The Team Ninja developed Metroid: Other M is more in line with a “traditional Metroid” as opposed to the Prime games, according to Nintendo’s Reggie Fils-Aime.
Last week’s announcement trailer for Metroid: Other M seemed to suggest that Nintendo was taking the franchise in new directions. With Reggie Fils-Aime’s pre-trailer talk of Nintendo working on new titles with teams known for its “mature” games, the action-heavy third-person combat on display in the trailer itself and, last but not least, what looked like a new hairdo for Samus Aran, it semed very much like a new chapter for the series.
But Fils-Aime says that even though Other M will “revitalize” the series in a creative way, it’ll be closer in line with the older Metroid games than the more recent Metroid Prime games that brought the 2D adventure series into first-person 3D. “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,” Fils-Aime said.
Looking back to what made the Metroid series great in the beginning was Nintendo’s goal, Fils-Aime explained. It’s also where the money might lie. “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,” he said. “As we looked at where we wanted to go with Metroid, we wanted to place Samus back in the more traditional lineage of Metroid.”
Not that it’ll be the same as the old games. “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,” Fils-Aime said. Harder edge would explain Samus’ newfound abilities to do superhero flips and stylish execution moves. I guess those things are part of what Fis-Aime called “a little extra special sauce” that Team Ninja is injecting into Other M. Now that just sounds kinda naughty.
