It's all a matter of context, Selena. Majora's Mask was innovative, but there was a divided reaction to the 3-day time limit. You surely can't be arguing that all innovations are attractive to mainstream audiences. There are a lot of high concepts out there that just don't have mainstream appeal despite critical praise.
If I were arguing that all innovations were attractive to the mainstream audience, I would have said so.
Innovations can be hit or miss. Some people will love them. Others will hate them. Developers aren't going to get everything right the first time. It's the fact that developers even bother to try and throw in innovative concepts that matters. Sometimes they take off and the mainstream audience loves them. Sometimes a great game can fly right under the radar. And then sometimes experiments in gaming can take a turn for the downright ugly. Innovation is a tricky beast. The more you innovate, the less the game resembles the franchise. A lot of people, for example, have stopped playing Final Fantasy. That's a series that has thrown in so much innovation, good or bad, that the modern games only scarcely resemble the older ones.
And you can't really hold Metroid Prime to the same context as Ocarina of Time and FFVII because by 2002, the "wow" factor of 3D technology had completely ran its course. What made Metroid Prime such a success was the groundbreaking immersive nature of its virtual environment. So why can't Zelda construct a new groundbreaking immersive virtual environment?
It's not about how long 3D had been around. It was still Metroid's first entry in 3D. That's what really matters. It was a huge jump, regardless of how long 3D had been around before then. Bringing back a franchise on hiatus
and giving it a huge facelift due to new technology will do wonders for a series. That was Metroid's case.
Also, it should be fairly noted that with sales just above 2 million copies, Metroid Prime wasn't that big of a success. It was a big deal to diehard Metroid fans, perhaps. As part of the greater FPS collective, the Prime games are, unfortunately, not all that special. Nor were they terribly influential. They were fun. They were solid games. But I haven't actually seen them influence the FPS genre much.
Last thing, I would like you to read the post I wrote before responding directly to you. Your use of sales statistics to somehow argue that RE4 wasn't an influential game is rather misdirected.
I did read your post.
Earlier in this thread, however, you used the statistics of Majora's sales to dismiss its innovations and maintain that Ocarina was a better game simply because it was more popular. It's not fair now that I've done the same thing for RE4? Your stance on 'general opinion' concerning games and innovation is something of a dangerous one - a lot of popular games are neither good nor innovative. Halo was not "combat evolved" because most of the stuff it did was already present in Marathon. Likewise, BioShock was practically a tribute to stagnation despite its extreme popularity. So was Dead Space, for the most part.
Sometimes innovation, influence and popularity do not go hand in hand. Extremely good games can fly right under the radar of the general public while at the same time influencing game developers, such as with System Shock. Very few people played it, but it's influenced the likes of Deus Ex and Portal. There are more factors to success that quality or fresh ideas. Likewise, successful stuff can be a ripoff of everything else that came before it. Not that the general public would know, as the general public has never played the games that actually did influence the popular titles today.
The same is true for most other mediums, sadly.
Which means you have to decide whether to play things safe and go for big sales... or take the riskier path of innovation, which can be extremely hit or miss. Die hard fans might leave, concepts could be laughed at, and the whole idea could collapse if not executed correctly. As "Zelda" creates a very strong imagine in one's mind about what the games in the series are like, there is a greater risk in Zelda than with most other franchises. The Nintendo guys probably don't want to rock the boat out of fear of drowning. Once you're a franchise, it's harder to reinvent a genre and make big changes.
And there's the factor of someone 'growing out' of a franchise.
While I'm here, there's one other thing niggling on my mind. Since when did the initial use of 3D suddenly become some sort of illusion? Why is it that we can hold up ALttP's gameplay functions to some high standard, but we can't applaud their use in a 3D environment? Some people say that the 3D environment is the only thing separating OoT from ALttP, but I say that's a fucking big separation.
It's a big change. It's not necessarily an innovation.
Having to gather three pendants from three temples to get the Master Sword and then collecting other trickets to get to the end boss is ultimately the same process whether things are 2D or 3D. And, as already mentioned, the wow factor of jumping from 2D to 3D is a trick that you can only do once. If you want Zelda innovation, you should probably look less at how the game is actually played (which is very solid) and more about the redundant gathering of things and saving of Princesses. That's one of Zelda's major drawbacks. Just having a different sort of plot and a different way of using the solid gameplay system would breathe new life into the series.
But then you get people complaining about how the absence of a fight with Ganon isn't epic enough.
edit: After all these years, Thomas the Tank Engine still manages to scare the ever loving crap out of me...
