Samus is the Batman of Nintendo
A funny thing’s been happening to me. For the last year, I’ve been working pretty hard, every single night, on an art project. I also have a full time job and a commute that takes me 90 minutes, one way. I don’t have much time at all for anything else, from seeing friends to playing videogames. So in this last 12 months, I’ve only played 3 games for more than an hour or two. These games are Super Mario Galaxy, Super Mario Galaxy 2, and the new Metroid: Other M. And the differences couldn’t be more profound.
Bear with me for a minute. When I was younger, I read lots and lots of comic books. Comics of all kinds, really. X-Men. The Fantastic Four. Hellboy. Batman. I loved ‘em. But after years of this (I won’t say “after I grew up” because I was reading these as a child, teenager, and an adult) I just got bored. I felt like I was reading the same stories, over and over and over and over again. Wow, Batman is fighting the Joker! For the 815th time! Only this time there’s a new artist and digital coloring! Yay! It seemed to me that the problem was not that the possibilities had been exhausted. There were lots and lots of great Batman stories that could have been written. The issue was the status quo. Nothing changed. Nothing COULD change. Despite minor changes here and there, Batman would always be Bruce Wayne, millionaire playboy whose parents were murdered in front of his eyes when he was a child and who had sworn vengeance on the criminal underworld. From the safety of his Batcave he would use his riches, his vast intelligence, and his array of gadgets to protect the innocent and punish the guilty. Blah blah blah. By now, the only people reading Batman comics are those hardcore comic geeks, generally a steadily shrinking audience of white men in their 30s and 40s with far too much disposable income and presumably little desire to have meaningful conversations with women. And because that’s the audience for Batman, that is who the comics cater to.
Batman doesn’t change. Batman can’t change. Today’s Batman story is the same as a Batman story from 1999 and it will be same in 2019. And I’m starting to notice the same thing in some videogames. Metroid is a depressing example.
See, we now know that in every single Metroid game, Samus will lose the full capabilities of her suit and spend most of the game steadily finding / unlocking things like the morph ball, the power bomb, the grapple beam, or whatever. She’ll also explore a vast alien environment, endlessly revisiting the same areas to go through that door that needed missiles to open, but she didn’t have them yet. In the end, she’ll face off against some dire alien menace, beat it just barely, escape into space, and ponder the mysteries of what just happened. The only things that change are the graphics, the point of view, and to a very slight degree, the game mechanics. Only those don’t even ever change all that much because Samus will always shoot, always curl up in a morph ball, always drop bombs, and so on. It just looks different with each game. Slightly different.
It’s been a while since the designers at Nintendo created a Metroid game of their own, and it shows. The Metroid games don’t change. The Metroid games CAN’T change. They have to keep rewarding the same buyers over and over again by giving them exactly what they want. But where is the innovation? Where are the risks? Is there truly nothing more that can be done with Samus?
The Super Mario games, particularly Super Mario Galaxy, are a fantastic example of a design team willing to break with continuity and truly innovate. Admittedly, Super Mario Galaxy 2 is nearly identical to Super Mario Galaxy 1, but compare the Galaxy games to Super Mario Sunshine, or Super Mario 64, or Super Mario Bros. 2. Each one of those games utilizes the capabilities of their respective consoles in exciting ways, yes. But what makes the Mario games so delightful, for regular gamers and newer players, is that the designers refuse to follow the slavish dictates of the continuity of the “in-game universe.” It seems like each and every Mario game is a brand new start. Sure, he’s going to rescue the Princess but characters appear and re-appear in different configurations each time. In Super Mario Galaxy, Bowser wants to make his own universe and he doesn’t care if he destroys the old one to do so. In Super Paper Mario, Bowser fights alongside Mario, Luigi and the Princess against Count Bleck. It doesn’t matter that this would seem to be at odds with what has happened in other Mario games. The emphasis is on the game play, and more importantly, on fun rather than on making sure that the events of the game can somehow be squeezed into the chronology of the pre-existing games. I don’t know how many articles I’ve read about Metroid: Other M that begin with some variation of “Taking place shortly after the events of Super Metroid…” What does that really matter? Why is it such an important selling point? Who is that information really targeted at, the hardcore gamer or the average person?
As you can guess, Metroid: Other M has been a disappointment. I am finding myself thinking some of the same thoughts about most videogames, especially the big franchises like Final Fantasy and Zelda, as I was about comics several years when I basically stopped buying and reading them entirely. Console games are boring now. The big franchises are such important intellectual properties that nothing will ever again change. Think about it. What’s REALLY next for Samus? What will the Metroid game of 2020 bring us? Incredibly innovative story and game play? Fun? Entertainment? Or…Samus exploring a vast alien environment steadily unlocking abilities such as the morph ball, the power beam and the grappling beam, on her way to a brutal duel with a huge and terrifying alien entity that she will barely survive? And the answer is probably much the same for Final Fantasy, for Zelda, for Castlevania, for Halo, and on and on and on…
It’s disappointing really. But at least I have Mario. And for that I am thankful.
