LogFAQs > #908515075

I think Samus is pretty damn surprising

Like don't get me wrong, Super Metroid is one of the very pinnacles of gaming achievement and Samus is an awesome character

But she hasn't been consistently used as a mascot or icon all that much. She's not one of the more frequently marketed characters or anything. The Metroid series, ESPECIALLY prior to 2002, was not a very well established one until they churned out quite a few in between 2001 and 2007

Just compare her to the rest of the original Smash 8 for instance. You've got Link and Mario, obviously, but the rest of them - DK, Yoshi, Kirby, Fox, and Pikachu - are all midcarders. All pretty strong presences, but not N9 material (well, maybe Pikachu, but that's a very recent development. certainly not in 2002). I always would have imagined that Samus would be down with those guys, and I certainly thought that in 2002, when I thought Sonic would easily clean up. It continues to remain a surprise that Samus is much more than that.

I think it probably generally stems from the fact that Samus is just really widely appealing - even people who are disillusioned with Nintendo's "kiddie" image won't have anything bad to say about her. Her appeal casts a really wide net.

I don't think I find any of the other N9 to be particularly surprising. Mario, Sonic, and Link are all givens. Cloud, Sephiroth, and Crono are representative of GameFAQs's most notable demographic. Mega Man isn't quite on the same tier of icon that Mario and Sonic are but he's really damn close - he has an incredibly long series of games and he's a prominent mascot figure, and almost everyone has at least one Mega Man title that they have played, given that they span pretty much every console (unlike Samus). Snake is probably the next most surprising to me but MGS is definitely right around that same era as FF7 and the like and a lot of people are really invested in the MGS series' story and characters so it kinda makes sense. His appeal also casts a very wide net.