It feels like I'm about halfway through the game ... maybe a little less. I just encountered Quiet Robe, and defeated the robot Chozo afterwards.
I'm a little conflicted on the game itself. The controls are exceptional, combat feels good, the abilities I've acquired all feel great to use, with one or two small exceptions (aiming the grapple just after aiming and charging the omega beam made my hands feel like lobster claws). Early on the game feels pretty hand-holdy, in that it gives the appearance of letting go of the control of where to go without actually doing it ... I defeated the first two EMMI, and I wanted to go back and explore those areas a bit more to look for powerups but it wouldn't let me do that, until I did something else first. You know how in Super Metroid, sequence breaks aside, all of the original areas you go through are accessible until you get past that one way gate in Brinstar? This game sends you through one-way gates constantly, especially in the beginning. It's like the game doesn't trust the player to find the way forward, so it blocks off a lot of the previous avenues.
I surprised myself, because I was able to sequence break some things (and get the quick kill on Kraid) which was cool to do. But I was only able to do that this first playthrough because I heard it was possible, so I spent an extra few hours intentionally avoiding the direction I thought the game was leading me and tried to break some things. And it's neat they allow you to do that! But there's still something about the exploration for me that isn't really hitting as much as I would like it to. For example, I was also able to get a pickup early, and it said I wasn't allowed to use it yet, which was kind of a bummer. I think a lot of it comes back to they keep trying to add story into these games. Which isn't a bad impulse, necessarily, but I think for Metroid it's not great. Super Metroid is a masterpiece of understated storytelling, but aside from the very beginning and the very end there's no plot that isn't gameplay.
And then there's the EMMI, which, I get it. They're trying to spice it up a bit. But those sections add nothing for me. I don't play them as much as I suffer through them. Sometimes I'll do the exact thing I did before, but EMMI will go the other way. Sometimes I'll drop down a few screens and EMMI will just be there and then I'm dead. And while the longer I play, the more they lose their teeth, I also find myself wondering why there's so much of that stealth element in the game.
I'm enjoying myself though. It's as least as good as Fusion, and probably better, though we'll see how the difficulty spikes in the second half. I very much enjoyed the very first boss fight, with the cloaking scorpion thing, and figuring out I could shoot missiles at it during the counter cutscene was very fun. I hope there's more stuff like that.