I think Nintendo's increasingly "kiddie" labeling is do to its own decisions. With the Wii they added Miis, whimsical music, silly animations, and their interface is cartoon like. Nothing about the Wii aesthetics is in line with more mature audiences, for everyone, sure, but things tend to go to the lowest common denominator. If you make something with 5 years old and up in mind, it has to work with 5 year olds and that is the age group that gets the most attention because the aspects that appeal to the older groups won't fly with the younger ones, therefore the older groups don't get what appeals to them.
Same goes with their games since many use the Miis, but also NSMBWii which in my opinion was a terrible game plagued with over active attempt to make it for as young of an audience as possible and as easy and simple as possible. I had 90+ lives through the whole game. The game was a tutorial from world one to world ten, it treated you as if you didn't remember you had a controller in your hand. The music was also irritating, too floaty, and the animation of the enemies dancing to the music. Why Nintendo, why? How come my enemies have big smiles and cute features when I kill them? It's sick, lol. For a game that was suppose to be the equivalent of SMB4, it failed me. Anyway, I found NSMBWii an abomination of Mario, but I suppose Nintendo has been slowly drifting towards this for years now. I was 5-7 when I played the original mario and that game was fine. The mario game today...well how much younger is it targeted for if the original was 5-7 for me? 1-4, idk, it is just baffeling that they would change the series so much.
Yes there are exceptions and yes there are titles that retained their general age appeals as well as 3rd party mature titles, but when you wrap it up in a bow and present it with rainbows and flowers popping out of it it is hard to view it as anything else. This is not an issue of the consumer, but one that Nintendo has created themselves. Is it necessarily a bad thing? Not really, unless you are a full grown adult trying to make it something it is not. Please do enjoy the console, the younger appeal doesn't prevent older people from liking it, and you can always grab some mature games. But if mature games are important apparently, then why can't mature hardware be as well?
OP, I'm guessing Japanese ratings are more diverse in criteria than in the US. The US would almost only put an AO label on a game if it was a sex game essentially, everything else gets an M. The labels in the US cover a wide spectrum of topics.
Before the PS3 everyone was nice to me :(
