The introduction of Metroid Prime does much to bring its series into the world of modern gaming after skipping a console generation, making the 3D leap and boasting surprisingly slick controls and fantastic presentation (every bit as good today, frankly). It also serves as an “excuse” to strip Samus of her signature abilities granted by upgrades to her power suit. To explain why the hunt for power ups was necessary in a sequel after collecting them all in the previous installment was uncommon. Usually the audience just accepted that the game would be boring if they began with access to every item from the get-go. It’s about the journey, after all, especially so in the Metroid series. But nope, says Prime, we’re going to explain why the planet crawl and item progression is necessary. And so a quick cutscene was devised wherein an explosion threw caused Samus to take critical armor damage and lose most of the upgrades it had. Now players could feel completely comfortable with the need to re-collect all of them, without the inconvenient narrative hangups.
The concept of “Gameplay and Story Segregation” is a pretty familiar one if you’ve played video games for basically any length of time. It’s almost omnipresent in the medium, and probably one of the few conventions to exist solely as a result of games’ own inherent nature: interactivity (as opposed to their borrowing plots, physics, presentation, or other elements from film or TV). Because it tends to highlight the tension between player actions and writing decisions, one sort of tends to get the impression that it’s a bad thing.
Even if we grant this (which I’m not sure we should), though, sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. The bigger impact the player has on the progression of the game, the more egregious it tends to become when writers try to maneuver around the resulting contradictions. This can lead to some clumsy-looking/sounding ambiguity in dialogue and other text or voice acting; and it can raise issues with continuity when sequels roll around.
Back to Metroid Prime, whose intro explosion set the stage in the simplest possible way. It’s more than its distant ancestor, Super Metroid, did to explain why Samus was only armed with the basic beam back in 1994 (i.e., nothing at all). This fit overall with Prime, which was ever so slightly more focused on the narrative than Super. In a way, that one simple explanation foreshadowed the equally simple but elegant presence of the lore in the rest of the game world, which, thanks to the scanning mechanic, was only there to the degree that the player desired. Still, as an isolated incident, it wasn’t exactly incredible – “boom, your power ups are gone” in a literal sense doesn’t integrate much better with the rest of the story than it does in a figurative one.
The sequel, Echoes, on the other hand, took every aspect of the narrative one step further. There were more mandatory cutscenes, more mandatory lore, and more integration of the loss of power ups into the gameplay. Prime gave you one vague objective (“track the Space Pirates and stop them”) that snowballed as you opened up the map, and whatever you found along the way to help was fair game. Echoes spelled out the main conflict explicitly from the start, but it also set up the recurring theme of getting your own abilities back from invading the monsters that stole them – much more implicit, but still central to the game. Showing Samus lose her items to the enemies in Echoes arguably worked even better than the one-off cutscene explosion in Prime because it gave the player (not just Samus) targets to hunt. This was much better plot integration, a point of real development in a sequel.
Here’s the thing, though: it created a bit of an issue for future installments. Lo and behold, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption comes around. The developers eschewed the ability loss this time around, and it might seem puzzling at first. After all, the Prime series had always been praised for its marriage of the franchise’s signature gameplay with a more modern narrative sensibility. Why lose that? Personally, I think the developers realized that it might be getting a little tiresome to keep coming up with new ways to justify the treasure hunt from the standpoint of story. And for all of Corruption’s departures from the previous games that didn’t turn out so well, I think this one was spot on. After all, the only thing more important in good game design than pushing boundaries, inter-series as well as internal to individual games, is quitting while you’re ahead. The more you disguise the same tropes, the more the disguise is going to look like a pair of Groucho glasses (I’m looking at you, Pokémon).
It became tragically ironic when Other M eschewed the eschewing a couple years later, perfectly displaying the danger of trying too hard to justify gameplay with narrative. Instead of Samus losing her abilities and finding them all over the course of the game, we had Samus lacking military authorization to use them and progressively activating them only as instructed by the general in charge – ostensibly because of their sheer firepower and the danger they would pose to other soldiers (who, to be fair, are usually absent or already dead when Samus arrives on the scene). But this explanation fell apart in the worst possible way when Samus couldn’t or wouldn’t activate a purely defensive function of her suit in a life-threatening situation.
Ultimately this was one of the most damning incidents in Other M’s plot, and it definitely didn’t do the rest of the story any favors when fans leveled criticisms against it for portraying an abusive relationship between Samus and her “father figure” commanding officer. It’s far from the only culprit involved in the game’s overall mixed-at-best reception, but it is the best example I can imagine of pushing too far to explain things that don’t need to be explained.
I think there’s this assumption among game writers that the old tropes and tricks, such as starting your protagonist from scratch in the sequel without any previous power ups, are just too juvenile to work in a game meant to be taken seriously. But titles like Other M make me wish developers would accept more often that sometimes it is enough to say “here it is” and leave the rest to be explored. I would contend that if gamers wanted everything in the experience to be told to them rather than left to be determined, they would be reading novels or going to movie theaters.
There’s nothing wrong with pre-determined narrative experiences, of course, but video games have the unique potential to create that tension between what the developer presents and how the player handles it. Perhaps it’s not always a bad thing when the gameplay doesn’t quite align with the story, and perhaps it’s not universally desirable for them to be mangled to fit in with each other?
When you as a player make something happen in a game that maybe wasn’t quite intended, that contrasts with what is pre-determined by cutscenes, it’s a reminder that this is an experience where you too have a degree of control. I think that’s an important aspect to the appeal of video games as a whole, and that’s powerful.
