"gen?"

?

Generation: the game's not going to drop in price anytime soon, and I'm already up to my ears in games to play.  The start of a new generation tends to be slow, so I'll have more downtime then, I think.

Ah. I was wondering if that implied that you were going to pass on the game entirely or not.

Can't: it's Metroid.  I suffered through Metroid II already.  This can hardly be worse.

? Metroid II had its unique charms, though the final boss was disproportionately hard (never got around to beating her, though i'd probably have the patience to if i could just dig out my old GBA). The only game where the Spider Ball allowed for total free roaming like it always should have (damn Prime and its magnetic rails), which gave it the glory of the original Metroid's exploration without the original's infuriating password system (and the caveat that came with it of having to restart with 30 health every time, mandating long periods of health grinding at the start of each play-session)

We're drifting off topic here, but the Spiderball was a great idea that was poorly implemented: it moved at the speed of molasses, its controls could get confusing once you reached the cieling, and to compound the problem many of the rooms in Metroid II literally had nothing in them, so you'd wasted the past four minutes climbing the walls and cieling for zero benefit. The idea was superb: the execution was faulty.  I find it telling that no other 2D Metroid ever returned to the Spiderball, and that the 3D ones deliberately restricted its use to predetermined pathways.

Additionally, the areas all look fairly identical, and there's no map to help.  It's worse than the original, because the original only scrolled horizontally or vertically: this game has caverns up the wazoo, and you MUST hunt down the metroids scattered within them.  I also thought that the fights with the metroids themselves were "bleh" at best: too many of them devolve into "shoot missles until it dies" due to the simple AI, and even the Queen goes down easily if you have enough health and missles.  Even worse, aside from the Queen there are no real boss fights, just a first meeting with a new metroid, which you will repeat several times before going on to the next model.

To me, II has encapsulated R&D's tendency to have grand and ambitious ideas that were beyond the hardware's ability to realize, a trend which only ended with Super Metroid.

...

What?

Metroid Prime is my favourite game of all time.

Prime 3/Fusion/Other M are, in my opinion, killing the series by introducing more characters, voice acting, making the game more linear, adding a narrative and dialogue, and trying to 'humanise' Samus when she already works as a silent protagonist.

This video confirmed for me that Other M is indeed going in that direction, featuring more of that than any previous Metroid game's beginning.

... I'm not convinced by this statement, at all.

It seems that you're mindset is still stuck in the NES era, because such statement is absurd.

What on earth is that supposed to mean?