Zero Suit Samus has a great character model

[chozo_hybrid]

To add some more fuel to the fire here's Samus' new pistol pose:

See how she dislocates her shoulder so her tits can be visible.

Haven't seen it in action yet, surely that's between frames of movement, that's not where her arms rest to fire it is it? Because that looks really unnatural.

 

[NoeL]

She's wearing the kind of six-inch heels Lady Gaga wore for music videos a couple of albums ago. That is not a choice Samus Aran would make, but rather one that was made by a designer for seemingly not other reason than fetishizing her.

See, I really dislike comments like this because they assume Samus to be someone the games never portrayed her to be. For the first two games Samus had no character - she was a robot that shot things, and that's it. We had no idea whether she was a stoic badass or a little girl that was pissing her pants every step of the way (that said, since she's a bounty hunter by trade we can probably assume she at least felt confident in her mission, even if she was scared). Super Metroid offered little characterisation too, though this Nintendo Power poster [http://warnersretrocorner.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/metroid-samus-diagram.png] reveals that she's incredibly physically intimidating (6'3 and 198lbs - a mountain of a woman). This is how she was represented in game too: tall [http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-a-mZvv-XyFY/UajRvxPALRI/AAAAAAAAXtQ/SFxlOlV01tE/s320/super-metroid-1.jpg] and ripped [http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100106020956/metroid/images/b/b9/Bikinisupermetroid.gif]. It's a shame Nintendo decided to make her more stereotypically feminine physically, but this says nothing about her character.

And that's the big thing. We've really seen very little of Samus outside her job, and being tall and buff does not mean she has no desire to be feminine, or fashionable, or sexy. After all, she's still human, and still a woman. All you have to do is look at mastectomy patients or female body builders that get boob jobs in order to feel more feminine, and thus more comfortable in their bodies. Someone else made the argument that she was raised by aliens and doesn't consider herself part of humanity - I call bullshit. Yes she was raised by aliens, yes she may consider herself an outsider, but she's still human with human desires.

To look at the heels and say "Gawd, the 'real' Samus wouldn't be caught dead in those!" presumes something about her character that has never been expressed in canon! Even if Nintendo retained her Brienne of Tarth stature you simply can't say that she wouldn't (or worse: shouldn't) embrace her femininity and maybe even want to look sexy.

That said, given how badly they clash the rocket shoes clearly weren't custom designed for Samus, and may very well be off-the-shelf additions she bought down at Rocket Shoes R Us or something. Maybe they don't even come in flats! Maybe Samus isn't fashion conscious, and bought those gaudy, uncomfortable things simply because of their undeniable utility (if you can still kind of run it might be worth it to be able to kick someone in the face with a fucking rocket).

We do know some stuff about her. One, she was raised by alien birds. Two, she spends most of her time alone running around the galaxy exploring alien worlds. She has chosen a solitary lifestyle.

Those are things that inform character.

She has chosen a solitary job. You can't infer anything more about her lifestyle than you could a truck driver. She still needs to interact with people if she's going to collect the bounty, and may have a perfectly healthy social life outside of work. Also hell, she may not have even "chosen" that job: maybe being raised by alien birds left her a little undeveloped in the finer aspects of human social interaction. Maybe she hunts alone not out of choice, but because she simply can't connect with other people and had to find solitary work. She may not be solitary and independent, but soul-crushingly lonely. That would explain why she's in such a life-threatening line of work: she just doesn't care if she lives or dies. Tragic.

Why would she be 'traditionally feminine'? Or try to appear sexy? Especially in battle?

Why wouldn't she? If you're going to proclaim "This isn't how Samus would dress!" you have to at least give a reason. I can think of at least one very good reason why she would want to look sexy: she wants to get laid! If you're all alone on alien planets for extended lengths of time you're bound to get a severe case of the blue ovaries. Where better to hook up than a casual martial arts tournament? After all, fighters are top athletes in prime physical condition... Captain Falcon's butt is looking mighty fine right about now. Do you have any idea just how much sex goes on in Olympic villages?

