This really was his game.
I know that Adam doesn’t get a ton of screen time, but he gets some very, very long cutscenes. And the vast majority of what Samus says is about him. His introduction in Fusion was quite sudden and lacked a lot of detail on why Samus would care so much about him. While we still don’t really know how he managed to become her ship, we do, at last, know why Adam is so important to Samus.
Every game where you can explore is going to have a “final collections” state, where you can go back and grab everything. Metroidvanias do this even stronger than most others, but the nice thing is that they also tend to let you do this as you go, so you don’t have as long doing final collections as you could. This also means that if you’re struggling against a boss, it might be that you missed a pickup or two, so you should go back, explore, and come back stronger. Well, hopefully. It might just be that the boss is hard. Regardless, it’s time for that big power boost before the end, so I’m going to grab everything that I can.