Pikmin isn't in the poll, what's up with that?

Metroid for me, to this day I still fire up the SNES and do a run through that game once a year.

Zelda. Pikmin is 2nd .

Legend of Zelda is the best franchise in all of gaming.

If sub-series like Donkey Kong Country are allowed then probably that; the original SNES trilogy plus Retro's two games are all golden, with for my money the best controls/physics, level design, and (DKCR aside) music in their genre.

A Link to the Past and Breath of the Wild are two of my favourite Nintendo games.

Metroid. I know that is has kind of become a meme answer considering the series relatively low-sales and just how much of the hype is self-contained to forums and subreddits. But, seriously, it feels like the most consistent series, and the most fully-realized one to me. I would go as far as to say there's thing in Metroid that I seriously wish were implemented into the likes of Zelda.

Coming up to this after defeating a boss has to be one of the best directed musical ques ever and one of the fondest memories I've had gaming the past few years, and I don't even like Super as much as Prime/Zero/Fusion

I guess the second would be Mario since of the few Mario games I've played in recent memory a disproportionate amount of them have landed in favorite-games-of-all-time territory (Mario Maker 2, 3D World, Mario Kart 8, ... and Origami King isn't too far off either but that's mostly because I usually don't like things) but there's something sort of odd about Mario that I can't place my finger on. I view the sub-series so differently from the mainline that I think I tend to underrate Mario as an entire franchise, because I really look at the separate sub-series as their own franchises (Mario Kart, Paper Mario, Super Mario, etc) even if they are part of the Mario franchise as a whole (I would word it as being part of the "Mario IP" though).  

Literally explained within the same line you cut off

Do you think I would have picked the series if I didn't know that? 

Thanks for a productive discussion. 

It is a memed pick, because people consistently act as if the fact that's it's so hyped on the internet relative to it's sales invalidates the praise it has gotten from a somewhat small circle-jerk niche community.

Regardless, you really would have realized that was obviously the point if you read the comment, dude.