Echoes really knocks it out of the park in making all the major areas feel like big interlocking puzzles, even the hub world. I think I need to replay it too now. It does all the great things Prime does while differentiating itself so it's less "Super Metroid 3D". Fantastic game.

If you hate the art style THAT much I wouldn't recommend it. It's a VN so you're gonna be looking at character portraits a lot between the turn based portions.

I think your perspective is one that's really interesting to read through and see in your art, even if I don't always get it! It's always a pleasure to see your work

the bike and desert were from Tanabe reading online comments nearly a decade ago saying an open world metroid could be cool. so they just put in hyrule field and thought yeah that's neat. ugh.
can Tanabe retire already please. he's two for two in terms of fucking up series he helmed.

a lot of the new blood in retro are ex-343 and Tomb Raider devs as well. i hope i'm wrong but i get the feeling they may be a lot more fond of that western AAA talkativeness than metroid fans are.

all the morbid little details like the guy glad he's not in the hot zone only to literally get mauled to death mid sentence, or the one guy who's just completely bonkers. infinitely more engaging than fakeout sacrifices. immediately establishes the sheer danger and stakes. people are dead!!!

i really hope Tanabe finally had his craving for space marines and mechs satisfied after this so he can stop making the least interesting part of Metroid, the humans, the most prominent part

very...lickable pipes, tbf

girl that is pipes and metal plates

i do find a morbid curiosity in people who like, explicitly dislike the games they speedrun and are only speedrunning them for the clout of getting a world record. like damn man, you're doing this solely for the admiration of maybe 12 people and you're not even gonna get laid from it.

you gotta have the big insane swerves of like, yeah you gotta turn Spyro inside out. You need to kill Lara Croft and reanimate her corpse. that's how you turn heads. if all you ever found out was that you can make yoshi jump slightly higher save it for the people who will actually use that knowledge

it's like watching monks hit themselves in the balls and walk on hot coals. like yeah boy torture yourself for my entertainment! but at least make it entertaining! that's where a lot of these video essayists fail. they don't realize that the public doesn't really find frame breakdowns interesting