- For a game supposedly meant for old players and new players alike, it's by far one of the harder 2d Metroids on the default difficulty in terms of how much damage everything deals in general. Green shield power helps a little, but it eats through your aeon gauge so quick
- Anyone who has played the original Metroid 2 and saw that first set of crystals hidden under the first chozo room would have likely groaned knowing they were going to force you to backtrack and revisit places ALL THE WAY after beating the last Metroid. None of the backtracking felt organic solely due to the linear level design they adhered to from the original game's general layout. Also may have spoiled that they were adding something after the supposed 'last' boss since why would you need to collect shit after what was the last Metroid
- All the recharge, save, teleport stations just felt out of place in general given 90% of them were just out in the open
- Way too many spiderball areas, which grinds the pacing to a halt because of how slow spiderball is. Gameboy Metroid 2 had the same issue, but it didn't have 100 some puzzles or pathways involving it
- Game gives you screw attack rather early feeling, making a lot of your tools rather useless from that point onwards since you can be lazy with the screw attack on most enemies
- All the unnecessary Super Metroid callbacks. I'd rather each entry be as original as possible spare some common upgrades.
- Robot boss is an exercise in patience. Is likely a big roadblock for newer casual players
- Zero config options. Sound effects are so loud compared to the music that I could barely hear half the tunes. Can't remap buttons either. I'd prefer quick morphball on the d-pad and make the Aeon scan a touch-screen button. Did New 3DS make use the extra shoulder buttons? Still toting an old XL here
- Locking a difficulty behind an amiibo. I own the Metroid amiibo pack for collection sake, but I don't want to open it. Going to have to go the illicit route for accessing it instead.
- Chozo shrines for inserting Metroid DNA into just looked really dumb to me. Just do the screen shaking stuff Metroid 2 (and AM2R) did when you kill the required amount
- Probably more due to my playstyle, but Ice beam and Yellow Aeon power hardly got used out of their respective area you unlock them from. Space jump is obtained not too far in and obsoletes freezing-enemy puzzles, and yellow aeon just chews through your gauge, and isn't effective against too many enemies
- Enemy variety in general is lacking, although what is there is tuned rather well.
- Framerate drops in rather simple looking sections? Might have been parts of the map that choked the CPU streaming in area data
- Analog aiming feels like it'd have been better in a twin-stick setup so you can run and shoot any direction at the same time. Not feasible on a 3DS though unless you want to scrap a ton of potential customers who don't own a New 3ds model.
- A lot of the areas are rather samey in theme/appearance. This was the case in Gameboy Metroid 2, but we're not stuck with those limitations these days. I don't need 50 different colours of stone/rock. The area with the Maridia music (Super Metroid) was a nice change of scenery. Needed more of that.
- Lava stuff just feels shoe-horned in as an excuse to give you two suit upgrades (one to survive heat, one to survive lava). Nevermind the loud Norfair music mentioned in an earlier post
- The Metroids have different themed attacks (electric, fire), but it seems to affect nothing other than appearance? Could have had one stun you, and another burn away for a bit if you got hit
Things I did like though, to be on a more positive note
- You can go for speedkills on Metroids, which includes the ones that generally try to run away to another nearby location
- Map scanning is a nice QoL over Super's Xray, albeit I wished it wasn't as large a radius, and didn't blare a bleeping noise
- Aeon abilities are an alright way to mix up the toolkit.
- Game is really good about making you have to deal with enemies that are bullshit at first time of appearance for awhile, before you get a proper means of dealing with them later. Does make the fodder feel like threats
- Boss cutscenes are cinematic and straight to the point, as it should be. Unlike a certain Other Metroid
- Good run length by 2D Metroid standards. Took me 9 hours to get through it 100%, although a good 90min of that was just backtracking area-by-area to 100% them, which does feel a bit like filler since you can't 100% some areas until the last 30min of the game.
- Some of the boss difficulty offset by the game checkpointing you before entering the room.
- Game breaks areas into multiple chunks and uses elevators to mask load times, and in turn lets you just run right through doors, unlike prior 2d Metroids where every door had a transition to load in map data. Decent trade-off imo
I'm probably leaning more towards AM2R in terms of what I enjoyed more of the two, even though 2R had a big problem with its last area feeling underdeveloped, and SR having better Metroid mechanics in general. I couldn't put down 2R when I started it. SR I played about an hour at a time in comparison.