I played the game with an open-mind and expected halfway decent gameplay.
it was worse than i could have ever imagined
The game was so horrible in so many ways, and not to tread familiar territory, here are just a few things that people don't mention very often:
Pic related, it made the game utterly painful to look at, at times. The artstyle is complete trash, and I don't even like the Varia suit redesign. The old Prime suit was better.
The combat was bad not just because of the missile aiming gimmick, but also in a large part because there is almost no aiming involved in the shooting. The asinine control scheme mandated that you auto-lock to any enemy that you are vaguely facing the same direction as. The parry would have been fun if it required any skill to use and the game didn't tell you exactly when to use it, but no. Even the takedown animations get boring after the second time you see a given takedown.
Putting aside the fact that it was a total ripoff of Fusion's setting for a second, the environments were as follows:
They looked awful visually thanks to the piss-poor graphics and gameplay-wise they weren't much better. Almost all metroid games have some kind of exciting, unexpected or interesting route through the environment. Even Fusion had some great moments where you went off the beaten path and felt like you were exploring. There are no moments like that in Other M. All of the areas feel almost completely linear and the paths are exclusively room-to-room, door-to-door fare. Never do you have to negotiate extensive structural damage, break your way through a caved-in tunnel, or even so much as shatter an iced-over doorway. The "exploration" just puts you to sleep.
Even disregarding dreadful writing/dialogue, the ripoff from Fusion is a bad enough offense.
And I know some people don't like Fusion, but I happened to like it and thought the plot was alright. Other M butchers it completely, because it's just a jumbled mess of plotpoints that were in Fusion, and make no sense taking place before it in the timeline. The plotholes pile up everywhere.
Also, am I the only one who noticed how bad Other M's soundtrack is? Metroid is supposed to have good music. Even Fusion, which had one of the weaker OSTs in the series, had some classics.
Where's all the good music? All of the tracks are "atmospheric" garbage. I can barely remember how any of them sounded.
Seriously, fuck Other M.
Ok, I feel better now.