YMMV / Metroid: Other M

• Adorkable: Anthony Higgs is a charming jokester who always treats Samus with respect, and it's topped off by him always being in a good mood to help bring levity to missions. The Japanese fanbase often takes these dorky traits and make him Moe in fan art.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Samus's motivations for following Adam unquestioningly. It's unambiguous that she's attempting to prove herself, but she also mentions that they need her if they want to survive. Was this just trying to get his approval to join the mission, or an accurate, calculated assessment? Also, would she have been quite so unsure of herself if Adam wasn't present?
  • Adam's treatment of Samus can be interpreted in multiple ways. While it's true that Samus could damage the Bottle Ship if she was reckless, does Adam really not trust her with her abilities, or does he view it as reining in her Chronic Hero Syndrome? Some of his more dismissive actions suggests the former, while his statements during his final scene suggest the latter, and the differing tones between the English and Japanese scripts also blur matters.
  • Furthermore, was Adam aware of what went on at the BOTTLE SHIP when he arrived? Or was he just as oblivious as Samus and his platoon? Seeing how Adam knew his Metroid report had been co-opted, was aware of MB's evil intentions, and had armed his platoon with Freeze Guns (a defense against Metroids), it wouldn't be surprising if he secretly knew exactly what he was getting into. On the other hand, he has multiple lapses in knowledge and judgement throughout the mission, making it just as likely that he was in the dark too (or at least playing dumb).
• Americans Hate Tingle: While Japanese Metroid fans weren't impressed and found the game lackluster compared to past entries, the general consensus towards Other M was still more positive than the vitriolic hatred that the Western fanbase had towards the game.
• Angst? What Angst?: Despite the game aiming to explore Samus's character and aspects of her past, one topic that never comes up is the destruction of Zebes, which the game never acknowledges as being the planet where Samus was raised for most of her formative years. It's odd that none of her monologues touch upon the loss of her home planet.
• Anti-Climax Boss: The fight against MB abruptly ends when you lock onto her instead of the Desbrachians that keep getting in the way. Many people finish this battle by accident while fighting off the Desbrachians.
• Awesome Music:
  • Ridley's boss theme "Nemesis Ridley" is usually agreed to be the best song in the game, blending Other M's orchestral soundtrack with a classic Metroid tune. After watching Ridley toy with Samus and supposedly kill Anthony, it feels good to go to town on him with this intense tune blasting.
  • The song "Mystery Creature" is an industrial track that cleverly hides Ridley's theme in the percussion line.
  • "The Biological Experiment Floor" has a nice balance between the game's usual atmospheric ambience and the haunting tones of a classic Metroid-style track.
  • The Rhedogian theme pumps you up for a challenging mini-boss fight.
  • "Final Mission Resolve" plays just after Samus has received her final orders and Adam has sacrificed himself in Sector Zero, resulting in a fast-paced race to complete the mission. It's an exciting and epic tune that highlights how Samus has her confidence back and is motivated to see this adventure through to the end.
  • The theme of the Desbrachians has a focused, repetitive beat, sounding unlike anything else on the soundtrack, making for some memorable encounters with the game's toughest enemies.
  • The "Final Boss" theme shared by the Queen Metroid and Phantoon is fittingly epic and dire, truly evoking the idea of fighting an unstoppable and cunning force.
• Badass Decay: Samus Aran, while still a powerful warrior, is considerably more ineffective in this game than in any of the other Metroid titles. Justified as her character arc in this game is that she's working through an emotional crisis, but the end result is a more passive Samus.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The infamous scene of Samus suffering a Heroic BSoD and metaphorically turning into a child at the sight of Ridley. It checks all three criteria:
  1. It comes out of nowhere. Despite the game exploring her personality and her past, Samus's personal history with Ridley is given no buildup or foreshadowing in Other M, with Samus only referring to him as "[her] long-standing nemesis." Previous games are no help either, as none ever mention his role as the destroyer of her birth colony and murderer of her parents, only depicting a No-Nonsense Nemeses relationship that doesn't suggest anything deeper.
