The Fusion part always confuses me, since this game was supposed to be treating story more seriously. Samus should have been yelling at computer Adam about Nightmare, about the cyborg Space Pirates, about the whole fucking ship.
I also agree about the combat; those lightning kung fu lizards are the most obnoxious enemy I've faced in a Metroid game.
However, the Ridley scene does have a satisfying explanation that's much easier to swallow than an extreme case of PTSD out of nowhere: Time compression. It's a few seconds shown in slow motion, so instead of Samus being petrified for what seems like an hour, she's instead just shaken for a much shorter time.
Oh look, I just bumped this to the top of the review page. Have fun. ;)
Fight. Struggle. Endure. Suffer. LIVE.
Honestly, I thought the combat was a definite high point of the game, despite the broken Sense-Move mechanic.
However, the lack of health pickups or any other gameplay benefit to be received from defeating foes sort of killed it for me. Rolling around an enemy's shots and drawing close enough to spring onto their head and shoot them point-blank through the skull made me feel like a total badass (and I don't usually go in for the whole video-game-as-self-insertion-fantasy schtick), but I ended up avoiding all combat unless it was needed to open a door because, fun as it was, I couldn't really enjoy it when I knew that there wasn't any benefit to balance out the damage Samus would inevitably take in the process.
Fighting enemies would only ever have a negative net change on the player's status; in a game with so much attention having been given to its combat system, that is a very bad thing.
The kung-fu lizards and first-person mode both sucked Morph Balls, though.
I honestly never really found Other M's story to be as heinous as others make it out to be, probably because I have the critical thinking skills of a jellyfish. No Varia Suit in a magma zone even though there's no reason not to? HERP DERP NUTHIN WRONG HERE
Was, is, and always will be in a passionate love affair with the semicolon.
No exploration, no health pick-ups, and such really does kill the game not to mention the bad first person gameplay. They changed too many things at once.
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I Hate This Game
But I will try to put down all the reasons calmly. Keep in mind, this is just one man's opinion.
First off, the controls. Using a d-pad to navigate a 3-dimensional space feels very awkward. 8 directions is not enough for me to feel in control. My ability to control how fast I move is also lacking. When shooting at anything besides enemies, the only way to get any semblance of accuracy is to use first-person mode. Switching views is relatively quick, but being forced to do it a lot is irritating.
Fighting is alright. It's easy to dodge enemies (basically just spam random directions on the d-pad), and it feels pretty badass while you're doing it, and your shots seem to automatically lock onto enemies. The problem is that it takes forever. The enemies have way too much HP, and there's way too many of them. Maybe it's just that I got bored doing almost the exact same thing so many times, but I could swear that it took ten minutes to get through some rooms, and the entire time was just dodging and shooting. It gets a little more exciting with larger enemies that I can do all the fancy melee combat to, but those are more the exception than the rule.
Battling in first-person mode, by the way, I found to be the single most annoying thing I've ever been asked to do in a video game.
The story is, like with many people, the biggest problem for me. It makes Samus trusting the Federation in any capacity in Fusion seem incomprehensible. Samus is just as introspective as in Fusion, but her trauma and fear feels unnatural and not in agreement with past characterization. If you've seen the Ridley scene, you know what I'm talking about. Martin's voice acting doesn't help. Neither do the constant monologues. Especially not when combined.
The explanation of Samus's inability to use her items is dumb. It started off making enough sense, with the whole "don't use power bombs because it would melt us" thing, but when she's miles away from any of her teammates and getting killed by a giant monster, it starts to fall apart, especially with items like the Varia Suit (which makes one wonder, why wouldn't Samus always have that on?). The worst part is that this stupid concept is brought up throughout the game, so you can never forget about it. Having a reason for Samus lose access to her equipment is a nice idea, but it was done better in Fusion.