Buried under the cutscenes, the embarrassing & sexist recharacterisation of Samus, the controls and perspective, the horrible artificial progression... underneath it all, believe it or not, is a decent Metroid game. But to get to it, you have to dig.

Let's get it out of the way - the cutscenes suck. They're long, with little substance. Samus' voiceover is flat, yet also absent-minded and dreamy, as if the VA was talking in their sleep. And she's short now. 0/10 bad game. These are just a few of the changes that, in accordance with the woeful script, recharacterise Samus as a helpless and naïve child in need of authority. It's completely nonsensical.

But, when the narrative gets out of the game's way, things are a little better. Other M wants you to feel like a ninja, not a tank, and when you learn to play along, it can feel great. Can. Regular enemies hit pretty hard, since the game expects you to be using 'Sensemove' to dodge attacks and 'Overblast' to kill enemies quickly - good luck trying to play the game without these, because you'll be heavily punished for running/jumping away from attacks and you'll run out of missiles pretty quick. But, when you start using these, it's pretty hard to stop, since they're pretty overpowered. Spamming directions on the d-pad will make you nearly invulnerable in most combat situations.

Another issue that myself and most others had with the game was the artificial progression. Samus' abilities aren't discovered or augmented during the game, but are instead authorised for use by Adam - or worse, they're completely arbitrarily enabled for a setpiece sequence. Most will point to the Varia Suit cutscene, which is plenty ridiculous already, but I think the most egregious case is the fact that the Gravity Suit is clearly accessible to Samus for the whole game, but she doesn't use it until a setpiece very late in the game (after, by the way, multiple rooms of water that made her immobile and the boss fight against gravity-warping Nightmare).

Metroid gets shtick for how Samus starts every mission with nothing, but Other M pushes this to the extreme, and it really hurts the experience. That said, I'm not sure how else they could've worked in this facet of Metroidvania design - perhaps by taking inspiration from Prime 3 and leaning into the laboratory aspect of the Bottle Ship to frame Samus' upgrades as Federation Army tech created by studying the creatures in the ship's habitats?

All of this bad added up, and I nearly left the game to gather dust. But, I stuck with it, and over the course of the last 30-40% of the game, it somehow redeemed itself. The high point of my playthrough was the fight against Nightmare.

I'm a huge fan of Metroid Fusion, and I love the buildup to the Nightmare fight in that game (at the time, its first appearance) and, to an extent, the fight itself (even if it's a little phoned in). But - and I didn't think I'd be saying this - Other M beats this hands-down, and it's honestly one of the standout sequences & fights in the 3D Metroid series as a whole. The buildup consists of platforming and fighting enemies while gravity flips and warps from room to room, and the fight itself is frantic and dynamic, requiring you to repeatedly freeze Nightmare's gravity manipulator and then pummel its faceplate with missiles Fusion-style, all while Sensemove-dodging attacks and jumping out of the way when it goes on the offensive to sweep you off the platforms. Finally, you whittle its healthbar down and cause its gravity manipulator to malfunction, which smashes the monstrosity against the walls of the arena before it crashes to the ground, destroying its faceplate and revealing the six-eyed creature encased within... a hard-won victory.

...Until 20 minutes later, whereupon backtracking through this room, Nightmare's corpse is absent... until it descends upon you once again as you try to leave, more violent than ever. It goes down easier this time, but it puts up even more of a fight, creating gravity wells that linger in the arena and misdirect your missiles even after freezing its gravity manipulator. What a fight.

The rest of the game up to the credits was a little up and down - the final boss in particular is quite underwhelming. It's a somewhat disappointing end, but then: an epilogue! You're set free on the Bottle Ship once more, with all your abilties to boot. You're back here to retrieve Adam's helmet, but to get there, you have to reveal new paths through the ship using power bombs (finally...) and battling the ferocious Desbrachians that reveal themselves upon detonation. These enemies will put your Sensemove skills to the test, and you'll need to Overblast them at the right time to finish them off. Working my way through the station and collecting the items I missed was honestly quite fun with all my abilities.

And then, one final bonus boss: Phantoon. This one's definitely more of a setpiece than a challenge, especially if you have all the items, but it's amazing nonetheless. And, to top it all off, what we've all been waiting for: a classic Metroid countdown sequence to escape the ship.

What a rollercoaster. Other M started pretty poorly, and took a while to get up to reasonable speed. Had the game ended halfway through, I'd have rated it a 2/5, maybe a 2.5/5 if I was being nice. But the latter half felt like a Metroid game, and significantly redeemed the game. Honestly? I'll probably play it again someday!

Pseudoregalia is a refreshing take on the Metroidvania genre. It's got excellent movement, classic lock-and-key progression, and a uniquely strange atmosphere to its world - at times it felt like I was wandering through a forgotten indie horror game.
Sybil (my beloved) can gather a wide array of abilities over the course of the game, but most of these are movement-oriented. This leaves the combat feeling very underdeveloped - many fights are won by just circling your enemies and spamming the basic attack or charging for heavy attacks, assuming you're even in combat long enough to need such a strategy. The game's boss fights are similarly simple, with no health bars or indicators of any kind, and no phase variety as far as I could tell. All that said, I still found the combat satisfying.
All-in-all, I really enjoyed Pseudoregalia, and I'd quite like to have a go making my own spiritual successor!

