Yeah I was glad that Ridley wasn't shoehorned into it and that Metroid Prime itself/Dark Samus/Phazon stayed dead, undoing that would have diminished the original trilogy and felt forced.

On the whole I enjoyed it taking a different approach with the Federation troopers taking a bigger role, kind of the "Aliens" to the original game's "Alien". I can see why purists may not like it, but I thought it was fun.

Also agreed on the game's multiple developers definitely showing through in the way that its ideas didn't always gel together cohesively, even if it was still well made and polished for the most part. Hopefully it sells well, so that Retro can make a followup all their own.

With how beautiful Prime 4 looks within the limitations of Switch 1, a Switch 2 exclusive successor could look insane.

MP4 is a very Hollywood take on the Metroid series but still fun unlike RE6 which was the RE movies the game lol. Awful. Agreed it was nice to see Fed soldiers with some character. Humanize them. Nothing too original but fine enough for the archetypes.

Before I played the game I had such a different theory about how the story would go:

The lamorn's head shape with their 6 extrusions sticking out really reminded me about the floating head of Metroid Prime outside its armor. I really thought we would have zipped back in time/space and ended up on Phazon in the past. Where in the end a Metroid (Moctroid?) corrupted Lamorn trapped in a meteorite would escape the planet to end up on Talon4. Basically telling Metroid Prime origin story.

But I'm happy how the story went for real, setting up something new.

I never even noticed this resemblance, good catch!

But yeah, agreed that I prefer that they did something new instead of trying to artificially extend the plot of Prime 1-3. 

I'm fairly sure Prime 1-3 take place between Metroid 1 and Metroid II and Prime 4 takes place after Super Metroid but before Fusion & Dread.

Can anyone answer this for me? I've taken a pause on the game ...

I have all 5 keys, 100 % on the green energy but only 98% on items when hitting the "point of no return" . Are that last 2 % of items found in the end game or did I somehow miss a few things despite revisiting each area after activating the scanner drones for them all? I don't know that I will replay this on hard but on the off chance (I don't think it likely) that I did get all scans I want to 100% the items. I would have finished the game already if I knew for sure one way or the other.

I do not recall any items post no return.  

You've missed something, there are no items post the part of no return. Did you get the scanner in the desert? There are three items in the desert which are given to you by a certain character, but he needs to be there for it to happen, so you may need to exit and re-enter the desert since he won't be in all the places at once. The places he does spawn show up after you scan the desert, though. 

Yeah I did get that scanner and wasted all kinds of time and ammo at two of the spots the one closest to Volt Forge and the one in the wreckage before finally coming across the sniper outside of Flare Pool and realizing the other locations were probably him too.  Good call though.  I'll just have to pop back into each area and really look at my maps.  Thanks @Majin-Tenshinhan and @Chrkeller 

Beat it on the last day of the year. Unfortunately, I missed 1 scan of a miniboss and lost out on 100% completion as a result, which was pretty disappointing when I realized it. But I have the Sylux amiibo so all I missed out on was Samus taking off her helmet. I think what happened is I couldn't get a lock on the center mass because of all the drones the miniboss was surrounded with. The whole game the scanner was finicky with locking onto the wrong thing whenever there were too many targets on screen. There were times I would very clearly aim at 1 thing, and it would insist on telling me what something that wasn't even close to the center of the screen was instead of what I wanted.

That's a relatively minor problem, but it's those little things that bugged me. Like having no idea how much more green energy I needed to collect because the graph only updated every 15% or so. The final search was a nightmare because it stayed stuck at 80-85% no matter how many green crystals I smashed. Even power-bombing a bunch of those boulders didn't move the needle at all, until after 1 crystal it just jumped the last 15-20% to 100%. It doesn't need to go up after every crystal you drive into, but rising in increments of a few percent would go a long way in alleviating frustration when you are at 99.9% but it still says you're at 80-85%. It should give some sense of how much left you have to do instead of turning it into a guessing game.

With issues like those, I think this is the least-polished numbered Prime game, and probably the worst of the 4. But it is still a really good game overall. The visuals and the boss fights are definitely the standouts. It's beautiful. Even the desert looks really good. All the environments look great. And the boss fights are challenging and thrilling. I think I still prefer Prime 3's boss fights overall, but it's about equal to Prime 1 in terms of boss fights.

Exploration is overall good, and there are plenty of really good puzzles throughout. It doesn't have the interconnectedness of Prime 1, which is a shame. I think they could have had each zone connect to 2 of the other zones in the late-game after you get certain items instead of only having 1 entrance to each zone. The canon you need to take to get in and out of Fury Green.

It's a lot better than Other M, a game I like more than most, and I'd love to see what Retro would do when not working with the constraints of the Switch 1 hardware.