Reggie Thought Metroid: Other M Would Be A ‘Defining Moment’ For The Franchise

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Metroid: Other M hasn’t has the smoothest of rides since it launched for the Wii back in 2010. Although widely praised for its combat and visuals, heavy criticism was given for Samus’s characterisation and the overall narrative. Although the game has earned some positive reprisals from fans in more recent times, it’s clear that the game wasn’t quite what audiences were looking for after Retro Studio’s stellar Metroid Prime trilogy.

Reggie Fils-Aimé has been doing the rounds recently in promotion for his new book, Disrupting the Game (check out our review here) and has spoken about the reception to Metroid: Other M on the Kinda Funny Gamescast.

Reggie states that he thought developer Team Ninja’s approach would be a “defining moment” for the franchise, before going on to explain the feedback he delivered to the likes of Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto on why the game didn’t land in the way they thought it would:

“I really thought that that was going to be a defining moment for the Metroid franchise. It was giving much more of a perspective about Samus. I really thought that was going to be a killer moment in the franchise’s history, and it wasn’t. It didn’t deliver – not the business results, it really didn’t touch the player the way we hoped it would.

“Interestingly, I was in a large group meeting, a strategy meeting with (Satoru) Iwata and (Shigeru) Miyamoto and the game developers, and we talked about why not. I was always the brash American. I was the one who would say what I believed was truth to try and help the business move forward. The point I made to the developers was it took too long to get into the meat and potatoes of this game. The first five hours of the game, you kind of plotted around. There wasn’t a lot of payoff, there was a lot of dialog, and I’m sure I p***ed people off in the room. But the learning here was the player wants to get into this much faster. Yes, there are elements we need to do from a tutorial standpoint to help them understand the game mechanics, but you need to move things along much quicker. And hopefully that advice had a little bit of an impact on the developers in the room.”

You can check out the full interview with the Kinda Funny crew in the video below:

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What do you make of Reggie’s comments on Metroid: Other M? Where does the game sit in your personal ranking of the Metroid franchise? Let us know in the comments!