Does any character in the Nintendo universe tug at the heartstrings like those in Harry Potter, Star Wars or even Despicable Me? I guess that is one of the issues with Nintendo for me....I just don't feel any emotional attachment to this IP. I never really played the games so I understand that for many of you and others...there will be a strong sense of nostalgia.
I could compare Nintendo with Avatar. I saw Avatar but was sort of "meh" about the movie & characters.....but I love Avatarland & give Disney a 9 out of 10. There is no doubt that Universal could and probably will hit a homerun with the execution of Nintendo...but unlike the realish world and characters of Avatar, Nintendo will be relying on a cartoonish world. It will be interesting to see what develops. No doubt it will be a lot of fun though & that is what people will ultimately remember from their theme park experience.
It really just depends on your connection to the franchises, I guess.
For me, I played all the old Mario, Zelda, Pokemon games in the early 90s through early 00s back when Nintendo was really the dominant video game company.
My favorite video game ever is probably Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, which I've played fully through at least a dozen times, and I have as much of a connection to Geno/Mallow (which certainly aren't recurring characters by any means) as I have to any Star Wars side character. Of course, I don't expect those two to show up in any Super Nintendo World, but the connection is always there.
For somebody like me (and I'd assume a lot of people that grew up with NES/SNES/N64 or grew up later with the Wii or now with the Switch), Nintendo probably had a more important impact on my youth than any movie franchise by an order of magnitude.
The best way to show the impact of these franchises is to just look at what happens when they're offered cheaply as an app. They explode; i.e. Pokemon Go or Super Mario Run can get tens of millions of downloads in a week even for low quality experiences. That shows how much pent up demand there is for Nintendo's IPs.
And this even goes back to the Zelda argument on these pages earlier. Let's just wait and see what happens when Nintendo releases a Zelda app; I'm almost willing to guarantee it'll get more downloads by at least triple or quadruple than any single Zelda game has sold.