As someone who has an interest in Fire Emblem rom hacks and has also scrolled through a regrettable amount of Pokémon discourse on the hellsite known as Twitter.com, I've grown to dislike this mentality I've seen pop up where fangames are promoted as some sort of "Take that!" to Nintendo and companies with similar levels of scumminess rather than on their own merits. AM2R is an easy example of this mentality, as its unfortunate takedown by a DMCA claim has caused it to be reborn as some sort of rallying cry against Nintendo, be it in its original context of "look at these fans making a Metroid game when Nintendo can't be bothered to" or the new context of "look at how much better this fan remake is than the official one" it's taken on after the release of Samus Returns one year later. I need to stress that I am actively against the takedown of AM2R and those of similar fan projects but I think the disproportionate focus on these types of acts in conversations about Nintendo's misdoings ultimately serves to reduce these conversations to a slap on the wrist. Compared to Nintendo's history of anti-union activity, the company knowing the epilepsy risks of SNES games and did not provide so much as a warning, or its use of prison labor, fangame takedowns can be discussed in an "apolitical" context and without the need to further interrogate broader societal issues like labor rights, the treatment of people with disabilities, or the U.S. prison industrial complex, respectively, that have the potential for political radicalization. The end result is that the primary interest in the discussions of Nintendo's misdoings in regards to fan projects is in seeing them as an attack on the consumer identity of being a fan of the relevant series, meaning that the condemnation of Nintendo will inevitably fizzle out when it does something to appease said consumer identity, such as when the FreeMelee campaign lost steam the second the DLC trailer for Sephiroth dropped.
As a game divorced from the context surrounding it, I find AM2R to be fine enough and better than the other remake of the same game (which is a low bar but shhhh). I have my gripes with a fair bit of presentational stuff and the way that creating a "modernized" remake of Metroid 2 inherently softens its messaging but at the end of the day, I can still see its appeal as it perfectly captures the excellent controls of the two GBA Metroids and the general Metroid formula, even if I didn't feel the need to play past the last fight in the Hydro Station. However, with how derivative it can be of other Metroid games (even if we were to exclude the one it's specifically supposed to be a remake of), AM2R makes one thing abundantly clear: the way that fangames like this are treated as competitors to official Nintendo games in a capitalist context only serves to reinforce Nintendo.

Went into this intrigued by its reputation as some uniquely brutal experience but ended up finding a pretty natural and genuinely impressive iteration on what the first game accomplished. The scope of the world you explore has expanded to the point where that of the first game appears as an island that provides a point of comparison. Presentation also has noticeable upgrades with the overworld theme changing to a happier theme when you have your fully party and back to the original one when one of said party members faints and some dialogue scenes having fairly dynamic blocking for a year where the best the other notable RPG release could do was make a major character move one step backwards after speaking to him solely because it couldn't quite figure out how to give him more than one text box. And most notably, combat has expanded, with the player getting more than one party member and having to face off against more than one enemy at a time.
I might even go as far to say that the combat in this can be genuinely fun if you play it with the right mindset due to the very thoughtful design of your party members. Your main protagonist, the Prince of Middenhall, has noticeably higher stats than his two companions due to better equipment and more experience but lacks any use of magic, making those two companions end up as valuable support. But due to those two's low stats, the defend command that's often seen as a vestigial part of subsequent games in the genre becomes an important decision at the core of most battles: Do you defend to prevent them from dying or do you risk that and provide important support like healing and buffs/debuffs? Topping this off is the enemy design which more often than not has low enough HP that the hero could defeat them in one or two hits if playing at the intended level but punishing tools like attacks that hit all party members, sleep spells, etc., which results in these frantic, uncertain clashes that create the impression of a couple of inexperienced kids going up against far stronger foes and make running, an option often seen as vestigial in a similar vein to defending, another genuinely interesting choice.
This is nowhere near my favorite RPG of the era and even if we're going by 1987 standards, I personally find both the first Dragon Quest's simple ludonarrative of the rise of a hero and the way the aforementioned "other notable [1987] RPG release" reflects the state of its company on the verge of bankruptcy at the time to be more compelling. Still, its legitimate issues like occasionally cryptic progression and a massive difficulty spike in the final stretch are more so things that are just to be expected from games of the NES era rather than anything warranting the "black sheep" reputation this game has received. And if anything, said reputation masks how genuinely impressive this game's accomplishments are and how much it paved the way for future RPGs.