  2. It makes no sense in context. Since this deep personal history was never expressed, many fans were left confused by the surreal visual metaphor of Samus turning into a little girl, puzzled that an experienced warrior like Samus would regress into a child upon seeing a foe that she's already defeated over and over again. It was likely intended to link with her character arc, as a culmination of Samus referring to her past self and her feelings of uselessness as "childish" in flashbacks, but the idea was only brought up vaguely twice prior, with some of the differences between the Japanese and English scripts obfuscating this theming even more. As such, it comes across solely as an uncharacteristic PTSD attack.
  3. It has no significance or effect on the rest of the plot. Samus regains her focus and goes back to kicking Ridley's butt as usual, and Samus never monologues about her feelings concerning Ridley in the aftermath of the fight to help contextualize why she froze. Rather tellingly, the Maxximum Edition Game Mod was able to easily cut out the "Samus turning into a child" scene from the larger Ridley pre-fight cutscene, and re-edit the moment to instead give her a traumatic fight response without changing the rest of the cutscene's tone or the narrative as a whole.
• Bile Fascination: Many have played the title just to see how warranted the story's infamy is.
• Breather Boss: You can kill Nightmare in its second encounter before he launches his first black hole by entering the fight, guns blazing with your Super Missiles. Each Super Missile stuns it, and it only takes four taps to put it down for good.
• Broken Base:
  • The story, while widely deemed poor by fans, is split on how it's poor. Opinions are broadly split into two camps: those who believe the game had good ideas but middling execution, and those who believe the story was fundamentally rotten. And those groups can be divided even further; those who think it had good ideas will still argue about which ideas were good and/or executed well. Meanwhile, those who hated it will debate exactly which story element was the worse or most damaging. And that's all without touching upon how Other M has been used as ammo in wider disputes over Gameplay To Story Ratio in the franchise as a whole.
  • The combat. Some people like the combat, enjoying the addition of melee moves to Samus's arsenal and the stylish nature of her movement in combat, viewing it as the best part of the game; a growing segment of fans even view this gameplay as some of the best in the series and making up for the issues with the game's story. Others disparage the combat, viewing it as far too easy and mindless due to the dodge move having no cooldown, meaning you can effectively spam it and avoid everything with little effort. And some, regardless of their thoughts on the quality, think that the combat style mixed with the game's linear structure made it too far-removed from the rest of the series' gameplay to feel like a proper Metroid title.
• Catharsis Factor: After putting up with Adam's "authorization" system for most of the game, many fans enjoy hearing Samus sarcastically say "Any objections, Adam?" before activating the Screw Attack herself.
• Come for the Game, Stay for the Mods: The "Maxximum Edition" mod fixes as many story and gameplay issues as one can without remaking the entire game from scratch. Improvements include, but are not limited to, firing Missiles in third-person, the Gravity Suit looking like itself in gameplay, and at least one very specific scene being rewritten.
• Common Knowledge: Many fans believe that Samus' infamous Heroic BSoD when facing Ridley in Metroid: Other M was a PTSD attack due to the childhood trauma of Ridley leading the attack that killed her family. This was exacerbated by the visual metaphor of her regressing into a little girl. In reality, this was not the intended effect, but it is meant to convey how useless and powerless she felt upon seeing Ridley's return after what she thought was his final death on Zebes, punctuating the emotional crisis she's been having throughout the game.
• Contested Sequel: One thing generally agreed about Other M is that its story is of dubious quality. Opinions on the game at large are more varied, ranging from "a good evolution of the series" (favoring it over similarly contested Metroid Prime 3: Corruption) to "Play the Game, Skip the Story" to "total crap". Even among detractors, there are arguments as to whether anything Other M produced is salvageable and how its elements should be addressed in any future installments. As far as gameplay is concerned, future 2D entries would continue building on the fast combat, mobility, and melee ideas introduced here, and gain overall positive reception for doing so.
• Continuity Lockout:
  • The appearance of Phantoon can come across as completely random if you haven't played Super Metroid or read its Japanese manual, which explains the nature of the extradimensional creature as Mother Brain's consciousness given substance. Meaning that this is effectively a rematch against MB.
  • Nightmare seems like a fairly arbitrary boss fight without having played Fusion.
• Critical Backlash: In the years after its release, Other M began to gain its share of defenders; both consisting of those who enjoyed the title as one of their first Metroid games and those who find the negative fan response to be overblown. Many in this group argue that even if the story was disappointing, Other M is still host to some solid action gameplay and has some of the best boss fights in the series.
