A core thing I've grown to believe about Metroidvanias (and to be honest, many RPGs full stop) is that too much reliance on stats to balance difficulty winds up discouraging exploration, because it means that if you see everything, the endgame becomes a cakewalk. (Souls has long since solved this by making your equipment's strength top out pretty early in terms of damage to late game bosses, which with only a few exceptions means you do have to learn the boss' patterns to win). There are several pieces of equipment here that just absolutely trivialize the game by an absurd factor compared to more normal equipment, which you may wind up wanting to abuse once you start growing weary of backtracking and constantly respawning enemies. The other problem here is that you'll never use like 70% of your inventory. Has anyone really ever remembered to use the TNT?

Music, art direction, movement, pacing, variety, verticality, exploration are all otherwise still very nearly at Super Metroid's tier of vision and excellence.