A lot more remained than I thought!
I really thought they were dead. Everyone knows the trope of a heroic sacrifice, especially from companions of the hero. However, both of those words are subverted here, as the percieved barriers are only present for the hero, not the enemies, and all the companions lived anyway. They’re not even damaged, aside from the robot! I’m still not sure how the robot got down there in the first place, but at least we get to have companions to the very end. I imagine the engineer would be pretty devastated if only he (and Samus) managed to survive all this.
With all five teleporter keys in hand, we only have a tiny bit of story left to do before the final fight. You know what it is: looking for those scattered objects they never told you about! However, unlike all the other games, these are marked on the map, with one exception, and that exception is placed in a spot we couldn’t access until right now. It’s a much easier scavenger hunt than usual, which is probably why they put a bunch of other difficulties in the way that normally aren’t present. I liked the desert boss fight, but as I said during the fight, it was more in the “annoying” realm than “hard”. The boss could barely deal damage, as Samus is invulnerable to its attacks while on her bike, and it threw out healing whenever she dealt it damage. Still, it was nice to have something interesting happen in the desert.