I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one who was more offended by the gameplay than the plot.
I'm the kind of person who prefers a plot to be either really good at driving me to continue or taking a massive backseat, existing only to add some neat insight into the world I'm running through. Other M chose very poorly by making the plot directly stop you from using your neat power-ups (although the logic behind not using Power Bombs actually made sense), but not as poorly as choosing such a weird and awkward control scheme as it did.
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http://i259.photobucket.com/albums/hh293/zukiraphaera/war-sig-1.png
http://i.imgur.com/597oi.png