The bones for a pretty good Metroid Prime title are here. It looks the part, controls are pretty good considering the limitations, and it's certainly got the ambience down. However, the single-player is undercooked, severely so. The extra energy tanks don't even extend the length of the energy bar. When has that ever happened? No wonder the game uses scans as its main tracked percentage, tracking items instead would reveal how few there are to collect (I still used items as my 100% goal though; fuck scanning everything). I will say that the Hunter encounters played pretty well, but the main bosses were just awful and repetitive. Such a shame, this could have been great. Perhaps the multiplayer was worthy, but with no servers it's lost to time, and all we have is an underwhelming single-player... damn.

The experience of Hunters has reoriented my perspective of what "main series" Metroid even is. In this full-series playthrough, I'd skipped Pinball but accepted that Hunters and Federation Force could be considered main enough to warrant inclusion. I no longer feel that way. This will be my only excursion into what I'm dubbing the Metroid Prime Spinoff Trilogy for this series playthrough, though I might try out Federation Force some day as it looks kinda fun.