You know the story by now. Nintendo announces what amounts to the first Metroid game in 6 years, and the first to bear the Metroid Prime moniker in the best part of a decade, and it's not what the fans wanted. It is very, very much not what the fans wanted, adopting a chibi art-style for its playable mech soldiers, abandoning the sense of isolation and adventure that have been the series' mainstay while Samus Aran, the iconic bounty hunter who's been there from the very start, is almost entirely absent.
For a series whose return has been so eagerly anticipated, it's an act of madness - like Valve confirming the existence of Half-Life 3, except that now Gearbox are on development duties and it's a arena shooter with Gordon Freeman cheering your team on from the rafters - so you can understand some of the reaction: the storm of dislikes around the announcement video, the Change.org petition calling for its cancellation. There's the creep of entitlement in the waves of dissatisfaction, but there's also the affection for one of Nintendo's greatest series being frustrated by an ill-timed experiment.
Which is an awful shame, as having spent a couple of hours in its presence it's clear that Metroid Prime Federation Force is a good game. It's potentially a very good game, an example of what Nintendo is capable of when it brings its lateral thinking to new genres and creates something quite brilliant in the process. If this wasn't burdened by the Metroid baggage, the buzz around Federation Force might be very different indeed.
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