Edit: Revised to add some thoughts after finishing, didn’t feel like a whole new post.

I was very close to dropping Other M a couple of nights ago. There were just so many stretches of boring hallway, and the jump physics were killing me.  I was still liking the music, at least, but I kind of felt that I’d seen enough and could move on.

Then, I hit a boss (the construction robot, to be precise), and it flattened me. I hit “Yes” to continue, expecting to have to sit through a bunch of cutscenes and dialogue, and was floored to find myself facing the same boss again, with no preamble. If you’ve ever played Dark Souls II, it was very like the Royal Rat Authority, where death->fog gate->one more try was made blissfully fast by a bonfire positioned 10 seconds away from the boss room.

Anyway, the robot killed me a lot, but I kept feeling like I was getting *better* every time, and the satisfaction of watching it stop and fall over once I got good enough was a wonderfully warm feeling.

This turned out to be a good warm-up for the next tough boss fight, AKA “hey it’s the lava stage and the big pterodactyl dude from Dead or Alive Dimensions! Awesome! Ow. Ow. Hey guy, that hurts! Quit it please?”

(Apparently, his name is Ridley, which is not a name I associate with big pterodactyl monsters. Who knew?)

I’m not sure how many times I wound up eating dirt on that fight, but I do know it took me a TON of tries. Again, being able to instantly take another swing at the boss turned out to be the key, and he eventually dropped.

Tl;dr version of this post: I was really close to deciding that this game had outlived its welcome, but it is being redeemed by some seriously fun boss fights.

(Edit begins)

Finished Other M tonight, after a three hour marathon to get through the last few boss fights.  I know that “three hours” isn’t much of a marathon, but the control scheme made it feel a lot longer.

To sum it up: I really liked it!  I understand it doesn’t fit perfectly into the canon from the other games in the series, but I haven’t played any of those so I’ll just go with what I personally experienced.  It’s a little odd in that the best boss fight, against the aforementioned giant pterodactyl, comes about halfway through the game, and the final boss is actually quite a letdown, but I liked the way that I went from being kind of a pushover at the start of the game to an unstoppable spinning death ball towards the end.

Between this and Pokémon, that’s two major* Nintendo franchises that I’ve played for the first time this year.  Maybe I’ll even play a Zelda someday.

* I’m not sure if Metroid actually counts as a “major” Nintendo franchise.  It’s not one of their big sellers, and it skipped both the N64 and WiiU consoles, but at least it’s more alive than F-Zero.