Ending rant (spoilers)

I won't touch on too much on how Sylux's mind controlling Metroid army gets thrown in the bin literally 15 minutes into the game, but I wanted to at least mention it because it's quite telling about how poorly this game was written.

Now I've seen many people complain that the GF troopers were annoying and so on, and I somewhat agree insofar as MacKenzie could shut up and stop telling me to go here or there so often (I hope they add an option to disable hints like in the original trilogy). All in all though, I ended up getting quite attached to them and the ending hit me like a freight train, not so much because of it being a sad ending, but because of how dumb it is.

You're telling me they had our heroine Samus abandon five troopers who were ready to give their lives for her and were instrumental in getting her to the master teleporter? Troopers who were so happy to be able to go home? A father? A young soldier who absolutely idolizes Samus for what she is and what she represents?

It makes no sense whatsoever. It feels like she's a different character to what we've seen ever since this franchise started. Of course she's a battle-hardened badass, as stoic as you like, fully in control of her feelings at all times (except for the ocassional PTSD outburst in Other M), but you can't tell me after all of that she just plants the tree, leaves the necklace and walks away almost as if saying "too bad". You might not like the NPCs, but plotwise it makes no sense.

There's a post giving an in-depth argumentation as to how at least a couple of the troopers might have survived the encounter with Sylux, that is if they even managed to survive the teleporter explosion in the first place. I guess the play now is to keep a trilogy going with Sylux as the main antagonist and we get to rescue whoever's left at some point if they don't get forgotten or thrown under the bus because of their poor reception, not as characters necessarily, but because of how they affected gameplay. I'm sure Retro will be perfectly to misinterpret our feedback, but I digress.

Just hear me out here. Say the roles are reversed and Samus sacrifices herself by staying behind, finishes off Sylux or doesn't or whatever, and the troopers go home. Wouldn't that have been a way better ending? It would at least be a perfect set-up for the next game, allowing for a truly lonesome experience without as many NPC interactions, which most people would surely be on board with, and without meaningless sacrifices.

Duke even tells Armstrong this during the cutscene at the end of Flare Pool. "Trust that she'll make it out." or something of the sort. They know Samus has the skills to survive. It was the logical choice to make if not for Samus having to plant the seeds for a civilization that is already as extinct as it gets.

I don't know what else to say. I think they wrote and developed themselves into a corner here. I guess we'll see what becomes of the sale numbers for the game before we know if there will be a Metroid Prime 5. If there is, they'll hopefully learn from the many mistakes they've made this time around, both plot- and gameplay-wise.

See you next mission!