Well, no, not really- not if Nintendo wishes to keep its lucrative spinoff market of Pokemon plush doll (or ‘plushies’), stuffed toys, figures (such as Zuken and Tomy figures), and the media line including the animation and the manga going strong. Not only are children not attracted to dark, complex doomsday scenarios, they would just end up frightened by the whole premise and have nightmares.
For kids, the Pokemon world is a fantasy world, but a safe one- especially for people. I think they just accept the world at face value. One can make the argument that any storyline that includes radical genetic mutation as a major premise must be sinister in some way or another. Kids obviously aren’t giving it much thought though and who can blame them?
The fact is though that upon examination the Pokemon world is very strange indeed. Aside from the spontaneous mutations, very few humans seem to inhabitant the world. I admit that I am not a huge fan, but as far as I know Vermillion City is the only town I know of in the Pokemon world, and the only reason for our main characters to go there is to battle their captured Pokemon.
Science labs dot the countryside, and while they certainly are experts on Pokemon, we have no idea what else it is that they are studying. In this world, it seems the earth has returned to countryside- there are no factories, restaurants, or highways about, or even houses. There is no shopping mall yet Satoshi dresses like a modern kid. We don’t know really where they are getting their sustenance.
It is a world dominated by Pokemon, and the only reason that humans are able to dominate the Pokemon is because of the Pokemon’s odd passivity and obedience toward them and the fact of their (the human’s) superior intellect. Humans, it would seem, have gone into hibernation in this world and the only reason for their existence as we understand it from the storyline is to engage Pokemon into battle and win tournaments. There is no underlying infrastructure or civilization- under than the labs and the arena- that at least we can see, that is not related to Pokemon and the battles.
For an adult, these raise huge questions. Does this not seem a world that was destroyed millennium ago, and is reemerging as something different? While humans seem to have survived and do not appear to be in danger, they also seem to have no direction, no civilization. Or perhaps a small colony of humans ended up on the strange Pokemon world. Either way, there are many odd gaps in the Pokemon story.