>>48964426It's a very good question, one I pondered for many years. There's a couple of banal answers, like Nintendo's creative staff are old and no longer care or all the of the important people have moved on, the newcomers haven't been trained correctly, or sheer narcissism from Miyamoto.... These explanations are fair but don't tackle the way that Nintendo seems to actively fuck over it's best and brightest, which we see with Pokemon as well.
In a different thread recently I detailed how a business could make a ballsy move and reach out to fan creators for a cooperative and collaborative approach, much more than what we see in SMM, and that the first company to do this properly will earn both cash money AND reputation, the true currency that Nintendo currently seems to take for granted. Most businesses have an incentive to NOT do this as they are afraid it will create IP and copyright loopholes and other businesses will sneak-fuck them, and this leads to other behaviours like the soulless reduction of variety in Mario.
For Pokemon, new designs seem to be made to be easy to create vaguely yet different to exactly replicate, which is pure copyright optimisation. Whereas older Pokemon designs, and the way that the first two Paper Mario games play around with the Mario series, are copyright nightmares. The lazy path of least resistance, for a creative right's holder than doesn't give a shit, is to stop making those sorts of games, but sometimes I worry - what if Nintendo "remakes" the first two games and just destroys all of their charm?
I think that modern Nintendo WANTS to do that but knows that the backlash would destroy them, so in their heads they compromise with the newer, not-really-appealling-but-it-has-Paper-Mario-on-the-box games as a means of keeping up appearances. It's all a cheap propaganda management, because if they released NOTHING then the backlash would also be huge and obviously terrible. Pokemon is more of a straightforward money-print op.
