I used Fire Emblem as an example for a reason. The last two games have added a lot of sexual content to the games in order to sell more content, but the core gameplay still remains intact. You need to find a fine balance between the two, but it's certainly not impossible.
That's like saying "Because romance doesn't ruin Mass Effect, it won't ruin any other game it gets put into." Fire Emblem is a game that's built on interacting with a number of different characters and developing some level of attachment to them. Romance is a workable next step. For a series built entirely around isolation, it's about as out of place as Skrillex in a classical music convention.
That's why you'd hire good and competent writers...
Even if you could somehow hire the most competent writers on the planet, it still wouldn't work. Regardless of how good your writers are, you can't suddenly redefine a character without people raising some objections, especially since God knows how this would even be written into the plot.
You're talking about the franchise that awards you with a picture of Samus in a bikini if you beat it fast enough...
I'd argue that that was generally a mistake too, because it comes off as pretty shallow to me as well. With that said, having a picture of someone in a sexy outfit is far easier to get away with than showing a picture of someone engaging in sexual conduct (or romantic conduct if we're not going that far) because one can reasonably make the argument that Samus simply wears these clothes all the time. Which is somewhat reasonable, considering that she might at any time need to run for her life or activate her power suit, and wearing constricting clothing would get in the way of that. There's at least some logic behind it (mostly thinking of Zero Mission here).
There's no logic or sense behind this. Not only is it a blatant attention grab, but it makes no sense, given the character and the series we're dealing with.