 

[Icehearted]

Spoiler: click here to see the whole post

'Twas a joke, good sir.

"If you're offended by this, you're the one with a problem, because you noticed" is frequently used as a real argument. You might want to avoid sounding like that, since there's lots of people that use that argument in perfect seriousness. It strikes them as a good way to silence dissent, for some reason.

Really? I seem to remember she was one of the first to have a bikini cheat code, and rewarded the player with variously increasing levels of undress based on their speed in completing Metroid games.

On the surface this looks like an excellent point. But what's the first rule of Metroid? Don't just look at the surface. And this argument's about as full of holes as Zebes.

In the original games, Samus killed every living thing in her way, then when her work was done she took off her armor. Which is basically what you'd expect any soldier to do when the battle is won. You could argue it was a bit crass for Nintendo to let us see her when she was relaxing after work, but it was fanservice delivered in a way that let Samus as character develop into something strong and really not sexualized. 10 seconds of her out of her armor in the credits is heavily outweighed by however much time you spent with her in her armor beating the game.

So she became characterized someone that was all-business most of the time, wearing completely practical clothing, but with the ability to relax later. When she finally got a few lines of dialog, they matched with that personality. She was quiet, serious-minded, introspective, and practical. Basically, someone that has no business wearing high heels, the epitome of clothing selected for their sex appeal and not their practicality.

Personally I was amazed when the Zero Suit was a thing, because it's basically a body stocking. We're way past being guarded about how she's portrayed at this point, and these weirdly irregular ideas about what's too sexy have become much to polarized by the glut of forced controversy being shoehorned into this medium by parties interested in controversy for controversy's sake.

Are you really going with "you're not a real gamer if you disagree with me"? Lame.

As for why people are saying something now, "when clearly Samus has been sexualized for a while" it's because it's a shift that happened bit by bit, a little at a time, and it wasn't even a straight line. In the original games the "sexy Samus" was limited to when she was done with her work. In Zero Mission we saw the Zero suit briefly, but it was presented as a hell run of sorts, something you wanted to get over as quickly as possible, and was still a small fraction of gameplay overall. A few people complained and said it would end badly, but they got laughed at. I mean come on, the official art even had Nintendo saying "no high heels!" they weren't going to turn Samus into Lara Croft (a character that in 2006 showed more sense than modern Samus, by taking off a pair of high heels before fighting)

Smash Brothers' introduced the Zero suit more visibly, which is unfortunate, but the main Varia suit was still the thrust of the character, and you had the Prime games presenting Samus more desexualized than ever. At that point it could have gone either way.

And we got Other M.

'Nuff said.

We probably would've spent more time protesting the high heels and beauty mark in Other M, but there was just soooo much to hate in that game. We're only human!

And now here we are with her in high heels, a skintight suit, enlarged breasts since the last game, a beauty mark, and the "no armor on" Samus is being pushed to the forefront so heavily it's a playable character itself. What was once something you got for a few seconds, if you worked hard, which still let the character remain serious, is now being shoved in the fans' faces from the word go.

This hurts nobody, nor does it set civilization back by any stretch.

This one specific thing, all on its own? No, it's hurting nobody. But that "high heels, so what" attitude in general? Yeah, that actually factually provably is harming people. These days games are being played for a few billion hours worldwide every week, and people are influenced by what they see. That doesn't mean that because people play a FPS they'll go out and shoot people, because we all know shooting people in the real world is wrong. But continuing to push high heels as the norm? Yeah, that'll probably feed the public's denial that they're actually a major health nuisance. They may not be killing many people (I say "many" because something that common which leaves you off balance and limits your mobility has to have claimed a few lives over the last couple centuries), but it's well-established that they're a major source of injuries and health problems for women. So the overall trend of continuing to slap them on more and more women in media, even ones that should have more sense than to wear the horrible things, is definitely hurting women. And since some of those health issues, like osteoporosis, are likely to kick in when they're older and on Medicare, it's a drain on taxes, so sure, it sets civilization back a bit too. Less so than some other health hazards, but I can't think of many contemporary health hazards that get shrugged off and ignored as much as high heels.

