Oh, for a space helmet

I played Metroid Prime 3: Corruption for the first time tonight. Aside from the usual "wow, this is really cool" effect of playing Wii games, two main things about the user interface struck me as very well done.

• First, the controls (of course). The running, aiming and shooting action all take some getting used to, but there are some very nice touches, like moving the wiimote toward and away from the screen to activate a door lock.
• The heads up display (HUD) is also really nice. Samus Aran of course wears a nifty space helmet, and the HUD actually looks like a visual overlay from inside her helmet. So instead of information sitting on the screen in some sort of omniscient way, it really looks like you're seeing only what she would see. It's also possible to make out the faintest reflection of Samus' eyes in the HUD, which is a brilliant detail.
  

Ok, so the controls and HUD basically make up the whole user interface, but the sense of immersion is almost immediate and breaks rarely (most notably when she rolls into that little ball).

This of course leaves me wondering how to improve immersion in an RPG-type game. Standard RPG controls and HUDs hardly make sense at all, actually. How do you know how many health and magic points your target has? What do menus and hotkey bars have to do with making decisions in a real battle?

One answer is that the objective is different in FPS games than RPGs. FPS's rely on first-person perspective and a direct connection between player and avatar. Often the in-game character's face is never visible. RPG UI tends to be much more akin to omnicient third-person perspective in a novel, where the player assumes a god-like control of characters' actions. Maybe these two kinds of perspective are just there for different reasons, to facilitate a different kind of immersion.

This to me seems like an easy out for RPG developers. I think most of the time the quality of immersion (and story telling) takes a back seat to the goal-oriented "game" aspect of things (why else would you need to see a number flash on screen every time you deal damage?). Some would say that's the way it should be, but I'm not so sure.

So how do you combine the best of both worlds? I'm not sure yet, but my best idea so far is to have all my characters wear space helmets.