gyrobot said:
An idea that has always bugged me was how every other console out there had abandoned the children's market to a certain degree that outside of party games there has been little effort to make anything "child friendly" (unless you call bleeding sandbag humans with no dismemberment child friendly) and Nintendo has yet to make one straight from their first party devs.
The idea I had was to connect the Galaxy Federation to similar futuristic plots (Star Fox, Metroid and F-Zero) where the Federation gets caught in a bloody hot then cold war between an alternative dimension where the GF became a collective of dangerous warbands as they begin to wreck havoc on the Federation. As a mercenary he is sent across the galaxy to either provoke conflicts for profit or to secure the interests of the GF's collective of clients with their own agenda.
So what kind of first party M rated franchise you would like to see from Nintendo?
Well, I'd say Nintendo should just develop a new franchise if they want to go in that direction. Honestly though it's not usually one of Nintendo's strengths there. If I had to guess what they might do well at it might be something like a more "adult" Pokémon, something in the vein of the Shin Megami Tensei series.
If I was developing a product for mature audiences for Nintendo though I'd actually consider taking their surrealistic shared "Mario-verse" as it exists in the context of their party and cart games where it implies all of their IPs share the same continuity despite all common sense like the old Hanna Barbara universe, I would however consider "Mushroom Kingdom" the central concept. I'd then turn around and making dark, grim, gory, and incredibly sexualized... a sort of "Mario" version of what people like American Mcgee and Todd Mcfarlane have done with "Alice In Wonderland" and "Oz" over the years. The Mario-verse being a sweet, magical place, that has recurring ideas and imagery that has existed for decades and grown up with a lot of people and is rife for insane re-interpretation.
I'd probably start with some of the recurring jokes people make, about how Princess Peach never puts out, the exact status of the Mushroom-people serfs, whether the magic mushrooms and such have narcotic effects, and similar things. Probably have Princess Peach defined as a sado-masochistic lesbian whose into her human-like handmaidens and wears a studded leather catsuit under her dress, the mushroom people as actual slaves, bowser still evil as a cannibal psychopath. Mario himself would be a real piece of work and probably wind up finally just taking over the kingdom, raping peach for manipulating him, and making her his slave for a time, leading to a civil war, and similar things. Pretty much every warped, WTF, thing you can think of.
As far as a plot tying it together, I'd probably want to make it a first or third person non-linear game with the basic premise of survival and escape, the player having been pulled into the "real" world of Nintendo from the real world, falling quite far down the rabbit hole and wanting nothing more to escape. Possibly summoned by a revolution (which is just as bad as anyone else, hence the desire to escape) to try and take over. I'd probably use the logic that despite how they are "interpreted" in the universe Mario and Peach and the other human-looking characters are all actually from outside, and being stronger, faster, able to jump, etc... have thus been able to dominate the indigenous lifeforms, which are evil and monsterous in their own right.
The overall result I'd be going for is having people look at it and say "that's just wrong on every conceivable level" yet still enjoy it anyway. For sequels you could always do the whole "You never truly leave wonderland" schtick and always have the protagonist getting sucked back in, willingly or not, with goal always being to just flat out get away.
Of course Nintendo would never do anything like that with it's IPs, even as a sideline. At some point decades in the future if Nintendo ever goes out of business someone might try something similar on a large scale though.
