Japanese reactions to Other M

Edit history:

UchihaSasuke: 2010-09-12 03:24:16 pm

2010-09-12 03:24:00 pm

my umbrella goes directly to Bankai

the original Metroid was on the Famicom Disk System and that system worked by downloading games off a station onto a rewritable disk. i'm betting that some of those sales are repeated customers that got the game and then copied over it but felt like getting it again to give it another try.

ComboKing

2010-09-15 10:09:51 pm

Currently A Speedrun Noob

Probably a Sony fanboy. He does realize that he just advertised a game to the public right? He also gave Nintendo a sale and the store $50?

tomatobob

2010-09-15 10:27:50 pm

One shall stand, one shall ball.

Quote from ComboKing:

Probably a Sony fanboy.

yes, clearly.

RT-55J

2010-09-16 03:45:21 pm

Armor Guardian

Actually he's an Xbox "Funboy".

TheGreenManalishi

2010-09-16 03:49:49 pm

coz cutting it up and filming it DEFINITELY says "this game rocks" to viewers

what it says most is "I have too much disposable income"

kesvalk

2010-09-16 06:11:04 pm

Indie Lover

it says "i am a stupid dude"

UchihaSasuke

Edit history:

UchihaSasuke: 2010-10-16 02:27:41 am

UchihaSasuke: 2010-10-16 02:27:09 am

2010-10-16 01:42:56 am

my umbrella goes directly to Bankai

i didn't want to make a new topic for this so i'm using this one that already has sales numbers.

NPD sales results came in yesterday and looks like Other M sold in the 100k range (why did they have to stop releasing full numbers now of all times?) for the full month of september and the august launch. (NPD tracked sales from aug 30th to the end of september)

it looks like the game has been a complete failure worldwide. even Hunters had better openings and that's one of the worst selling games in the series. to see how bad Other M is, it is only beating Pinball so far and looks like it will take a big effort just to go past Hunters, nevermind any of the other games.

knowing Nintendo, we'll go back to either 2D handheld Metroids or the Prime series.

edit: we've got more exact sales numbers. Other M sold 173k. still, pretty bad considering Nintendo was expecting 1.5-2 million out of it. the game is maybe past 300k worldwide now.

arkarian

2010-10-16 01:43:55 am

red chamber dream

good.

well not the very last thing you said

Opium

2010-10-16 02:09:49 am

Make a shitty game, get shitty sales. Makes sense to me.

KingBroly

2010-10-16 06:32:12 am

Um...I fear for what'll happen with Metroid now though. I don't care what they do to Sakamoto though. But honestly, it's getting more and more justifiable to say Other M isn't canon, whereas he sorta set out to have Prime not be canon.

Turtle

2010-10-16 02:22:57 pm

I like turtles.

I guess you could say it was a...

Canon misfire.

Prime Hunter

2010-10-16 03:05:24 pm

I don't care if everyone else considers Other M a failure, I still enjoyed it. Would've been nice to have the sales be better, but I'm not as surprised at this given the backlash from most of the fans and how the internet spreads negativity like wildfire all of the time. As long as we still get more Metroid in the future, that's all that matters to me at this point.

arkarian

2010-10-16 03:06:59 pm

red chamber dream

i enjoyed it ... some but i'm glad it didn't sell well because i don't want them to make another one.

Prime Hunter

2010-10-16 04:42:41 pm

Well, to be honest I think I'll agree with you there. We need a fresh Metroid experience that steers us back towards the open ended exploration of the earlier games in the franchise. That doesn't mean I wouldn't mind seeing another Metroid game that has story elements in it one day, but I think putting out another one right after Other M would be a bad thing due to the reactions it got. Doing that at this point could very well push Metroid down the road of no return in a sense if the sales figures matched what Other M currently has, and I'd bet nobody here wants to see the series die completely.

arkarian

2010-10-16 04:44:05 pm

red chamber dream

i wouldn't mind at all. the last good metroid was 6 years ago and that was a remake. the series has been sucked dry.

mazerski

2010-10-16 05:27:50 pm

It seems odd that after years of Mario, Nintendo is still able to wow the gamers with new games... it may be time for the Nintendo developers to get to work on a new Metroid (leaving out Retro and Ninja).

