One time I made an agreement with a friend; he would play Wind Waker and I would play Earthbound. We both ended up dropping each other's games a few weeks later and I'm glad that I did. Earthbound might just be the most mindless game I have ever played in my life. Most of the game is spent trying to get from point A to point B getting flooded with Random Encounters. The combat in this game is terrible you have a basic attack and PSI moves which for the good chunk of the game near the start is just higher damaging moves than the standard attack but they use Mana. The PSI moves during my time playing the game was just a single target attack a multi-target attack. There is a heal spell which can be useful but it can only heal one person at a time and it CANT BE USED IN THE OVERWORLD. I also don't recall there being any healing items. The gameplay basically consisted of getting into a battle selecting one of two PSI moves on strong enemies/ groups of enemies until you were out of mana otherwise it just Mashing the A button to use the standard attack. There was never any strategy it was just pressing the A button over and over again until I was too low on health so I had to walk back to the nearest save to heal again. That was my biggest problem with the game due to the inability to heal in the Overworld whenever you're low on health you have to walk AAAALLLLLL the way back to the last save and then walk AAAALLLLL the way back to where you were except now all of the enemies have respawned so you have to do it all fucking over again. Other than sometimes being able to run past enemies the only way you ever actually get to the place you're trying to go is by being high enough level so the game is mostly just grinding enemies in the most mindless combat system I've ever played. There's some kind of story but it hardly matters with how shit the gameplay is. This game it's only a step above belonging in the Atari landfill.

It takes the standard Metroid formula and somehow recreates it perfectly in 3D.
I expected this game to feel very different from the 2D entries but was instead surprised at how familiar it felt and I still don't know if that's a good or bad thing.
It's a great game and has everything that I love so much about the 2D games although despite being 3D it somehow manages to blend in with the rest of the series and doesn't really do anything to make it stand out. The one thing this game DOES excell at compared to the 2D games is the atmosphere mainly due to the ability to scan every single enemy, item, computer/screen, piece of machinery, and ruins in the game to either read it or get a breakdown of how it works. I loved reading all the minor and "unnecessary" text in the game. that being said the emersion only added so much to my experience with the game due to the somewhat generic setting and story. The setting wasn't exactly uninteresting but didn't really captivate me either.
All that being said I would definitely recommend this game to any who is a fan of the 2D games as well as anyone looking to get into the series as it's pretty beginner-friendly although some space pirate logs do mention the events of the first game.