next Metroid developer

[Demotruk]

Helios said:

What does 'value' have to do with authority? The market can reject a game, yes, but that has nothing to do with Nintendo's authority over its contents. Nintendo can chose to pander to the masses, but they do not have to, nor should they, necessarily. It is a red herring to pretend that authorial intent is (or should be) a product of corporate interests, or vice versa.

As to your second point, I'm a bit lost, actually. My point was that the early Metroid games had some amount of characterization, and that it was meaningful.

This harangue of yours... Yes? That's one way of approaching the issue (though I think your example is rather poor - Frodo is purposly distanced from the reader at the end of the story). A valid one, but by no means the only one; Lolita being a particularly famous example of a work with a distinctly un-relatable protagonist.

I argue only from the frame of Nintendo's interests. I don't see any reason to argue from any other point of view, since they are the ones who would make any decisions. Nintendo own the legal rights to publish works that are based upon a character or IP, but that does not mean they are an authority over the ideas people have, which is where Samus really exists. If the public reject Nintendo's ideas of Samus, they are not the authority on who Samus is, which is different from a legal right to an IP.

I was expanding upon why characterization is an issue in a game, and that it is not my position that ALL characterization is necessarily bad. Lolita is a character based novel, I talked about TLotR because it is an events based story, like the majority of video games. The role a protagonist plays in both is different because they are both being read to serve different interests. If/when character based video game stories become realistic, it'll be interesting to see how they will be done, but they aren't right now and Metroid certainly isn't bought for the personalities involved.