person you want to use it against is conceivably more than six minutes away from the surface of the planet and you've evacuated everyone of importance off the planet. Imagine if the thing had gone off while fighting Draygon. Lazy Space Pirates.

Anyway, in pretty much the first cutscene Samus goes so far as to say that she honestly doesn't expect to see Ridley ever again, due to his remains being totally doubleplus exploded by first eating too many Super Missiles and again by having the planet the remains were on exploded.

Samus is not genre savvy. She has demonstrated this by removing her Power Suit in Zero Mission before making sure she was safe (Notice that the next time we see her flying her ship in anything other than her Power Suit is in the start of Corruption. En route to a Galactic Federation fleet), she will go on to demonstrate this in Fusion where she ironically names her ship's computer after a conveniently dead CO because it reminds her of him and didn't consider, unlike most people, that the computer was actually the CO's eBrain.

Not many things survive a planetary explosion. And, to be honest, if my lifelong nemesis who murdered my parents right in front of my very eyes when I was three years old, someone I had been trying to cack for the last few years and he just keeps on regenerating from a single cell, I'd probably consider the job done once I've blown up the planet he was on.

Her reaction was perfectly understandable in any circumstances.

Now I'm just wondering how the hell Nintendo would get Ridley into Metroid 5 if it takes place post-Fusion. Consider that:

1) He was dead already.
2) The station he was on was detonated...
3) ...Into another planet that also went kaboom.

Ridley coming back in Metroid 5 is likely to make Samus' head explode. Literally.

[PrimeTime90]

One thing I really liked about Samus is how they combined humanity with her well...unhumanity. She has emotions, likes and dislikes, loves and fears. And yet, her monotone voice, her body language with most of the people she talks with, the way she scares civilians by simply appearing. This is a woman who spends most of her time in complete isolation from society, who lives in a cold metallic ship and is at home in a cold metallic suit of battle armor. I'd imagine Samus isn't the life of the party or gets down on the dance floor, and I imagine her social skills are a bit stunted. It doesn't help that she grew up with bird people and probably has nightmares about the traumatic events of her life.

I like that quite a bit, unintentional or not. She's not angsty whining, but she definitely not gonna be the popular chick on Facebook with 500+ friends who updates her wall daily.

[Schrau]

One thing I really liked about Samus is how they combined humanity with her well...unhumanity. She has emotions, likes and dislikes, loves and fears. And yet, her monotone voice-

Actually, that's possibly the most annoying thing I've found about the game so far (Well, that, and the fact that I might try and play a drinking game with a sip for every time Samus uses the word "baby", I predict I will lose about 50% of my brain before the end credits roll.).

Samus' VA is terrible. Really, really, terrible. There's a way of showing that a character may be emotionally detached without sounding like Samus does in this game. The VA isn't simply good enough for a human being, it's not even good enough for a robot. What you're witnessing here is basically the uncanny valley for the ears.

There's a golden rule in storytelling: Show, don't tell. Samus was upset by the fact that Adam spurned her as an outsider when they first met on the Bottle Ship? Then deliver her next line in an upset tone rather than pretty much coming out and saying that she was upset. Want to show fear or distress or any other emotion? Then you add that emotion to the line rather than stating it. The first line out of her mouth in the game? "Why am I still alive?" delivered in a completely flat tone that doesn't exhibit any panic about nearly being killed or any wonderment as to how she has survived. "Mother, time to go!" isn't delivered with any confidence or vengeance or anything. Her VA is pretty poor.

You want to show a character as being human, then get a fucking human to do the voice acting. Jessica Martin apparently doesn't qualify.

Dammit, they should've just sprung the cash for Jennifer Hale to reprise the role once again. She would have totally nailed it.

[PrimeTime90]

Don't get me wrong, I found the storytelling in Metroid Other M absolutely abysmal. But the idea of Samus' characterization I liked quite a bit(now the excution...that's a bit different )

And when I play Mass Effect 2, I make Female Shepard look exactly like Samus. I even add a helmet she can wear when she's out blasting aliens. All that PLUS the fact that she is voiced by Jennifer Hale. I can live out my well-written semi-Samus' fantasies if I really wanted to