History Headscratchers / MetroidOtherM

** Prime didn't happen in this storyline, so they don't have access to the Pirate logs and terminals about how difficult it is to achieve a balance between your forces not having a weakness your enemies can exploit and having a weakness that you can keep your forces in line with.

** It was said that the developers actually had to shave off a few seconds from the cutscenes that are already on the game just to get everything to fit onto the disk. Any more would have been too much for it to handle. As nice as having flashbacks to child Samus would be, the cutscenes that are on the game are much too important to the plot at hand to throw out and replace with Samus's parent's being killed.

** All the computer systems were wiped clean if you remember, they had a hard time just getting pard of the exposition document.
** Actually, the memory was still intact, it was the CPU's (aka processors) that were destroyed. Though this does beg the question of how they were able to turn on the computers at all. (Or it could have been a writer who knows nothing about computers trying to sound technical.)

** You're wrong about Prime. Ridley appears in person aboard the Orpheon, while the logs detailing his survival are found inside the Pirate base on Phendrana drifts, a full two to three hours after the fact. In fact, the "Fall of Zebes" log found before Ridley is encountered even implies he's dead by claiming that all ground personal that were on Zebes are considered dead by the crew of the Orpheon. Furthermore, Samus doesn't "freeze up" when she encounters him, she simply reacts with surprise for a moment and cautiously waits to see what he's going to do, completely different than allowing him to attack her.

**** OR, we can use our brains here, instead of jumping on the idiotic PTSD bandwagon. When she encountered Ridley suspended in the Orpheon, he was inactive, and the place was about to explode. She had no time to waste trying to destroy a, technically, dead enemy. When she was out of the Orpheon, and she watched Ridley escape, let us THINK: The space station has exploded, she barely made it out of the reactor shaft, all of her equipment was irreparably damaged in the explosion, the space station was currently on a crash course with Tallon IV, and then the robotic Ridley, an opponent whom she does not know the full extent of the upgrades done to his body, and the resulting combat ability improvements, flies off of the ship with no intent of fighting with her. Even the most suicidally brave person would not be moronic as to attempt to engage Meta-Ridley. She had none of her powers, her foe had unknown combat abilities, and the Orpheon was CRASHING. Ignoring the fact that Ridley is not stupid, and he would simply have stayed out of Samus' range until she burned up with the Orpheon, there was no way in hell she was going pierce his armor with her arm cannon alone. There is no AlternateCharacterInterpretation at all here. There's just common sense.
**** There's a difference between not attacking right away while your target is at a distance, and outright freezing while your target is bearing down on you and your CEO is yelling for you to open fire.
* Samus apparently has PTSD. But if that's the case, shouldn't she have frozen up several other times throughout her career, not just when facing Ridley? (I admit, I am not terribly familiar with PTSD. If I'm wrong, feel free to correct me.)
** It depends on the cause of the PTSD. Since Samus' PTSD stems from Ridley killing and eating her parents in front of her, only things that remind her of that even would trigger it. Facing Ridley is the only example shown in canon, but other things that could cause her to freeze up would be seeing another member of Ridley's species or returning to the ruins of K-2L. Someone taunting her about it could even trigger it.
** She likely would have found it difficult to discuss the topic, narration-wise. The oh-so ci
** PTSD is the equivalent magic faerie dust in this script. You can use it to explain why a hero has breakdowns at convenient moments without actually putting effort into setting up the conditions for said breakdown.

* On a completely different note, why did Anthony never think to call Samus back after his escape? OK, so his com link wasn't fully functional, but according to Adam, they still had functionality in the nav rooms. Why did he never stop by one, plug in, call Samus, and say, "Hey there. You alright, Princess? Hopin' you made it out OK with old lizard-breath back there. Anyway, I managed to escape. I'm keepin' an eye out for KG and James, but if you need me for anythin', we can meet up in Sector 1, alright? Drop me a line sometime!"

*** Not really, after all there are sceens where she loses her armor and does not become shorter. And where would the extra height be? Samus's eye line up with the visor and her boots don't have heels on them.

** Super Metroid had inconsistencies with Metroid 2 despite being a direct sequel. The hand waves for that weren't until ''Prime 3''(written by a different team). Other M isn't even consistent with Prime 3 despite coming right after it. This director is pretty creative in level design but isn't known for consistent narratives.

