I beat it, clocked in at about 5 hours 84% items on my first playthrough, pretty meaty for a Metroid game(I think I beat fusion in 3 hours).
Just a fantastically crafted game from start to finish, more then enough originality to set it apart from Metroid 2 to make it feel like a brand new adventure. I was playing it on Normal but I felt that was too easy and restarted about an hour in and switched to Hard. Hard is reasonably difficult, but not Megaman fangame cheap difficult where if you mistime a jump without reaching the edge of a block you'll die instantly. Hard means you can't really brute force it once you hit the mid-game and you have to pick up on enemy patterns for some of the later metroids/bosses. Samus still becomes a goddess once she's acquired every one of her power-ups mind you, but by that time you're at the end of the game, and the only thing that can/should threaten you are the bosses. I just had a great time playing this. I'm glad it made it out into the wild before Nintendo tried to shut it down, and it's in my Top 3 favorite Metroid games of all time easy.
