Sidenote/personal musing: For all the incessant bitchery in both Hollywood and the games industry about sequels, there is nothing inherently wrong with them. It is a matter of balance, not value. It would be just as wrong to never revisit an established character as it would to never create a new one.
People who look at a sequel, and devalue it on the full and sole grounds of it being a sequel (IGN did this a lot), need to remember that.
So originality is only original if it's aimed at people who actually want the same old [parasitic bomb]?
Which, BTW, on a Mega Man board, generally isn't considered a bad thing. Many of us have played the same game 11 times over in the Classic series, 8 of which were in an identical visual format.
I'm not really discussing the definition of originality as a whole, just how the quality and standards of the gaming industry really work around it. The Megaman franchise survived for a long time making series and milking as much as possible out of them, but the fact is, aside from a few new fans gained by some new series on the market, it's destined to never become the behemoth it once was unless it makes something new and amazing out of itself.
Like it or not, games are now an art form. But we're not taken seriously by other media forms in the least. Games stopped being portrayed as the thing geeks play in their basements, and started being portrayed as the things with explosions and guns that everyone plays in their spare time. But lately, many games have tried to change that. Be it stuff like Okami or Shadow of the Colossus, which are critic's darlings when it comes to defining art in games, or be it stuff like Limbo, Minecraft or Braid, which deal with gaming concepts in an experimental manner, for the experience of the player themselves. Gaming is in its infancy as an art form, and yet, it's become a commercial behemoth before it even began to have artists making it popular.
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