That’s true, it makes sense looking at what they were doing with Samus/ the zero suit sexualization and I think I was/still am too much of a dumb teen at heart to see it as anything more then suddenly trying to inject stealth tension into the game before it was pretty much just playing it straight as a Fusion retrofitting of the original
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samus having all her powers taken away and being forced to crawl through tunnels scared and alone while overpowered dudes menace you and everything is screaming at you doesnt feel great. like theres different ways to take away power EVERY METROID GAME DOES IT without sexual menace dripping out of every pore
super metroid doesnt do this. its great.
(i think theres a place for menace like this in games but its not metroid. like let us have one mary sue nintendo. stop sexually assaulting samus and not celebrating her birthday. )
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like I didn’t know if I was just being sensitive as a kid but like I showed that section to daphny a few months ago and it was actually worse than I remembered, I think it’s pretty telling that usually when I explain how I feel about it people are usually like yeah that seems kinda gross actually. zero mission is the point for me where metroid went from being about samus being 6’3 and 298 pounds of pure muscle to like, being a skinny bitch in her underwear constantly under the threat of sexual assault because the other m guy is a fucking freak
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barf
huh i never read it that way. I always saw it as a “Even losing everything isn’t gonna stop me from surviving” kinda thing. but yeah, think thats not correct, especially after other m (I usually ignore other m and often forget it exists)
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Conversely I thought it was cool how Samus got to be badass without her suit, because it means Samus is a badass even when she has almost no resources at her disposal. That makes her way less helpless in my eyes.
And then the cathartic satisfaction of going back through all the terrain you had to navigate with a more limited toolset made the last section that much cooler, because you went from nothing to being more powerful than you were at the start of the stealth sequence.
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Someone should do a fan game that has sections of Samus without the suit, if they haven’t already. Or a game where you have to slowly build the suit up piecemeal.
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i dont think we need to ruin metroid any further by making more games featuring the fucking outfit that was conceptualized with “I CANT WAIT TO DRAW THIS” and an arrow pointing to her fucking ass. i’m sure samus is a badass without her suit. Because shes not a fucking waif, shes a bounty hunter who goes on grueling solo missions and is jacked as fuck. but the reality in the game is that now shes a conventionally attractive blonde woman who functionally can barely defend herself without her suit. you cant fight the space pirates in that section at all, your only option is to run. thats not empowerment in the slightest lol, its a sequence where men decided that arbitrarily Samus is no longer allowed to defend herself because seeing a woman in peril gets their fucking dick hard
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zero suit ruined samus for me for like ten years theres no argument that can say the zero suit is badass when everyone does fanart of it the way its meant to be interpreted. like im sure i could make some kind of headcanon where being in a zentai suit and menaced is empowering actually but id rather not do the mental gymnastics, id much rather experience something where i dont have to be reminded that no matter how strong i get some dude will menace me into helplessness. it hits a lot different based on life experiences im sure
like at least when mother brain kicks my ass (mother brain having a body is the worst part of the game to me BUT) 1. shes a woman and 2. she doesnt take my clothes
if samus kicked ass without her suit itd be different. maybe if you had more than A GUN YOU’RE TOLD IS WORTHLESS TO RUB IN HOW POWERLESS YOU ARE
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im just done making excuses for men wanting to see tity
no one takes aloys clothes in horizon zero dawn
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theres approximately like, one time in horizon zero dawn where men are vaguely rapey and you proceed to kill all of them to the last man. please dont let me have to play a fucking aaa sony game to have a legitimately strong female character as the protag who isnt totally one-dimensional
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the stealth section in zero mission is so incredibly tacked on i have a hard time believing why theres any possible reason its good and should exist. metroid was one of my favorite series growing up and its just such a fucking sadness that this is what it is now. terabytes of zero suit samus rule34 and fucking forgotten birthdays
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I beat Ape Escape 3 and it was like, cool and charming but it also didn’t really have anything to it that I’ll ever think about again now that I’ve beaten it. It was a game all about fun and I’m realizing fun has become pretty low on the list of reasons why I play video games. Where did I go wrong in life to become this.
Actually I will remember the first time a monkey stole the net from me and then caught me with it, instantly kicking me out of the level. I have deeply hated monkeys since the one time they stole my lunch when I went out swimming on an island off the coast of Shikoku and this Ape Escape experience produced an acid reflux of the mind in which throughout the rest of the day I kept coming back to thoughts like “no creature should be given thumbs without also being given empathy”
Anyway now I’m playing Yakuza 2 in Japanese and oops I overestimated my language abilities in this one. But I’ll get through it and I’ll have a good time and I’ll learn a few more things. There’s so much kind tortured himbo energy in this game and it makes me just wanna get shredded this winter when it gets too cold to run. I am kind and tortured but not a himbo (yet).
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I agree the sexualization of Zero Suit can suck! But I also like seeing protagonists survive overwhelming odds, and I don’t think the only possible way for that to be cool is by murdering everything in sight…which she does eventually do anyway.
One of my favorite genres is the stealth genre, I like protagonists getting the upper hand on their enemies in creative ways, or moving through spaces where everything is deadly and could kill them but they nevertheless survive.
Sorry if I get heated here but…your responses to my post make me feel like just sharing my honest reaction and interpretation to the game I played is intended as a form of apologia for gross dudes, which it vehemently is not intended to be.
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i can’t not get mad about misogyny, sorry, i’m not directing it at anybody who posts on here. she could survive overwhelming odds without being put in her fuckin underwear but that’s not what happened. i hate always being the person who points out how fucking shitty towards women most media is but it immediately and permanently colors my perception of a game the second it gets fucking gross. that’s the real problem here, not with any of us
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I love Ape Escape 3, it’s a generous game packed with mostly fun stuff but I agree, there’s a kind of blandness to the series (the second games suffers from this the most) and my memories of it fade with time… The art style is both well executed and pretty but also kind of generic. That said, I love the power suits in the third one, shooting up shit as the cowboy felt great and I still think about how all the monkeys have horoscopes you can look at and investigate romantic compatibility between them etc. Also the race car gadget remains a brain tickling thing that one could maybe make an entire game out of. Anyway, the best Ape Escape game might be Snake Eater?
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Oh dang yeah the soundtrack was by far the best part of the game, thank you for reminding me. Constant drumming along on my desk to the loading screen music.
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The Zero Mission stealth section is a cool idea in theory (Samus temporarily challenged to rely on skills not augmented by the suit) but it seems extremely motivated by not being able to wait to draw this.
The Smash bros shit where the rationale is that a genetically augmented alien-hybrid warrior can’t competitively engage in combat or even fucking double jump (even Snake can do this) without rocket high heels is abysmal.
I kinda wish Ape Escape would come back but then the series really does suffer from that quirky-but-bland problem. Suits in 3 were cool and I completely forgot you can be caught by your own net. I guess now that most games exclusively use the right stick for camera there’s no market for traditional Ape Escape controls.
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am i the only one who thinks samus might be wearing at least another 2 suits under the zero suit? also she can probably take off her skin and underneath it’s another suit.
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