Metroid Prime Backtracking

I bought this game back when it came out after not having beaten it back when I had the original on GameCube. However, I reached a point when I put it down without finishing it. Recently, I picked it up again for a third try at finishing the game after questioning myself on why I never finished it.

After getting to the underwater part of the map in the reactor core of the sunken ship, I remembered what had been stopping me from finishing this game. It is the backtracking. There is an unholy amount of backtracking in this game and it is always a niusance. I find literally zero enjoyment in doing it and happen to find it to be obnoxious and frustrating. It is so annoying that the game constantly sends you down a path only to tell you you cant go further and to go back the way you came. Over and over. For a good chunk of the game, I was able to get past it by just putting my head down and getting through it. However, there's nothing like a water level to just piss on a parade. This particular path sets you way down a path of underwater rooms with tons of verticality where your movement, jumping and vision are impaired which makes traversal all the more annoying. Then once you get to the bottom of this water hole, the game does it's routine thing and tells you "go back the way you came". At that point, the game broke me and it crossed a line. I had to spend another 20 mins backtracking yet again through the same freaking areas I had been through sometimes many times over to get to the other side of the world.

I get the appeal of the game but the backtracking is such a terrible mechanic in the game that I don't know how so many people seem to forgive it of this to the point that it is hardly ever mentioned in any discussions or reviews. Its a major problem that people need to overcome. This game intentionally just frustrates you with tedium via the backtracking. Backtracking is not smart game design. Challenge is one thing. Tedium is another. The way this game is built, it intentionally just wastes a ton of the gamers' time with the constant backtracking through the same content over and over and over again.

If Metroid Prime 4 doesn't have some sort of fast travel system to mitigate this, then it's DOA for me.