I'll keep this brief but I have to say that as an electrical engineer and Java developer, developing web applications has this thing that I state as:
what the customer wants, what the customer needs and in the end, the final product. I'm not a game developer but all of us are the customer and of course it is impossible to please everyone. It seems that most everyone believes Metroid is about exploration, solitude (mostly), great puzzles and boss fights, etc. My opinion is Super and MP and MP2 exhibit this the best.

Ultimately schedules come into play as do opinions by the designers. Speed running a game probably causes overall grief especially to the point that it has been done in MP and now MP2 with not losing powers. I'll stop here...

This is to Ark and the other administrators of this forum... does anyone from Nintendo or Retro ever contact you to ask this or that? They should as there is a ton of good input here from us - the customer.

It seems odd that after years of Mario, Nintendo is still able to wow the gamers with new games... it may be time for the Nintendo developers to get to work on a new Metroid (leaving out Retro and Ninja).

I'll keep this brief but I have to say that as an electrical engineer and Java developer, developing web applications has this thing that I state as:
what the customer wants, what the customer needs and in the end, the final product. I'm not a game developer but all of us are the customer and of course it is impossible to please everyone. It seems that most everyone believes Metroid is about exploration, solitude (mostly), great puzzles and boss fights, etc. My opinion is Super and MP and MP2 exhibit this the best.

Ultimately schedules come into play as do opinions by the designers. Speed running a game probably causes overall grief especially to the point that it has been done in MP and now MP2 with not losing powers. I'll stop here...

This is to Ark and the other administrators of this forum... does anyone from Nintendo or Retro ever contact you to ask this or that? They should as there is a ton of good input here from us - the customer.

sabata2

2010-10-16 05:30:01 pm

ANKOKU

You realize it was Nintendo's idea to put all the story and use JUST the Wiimote in Other M right?

Team Ninja just put together the engine and maps.

KingBroly

2010-10-16 06:13:48 pm

Honestly, I can't see the series moving forward in the timeline without correcting this. The problem with Metroid is that it's been on a strict 3-year cycle for a while now after 8 years of being dormant. They really need to space these out more to give us better quality. Maybe a 4-year cycle would be best. This game clearly wasn't done when it was released. There are minor to major flaws in every aspect of the game and how something like this got out I'll never know.

But yeah, Nintendo should know they messed up big time with this. I'm not against giving Samus a voice/personality at all, especially since she's talked in previous Metroid games. But, yeah...they clearly didn't know what they were doing here. I don't know what they were going for with Samus' personality/character, but it clearly didn't come across the way the wanted, and this is cemented by the interviews Sakamoto has given, which directly contradict what is in Other M.

mazerski

2010-10-16 07:06:45 pm

Nope -- I don't know who did what.

The game got out because of $$$. Money drives everything. I can tell you with certainty that in hard engineering (power plants, oil pipelines, structures...) unless there is a super catastrophe, the schedule never changes. Period. (note: this is why plants end up costing a lot more and people work tons of overtime). In software engineering - my experience shows the schedule never changes - again, unless a severe error is caught in say the integration phase. The difference is with an app there is always a Release 2. With a game, it is what it is.

UchihaSasuke

2010-10-17 04:17:36 pm

my umbrella goes directly to Bankai

i hope they realize that people want games more open and with less story/cutscenes like the old ones and not linear ones like the recent ones. the only way a company big like this is going to listen is the hard way and that means a sales failure.

most of the speed running and sequence breaking has been invisible to the more casual consumer for years. there's a lot of people with 0-00 copies of mp1 who don't even know what a SB is and they still enjoy the game a lot. it doesn't make sense to reduce the options within a game just because someone at Nintendo dislikes some glitch. the game was made better overall because they had more time to make the actual game than just putting invisible walls and shit around to make the game very rigid.
super is another game where clever use of the moves available let you do things in a very different order and yet these tricks are invisible to most of the more casual gamers who really liked the game.
they should go back to the old way of making the games if they really want the series to bounce back. their continued ignoring of what the consumers want just blew up in their face big time and i don't see them making another game like Other M anytime soon because of that. the real question is how far back they'll look. they seem to be stuck at Fusion since they have never looked to the games that came earlier in the last years except for when they made ZM. time to really revisit Super and remember what made it good and stop using the stuff that is bringing down the series.