• Critical Dissonance: The game received positive reviews from most outlets, with Japanese publications like Famitsu even scoring it higher than other entries in the series. Meanwhile, fans tend to regard it as one of the weakest installments overall, with a fair amount pretending the game never happened.
• Designated Hero: To many players, Adam is not the great father figure and role model that Samus claims he is, but a condescending jerk. This is mostly the fault of the English translation and a few writing decisions common to both Japanese and English. Some have gone as far to even read an abusive undertone to their relationship, due to the many controversial decisions he makes over the course of the game and his cold attitude towards Samus.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Anthony Higgs. Even those who dislike the game like that it gave Samus a friend who's willing to playfully poke at her more serious nature, with his "Princess" nickname being seen as a good-natured term of affection that shows how comfortable they are with each other. Not to mention the "Remember me?" meme, which shot him up in popularity well before the game came out. He also outright averts many Token Minority tropes and even ends up the sole member of his platoon to survive the events of the game. Oddly enough, despite being one of the few elements of Other M that the fanbase unanimously wants to return regardless of their feelings on the game, Anthony's never been acknowledged since; not even as a trophy or spirit in Super Smash Bros..
• Fan Nickname:
  • Mysterious Black Dude, Remember Me Guy, or Manthony for Anthony Higgs.
  • BSL (Blonde Scientist Lady or BOTTLE SHIP Lady) for the important woman at the end of the reveal trailer (who turned out to be named MB). Interestingly and coincidentally, this happens to be the same name as the space station that is the setting for Metroid Fusion.
  • "Hell run" for the section of the game where Samus has to get through part of the Pyrosphere without the Varia Feature that shields her from the heat. While this name is also used for deliberately going through hot areas in other Metroid games without the Varia Suit to sequence break, it's heavily associated with this particular instance due to it being mandatory.
  • "El Pollo Loco" for the Mystery Creature AKA the chicken lizard◊...thing which turns out to be adolescent Ridley.
  • Ridley's infant form is a creature that looks like either a furby with legs, or a cross between a Chocobo and a Moogle. Fans have nicknamed him "Choogle" or "Choogu". It also has an in-universe nickname: Little Birdie.
  • After both creatures were revealed to be forms of Ridley, Little Birdie and the Mystery Creature were given Punny Names by the fans, which are Furbley and Ugley respectively.
  • Ridley himself is affectionately called "Roidley" because of his sudden change in bulk compared to previous games, where he was skinny as a rail.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Because of Samus' characterization, amongst other things, a decent chunk of Metroid fans prefer not to acknowledge the story of this game. It helps that it is a mostly self-contained interquel.
• Franchise Original Sin: Samus' infamous Heroic BSoD against Ridley mirrors what happened in the Metroid manga. However, while the Other M encounter was trying to be a visual metaphor demonstrating how powerless and uncertain Samus has felt recently, the manga encounter is solely about Samus having traumatic flashbacks to Ridley killing her parents when she was three and being unable to cope. In addition, while the manga encounter is the first time Samus had seen Ridley since she was a child, which lends the moment more drama, the Other M encounter is after Samus had already bested Ridley in battle countless times in other games (none of which ever mention what he did to her as a child), making fans question why a recurring foe was triggering such a visceral reaction.
• Game-Breaker:
  • After being reduced to a glorified Wall Jump in the Metroid Prime games, the Screw Attack returned in top form in this 3D outing and is more game-breaking than ever. It really says something when a few taps on the jump button is all it takes to obliterate the entire horde of enemies Phantoon summons against you (except for the Rhedogian).
  • If you mash the D-pad enough, SenseMove can leave you completely untouchable in any combat scenario. It also looks sick as hell. You have to abuse this to survive Hard Mode, considering that enemies in that mode can defeat you in 1 hit due to the lack of energy tanks and missile upgrades.