*** When doesit ever say anything like that in game?

* So Adam goes into Sector Zero, is killed when it blow up, and his remains, if any, are somewhere within a very large volume of space, inside the remains a very large debris-filled section. So how on earth was Adam in Fusion based on him? Was it scanned before this mission, somehow? If it's protocol to upload the minds of great leaders and scientists, wouldn't the political faction behind the bottle ship do their best not to give the Adam AI to the rebellious bounty hunter they can't control?

* So how did DNA get on to Samus's suit anyway? The metriod games are not known for there gore after all. Samus shoots hot power beams and cold ice beams to defeat her foes. The hot beams would destroy the DNA out right and the ice would contain it. No mess, no fuss.

** If Samus's suit disintegrates then why/how does it needed to be washed?
* How can Adam see what Samus see? Its not like her power armor is federation issued.

*** Sure as sure, but if its a ''different part'' as you say then the would that not mean the same as not happening(as far as Other M is concerned)? After all this is the ''first time'' Samus joined forces with the Federation.

** "First joint mission after becoming a freelance bounty hunter", that line in itself causes many problems but most relevant here is that it throws ''Metroid Prime 3'' out the window if true. Of course, her "excitement" over having a CO throws out fusion as in that game she said she was not particularly found of [=COs=] and did not like following orders.
*** Fusion comes after--it could well be that her distaste for [=COs=] came after Other M (or possibly is because of Other M). As for the other? Eh, one line that I could argue a few different ways. Prime 3 was, for the most part, less a joint mission and more Samus doing her thing on her own with occasional support from the Federation. She wasn't taking direct orders from Admiral Dane, for instance, and did most of what she did on her own initiative. Other M, in that case, was the first time she'd put herself under direct command for the duration of a mission, while Prime was when she was one of several bounty hunters independently contracted by the Federation.

* Why did no one on the bottle ship think to put kill switches on the clones and such? Or did all there top scientists graduate from the Space Pirate University?
** Because it was poorly plotted? No lets go with that, they were all educated in the space pirate method of lab procedure and manufacturing. Space pirates have infiltrated the federation, call it WildMassGuessing or {{Fanon}} if you want but its the only way the very idea of the bottle ship makes sense.

* This is kind of meta, but why do people claim that one can better understand ''Other M'' if they read the Metroid Manga? Other then having have some similar ideas there is not much to tie the two together.

** Funny thing is, Other M metaphorically spits on the manga's storyline by changing Adam's encouragement to starting her bounty hunting career to his disapproval and makes Samus a "soldier" under his command when she never was in the manga, their conflicting jurisdiction with her being in the police being a plot point. People are just desperate to defend ''Other M'' and are probably just using second hand details they heard about the manga without having read it themselves. If people really cared about the manga they would have voiced their protests when Zero Mission made zero effort to stay consistent with it.

** Samus is human. Sometimes, humans just don't think to look for certain things. Samus sees what she thinks is a human, where she expected to see a human--and a particular human at that--and makes an assumption that this is the human she was looking for.
* So [[spoiler: the Queen Metroid drains Ridley.]] Fair enough. But then how does [[spoiler: Ridley's carcass get to the station in Fusion? Ridley should have collapsed in to a pile of dust under his own weight.]]
** Perhaps it did not, maybe the Federation just cloned him again and the one in the freezer was in the process of under going its Metamorphosis before the X came and ate it up.

** It's an easy enough mistake to make, the mature form looks the same as the infant form other than being larger. Metroids as is shown in the above life cycle change radically as they mature into Alpha, Gamma, Zeta and Omega forms
* Babies cry distress signal; Why is the bottle ship sending out such a high profile SOS when the last thing it would want is a random element possibly taking there research?[[spoiler: Nightmare, Metroids, Mother Brain, Cloning.]]

* Why is there ranks of distress signals? This is not the first time that Samus received a SOS form Federation or otherwise that were in just as bad shape or worse then the bottle ship, so hearing that there is a higher rank of SOS just sounds absurd.

* Where does Samus armor go when she is not wearing it?

** It goes into her gunship, that is why the armor was destroyed when the ship was shot down while she was not wearing it in Zero Mission. That explanation works just fine with every other Metroid game so even if ''this one'' seems to imply other wise it is irrelevant.

** The BOTTLE Ship is a science vessel so they could be...testing geo thermal facilities in a controlled environment. Yes, the fact that it would take more energy to keep the lava from melting the ship and just to keep it hot in the first place makes this a questionable endeavor but the Galactic Federation, or whoever is responsible for making the BOTTLE Ship, are idiots anyway. Alternatively, Team Ninja had no idea what they were doing when they put that in.

