This game is like playing out one of those travel montages on a TV show with the dotted line crawling across a map of the world, where they get lost and bang into random continents. Only, that's the intentional game route. Whatever points of concession may be granted the necessary progressive gameplay tools to be called "Metroid." they're negated by an evident spite for this ruleset that the sequencing takes the utmost pains to utilize in the most monotonous and time-consuming fashion. And in spite of capitalizing on what may seem a "new" approach to the level progression, the reality is it serves a miserably formulaic pattern. The vast majority of the playtime, which is an eight hour game stretched to the ballpark of 20 by strategies like this and a series of separate, ongoing keyhunts that comprise the game's whole goalset, will be spent crawling back through the same rooms, re-navigating through the same morph ball mazes and puzzle rooms, which serve as the MOST DIRECT means of reaching obvious points of destination on a single intended route. Exploration is minimal. Instead, there are systems of portals that further inflate the game length with repeated objectives, achieving novel gameplay ideas like getting from one side of a room to another. A promising new alien race design revs up the series' universe by installing glorified keycards into Samus' helmet during expository cutscenes. Combat is a series of Simon Says routines where enemies arbitrate states of invincibility and make you wait out their pattern in furthering the game's bid to be "the biggest Metroid game ever" (by technicality). The only challenge present is a battle of attrition between the game and your patience, and is only exacerbated by the game's Veteran difficulty which does nothing but make enemies take five super missiles to the face to go down. I can't believe there are snowflakes who call this the best Metroid game.
This game is like playing out one of those travel montages on a TV show with the dotted line crawling across a map of...
haha arm gun goes pew pew
Tell us how you really feel
I'm really glad OP didn't use "reddit spacing". This text is perfectly readable and I'm definitely going to go through all of it and express my opinion about it, shortly! Just you wait!
>complaining about backtracking in metroid
You know what, I think I jump too much in Mario. I'm gonna go make a thread about that.
didn't read.
Missing the point. Metroid games are typically a series of interweaving paths, you might detour down one way and end up intersecting with the foregone path regardless, and you'll go back down that way at the pace you want to. This game rigorously limits what you can do at any given time. You'll go halfway through an area, get an item, but be roadblocked *immediately* by the need for an upgrade you haven't gotten, that you couldn't get yet (not because you missed it like might have been the case in another Metroid game), but because now you have to go back into the last area with that new upgrade in order to get the other one that actually moves the game forward. This is the game's formula. EVERY AREA works this way.
How different would you say that is from Prime 1?
I don't disagree with your assessment at all, but you could have expressed your opinion in a far simpler, clearer and easier to read manner than that gargantuan wall of text.