Usability in Metroid: Other M

This post contains spoilers for Metroid: Other M

The ending of the main story arc of Metroid: Other M was very frustrating to me, and I think the blame lies in the poor usability of one of the final boss fights of the game.

The game begins with a tutorial which teaches you the button combinations for Samus’ attacks. One of the moves is the Power Bomb, and once you leave the tutorial this move is disabled. However, you still have the regular Bomb attack. Towards the end of the game, you fight a Queen Metroid and roll down into the creature’s stomach in Samus’ morph ball form. As the morph ball, your only attacks are to lay bombs.

When I reached this point, I began laying as many Bombs as I could but did not see the monster’s health dropping. However, mine was falling while inside the monster’s stomach and I eventually died. The game let me restart right before I entered the monster’s stomach, but with only about half my health. This time I rolled around trying to lay bombs in as many places as I could, trying to find a weak spot that would let my bombs do damage. With my health much lower, I had less time to lay bombs and died again. I repeated this a few more times, using what little time I was given each restart to look for some weak spot that would damage the queen.

After dying over and over, my wife checked online to see how I was supposed to beat this monster. She told me I was supposed to use the Power Bomb attack. I had to look up what the button combination was because I did not remember it from the tutorial, which I had played through at least a week before. When I restarted again and used a Power Bomb, the monster immediately was killed. It was at that point that the game showed the Power Bomb ability being unlocked and reminded me of the button combination to perform it.

This was not a boss fight designed with usability in mind. The game required me to use a move the game told me previously was not available and only reminded me of how to perform the move after I had to use the move. Since the other abilities in the game would be shown as being activated when they became available the same thing should have been used here, probably when the player performed the action to jump down the monster’s throat.