what i fear is that the series suffers the fate of F-Zero and we don't get any new games ever again. that series was also in a downward spiral and Nintendo refused to listen to the consumers for the later games and instead did things that made people ignore the games.

i hope they realize that people want games more open and with less story/cutscenes like the old ones and not linear ones like the recent ones. the only way a company big like this is going to listen is the hard way and that means a sales failure.

most of the speed running and sequence breaking has been invisible to the more casual consumer for years. there's a lot of people with 0-00 copies of mp1 who don't even know what a SB is and they still enjoy the game a lot. it doesn't make sense to reduce the options within a game just because someone at Nintendo dislikes some glitch. the game was made better overall because they had more time to make the actual game than just putting invisible walls and shit around to make the game very rigid.
super is another game where clever use of the moves available let you do things in a very different order and yet these tricks are invisible to most of the more casual gamers who really liked the game.
they should go back to the old way of making the games if they really want the series to bounce back. their continued ignoring of what the consumers want just blew up in their face big time and i don't see them making another game like Other M anytime soon because of that. the real question is how far back they'll look. they seem to be stuck at Fusion since they have never looked to the games that came earlier in the last years except for when they made ZM. time to really revisit Super and remember what made it good and stop using the stuff that is bringing down the series.

what i fear is that the series suffers the fate of F-Zero and we don't get any new games ever again. that series was also in a downward spiral and Nintendo refused to listen to the consumers for the later games and instead did things that made people ignore the games.

Turtle

2010-10-17 04:43:37 pm

I like turtles.

Lately I get the impression that Zero Mission was a massive swan song for sequence breakers and speed runners - a sort of "sorry you didn't like the newer titles as much, but this is the direction we're taking the series; we'll acknowledge you for one game but quit bothering us" - rather than a return to form. This thought makes me sad.

Metroid_Zelda Fan

2010-10-17 05:08:23 pm

I think they just made MZM to show how they wished Metroid 1 would have been like, if they had the technology.

Also, I think they should just leave the sequence breaks in. Sequence breaking doesn't hurt the designers, the consumers, or the sales. There is nothing that SB's do wrong. Nintendo just needs to realize this. I'm sure terrible sales will teach them a lesson. Now they just need to pay attention to what the consumers want, and everything will be fine.

Of course, if we still manage to find sequence breaks in their linear games (Fusion, MOM), maybe they'll finally realize it's pointless to try and stop us.

KingBroly

Edit history:

KingBroly: 2010-10-17 05:31:33 pm

KingBroly: 2010-10-17 05:30:16 pm

KingBroly: 2010-10-17 05:29:20 pm

2010-10-17 05:28:41 pm

I'm not against the idea of a story-driven Metroid title with Samus speaking. I'm against the idea of them doing it poorly, like they did with Other M. I'm definitely not against giving Samus weaknesses, but again Other M tore down so many walls not just in terms of Samus' character, but in terms of design, that it should really be retconned out of existence so they can save some face about it, or at least remake it so Samus is stronger in it. The idea of her being strong while under your control and not being strong outside of it isn't good storytelling, but they probably thought it would work (AND FAILED). Instead of what's been given to us in the games, what we got was a Nintendo Princess with a Gun, and that's just not who Samus Aran has been up until now, even in the manga and in other games.I want to blame Sakamoto here for not acknowledging the Prime games here, but also Nintendo for allowing this script to go through.

Baron Dante

2010-10-17 05:57:53 pm

Eh, someone get in touch in Sakamoto and translate this thread to him and we are good to go.

Metroid_Zelda Fan

2010-10-17 06:05:16 pm

Other M did kind of overdo the story elements. I mean, giving Samus a personality is good, but it should be done well. Other M did not do it well. Other M acted as if Samus's personality was a blank slate, but it's not. Even if she doesn't talk in other games, she still had a personality. Samus in Other M was nothing like Samus in any of the other games. That was the problem. If they had made her fit more with the other games, then they could have established her personality without contradicting every other game in the series.