Quality Over Quantity
One of the first things to jump out at the casual series follower or bullet-point memorizer is that Pokémon X and Y doesn’t introduce very many actual new Pokémon. Though it initially sounds like an obvious negative, I think Game Freak’s choice to limit the number of new monsters to a modest 69 was a smart one. One of Black and White’s biggest criticisms was the downright silliness of some of the creature designs — something like Garbodor comes to mind — so taking things slow and interspersing the new guys with the old made everything that much easier to digest. Even Klefki.
Though it’s difficult to apply this decision directly to other games (since most games don’t introduce 150 new characters every few years), perhaps the answer lies within the odd non-comparison itself. It may not be labeled as such very often, but Pokémon is a yearly franchise. Yes, some years are just revamps of last year’s game with extra features, or remakes of editions that were released many years prior. But I think what Game Freak has done with X and Y is take the focus off of the numbers, and put it back on the experience. True, there are only 69 new Pokémon, but so what? This game is more than the sum of its Kalos Pokédex, and it’s this very approach that could stand to make yearly game franchises all the more fresh and creative.
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