1 and 2 were already great, so things should only get better for 3, right?

Prime 3 is paradoxically the best and worst of the series. It found a way to frustrate me at nearly every turn, but it still fixes some things that the other two Prime games struggled with.

First, some good. While I really liked beam combos and the various beam effects in the previous games, Prime 3 really doesn't lose out on much by simplifying the system to a more 2D-esque standard. Power Beam -> Plasma Beam -> Nova Beam is a nice progression (though this is made slightly more complicated by Hypermode... we'll get to that) and the Ice Missiles borrowed from Fusion are nice - when they work.

Prime 3 doesn't break much new ground in terms of environment design, other than the stunning (albeit somewhat samey) SkyTown and perhaps Phaaze (you like blue?). Bryyo has some neat variation, condensing Tallon IV into a few decently interconnected areas. The Pirate Homeworld is also quite striking, though not as much as Sanctuary Fortress. Sanctuary Fortress also doesn't have an escort mission in it...

The game's small cast of Hunters is a welcome addition, though they don't nearly get enough screen time. Justice for Rundas.

One of the best changes made is the addition of the Chozo Observatory. 100% completing the previous two games is quite tedious, because there's no record of which rooms have collectibles, nor which rooms have had their collectibles picked up. Prime 3 not only lets you bookmark rooms to track this kind of thing, but the Observatory later reveals the locations and collection status of every collectible in every area of the game (as long as you've beaten or at least advanced quite far in that area). The previous games would've greatly benefited from this - if a similar system was available in all three games, then I'd have 100% completed them all.

And now, the bad. Let's cut to the chase: Hypermode. Hypermode is a truly bizarre addition to Prime 3. It's interesting narratively - Samus is quite literally corrupted by power, and using Phazon turns her into an unparalleled killing machine. But the ramifications for gameplay are dire. Hypermode consumes energy, up to a full tank if you run out the timer, so to facilitate using Hypermode, Prime 3 throws several energy tanks at you within the first couple of hours of playing. This neuters the difficulty, so what does the game do? It bumps up the health of every enemy, making non-Hypermode combat drag on; and it allows some enemies to enter Hypermode themselves, which pretty much forces you to enter Hypermode yourself if you hadn’t already.
The result? Combat encounters go one of two ways: you can either try to play the game like its predecessors, using your movement abilities to dodge enemies while chipping away at their health with your beams (or slowly putting missiles into them until they freeze, assuming that they even can freeze); or you can go into Hypermode and kill them in a few shots or with a Hyper Missile or two. You’ll probably lose the same amount of energy either way.
Most of Prime 3’s bosses are no more complex or interesting or challenging than Thardus from Prime 1, which is pretty disappointing. Most are simple “wait until I’m not invulnerable anymore, enter Hypermode and shoot me for a bit” affairs, while others are just bullet sponges. The best they really get is Ghor, who works a little like the Quad enemies in Prime 2; and Omega Ridley, who has decent phase variety and utilises the X-Ray visor in a cool way, but I’m really scraping the barrel here. It also doesn’t help that three of the fights take place in the nearly-identical Leviathan Seed boss arenas and two more take place within Phaaze (did somebody order blue?).

That was a lot. But there's more!

Ping-ponging is back, with extra obnoxiousness. Getting a message from Aurora-242 to straight-up tell you that you need to go to a different planet is ridiculous, but what makes it worse is that there are already solutions to this problem, some of which are even used within the game! Some of these hints (or directions, if we're being honest here) are presented more diegetically, like how "go to [x] room on the Pirate Homeworld" is framed as a call from Admiral Dane asking you to meet up with him and a squad of Federation troops - if the Federation are going to be made so prevalent, then why not frame the hints as points of interest discovered by the Federation exploring these planets?

Motion controls... motion controls. One step forward, two steps back. Motion aiming is great, a welcome change from the tank controls of the first two games; but the lack of direct camera control makes traversal almost more clunky. And then there are the motion sequences and the waggling. Shake controllers to break free from things. Twist the controller to remove battery cells. Pump the controller to make stuff work on Bryyo. Mime pulling a lever with the controller to make the trams run on Pirate Homeworld. Pull the nunchuk to move debris and expose boss weakpoints. I just goes on and on and on... the "this was meant to be a Wii launch title" influence is very visible.

...I think that's it. For all the complaining I've done, I honestly did still enjoy my time with Prime 3. I like the ideas it has, and I'm glad it improved on a few issues in its two predecessors. But makes a heap of mistakes in the process. If I ever revisit this trilogy, I'm not sure I'll do a full trilogy playthrough... yikes.