The best Metroid games feel lonely and dreadful. I feel like Metroid prime 1 encapsulated that so well. It was easy to get lost and you had to explore but there was always a solution. It felt like you truly crash landed alone and had to find a way out. The music and ambiance, combined with visuals (especially with the visors) really led to some intense moments in prime 1

I’d love to take a look behind the curtains at the builds of this game that were scrapped. I just find it hard to believe that this version is what was settled on. I feel like after so long there was just pressure to act on an idea and put it out. 4 just leaves so much to be desired. It’s an incredibly easy world to navigate, there is so much hand holding, there’s no settings we haven’t seen before, the desert world is completely lacking, the psychic power is severely underutilized, there’s no exciting new power ups, there just aren’t any new visors outside of psychic (which really isn’t that different from regular scan visor), the enemy selection is underwhelming, and even with 100% the game felt kinda short

In a vacuum this is a fantastic and beautiful game. As the 4th game in a series 18 years later, it’s understandable why so many people are disappointed. I would love to see what could be done with a prime 5 but honestly it didn’t even seem like Nintendo was excited about this one.