*** No they're not. Power bombs do hurt [=SR388=]-strain metroids, BUT it takes 3 power bombs to kill even 1. These aren't the weak Tallon metroids from the Prime games here, where even the basic power beam can hurt them and a power bomb instant kills them, these are [=SR388=] metroids, like in Super. Taking out goodness knows how many metroids with power bombs, when it takes at least 3, would just not have been feasible. With the way Other M does power bombs, what with a slow charge up to use, a very slow cooldown afterward, and it taking 3 to kill one metroid, Samus would not have made it.
** We don't even know they're immune to the ice beam though! There is some evidence they can survive in arctic conditions. So? The icebeam freezes things in the ice sector just fine. It also freezes creatures living in fucking lava. That's not arctic. That's colder than liquid nitrogen. There's no good reason to suspect that making them less susceptible to frigid environments made them completely immune to freezing. Power bombs might not be feasible, okay, but how much damage did Adam need to cause anyway? It looked like he went in there with just rifle and sidearm. He didn't bring anything that could be set as a timed explosive? There wasn't anything on the ship that could be used as such? It was an extremely dangerous mission, granted, but there was no reason he couldn't have survived.

**** Even without the suit she's supposedly much stronger than him, thanks to Czho-tampering and all that.

*** No they're not. Power bombs do hurt SR388 strain metroids, BUT it takes 3 power bombs to kill even 1. These aren't the weak Tallon metroids from the Prime games here, where even the basic power beam can hurt them and a power bomb instant kills them, these are SR388 metroids, like in Super. Taking out goodness knows how many metroids with power bombs, when it takes at least 3, would just not have been feasible. With the way Other M does power bombs, what with a slow charge up to use, a very slow cooldown afterward, and it taking 3 to kill one metroid, Samus would not have made it.

*** Brawl did, in Zero Mission there wasn't any feat of agility she couldn't pull off with the suit outside of pure jumping height, she jumps higher when the suit doesn't have any of its mobility upgrades. She had the space jump so that point is mute. She runs faster in the suit and can barrel through walls in it so speed isn't an issue. The cannon can open up like a pseudo claw, which if Prime 3 is ignored then maybe she would still need both hands but from the arguments on this page it apparently wasn't so it wasn't to free hands...

** Okay, working off the logic the entirety of ''Prime 3'' was less a join mission and more Samus being assigned to do a task in Federation territory she ''still'' ends up going on several join missions with the Federation. Exiting Olympus to Norion, activating the planetary defense system, protecting the demolition troopers, leading the way to the source of phazon, all were done beside fleet troopers and marines.

**** Then Adam can order her off the station, or arrest her. He can't order her around. He says he needs to ''ask'' her to work with them and follow his orders. The Marines work with Samus just fine in Prime 3. The woman is a walking WMD. She has destroyed ''planets''. She should already have one of the highest security clearances available. And how does Adam know what her clearance is? How does he want her to work with them without telling her what's going on?

** Okay, working off the logic the entirety of ''Prime 3'' was less a join mission and more Samus being assigned to do a task in Federation territory she ''still'' ends up going on several join missions with the Federation. Activating the, exiting Olympus to Norion, planetary defense system, protecting the demolition troopers, leading the way to the source of phazon all were done beside fleet troopers and marines.

*** Brawl did, in Zero Mission there wasn't any feat of agility she couldn't pull off with the suit outside of pure jumping height, she jumps higher when the suit doesn't have any of its mobility upgrades. She had the space jump so that point is mute. She runs faster in the suit and can barrel through wall in it so speed isn't an issue. The cannon can open up like a pseudo claw, which if Prime 3 is ignored then maybe she would still need both hands but from the arguments on this page it apparently wasn't so it wasn't to free hands...

** You're missing the point, their rounds in Prime 2 were ammo based but they were not ''regular'' bullets.

** The real question, for those who played Metroid II, is why were you using ice to kill an Omega Metroid. Let's just says this director has made good games but is not the best story teller, especially when it comes to consistency.

** "First joint mission after becoming a freelance bounty hunter", that line in itself causes many problems but most relevant here is that it throws ''Metroid Prime 3'' out the window if true. Of course, her "excitement" over having a CO throws out fusion as in that game she said she was not particularly found of COs and did not like following orders.
*** Fusion comes after--it could well be that her distaste for COs came after Other M (or possibly is because of Other M). As for the other? Eh, one line that I could argue a few different ways. Prime 3 was, for the most part, less a joint mission and more Samus doing her thing on her own with occasional support from the Federation. She wasn't taking direct orders from Admiral Dane, for instance, and did most of what she did on her own initiative. Other M, in that case, was the first time she'd put herself under direct command for the duration of a mission, while Prime was when she was one of several bounty hunters independently contracted by the Federation.

