I think one of the reasons we don't want talking humans in a metroid game is that metroid games always immerse the player into the world by being just quiet; not explaining the logic of the world to samus/the player, but letting the player discover it for him/herself. That made the world believable in itself, the weird alien creatures, the sinister world, the moody music, it stayed with you all the time and never broke the mood.
Whereas humans, standing next to you, talking to you, is something very familiar. The only thing is that they're so familiar, we notice the smallest details and because of that, creating a believable human character is incredibly hard. In super metroid, the notion of a human world was simply given; there were pictures of scientists and that was it. The rest of humanity, we had to imagine for ourselves, and probably, we imagined them as the humans we are surrounded with, we never had to see them represented in the media in a way so that we could judge them; Hence they were believable.
Thus we had a believable alien world (the world was simply very alien and carried a strong mood; it was also eeriely quiet and large, containing puzzles of a certain logic; as you conquered the puzzles, you 'learned the language' of the world and started feeling at home with it. When you started to break sequences and just play around in it, you suddenly had become immersed in it. Thus, it felt believable.) and believable humans (either they stood still and looked fairly realistic, not BEHAVING, or they were dead. Realistic. People on photos look like people, check. Dead people don't move a lot, check. Realistic! The rest of humanity were not shown on pictures, so there we had to imagine them for ourselves, and we imagined them as real people because that's our natural reference for people. Realistic.) and we had the isolation from these humans, and we were satisfied, and we dubbed the experience of expreriencing this world 'the metroid feeling'.
Whereas a polygon model of a human, making simulated motions, perhaps well animated (I can only hope), SPEAKING to samus in english, can, and can not concieve a realistic representation of a human.
There are a lot of problems that can come up.
The model may not be detailed enough, perhaps the human person looks unrealistic in some way, his speech and animation may not be well synced, and thus we will not believe that this is a human. Even worse, maybe the voice actor has one of these texas accents, that'd put me off TOTALLY. Texas accent and 'metroid feeling' do not go together. I know that that's fucking nitpicky, but that's the thing about trying to represent humans in videogames. We get totally nitpicky about them.
And then I heard that there was this 'ice-man'-style icicle-riding alien chap bounty-hunter who was gliding around killing space pirates and dropping witty comments. I mean, WHAT IS THAT? Not even STAR TREK would have such an unbelievable character :( Is he going to be in the game? I hope he's killable. Super-powers and witty comments, NOT IN MAH METROID.
Oh my god I'm a ranting fan :((
Anyway, AdamAtomic, marry me, your thoughts about metroid are perfect, now let's make a fan-game of it or something.
EDIT: Having seen the steampunk world, it does not remind me a lot of metroid (if I had made it, I'd try to stuff a lot of other different moods into the game), but of MYST and games like that. And I REALLY like the design, it's immersive and nice. I think I will enjoy it. :]
But since I am a damn FANBOI I'll still not think it feels like METROID boohoo boohoo :]