The future of the Metroid franchise

So this is interesting. The sales of Metroid games plummeted after Metroid Prime. That means the vast majority of people who bought Metroid Prime didn't care for it, or at least not enough to get the sequels. This is especially egregious in the case of Metroid Prime 3, which sold poorly despite the Wii being a massive success and the best selling console of its generation.

The perplexing thing is that Metroid Prime was clearly intended to revitalize the franchise, and it received enormous critical acclaim. So why have sales been so poor?

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Metroid's problem is that Nintendo accidentally created a series that would be more at home on the Playstation or Xbox than on their consoles.

I think a big factor is that japan just never gave much of a shit about Metroid.
Nor did the EU.
It seems to be one of those series that is mostly just very popular in NA.
I wonder why that is, it doesn't seem that different from other shit on the market that, even at the time, has been consistently popular all over the world.
What is it about Metroid that makes it a hit in NA, specifically?

Prime was a novelty and a huge disappointment after Super. Prime only sold well because it came out when there was nothing else on the gamecube except Luigi's Mansion, melee and other trash nobody cares about.

>sales dropped of a cliff after Metroid Prime

Gee, I wonder why:
>Samus, supposedly an agile bounty hunter, moves like a senior citizen who just got released from the hip replacement ward. She is slower than a generic FPS protagonist. This is especially egregious since the game has a ton of backtracking
>tank controls, can't even strafe freely, can't even look up and down while moving, absurdly low FOV. What is up with these weird limitations?
>you don't even have to aim because of lock-on (thus completely negating the advantage of going with a first-person perspective, so why did they even choose it?)
>bosses are boring HP sponges that barely even move and are basically stationary and boil down to 'scan for weak spot and wait for boss to open their sphincter to reveal their weak spot. After a few shots, they closes their sphincter and periodically opens it again, allowing you to get a few more shots in. Rinse and repeat about a billion times'.
>they prioritized graphics over gameplay, so the exploration is constantly broken up with corridors that are disguised loading screens, which also makes the level design feel very artificial
>instead of building to a proper climax, last stretch of game is literally one giant fetch quest
>instead of letting you explore and examine things yourself (which the first-person perspective is ideally suited for), you have a scanner that spoonfeeds you everything rather than letting you discover things for yourself
>third-person transitions like the morph ball transformation are too long and constantly interrupt the flow of gameplay
>does a bad job of immersing the players with constantimmersion-breaking third person cutscenes of Samus riding an elevator or doing some other pointless shit (again, why even use first-person then?)

Metroid Prime is a prime example (no pun intended) of how NOT to translate a 2d game into 3d. I sincerely hope MP4 starts with a clean slate and doesn't take any inspiration from it.

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If you look at the sales charts Metroid actually used to do alright for itself in Japan. It wasn't some mega hit but it also wasn't like now where you wonder why they even bother to release them over there. I think what killed it over there was the 8 year hiatus, more specifically what happened during that hiatus.

People always say that the reason why Japs don't like Metroid is because they get lost, they're intimidated by strong women, they get motion sickness from FPS games, but I think the real answer is simpler than that: the target audience simply moved on to the Playstation and never looked back.

>Federation Force and Samus Returns sold around the same

FUCKING HOW

Meanwhile Fire Emblem sales only get better

Lucina is more iconic than Samus nowadays

>Lucina is more iconic than Samus nowadays

Nerfing Samus' tits and ass in Smash certainly doesn't help.

The takeaway from this chart is that Metroid is actually the most rigid of Nintendo's IPs.

Either Retro Studios makes a first person shooter aimed at Americans, or it fails.