• Goddamned Boss: The second time you fight Nightmare, it shoots a black hole that sucks ALL of your beams and missiles away from your target, and the only way to hit it is when it just happens to be in the way as it prepares to attack, making a fight or flight situation with no third option. There is, however, a secret trick to the fight. If you start firing Super Missiles the very second the battle begins, you can stun Nightmare long enough for you to fire off a second one, and then a third one, and finally a fourth one to take it down.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Anthony Higgs' very first line, said in Other M's reveal trailer, was asking "Remember me?". Given that he became a meme promptly thereafter, and the most popular character in the game after it released, it's safe to say that yes, people do remember Anthony.
  • The game's premise, a group of astronauts on a space station where one team member is a traitor slowly and quietly picking the others off one-by-one, has led more modern audiences to crack some Among Us jokes.
• It Was His Sled: Samus suffers a Heroic BSoD when she sees Ridley's clone. While it was meant to be a big surprise, it quickly became the most-discussed plot element in the entire game, and its infamy makes it one of the most well-known aspects of the game even for non-fans of the series. The Ridley encounter (or rather, the moment Samus recovers from her shock) is even used to represent Other M in Metroid Dread's ending screens.
• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: Although MB is the Big Bad of the game, Adam, who is supposed one of the supporting protagonists of the game, gets more dislike from fans, due to his condescending and overall unpleasant treatment of Samus.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • MB, aka Melissa Bergman, was created as a clone of Mother Brain by Galactic Federation scientists on the BOTTLE SHIP in order to control their bioweapons, specifically the Metroids. Gaining emotions, the resulting attempt to reprogram her, as well as the seeming betrayal of her "mother", Doctor Madeline Bergman, sent her on a rampage against the scientists, using the ship's creatures to slaughter them. MB then cultivated the bioweapons and sent the BOTTLE SHIP on a collision course with the Galactic Federation HQ, hoping to wipe it out. Meeting Samus Aran, MB successfully won her trust by pretending to be Madeline, sending the Bounty Hunter to die in Sector Zero at the hands of nigh-invulnerable Metroids. Her plans foiled and confronted by Samus and the real Madeline, MB almost surrendered peacefully with her mother's tearful apology, only dying while fighting against aggressive Galactic Federation soldiers.
  • The Deleter, real name James Pierce, was hired by rogue Galactic Federation operatives to kill anyone associated with the BOTTLE SHIP incident as well as anyone investigating it. Arriving at the ship as a member of Commander Adam Malkovich's team, the Deleter pretends to be an ally before stealthily betraying and taking out teammates one at a time, and eluding capture by Samus. And with his demise at the hands of MB, Samus was unable to determine his identity in the end, leaving the player to figure out his identity themselves.
• Memetic Badass: Anthony Higgs, though it's mostly justified by his having a plasma gun on his back, which would likely require some level of badassery to be allowed to use. And yes, he does know how to use it. He also does an awesome backflip while fighting Ridley.
• Memetic Loser: Samus in this game. She's seen by a decent number of fans as rather underwhelming and lacking agency, with her actions ultimately contributing little to the narrative. It isn't uncommon for parodies of Other M to depict her as overly weak and/or moody, obsessing over "The Baby" at all times.
• Memetic Mutation: See the franchise page.
• Minimalist Run: Hard mode removes all item expansions (Missile Tanks, Energy Tanks, etc.).
• Misaimed "Realism": The attempt to avoid Bag of Spilling with the authorization mechanic is all well and good, until Samus decides to go through a volcanic area and Adam doesn't think to authorize her Varia feature. In the Japanese script, it's implied that he was too busy monitoring the other soldiers and legitimately didn't notice that Samus decided to stay in the area for a prolonged period of time without telling him. Meaning that Samus did this of her own accord.
• Mis-blamed:
  • Some of the more disliked elements of the story, such as Samus's emotional dependency on Adam, are partly due to the localization, rather than being the fault of the game's writers. In the original, she respected Adam but wasn't as desperate for his approval. As a result, her character arc is a more personal journey about her working through what is essentially a quarter-life crisis than it is her attempting to regain his respect. See a more detailed analysis here.
  • Samus' voice actress is, in fact, a skilled actress, as demonstrated when Samus interacts and responds to other characters or even speaks out loud to herself. The detached and emotionless monotone used during the internal monologues was deliberate on Sakamoto's part, who took on the role of voice director despite not knowing English very well.