Baseless slippery slopes, hyperbole, suppositions, and straw man arguments (see portion marked in red as example of the latter two). You literally replied to things I didn't even write when vaguely addressing the things I did. I don't know how to reply to any of this other than to call it out for what it is. Underwhelming? Anticlimactic? Unsatisfactory? What else can I do when someone tries to say I'd said things I didn't in order top elicit a reply to things that have nothing to do with my original point?

That said I stand by my original post in it's entirety. You have only, if anything, proven the point I'd made in the second box in which you'd quoted me. That's some hard irony right there, mate.

 

[Sacman]

Actually Samus's character model is pretty underwhelming, as far as modelling and texturing goes, it leaves a lot be desired whether you're going for a stylized or more realistic look, it's very plain looking, in that it's hard to tell details, like what material it is, how it's constructed or how you get it on, or previous history in it's wear, it's just a blue suit with dumb looking heels...

 

[JimB]

She's wearing the kind of six-inch heels Lady Gaga wore for music videos a couple of albums ago. That is not a choice Samus Aran would make, but rather one that was made by a designer for seemingly no other reason than fetishizing her.

See, I really dislike comments like this because they assume Samus to be someone the games never portrayed her to be.

Samus is defined by her actions. She is a warrior, a hunter, a killer. She has zero incentives to wear those shoes, and several incentives not to wear them, since if she was caught in a fight or flight situation with them, they would hamper either option by limiting her ability to move any faster than a trot and would threaten to snap her ankles if she loses her balance. Those shoes would cause her to die.

They make especially little sense given that, as far as I can tell, the zero suit is some sort of insulation or lining for her power armor, like the first layer of clothing an astronaut wears under all the padding, since it first appears after she loses her armor in Metroid: Zero Mission; which means her power armor has to have some kind of spatial folding technology to create an extra-dimenional pocket for those heels to fit in so the armor's feet can remain flat. I don't doubt that the armor actually does have that capacity, since the morph ball would otherwise pulverize her bones and internal organs, but it's fucking dumb for wartime technology to devote power to reality-warping equipment just to allow a woman to wear stilettos inside armor that looks flat-footed.

 

[NoeL]

She's wearing the kind of six-inch heels Lady Gaga wore for music videos a couple of albums ago. That is not a choice Samus Aran would make, but rather one that was made by a designer for seemingly no other reason than fetishizing her.

See, I really dislike comments like this because they assume Samus to be someone the games never portrayed her to be.

Samus is defined by her actions.

This makes me think you stopped reading my post right after the sentence you quoted. I find it hard to imagine that you could read my comment then repeat the exact same claim I was responding to.

She has zero incentives to wear those shoes

Except, you know, flight and rocket kicks to the face. You seem to be pretty willfully ignorant if you don't see the incentives despite them being explicitly spelled out in her trailer.

they would hamper either option by limiting her ability to move any faster than a trot and would threaten to snap her ankles if she loses her balance. Those shoes would cause her to die.

She seems to move pretty well in the video, soooo... (I also just realised the incredible irony of people complaining her rocket shoes are impractical for walking. It's like chastising a swimmer for wearing flippers because it makes them slower on land. Wha?)

which means her power armor has to have some kind of spatial folding technology to create an extra-dimenional pocket for those heels to fit in so the armor's feet can remain flat.

You do realise that ZSS is a separate playable character to PSS, right? There's no point where the rocket heels are inside the power suit.

 

[DrOswald]

To me it looks like she works out, not like a buff amazon. Toned maybe, but hardly amazon muscled.

I'm guessing I used 'amazon' too liberally for your liking.

I merely meant tall and muscular a la Maria Sharapova.

I guess I see very little difference between someone like Maria Sharapova and current Samus. A quick image search of Maria Sharapova gives me a dozen pictures of her in a bikini and she has no visible muscle definition. Samus is a bit thinner, but that is because Samus is tall and lanky, like she always has been.

