I played the first Pokemon game about a year ago (luckily the battery held out, since the game is pretty old). I'm an adult and I have some qualms about playing any more Pokemon after that. Not because Pokemon is kid stuff; the cartoon is kids' stuff but the games are more tolerable for all ages.
But because Pokemon so highly depends on looking up guidebooks, figuring out how to optimize your party with inadequate information, knowing things like that a particular Pokemon gets a particular attack at level 50, knowing intricacies about the level up system (did you know that your Pokemon gain stats differently depending on what they fight to level up?), etc. Later games get a lot worse, with things like rules for gaining attacks when breeding Pokemon, Pokemon that evolve under obscure circumstances you can't guess, or that only appear at certain times on the real time clock, etc.
In other words, it's complex. And complex, here, is bad. I can just imagine someone starting a newer game in this series and having to figure out "you get this Pokemon by fishing on one out of several hundred randomly chosen tiles, then find the right Pokemon, and feed it a particular stat increasing item many times while making sure it doesn't have the stat which makes the stat-increasing items useless, then let it evolve".
That's the thing about the Pokémon games. Yeah, you can look up and wade through stats until your eyes go crossed, research gameplay mechanics, delve into the mysterious 'effort values', try to figure out egg groups and chain breeding to transfer a rare/useful move to the offspring, and find the 'correct' nature to min-max your monsters, but all of that's totally optional. You can have a perfectly good time going through the game, collecting monsters to build a well-balanced team, being pleasantly surprised when your level 49 Staraptor learns Brave Bird (and reacting accordingly instead of planning for it), trading with friends, and generally enjoying the story (such as it is). That's one of the great things about the game: it caters both to the 'pick up and play' types and the people who obsess over every statistic and spend hours min-maxing.