  • In terms of controls, the fans gave Team Ninja a lot of heat thinking they are the ones responsible for the single Wii remote gameplay style leading to complaints of the game feeling clunky to control. It was Sakamoto who insisted on the single Wii remote gameplay, citing ease of access for even those who have no experience with action games. Team Ninja tried very hard to get him to change his mind.
• Moe: Samus was supposed to tap into this, with Sakamoto hoping the writing would make Samus come across as an appealing and lovable character. While Samus does showcase her traits of kindness and loyalty more clearly here, as well as increased emotional vulnerability, it is at the cost of her more well-known stoic attributes.
• Never Live It Down:
  • During most boss fights, Samus is as cool under pressure as ever, courageously facing her foes while pulling off amazing aerobatics without a sweat. Samus suffering a Heroic BSoD when she meets Ridley only happens briefly in one cutscene — and the fight ends with Ridley running for his life from the bounty hunter, at that — but the breakdown is often discussed as the epitome of everything wrong with Samus's characterization in Other M, forever painting this instance of the character as ineffectual, weak, and needing someone to guide her to get anything done. When Metroid: Samus Returns was released, many fans made snarky comments about Samus possibly suffering yet another Heroic BSoD at the sight of Proteus Ridley.
  • Adam's most significant contribution to the plot is his Heroic Sacrifice to destroy Sector Zero. However, the one action he is mostly remembered for is when he fails to authorize Samus' Varia Suit when she enters the volcanic area, whether the player believes he was aware that Samus was doing this or not.
  • This is the only game to give Samus's Zero Suit high heels. Super Smash Bros. would redeem the concept for some by turning the heels into thrusters, effectively giving her jet boots, while later depictions of the Zero Suit within the franchise itself would greatly reduce the size of the heels, making them significantly more practical looking.
• Nightmare Retardant:
  • Possibly because of the T rating, the two supposedly gruesomely-murdered researchers' corpses only have small black/green stains and no other sign of physical harm.
  • Little Birdie is a dangerous and intelligent creature, and Samus refers to it as a disgusting beast... but its design still makes it look Ugly Cute, which both concept art and the official guidebook emphasize, and the Federation Scientists give it the nickname of Little Birdie.
• No Yay: Due to the case of Platonic Writing, Romantic Reading, many players mistakenly viewed Samus's relationship with Adam as having romantic undertones. Since said relationship is also seen as one-sided and abusive, this contributed to the fans' negative reaction towards Samus's submissiveness towards Adam. As such, the fans who ship Samus and Adam tend to be met with backlash from other fans.
• Older Than They Think:
  • Other M is often controversial for showcasing Samus as someone with emotional issues and poor self-esteem. The manga released years prior reveals that these are character traits that Samus struggled with as a teenager, with the manga's plot also involving her learning how to work through these issues. Both works even share an encounter with Ridley as one of the obstacles she must face to achieve that goal. Samus as a more emotional and somewhat rash figure rather than a cool-headed stoic is also present not only in other supplemental material, like the Super Metroid comic and the Metroid Prime: Episode of Aether manga, but also other games such as Metroid Fusion.
  • The game is also disliked for showing the strong and independent Samus being under someone else's command. Samus already took direct orders from male authority figures in Fusion and Prime 3, and more broadly, her missions in most games are contract work from the Galactic Federation, going back to the very first Metroid game. If you include side-material, the manga strategy guide for the first game even starts off with Samus getting the mission from a Galactic Federation higher-up named Commander Nemo, who sporadically chimes in with advice throughout her adventure as well.
  • A lot of fans complained about the absurdity of Samus having bonded with the Baby Metroid. This relationship was set up in much of the supplementary material created for Super Metroid in 1994. Moreover, even if Super Metroid itself isn't explicit about how Samus feels about Baby Metroid beyond rescuing it being a self-appointed mission (one of the few in the entire series), it is explicit about how the Baby Metroid feels about Samus, with the climax of the game being based completely around the creature's relationship with the bounty hunter (from stopping short of killing Samus after recognizing her suit's Critical Annoyance to protecting and ultimately sacrificing itself for her sake during the fight with Mother Brain).
  • Samus's suit being summoned and powered by intense concentration was first mentioned in the Super Metroid comic, where Samus gets injured when her concentration falters, weakening the suit's defenses.
