You have the most interesting thoughts so far, so I'm sorry that my reply to this will have to be so late since I'll be at work the rest of the day.
It's all good.
The manga is canon. They even specifically used scans from the manga in the cutscenes in Zero Mission. When I referenced Bioshock and the like, I was talking about how other characters build the protagonist as a character more than the protagonist does. I think there are improvements to be made by not making Samus silent like they were, which I mentioned.
That doesn't necessarily make it canon, especially since certain bits of the manga (particularly Samus' trip through Norfair and how she defeats Ridley) directly contradict the events of Zero Mission. Using scans for cutscenes seems less like an indication of canoncity and more of a method to save money.
i don't think the hunters built a faithful representation of what Metroids world is. It's not a horror game, but neither is Bioshock and neither is Bloodborne, yer they still convey a tone that accurately reflects their franchises. I don't think the hunters do at all. They give the game a weird camp that the antithesis of what the tone in Metroid should be. It's like a poorly written military shooter.
I think they do provide a faithful representation of the Metroid world, and to argue the point, I'll reference an installment of a franchise which got quite a bit of recognition in the OP; namely Aliens. The hunters are sort of what the marines were in Aliens, the cocky, tough guy type who exist to get beat up and demonstrate the power of the antagonist. In the same way that the Xenomorphs ruthlessly dispatch the marines to demonstrate how powerful they are, Dark Samus corrupts the Hunters to show how powerful Phazon is.
I'd argue that Metroid DOES have the same sense of hopelessness as a souls game and I'd argue that the dialog benefits from a consistent tone.
I suppose there's no real easy way to argue amount of hopelessness, other than to say that most Metroid games give you the general premesis of "the world is screwed if you don't succeed." Dark Souls, meanwhile, tells you up front that the world is screwed regardless of what you do, and all you can hope to accomplish is to make the rest of your meaningless existence slightly less awful while learning about how the world got screwed up.
As for having a consistent tone, I agree to an extent. With that said, livening up the dialogue ocassionally doesn't offset a tone, if anything, it keeps things from getting monotonous. Take the Ace Attorney series, for instance. Despite consistently putting the player in very serious situations and maintaining an imposing and frequently very bleak atmosphere, it throws in ocassional laughs and jokes that help keep the mood from getting too monotonous. And it works quite well. Throwing in an ocassional joke doesn't automatically ruin a serious atmosphere, and that's all the hunters in Corruption really do (or, really, that's all Gandrayda does. Ghor and Rundas are pretty serious).
Reading doesn't control pace, it breaks pace. But I see no issue in providing subtitles with dialog that can be scrolled through at your own pace, like in a Souls game.
I'd argue that giving the player the highest amount of control over the speed at which they obtain information is anything but breaking pace, but very well.
Bioshock isn't a horror game either. It doesn't have to be a horror game to benefit from horror game design. Metroid is a franchise inspired by space horror and the games are imbued with horror elements. Metroids are inspired by face huggers, the epitome of horror.
...yes, but much of what you were describing was for significant portions of this theoretical Metroid game to be, essentially, a horror game.
"Most importantly, they should be fucking scary. You should see one and shit your pants."
Metroids have never been scary. Nor do I think they were ever really meant to be scary. And I don't think making them scary contributes to making a better Metroid game in the slightest.
You can take elements from horror movies/games without having a particularly scary experience. I'm all for Metroid taking some inspiration from the horror genre, particularly in level/art design, but I'm sure I'd be for an experience where the point is to make the player truly scared of enemies. Something like the SA-X in Fusion is what I'd argue the closest Metroid should come to horror should be. It provides tension, and makes the player wary of their surroundings, but it's not something that truly terrifies me, if for no other reason than horror tends to deincentivize exploration. I'll be far less willing to explore the dark caverns of Zebes or SR388 if I think I'm likely to be genuinely scared by what I find. Metroid is all about giving the player reason to explore.
Finally, the series should be rebooted because the entire canon is a mess. It's filled with plot holes, inconsistencies, and bad writing. They've also written themselves into a mag give whole with what to do with the Metroids now. A reboot would do away with that.
...I don't really see how the canon is a mess. Other M certainly makes Samus' actions look weird, but it's nowhere near as convoluted as you're making it out to be. For as long running as the series as been, its relatively simple to follow, mostly because the vast majority of the games require little to no knowledge of what happened beforehand, and most of the main antagonists don't stick around for very many games. Dark Samus was only around for two (three if you count its initial form as Metroid Prime), Mother Brain for two, SA-X for one. Ridley's obviously been around for a while but he's very rarely masterminding any of the schemes so it's not that big a deal from an "easy to follow standpoint."
To illustrate my point, imagine if a theoretical Metroid 5 were announced following up from Fusion's story. What would I need to explain to them to get them ready for the game? Probably not a whole lot more other than "There's a bounty hunter named Samus who's famous for killing off a species of deadly creatures called Metroids, except it turned out that doing so messed up the food chain of a planet and allowed for a species of parasites to grow, one of which nearly killed Samus. A group called the Galactic Federation took interest in these parasites, Samus thought they were too dangerous and destroyed them. Now the Federation is pissed at her for doing so." That's a paragraph of backstory, and that's all you'd really need to know.
Now take an actually really convoluted game, like, say...Metal Gear Solid. How long would it take for me to get someone ready for MGSIV if they hadn't played any of the past games? "Well, there's a guy named Solid Snake, who's a clone of some really totally dead famous soldier named Big Boss, and he's fighting against another clone of Big Boss who actually died before but lives on because his hand got grafted on to a guy named Ocelot. Solid Snake, meanwhile, is aging rapidly due to some problems with the cloning process and is currently fighting against some group called the Patriots who want to promote endless war because it's good for the economy, and there's these things called Metal Gears which are dangerous because they can fire nukes at anywhere on the Earth from anywhere, and everyone's trying to get their hands on the ashes of Big Boss because that will in some way further their plans, and..."
This isn't to bash Metal Gear, but Metroid's canon is honestly pretty tame and concise. There's so few overaching story themes that persist throughout multiple games that you can pretty much jump into any title and go from there with no preceding knowledge. If you're going to reboot Metroid because it's too confusing, then I hope you're prepared to reboot just about every single video game series in existence that's had more than like two entries.
I'd also be pretty much ok with them getting rid of Metroids. Yeah, the name Metroid might not make much sense, but hey. If we can have a Zelda game without Zelda, we can have a Metroid game without Metroids.
