Turns out the game isn’t as straightforward as people online complain about.
I have tried my best to dodge spoilers, but when you tell people you’re playing a game, they just can’t help themselves. Since I’ve started this, I’ve been told that “people don’t like how out-and-back the game feels,” which might be fair if they hadn’t played any Metroid Prime game prior to this one, except the first. The first Metroid Prime game is the only other one available on the Switch, so that’s fair, I suppose, but this game feels more like a combination of Metroid Prime 2 and 3: rather than a very interconnected world where you’re constantly swapping environments, you have themed areas where you might need to head a little ways into one before going back to the hub for your way forward. Having just played the entire Trilogy, I don’t think this one is particularly different in that manner.
While I may have been spoiled a little on things, I’ll only bring it up when it actually appears in my videos. For another example, people apparently feel like the hub area is empty. And, well, it kind of is. The Vi-O-La wouldn’t be nearly as useful if the space was full of stuff blocking your way, like the hub is in MP2, and there simply isn’t a hub besides your ship in MP3. However, the space has enough stuff in there to not simply be a point-to-point transit like the Great Sea was in Wind Waker. (It’s worth noting the Great Sea was also a loading zone: the GameCube could only handle loading one island at a time. It might be kind of the same thing here.) I haven’t played the full version of Final Fantasy XV, but that has the same complaints associated with its travel, so at least Retro Studios has a point of comparison.