  • Other M only gives the player a single additional missile per expansion instead of the usual five, but this isn't the first Metroid where this would be the case. Metroid: Zero Mission was the first game to change how many missiles you get, as its Hard Mode reduces Missile Tanks to giving you only two missiles per expansion. Metroid Prime: Hunters also changed the number, albeit by giving the player more missiles than usual rather than less, with ten missiles per expansion.
• Platonic Writing, Romantic Reading: It's established early on that Adam is seen by Samus as a platonic father figure, with Samus calling him such at the beginning and end of the game. It certainly didn't stop a few reviewers from calling him "Samus's boyfriend". The rather explicit mention in Other M may have been to correct the very same writing mistake from Fusion. And that's without getting into how a fair number of players view their relationship to be far more abusive than anything akin to mutual respect.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: Those who are fans of the game tend to fall into this, believing that the gameplay of Other M is just fine and enjoyable enough to counteract the lackluster story. For this crowd, the only real points of contention are the first-person missile system, the awkward Scan Visor segments, and cutscenes being unskippable in a first playthrough.
• Replacement Scrappy: Adam manages to do this to himself twice over, as well as the Chozo.
  • In regards to himself, The Adam AI from Fusion had a small-but-loyal number of fans who were intrigued by his characterization and past-tense working relationship with Samus. Meanwhile, those who knew about the manga at the time respected his status as a Reasonable Authority Figure that Samus would happily taunt by demanding exuberant payment whenever she took care of threats before his agents could. Suffice to say, none of these fans were pleased with the choices made regarding the original Adam used in this game, who comes off as cold and condescending towards Samus at best and abusive at worst.
  • In regards to the Chozo, Samus considers him to be a father figure in this game, with no mention on how much of the series' supplemental material hammered home the fact that Samus was raised by the Chozo and sees them as family. In particular, she had two father figures in Old Bird and Gray Voice, the former having found her in the aftermath of her colony's destruction, and the latter being one of the donors who gave Samus her Chozo DNA and who trained her to become a warrior.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Missiles. Well, less missiles themselves (as they're a staple of the series), but how you activate them in the first place. You can only use missiles in first-person, which is done by turning the Wiimote to face the screen. Needing to completely shift how you're holding the controller is seen as a clunky maneuver, and even after one gets used to it, it isn't considered as desirable as other combat options. In addition, Samus is unable to move in first-person aside from the SenseMove dodge mechanic, which the game doesn't tell you is still possible to execute in this mode.
  • The Pixel Hunt segments. The game occasionally decides to lock Samus into a first-person view point and stop the game until the player points the targeting cursor at some small detail of the scenery to trigger the remainder of the cutscene. The details that the game wants you to find usually aren't obvious and tend to blend into the background, with one of the most infamous being having to find green blood on green grass that is in the opposite direction of the object everyone else in the scene is facing. If you don't have a guide, you can find yourself staring at the screen for minutes on end with no idea what you're supposed to be looking for, destroying the game's pacing.
  • The story justification for how Samus gains powerups is largely disliked. Basically, Samus has her entire arsenal from the beginning rather than needing to locate them across the map, but refrains from using any of them without Adam's authorization to prevent her from accidentally vaporizing the other men under his command. This gets a little silly when Samus takes damage from the heat in the lava area because Adam didn't tell her to utilize her Varia Suit — something that couldn't possibly do anything but protect Samus better. Nintendo Power Issue 259 even set aside a whole sidebar in their review to highlight this as absurd. Ironically, one of the only items that Samus actually finds on the Bottle Ship herself is the Seeker Missile, which despite being the easiest weapon to misfire, doesn't require authorization at all.
• Signature Scene:
  • Samus’ Heroic BSoD upon Ridley’s clone showing up is easily the most well-known and reviled scene in the game, due to the fear Samus expresses coming across as out of character; especially since she has seen Ridley revived and defeated him without incident multiple times at this point in the timeline.
  • The gameplay section where Samus must traverse superheated parts of Sector 2 without the Varia suit in a mandatory Hell Run, due to Adam not authorizing it, is often brought up as the apex of the flaws with the authorization system and Samus and Adam’s characterization/relationship.