I am not mad at all about this, and I am not trying to deny that Zero Suit Samus is the fan service for this game. That is obvious. I am just confused when people try to claim that Nintendo using Samus for fan service is a betrayal to her character and how completely people misremember how Samus was portrayed in the early games. In Metroid 2 she was wearing a low cut tank top and had breasts the size of her head spilling out of it. Go look at the ending art for Metroid Fusion. The best ending in every Metroid game isn't you getting to see additional story, it is getting to see Samus in her underwear. She has always been a fan service character.

And frankly, the character changes related to Smash Bros have brought her much closer to the whole "amazon warrior" look. She is now much closer to realistic body proportions than ever before, they have thickened her up, and the zero suit is much more modest than any other outfit she has ever worn. And the new redesign makes it look more like actual clothing instead of painted on latex.

 

[Nazulu]

I am not mad at all about this, and I am not trying to deny that Zero Suit Samus is the fan service for this game. That is obvious. I am just confused when people try to claim that Nintendo using Samus for fan service is a betrayal to her character and how completely people misremember how Samus was portrayed in the early games. In Metroid 2 she was wearing a low cut tank top and had breasts the size of her head spilling out of it. Go look at the ending art for Metroid Fusion. The best ending in every Metroid game isn't you getting to see additional story, it is getting to see Samus in her underwear. She has always been a fan service character.

And frankly, the character changes related to Smash Bros have brought her much closer to the whole "amazon warrior" look. She is now much closer to realistic body proportions than ever before, they have thickened her up, and the zero suit is much more modest than any other outfit she has ever worn. And the new redesign makes it look more like actual clothing instead of painted on latex.

How can Samus be fan-servicing in the old games when they it wasn't even a selling point? Most people seemed to believe Samus was a guy called Metroid, till Brawl I find. And those images at the end aren't offensive in any way either, including they are too pixelated and simple to be considered sexy. You couldn't be fully clothed under the suit so it was a good way to see her unwind. I think it was meant to be like how Ripley took her suit of at the end of Alien.

I've never seen her as a fan service character until I saw this anime imposter without the iconic armour all over big posters, banners and video's.

 

[DrOswald]

I am not mad at all about this, and I am not trying to deny that Zero Suit Samus is the fan service for this game. That is obvious. I am just confused when people try to claim that Nintendo using Samus for fan service is a betrayal to her character and how completely people misremember how Samus was portrayed in the early games. In Metroid 2 she was wearing a low cut tank top and had breasts the size of her head spilling out of it. Go look at the ending art for Metroid Fusion. The best ending in every Metroid game isn't you getting to see additional story, it is getting to see Samus in her underwear. She has always been a fan service character.

And frankly, the character changes related to Smash Bros have brought her much closer to the whole "amazon warrior" look. She is now much closer to realistic body proportions than ever before, they have thickened her up, and the zero suit is much more modest than any other outfit she has ever worn. And the new redesign makes it look more like actual clothing instead of painted on latex.

How can Samus be fan-servicing in the old games when they it wasn't even a selling point? Most people seemed to believe Samus was a guy called Metroid, till Brawl I find. And those images at the end aren't offensive in any way either, including they are too pixelated and simple to be considered sexy.

Fan service doesn't have to be a marketed selling point for it to be there. And who said the images were offensive? Fan service is not inherently offensive unless you think sexiness for the sake of sexiness is inherently bad. But there is a difference between sexualization as important character building and sexualization for eye candy. Samus clearly falls into the latter category, and she always has (with the single arguable exception of the very first metroid.)

And I am not sure how old you are, maybe you are too young to have been there, but do you know how many rumors floated around about being able to make Samus go topless? I will agree that the first Metroid ending arts were way to pixelated to be considered sexy, but they stepped up their game hard for Metroid 2, Super Metroid, and especially Fusion. Those games ending artworks were created for sex appeal.

