Just finished. 11:58, with 100% items. Wasn’t originally planning to go for 100%, but decided to find a few as a break from retrying the final boss, and then just kept going. The extra tools they give you to track down stray items really removes a lot of the frustration that typically comes with trying to go for 100% in games like this, and I’m all in favor of it.
Liked it a lot overall. Great atmosphere, set of abilities, and the most fun combat in the series yet. The EMMI sections are conceptually a really good addition to the format, but the way they were tuned didn’t quite land for me. And the squiggly-linear map design was effective at keeping forward momentum, but felt even more artificial than is typical for the genre, and I found myself missing those times when there might be multiple threads to pull at in different parts of the map.
It’s not my favorite Metroid (Super) or my favorite modern metroidvania (Hollow Knight) or my 2021 game of the year (Nioh 2), but it’s not far behind in any of those categories.