While the announcement of Metroid: Other M proved to be a big E3 favorite that had Nintendo Nerds creaming their jeans and announcing that Nintendo does care about them (again), a few retroheads seemed concerned that the third-person action game from Team Ninja would not be a “proper” Metroid. Think again, as Reggie Fils-Aime has promised that Other M won’t butcher the beloved franchise.
“It’s all about what we can do creatively with a franchise to revitalise it,” explains Reggie. “A year ago, if someone asked me what’s going on with Metroid — when are we going to go back to the more traditional Metroid series versus the path that we went down with Prime? Here’s the answer: Other M.
“Metroid, for us, is a key franchise and in our view, since the SNES Metroid, we haven’t broken through — as in [selling] 1.5 or two million units. As we looked at where we wanted to go with Metroid, we wanted to place Samus back in the more traditional lineage of Metroid. We wanted to do it in a way that had a harder edge, and we wanted to go deeper into her story and more into this Metroid mythology.”
Reggie then made my own meat joke for me, by claiming that Team Ninja added “a little extra special sauce” to the development of Other M, in order to make it a “really compelling experience.” So worry not, my retro-obsessesed friends. Reggie has said Other M is a proper Metroid game, and that makes it true. Nobody knows and understands a classic Nintendo series as well as a Nintendo of America employee.