You couldn't be fully clothed under the suit so it was a good way to see her unwind. I think it was meant to be like how Ripley took her suit of at the end of Alien.

You mean the part where Ripley walks around in incredibly low cut panties and an almost see through tank top and stretches in front of the camera? Are we working on a different definition of fan service here?

I've never seen her as a fan service character until I saw this anime imposter without the iconic armour all over big posters, banners and video's.

Fan service may not define her character, but she was a fan service character. It's like her gender. Being female may not define her character, but she is a female character. And they have done a great job of compartmentalizing it, which is why you were so easily able to dismiss it in the first place. In almost all her main games Samus is the badass bounty hunter with the side serving of fan service. It was only when the franchise was handed to misogynistic jerks that this ever became a problem (with Other M.)

 

[theNater]

And that's the big thing. We've really seen very little of Samus outside her job, and being tall and buff does not mean she has no desire to be feminine, or fashionable, or sexy. After all, she's still human, and still a woman. All you have to do is look at mastectomy patients or female body builders that get boob jobs in order to feel more feminine, and thus more comfortable in their bodies. Someone else made the argument that she was raised by aliens and doesn't consider herself part of humanity - I call bullshit. Yes she was raised by aliens, yes she may consider herself an outsider, but she's still human with human desires.

To look at the heels and say "Gawd, the 'real' Samus wouldn't be caught dead in those!" presumes something about her character that has never been expressed in canon! Even if Nintendo retained her Brienne of Tarth stature you simply can't say that she wouldn't (or worse: shouldn't) embrace her femininity and maybe even want to look sexy.

That's all well and good, but the Zero Suit isn't recreational wear. Those heels might make sense if she were going to a formal or semi-formal social function and in appropriate clothes. But she's not. She's on the job, and the heels are different from anything she's ever worn on the job in the past.

That said, given how badly they clash the rocket shoes clearly weren't custom designed for Samus, and may very well be off-the-shelf additions she bought down at Rocket Shoes R Us or something. Maybe they don't even come in flats! Maybe Samus isn't fashion conscious, and bought those gaudy, uncomfortable things simply because of their undeniable utility (if you can still kind of run it might be worth it to be able to kick someone in the face with a fucking rocket).

Would you be making this utility argument if Fox, Mega Man, Olimar, or Sonic had shown up in exactly those shoes? Or if they were described as magical boots of flame, and were worn by Yoshi, Shiek, Marth, King DeDeDe, Link(either version), Mario, Luigi, or Pit?

 

[JimB]

This makes me think you stopped reading my post right after the sentence you quoted.

Believe what you want. I dismissed it as being unnecessary to quote because it was all just an expansion on the idea that no one can possibly know what kind of person Samus Aran is.

She has zero incentives to wear those shoes

Except, you know, flight and rocket kicks to the face.

Then I am forced to question why the outlet store she bought them from does not have shoes that can do those things in a non-Lady Gaga style, and I must conclude there is no engineering reason that the shoes are forced to exist in that format, and they are therefore a bullshitty designer's choice for the sake of sexualization.

You seem to be pretty willfully ignorant if you don't see the incentives despite them being explicitly spelled out in her trailer.

She got by without those things fine in the previous game. Those features do not improve her abilities; they only change them.

She seems to move pretty well in the video, soooo...

In defiance of any known law of physics, yes.

I also just realized the incredible irony of people complaining her rocket shoes are impractical for walking. It's like chastising a swimmer for wearing flippers because it makes them slower on land. Wha?

If he's wearing flippers on land to a fighting tournament, then yes, that swimmer is a bit of a moron.

You do realize that Zero Suit Samus is a separate playable character from Power Suit Samus, right? There's no point where the rocket heels are inside the power suit.

I said in the post you are responding to, and I will repeat in case you missed it, that to all evidence I currently possess, Samus wears that suit inside her power suit as a protective barrier between her flesh and the armor. If I am mistaken and you are aware of some circumstance which disproves my position, then I invite you to present me with that evidence rather than asking me condescending questions about whether I can tell people apart.

