One of the very first things I learned in my Creative Writing 101 class in college was a very simple rule of writing: Show, don’t tell. As a storyteller, the responsibility is on you to draw in the audience and paint a picture for them – let them understand what is going on through their own observations rather than simply explaining things to them. Showing a character’s irrational lashing out at someone is far more engrossing than simply saying “Dave was angry.”

The designers of Metroid: Other M must have missed this class, because they sure love to tell us pretty much everything.

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Back when I was in high school, I was involved with a regular D&D group. We’d bust out our 2.0 edition books, roll up some characters, and go on what was basically a glorified dungeon delve hack and slash. The story underpinning these adventures was never very in depth; there were never any deep political machinations, no secretly evil NPC waiting to turn on us, no damsel to be rescued who was actually working for the evil wizard we were fighting. Everything was very black and white. Hell, at one point, we were actually fighting a gang boss who had named himself “Mayor McDemon” (who we were pretty sure got elected through some sort of vote fraud). It doesn’t get much more straightforward than that. We were dudes who liked killin’ baddies, and these guys were the baddies we were gonna kill.

Because of this, and because of the fact that as a group we can’t go ten minutes without being cynical or sarcastic about something, it became a running joke in the party that we, as players, would wonder aloud what the monsters in these dark rooms were doing before our stalwart heroes burst through the door. Would they be thinking of the next strategy to pillage the local town, or would they be huddled over a lab table, coming up with new sources for renewable energy? Was that design on the floor a sigil to summon a dark lord? Or was it really just a diagram for how to best plant crops so that the town could have a self-sufficient food source? It didn’t matter to our party, because we were heroes, and they were monsters. They had to die.

Fast-forward 15 years to present day, and that idea still sticks in the back of my mind. As I embarked on my “New game +” of Nier, it made its way back to the forefront.

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It was in the northeastern wilds of Pennsylvania, sometime around the year 1985.  We were heading to the family cabin in the woods for a summer vacation.  In addition to the things you would expect to find at a cabin in the woods — trees, streams, swarms of angry hornets — it also held one very important thing: my cousins’ old Atari 2600. While I had an Intellevision at home, there was something different about playing the Atari.  Being able to play it was one of the things I most looked forward to about our trips. Perhaps it was just the simple fact that it was something new and different to me, or maybe the fact that it had an honest-to-goodness joystick.

On this particular trip, my cousins upped the excitement by telling me they had brought a new game with them: The Empire Strikes Back.  The game was actually several years old by that point, but it was new to me. I loved Star Wars, and the idea of actually being able to play out the movies as a game absolutely blew my six-year-old mind.  As soon as I had a chance, I claimed the TV and the Atari and gave it a try.

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