Nintendo is notorious for "playing it safe." Their most venerable series, like Zelda, Mario, and Metroid, undergo occasional revampings, but their core mechanics remain the same. Zelda games are still "about" going into dungeons, finding a new tool, solving puzzles with it, and moving on to the next one, and so forth. Mario games are still "about" jumping on the heads of your foes to get from point A to point B. (It must be noted, in fairness, Mario games have had a slew of other games in-universe, such as Mario RPG on the SNES and paper mario RPGs, not to mention creative efforts like Luigi's Mansion).

This doesn't make it the correct strategy, its merely an observation that many people use to criticize Nintendo's strategy. It hasn't seemed to wound their profits too deeply, however. That said, I do think Nintendo is interested in innovation - but not from the software angle. They might try out a new game style and think it's fine or whatever, but at the end of the day they fall back on what they know for the overall design. What they want to innovate on is how you play that game.

Ever since the move from N64 to GameCube, we all saw there was something off. The games on the system were fine, but they lacked innovation, they didn't make us lose our minds like the N64 did. So what happened? Nintendo decided that obviously this strategy wasn't working. Rather than monkeying with their key series and risking alienating their hardcore fans (the kind of people who can play every pokemon game and not get sick of it) they decided hey, we aren't going to have better graphics or faster processing or a better online system than any of these guys. Lets try and find new ways to play on the hardware instead!

Thus the generation of the DS, the Wii, and now the WiiU. Fine, and fun, and love it or hate it I give them kudos for thinking outside the established box on that front. I think this is how Nintendo wants to play it - rather than making their games very different, they'll try a platform or a particular interface for one or two iterations of any given series, and then they'll mix it up and try a new interface on essentially the same game design.

Pokemon is suffering from a peculiar kind of creative rot though. While the other games can have interesting ramifications or quirks when trying them with new hardware, Pokemon is just... not different. It doesn't make any mechanical difference whether you pick "attack" or "hyper beam" with a d-pad or a pointer or a stylus. It's the same. Time will tell if they want to do something new, or introduce a kind of hardware that really does make pokemon feel different. But until then, I think they are just trying to appeal to the super hardcore who could catch monsters forever, and the new who never did it in the first place. And that's keeping their profit margin alive just fine, but its clearly not rocking the worlds of experienced, interested gamers who know and think about how pokemon could be used differently.

I don't necessarily agree that the series needs to have a gritty coat put on it, although a T-rated game at least might be able to explore some more interesting themes. Unfortunately, there are some issues with making a hard-core, violent or otherwise M-rated Pokemon game. Foremost in my mind is the problem akin to "Marketing cigarettes with cartoon characters." Although it may never be anyone's intention, sticking pokemon in any game, be it a cute rail shooter where you take photos of pokemon on safari, or a Modern Warfare where Gyrados's hyperbeam is a kill-streak game-ender, little kids will pick it up. I'm not in favor of censorship in our art and entertainment, but I think we can't have your idea righto out of the gate. Lets try and make a different kind of pokemon game to appeal to more mature gamers, without relying on the staples of modern violence. Then once that has taken off we can ease into grittier territory once there's an established branch of the franchise for the elder fans.