Yukari...
Junpei...
Akihiko...
Mitsuru...
Fuuka...
Ken...
Koromaru...

Shinjiro...

Aigis...

Thank you... for everything...

A better Metroid killer than Samus herself ever was.

God, what a fucking disaster. For the past few years, I sometimes thought people were exaggerating how bad this game was, but no. After playing it for myself, I can safely say that it really is that bad. It claims to be a grand, epic breakdown of Samus Aran, when the story itself is just a basic-ass sci-fi thriller with cardboard cutouts for characters and several laughably stupid twists the game desperately wants to invest you in. Samus herself is butchered as a character. Instead of the stoic, badass bounty hunter she usually is, she's a robotic, brooding edgelord without an iota of what made her interesting in past games. She even breaks down like a toddler upon seeing Ridley again, an enemy she's defeated SEVERAL TIMES IN THE SERIES BEFORE! I'd somewhat buy it if this game was a proper prequel to the original game (like, let's be honest, it should have been), but do you really expect me to accept this after Zero Mission, the Prime games, Samus Returns and Super? This is TEXTBOOK character assassination.

Well, at least the gameplay must be fun, right? NO. All the atmosphere, exploration and satisfaction that came from previous games is reduced to atoms. This game's "areas" are just spaceship hallways, spaceship hallways and more spaceship hallways. They're boring and repetitive to look at, and especially to run through. There is not even a single memorable new piece of music within this game, if you can even call it music. Worst of all, this game controls like ASS. Combining the gameplay of the 2D Metroids with the Prime games was a good idea on paper, but it's utterly butchered by forcing the player to use just the Wii Remote. Moving around 3D spaces with the Wii Remote's flimsy D-pad feels awful, and being unable to move in first person is even worse. The combat is often mind-numbingly easy due to Samus' auto-aim in third person, but it also gets frustrating and unfun at times due to missiles being locked to first person mode. Why couldn't we use the Nunchuk? That would have solved at LEAST three quarters of the gameplay's problems.

It's easy to see why Nintendo put this series on the shelf for so many years after this game. If I produced something this bad in a series I've worked on for so many years, I don't know if I could ever make up for it. Thankfully, the series did eventually redeem itself with Metroid Dread, but that was OVER A DECADE LATER. The only good things to come from this game were Anthony, the remix of Ridley's theme, and a handful of decent boss fights. Aside from those, this is an insulting low for an otherwise great series, and the brighter its future gets, the more we should leave this waste of a game in the dust where it belongs.

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