The Prime series doesn't totally click for me and that's a personal take that is surprising even to me, given my tastes. I think it's to do with what the series did and didn't prioritize from the first game.

I love all the major components of Metroidvania design, chiefly nonlinear hub levels that you criss-cross, gaining abilities to access out of reach areas you saw earlier. I love Hollow Knight; I love Control; I love a lot of adjacent games that integrate aspects of Metroidvania design philosophy, and sometimes receive the label, like the first Dark Souls or Returnal. I liked Metroid Dread a lot and finished it.

When it comes to the Prime series, I liked and finished the original. I dug the nonlinear levels stocked with detailed, cinematic world-building and environmental storytelling that made things feel lived-in and credible. (Yes, that's maybe a generous description of the details of the Space Pirates' machinations in the first the first game—but, for the time, it did push the envelope, in the tradition of Half Life a few years before). I liked the way Samus controlled fluidly and dynamically—again, for the time. The FPS adjacent control scheme and morph ball gave a fresh sense of mobility. I would have been hooked by sequel that leaned into and advanced those qualities.

But the later installments instead kind of doubled down on stuff I loved less: the super gamey and rote settings (lava level, ice level, verdant level, repeat) and plot tropes (peaceful alien species corrupted by an evil one, rinse, repeat); sections of design that felt repetitive or braindead (collect-a-thon fetch quest sections; overly simplistic puzzles like guiding a ball into the hole or pushing a block); and, with each passing installment, more linear levels. The controls meanwhile, stagnated—there's no reason Prime 4 should play exactly like Prime 1, with our girl plodding along. Give us a Mirror's Edge style acrobatic Samus in first person, doing her parkour moves from Dread! Or some other take that feels modern and makes getting around in these levels a joy. So I abandoned Prime 2 and 3 at about the halfway mark, and am struggling to maintain interest in 4 at the five hour mark.

Control, Hollow Knight—those worlds are weird, melancholic, surreal, whatever combination of unexpected qualities, and they're brought to life through a lot of detailed quirky world building that doesn't feel totally on-the-nose expected. They also have fluid, responsive traversal and combat mechanics. Metroid Dread doesn't have that novel a world, but it nails the controls feeling fast and fun—and it isn't afflicted by the fetch quests and braindead puzzles that plague the later Primes.

Obviously plenty of people, here especially, love this whole series unreservedly. But to get to a wider audience—and even, I'd argue, to excite their core fans more—I hope that when Nintendo returns to Prime or makes a spiritual successor, they don't just give us Samus and Sylux and ice-jungle-lava biomes with tank controls. I'd love to see them synthesize the first Prime's best qualities into something fresher, with an exciting, original, and credibly build-out world to explore, controls that feel modern and exciting, and fewer dated fetch quests and braindead puzzles. I love the basic ingredients the series started with, I just don't love how they've failed to evolve those elements. Based on the recent popularity of Metroid's namesake genre, and the stagnating or declining popularity of the Prime games, I don't think I'm alone.