Messofanego
Banned
Because this is video games, an amalgamation of ART and tech. Caricatures like Samus Aran and Pac-Man with no human personality or identifiable ethnic backdrop, who operate as mere avatars, can be subjected to various artistic interpretations without closet racists and perservists condemning the notion and immediately branding these characters as something more in the guise of "30 years she looked this way bla bla bla" simply to validate their conservative positions.
But this is a pointless debate as Nintendo will never entertain the notion, but at least they have valid excuses as to why they'd be vehemently against the idea, which is more than I can say for some of the Metroid traditionlists in this thread. The ultimate merit of this discussion, however, is that it reveals to me there's a long way to go before we can be rid of the closet racists that still plague the VG community.
For such long-running franchises that are open to different gameplay and mechanics and design goals and other technical aspects that are quite hard to do, it's a bit telling that just changing the skin colour or background of the main character which doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things on a minute-to-minute experience basis would cause so much outrage.