** PTSD is the equivalent magic faerie dust in this script. You can use it to explain why a hero has breakdowns at convenient moments without actually putting effort into setting up the conditions for said breakdown.
** BRUCE WAYNE had PSTD since he saw his parend being shot. Now he hates criminals, and hates guns (But hoo boy, he can use one when he must do) but I never saw him freezing everytime he see a thug with a gun. If she's gonna freeze everytime she see Ridley, the leader of the Space Pirates, she has made the most stupid decision when choosing her career!

*** That article has been shown to death, though, if that's the one I'm thinking about. It's been used a lot to show the flaws of the game, though you've put a good spin on what it could mean when you think about what another tab on this page stated: that in Fusion, the AI DOES bring up her submission, meaning that this was clearly by design and is intended to make us ask why. Perhaps an intended plot hole in order to make us want another game that delves further into this sub plot.
** [[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/lb_i.php?lb_id=13373815860B43920100&i_id=13378783790I03420200&p=9 Ahem.]] Since all of you were basically screwming "graphical limitations" this and "RIDLEY DIED AND IT SURPRISED HER" that, I decided to show you all what you looked like.

*** Brawl did, in Zero Mission there wasn't any feat of agility she couldn't pull off with the suit outside of pure jumping height, she jumps higher when the suit doesn't have any of its mobility upgrades. She had the space jump so that point is mute. She runs faster in the suit and can barrel through wall in it so speed isn't an issue. The cannon can open up like a pseudo claw, which if Prime 3 is ignored then maybe she would still need both hands but from the arguments on this page it apparently wasn't so it wasn't to free hands...
** Because a Nintendo Power interviewer asked about whether ZSS would be playable, so Sakamoto decided to do this as a loophole.

** "Because Sakamoto ignored the Prime series" seems good enough a reason to me.

** Plot hole, plot hole, plot-HOLE~, Plot hole, Plot hole, Plot-HOLE~

** AttentionDeficitOohShiny

** Maybe [[BrownNote Samus' stupidity and Wangst]] [[AchievementsInIgnorance shorted out the comms system]]?

** It made it seem more realistic. Shame this game is anything but.

** Because RuleOfDrama. [[OccamsRazor Any other explanation would be actively looking for excuses for the game's shoddy storytelling.]]

*** She also bitches and moans about the Infant Metroid, which is obviously not alive. Why she would care more about people who she fought with for a couple years over the people who raised her for 15-20 years and gave her all her experience and training can be chalked up solely to bad writing.

** It was the easiest way to make Samus go Zero Suit without a hugeass subplot about getting it back.

** Objectification of women can be easily blamed for Fanservice, but I'd blame Japanese society as a whole for the visual alteration.

** [[UnfortunateImplications Because she's a goddamn female. The stupid bitch dared to wander into menfolk talk and deserves to be thrown into a furnace as punishment until she learns to stay at home, make me sammiches, and take my damn cock like a good little bitch.]]

*** When doesit ever say anything like that in game?
**** It doesn't. They're there because they're there. It causes a load of plot holes, but they're there. Plain and simple.

** This is a horrible plot. This is a horrible protagonist. This is a horrible game.

** The game was a faulty clone of Fusion to begin with. Their "Handwave" would be that it's what happened to Adam's helmet afterwards. Of curse, that doesn't explain why she didn't know about the BrainUploading until after Fusion.

** Plot holes. You could say Ridley's skin flaked onto her when he grabbed her on his death.

** The game forgot it's on an abandoned space station. No other explanation makes sense.

** Yes.

** [[{{Understatement}} BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA]]

** Sakamoto was turning Samus into his depiction of the perfect wife, plot holes be damned, so she inexplicably got attatched to it. Also notice how much smaller the Giant Metroid is in Other M.

** Why do SOS signals have varying priority in the first place?

*** None of the Japanese are.

*** Different Power Suit, different ship.

*** When dose it ever say anything like that in game?

** Maybe he's not as familiar with her moduc operandi as a bounty hunter.

*** On the one hand, it's not unlikely or unrealistic for Samus to have PTSD. On the other hand, it ''is'' unlikely and unrealistic for Samus to have come as far as she has without having an effective coping strategy to get through crisis situations or panic attacks. That's roughly how it'd work in real life.