Idea #1: How To Recycle Starters

Okay, let's take a look at the starter Pokemon you've revealed for Pokemon X and Pokemon Y:

You've got Chespin, Froakie, and Fennekin as the Grass-type, Water-type, and Fire-type starter Pokemon.  You seem to be recycling some designs here, if I'm not mistaken.  Let me explain why these look a little familiar:

Color them differently and color me unimpressed.  You really had some very original ideas when it came to the starter Pokemon for the first few generations, but then you started to reuse old ideas and your audience has lowered their expectations of you when you say, "Hey everybody, I've created new Pokemon!"  Granted, you've made some fantastic choices with Pokemon outside of your starter  pigeonhole, but with you limiting yourself to just those three types, you're bound to hit a wall every now and again.  This is your sixth wall now, and with that, you've pretty much boxed yourself in.

Did you see what I did there?

You see, a geometric cube has six sides...as opposed to...another kind of cube? Regardless, it was clever.  However, there are already a lot of goodies in that box, so it's just a matter of figuring out which ones to use and how.

Before there was Chespin, Froakie, and Fennekin, you had 21 starter Pokemon that people loved so much because you made them utterly unobtainable in later games that they would play through the first bits of the game in order to trade all of them into one game.  Believe me, I've done this; I've bought the extra game, the extra Gameboy, and the link cable because I wanted Bulbasaur, Squirtle, and Charmander on one Gen-I game.  If only you had made that easier for us way back when.

Wait a minute...

You already did! You gave us all three Gen-I starters accessible in a single game and we all loved that! Sure, you made it all about the anime, but that doesn't mean you have to scrap the concept that we should be able to access more starters.  I mean, you don't have to make a game with every starter accessible to a single player for free, but what if you just made a game where you could access one starter from a previous generation?

Wait a minute...

You already did! You allowed us to pick one starter from Johto at the very beginning, then one from Kanto and one from Hoenn later on in the same game!

However much of a successful fan-service that may have been, all you did was force us into the same three decisions we had made previously in the last games.  Might I recommend an alternative for a future game?

So, it's in the future, but not by too much, and Pokemon professors are more aware of how many Pokemon are actually out there.  There's been communication between the professors, they travel, they catch different Pokemon, they give some time for new migratory patterns to develop and new habitats to form, so when an up-and-coming trainer comes up and asks for a Pokemon to start off with, you give  the player a choice they didn't expect they would have to make.

Everyone who has ever played Pokemon Red or Blue (or FireRed or LeafGreen for that matter), knows who they would pick if they were given the choice between Bulbasaur, Squirtle, and Charmander...but what if the Pokemon on that table looked like this:

I'm not so certain that would be as easy a decision to make.  So, instead of recycling old Pokemon designs to shell out new starters, why don't you try recycling the old starter Pokemon to create new starter choice combinations?

Hire me, Sugimori!