Like many gamers, I’ve spent a healthy portion of 2023 revisiting old worlds that have been blessed with a new coat of paint.

I started the year off playing Dead Space, before moving on to Resident Evil 4 Remake and Metroid Prime Remastered. While I finished Resident Evil 4 quickly, I’ve spent much of the year on Metroid Prime. It’s a twisty, turny game — though the new hint system helps keep you going in the right direction. Each of these games has been reworked, but to different degrees. Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space are full-on remakes, while Metroid Prime just updates the graphics, provides alternate control schemes, and adds in that useful hint system. While it didn’t really need to do much more, the back-to-back tedium of its final boss fights detracts from what it otherwise does so well.

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I’ve never been the biggest fan of boss fights in general. Though I love FromSoftware’s games, the tough-as-nails confrontations with screen-filling beasties is the toll I pay to keep exploring, as opposed to something I enjoy in and of itself. There are boss battles that I do like — It Takes Two’s creative co-op fights come to mind — but the creativity has to equal the challenge. Metroid Prime ends on two boss fights that are mildly creative, somewhat tough, and super repetitive.

The first pits Samus against Meta Ridley, as the armor-plated cyborg pterodactyl launches projectiles and swoops down to stomp on the ground. The second finds Samus accessing a new area to fight the titular beast — the Metroid Prime. It changes colors throughout the fight, forcing Samus to switch between her four different beams in order to do damage. Both of these fights are boring, which make them a boring way to end the game.

There are cool ideas in both fights. Of course, it’s cool to fight a robot dinosaur. And, the Metroid Prime battle arena has grooves in the ground so that you can pass safely underneath the hermit crab-like monster as it skitters above overhead. The fight ends with the Metroid Prime turning into a jelly monster with a human face that can disappear into thin air requiring Samus to throw on her infrared visor and blast it while standing in a pool of energy which she can channel into an endless laser blast.

That all sounds cool. Both fights sound cool. But they ultimately just require you to shoot enemies with large health pools over and over again until they die. Both Meta Ridley and the Metroid Prime are bullet sponges and nothing about defeating them requires you to be especially clever or skillful. You just need to hit them over and over again while avoiding taking damage.

The game has a clever boss fight or two earlier on. The fight against Flaahgra, a plant creature surrounded by solar panels that Samus needs to destroy to cut off its supply of sunlight, was the highlight for me, with a clever conceit and good use of the different tools in your toolkit. But, even then, the boss fights are few and far between enough that they were never the star of the show. Metroid Prime is a game about exploration and these final boss fights don’t even ask you to explore the game’s mechanics. They just want you to stand and shoot. Though the game didn’t need a complete overhaul, this is the one place it could have been improved by a full-on remake. Samus deserves better.

NEXT: 2023's Remakes Are A Reminder That We Really Did Have It Better