• So Okay, It's Average: The general consensus around the game as time has gone on. Putting aside the controversial story, which continues to be the biggest source of criticism, a growing number of players find the gameplay to at least be passable, if inferior to past Metroid titles for its massive linearity, and overshadowed by later installments that adopted and improved upon the gameplay aspects that Other M did right and returned to a story style that was more in-line with the rest of the series.
• Subbing Versus Dubbing: Some fans argue that the original Japanese dialogue foregoes much of the Narm present in the English dub and makes for a more tolerable experience. While this is generally debatable, with Japanese reviewers and native speakers also criticizing that version's voice acting, almost nobody argues for the English dub as superior. Unfortunately, the Japanese version of Other M is the only one that contains dual audio.
• That One Boss:
  • Rhedogian has a long reach, difficult to avoid attacks, and can dodge damn near everything thrown at it.
  • Queen Metroid due to how the Metroids she spawns can (and will) gang up on you and the fact that you're required to use Power Bombs to defeat her, but but there's no indication that you're now allowed to.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The greater focus on narrative. Even ignoring the shift in focus to the more emotional side of Samus' personality, more story-averse fans objected to elements like Samus having fully-voiced dialogue with frequent monologuing and Samus regularly interacting with other human characters instead of being more isolated in her exploration.
  • One of the more minor changes that annoyed some fans was the Gravity Suit going from being its own set of purple armor to effectively being an additional function of the Varia Suit that manifests as a purple aura when in use. Sakamoto said he made the change so that scenes with Samus after she acquired it could still be serious, as he thought that the purple color of the Gravity Suit looked goofy. Fans of the suit disagreed, and in response future games would return to having the Gravity Suit being a proper suit upgrade, purple and all.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Anthony Higgs is the only widely-liked character in the game among the fanbase due to how warm and friendly his relationship and interactions with Samus are. He's largely considered to be a more interesting supporting character than Adam, but we don't actually get to learn that much about him beyond the fact that he and Samus were close friends back in her military days.
  • In addition to Anthony, none of the members of Adam's squad are given much exposure, despite a plot where one of them is secretly an assassin slowly offing the others to cover up what happened at the facility that would've been greatly enhanced by leaning into the inherent paranoia of it all. The Deleter's identity isn't even revealed in-game outside of a bit of environmental storytelling, only in external materials.
  • The Metroids are set up to be a great threat in the game once again. You don't even get to fight them outside of a single boss battle against the Metroid Queen and its hatchlings.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Of the four major narrative threads (Samus' military background and connection with Adam, the conspiracy with the Deleter and corruption within the Federation, Samus overcoming Ridley's apparent reappearance, and the disaster around MB), it's generally thought that none of them are given enough development despite each having enough material to drive the plot of their own games. Samus herself doesn't seem to have much impact on the overarching plot either, taking a passive role in most of the game's major events.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: Jessica Erin Martin, who voiced Samus in the English localization, is a passionate fan of the series who was shown to be genuinely excited and enthusiastic about getting to portray the character in promotional material, and has defended the characterization of Samus in Other M on multiple occasions since the game's release.
• Ugly Cute:
  • Little Birdie, aka Choogle, who looks like a cross between a Mini-Totoro and Stitch. Turns out it's baby Ridley. Never has anyone wanted a murderous space pirate as a plushie so badly.
  • The Joulions in Sector 2. They look like inflatable electric penguins. Is it any wonder they appear in the Pyrosphere stage in Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U?
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: As detailed elsewhere on this page, Adam unintentionally comes across as controlling and even abusive at times, which doesn't mesh with how the character is spoken of and portrayed as a respectable authority figure in Fusion and the manga.
• The Un-Twist: James Pierce being the Deleter. Granted, the game never outright says it, but it isn't too hard to deduce considering how suspiciously he behaved in the the Exam Center of the Biosphere. That and the fact that the other potential suspects were not very much exploited outside Anthony and Adam.
• Waggle: Despite being a 3D action game, Other M doesn't utilize a Wii Remote and Nunchuk setup. The sole control scheme is the lone Wii Remote, used sideways like an NES controller and occasionally as a pointer for actions like using missiles and searching the environment. Sakamoto insisted on this for the sake of simplicity, but most reviewers and players found it cumbersome to deal with, believing that the Nunchuk (with its analog stick and two additional buttons) would have felt more natural.

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