 

[DrOswald]

You seem to be pretty willfully ignorant if you don't see the incentives despite them being explicitly spelled out in her trailer.

She got by without those things fine in the previous game. Those features do not improve her abilities; they only change them.

Actually, she was noted by most players as lacking in heavy hitting attacks, which drove down her usability greatly. The idea of introducing equipment to improve her ability to deliver powerful attacks was a direct response to these criticisms. Even the highest tier players struggled to overcome this limitation. It took a couple years for even the best players to figure out how to make up for this massive disadvantage.

So no, she did not get by fine without them in the previous game at all.

 

[DrOswald]

And that's the big thing. We've really seen very little of Samus outside her job, and being tall and buff does not mean she has no desire to be feminine, or fashionable, or sexy. After all, she's still human, and still a woman. All you have to do is look at mastectomy patients or female body builders that get boob jobs in order to feel more feminine, and thus more comfortable in their bodies. Someone else made the argument that she was raised by aliens and doesn't consider herself part of humanity - I call bullshit. Yes she was raised by aliens, yes she may consider herself an outsider, but she's still human with human desires.

To look at the heels and say "Gawd, the 'real' Samus wouldn't be caught dead in those!" presumes something about her character that has never been expressed in canon! Even if Nintendo retained her Brienne of Tarth stature you simply can't say that she wouldn't (or worse: shouldn't) embrace her femininity and maybe even want to look sexy.

That's all well and good, but the Zero Suit isn't recreational wear. Those heels might make sense if she were going to a formal or semi-formal social function and in appropriate clothes. But she's not. She's on the job, and the heels are different from anything she's ever worn on the job in the past.

That said, given how badly they clash the rocket shoes clearly weren't custom designed for Samus, and may very well be off-the-shelf additions she bought down at Rocket Shoes R Us or something. Maybe they don't even come in flats! Maybe Samus isn't fashion conscious, and bought those gaudy, uncomfortable things simply because of their undeniable utility (if you can still kind of run it might be worth it to be able to kick someone in the face with a fucking rocket).

Would you be making this utility argument if Fox, Mega Man, Olimar, or Sonic had shown up in exactly those shoes? Or if they were described as magical boots of flame, and were worn by Yoshi, Shiek, Marth, King DeDeDe, Link(either version), Mario, Luigi, or Pit?

In exactly these shoes? No. They do not fit the design of any of those characters. But that is the thing. The zero heels have a strange sort of design to them. They are designed to mesh with Samus while clashing enough to have a sort of external look like it might be some sort of extra equipment Samus picked up, which is exactly what they are supposed to be! It's almost as if Nintendo planned this.

Now, if I see no reason why Link couldn't wear the fire heels of destiny in the next Zelda if the design worked well.

 

[JimB]

Actually, she was noted by most players as lacking in heavy hitting attacks, which drove down her usability greatly. The idea of introducing equipment to improve her ability to deliver powerful attacks was a direct response to these criticisms. Even the highest tier players struggled to overcome this limitation. It took a couple years for even the best players to figure out how to make up for this massive disadvantage.

So no, she did not get by fine without them in the previous game at all.

Maybe I'm just some kind of savant, or maybe I'm lucky, but I never had a particular problem with her. Then again, I play that game mostly without looking at the screen at all and just hitting buttons with my palm like a monkey trying to imitate the players trying to ring in on a game of Family Feud, so I dunno.

I am mostly kidding about that second sentence, but let's be serious for a moment here. As best I can tell, your argument in support of the Gaga heels is, "Zero Suit Samus didn't have powerful attacks, so Gaga heels are the only way to make up for that failure." I don't think that logic tracks. If you want to insist she needed rocket boots, then fine, whatever. If you want to insist they have to look external to the suit, then again, fine, I don't have a particular reason to argue that. But for them to look like that is just fucking disrespectful of the audience.

 

[DarkKnightCuron]

I don't know if people made the point already or not, but here's my take on it.

>> Samus Aran has always been sexualized in every game she's been.

