Honestly I felt the dialogue between you and May/Brendan was improved a lot since R/S/E. Yeah, some of it nearly made me sick but on the other hand, they're not soulless bums with no ambition or spirit anymore.
It's also not like pseudo-romance is exactly anything new to the franchise either, although I do agree maybe it's creeping more and more into the games. Violence is another thing that's phasing its way into the series. Remember in PMD2, when Dusknoir was going to "get rid of you" instead of kill you? No beating around that bush in OR/AS, several characters flat out say that if the current impending disaster isn't averted, you will die. I remember when there was a grunt who threatened to blow up a town in D/P/Pt, and I was rather surprised by that. Now we've got wars, giant death machines that kill entire countries, and apocalyptic weather.
Although, even in X/Y, a lot of euphemisms were used in any situation involving death. It was never directly mentioned that AZ's Floette died, it just said he received a box, and the player is left to fill in the blanks (which is easy enough).
Honestly, I like this shift towards a more serious game environment. The one thing that always really bothered me about Pokemon games was that everything-will-be-okay-after-naptime attitude that the series started with, where there were no huge disasters to avoid. Then we had disastrous situations involving Pokemon, and finally in X/Y a person (AZ) directly causes harm to other people. The romance is something I'm not too particular on, but I understand it appeals to some fans so I'll tough it out.
