I think Air Riders. Nintendo seems to be putting a lot more of a push on it, and I think the zany gameplay will be very social media friedndly. Both Metroid and Hyrule Warriors probably have a ceiling of about 5 million and I expect Air Riders to sell a lot more.

I'm also leaning towards Air Riders; Age of Imprisonment I expect to sell similarly to Age of Calamity so around 3-4m, and Metroid's always been rather niche, while Kirby should benefit from absorbing some of the Mario Kart crowd.

Coming back to this: Kirby is performing very well in JP, but is completely bombing across EU. MP4:Beyond seems to have a lot of internet buzz, but an 81MC is going to really hurt sales. Age of Imprisonment is… well… it is Zelda. So, it could be doing very well. Hard to say.

Any one of these games could win. I genuinely have no idea which will pull ahead. Maybe Kirby? I struggle to see the Metroid pulling more than its core base at this point.

I doubt reviews will have a significant effect on sales; very few people will actually decide not to buy a game just cos it scored an 80s rather than a 90s on Metacritic, internet enthusiasts greatly overestimate the importance of review scores, especially when they're not even that bad.

The bigger challenge for Metroid is that the franchise just isn't that mainstream, with even the highest selling entry only selling around 3m. 

Reviews matter a lot for niche series that sells to enthusiasts, which is the kind of game Metroid is. How do you think games like Clair Obscure sold so much? If it was a 81 scored game it would sell 500k at best 

Clair Obscur was a new IP without an existing base, and even then if the game was just as good, then word of mouth would carry it.

Very few Metroid fans are going to let a score in the 80s stop them buying a game they've waited 18 years for.

Your first sentence doesn't make sense, the game scored very high because most people agreeded it's good. If the game wasn't as good it wouldn't receive the high score 

The heavy reviews made the game an instant hit, from an unknow IP to GOTY. This could never happen with mid reviews no matter how good was the WOM

3 million or so units from the core fanbase is expected for MP4. The issue here is with heavy reviews it would bring sales from people are indifferent to the series, those sales are essentially gone now. In this sense is fair to assume the reviews will impact the sales negatively 

No, the game scored high because out of over 8 billion people on Earth, the mere 84 who are counted on Metacritic thought it was good. Reviews are not an objective measure of quality, they are the opinions of a tiny, tiny group of people.

And the number of gamers who'd pass on a game cos of an 81 metacritic is a similarly tiny, tiny group.

Funny thing is, with only 84 reviews you can estimate with 90% confidence and 9% of error margin the average score give to a game from pretty much any population size! granted the sample is random of course, which is not the case here so I'm being disingenuous 

My real point is you're severely underestimating how much critics and public scores actually overlaps. They do overlap by a lot. When I say E33 is good, what I'm saying is "people who played agreeded it's good, if the game was not agreeded to be good it would have scored poorly"

The consensus is Clair Obscure is quite good, and this consensus started by critics, the public just followed suit 

The views of critics and the broader audience diverge all the time.

Many games/movies/etc that reviewed very highly sold poorly cos the broader audience didn't care for them, and many games that were very popular and successful with the wider audience saw mediocre reviews from critics.