Counter Point: I guess they sexualized Ellen Ripley in Alien, but they were brief moments that incorporated into the story--a moment of near ultimate weakness when the creature reappeared upon the shuttle. But rather than keep focusing on her body, her eyes were the primary movement, showing her determination to persevere against an unknown--and hostile--lifeform at her lowest. I don't particularly think the games previous to Zero Mission and Brawl were going out of their way to oversexualize Samus--it was just a bit of a reward for completing the game so quickly. That's it--just a reward. You shouldn't have to feel pressured into completing the game that fast for anything other than just seeing her in a more relaxed outfit--she earned some R&R after some of those missions!

That being said, Samus' original character inspiration, Ellen Ripley, was supposed to be a female character in an often masculine role, having to kill Aliens (and the queen!) in order to continue her life. The most memorable moments of those movies were when she blew an Alien out of the airlock, confronting the Alien Queen in the lair, driving the APC to save the Marines, Fighting the Queen with the Power Loader--none of these memorable moments were particularly sexualized, and Samus Aran was much the same--her most memorable moments were fighting against some of the foulest scum and villainy in the galaxy, trapped underground against parasitic life forms, or squaring off against her own mirrored antagonist. None of these situations were sexualized to any degree--the only sexualized portion of her was at the end of the games.

Compare this to games such as Zero Mission and Other M. In the former, we spend a good chunk of the last 10% of the game in this undergarment state--a sexualized role to be certain, but one could look past that as you bravely navigate through the Zebesian Ship. We could get past that. Other M, on the other hand, it seemed like there was no pressing plot point to her being in the Zero Suit other than to just give people a look at her incredibly oversexualized body--a body we now have to look at all the time in Smash Bros. Games. It isn't an extreme detriment to the character, but it is one that lessens the impact of her overall personality. Hanging out on her ship after a long mission in the Zero Suit or some other form of lingerie is acceptable--its not outside the realm of reason. But some of the scenes she is in with the Zero Suit (not to mention the fighting exclusively in it in the upcoming Smash Bros. game) seem forced and out of character for her--especially the overall trainwreck of the Other M game as a whole.

So no, while sexualization of Samus Aran isn't particularly new, it is more often/visible/illogical at this point. The new look of Samus' Zero Suit looks odd (what's the difference between this and just a padded, black bodysuit with connection nodes?) especially the roller-derby heels. Seriously, they look like something out of an 80s rollerskate arena. So her high heels have jets in them--I can't imagine something that compact and small being that useful. Most women I know also hate high heels because they hurt for long durations of time. So... That's my two-cents. Hope it makes sense.

 

[Zak757]

I'd be pissed if they were regular high heels given how horribly impractical they would be. Samus never struck me as someone who would go for style over substance. I mean, the Zero Suit is sexy but it is practical given that it's designed to be worn under a suit of power armor, high heels on the other hand wouldn't be justifiable. In this case? Well, they're still kinda stupid, but at least the heels themselves are thick, and the fact that they double as rocket boots is awesome in a Bayonetta/Raiden sort of way. I noticed that when Samus kneels, her heels articulate to always be touching the ground, so she isn't just balancing on her toe, so I appreciate they are putting in some effort to make the heels completely unjustifiable.

As for being "sexualized," I don't have a problem with it like I did with Other M. And man did I loathe everything about her portrayal in Other M. For one, she kicks huge amounts of ass, she still has all of her agency, it shows that it isn't just suit that makes Samus, but that she is capable in her own right (while in Other M, the Zero Suit was being equated to weakness). Two, well, she doesn't seem to give a damn. I've always had problems with woman being sexualized when it was against their will, against the way they are characterized, or when it doesn't make any practical sort of sense for the internal logic of the universe they exist in. But if they are shameless and sexual (in which case you can't sexualize them at all) and the outfit makes sense, that's okay. Zero suit makes sense to me so I have no problems, heels are kind of silly but not dumb enough to be rage inducing and the rocket feature is a little bit awesome.