OH MAN! I remember DC I being called "the New Zelda". Kinda hilarious now.
I'm not too sold on Level-5 being for kids. Some difficulty spikes prove otherwise (Layton and Ni no Kuni is oddly pulled between having you play in an adult game while the rest of it feels so fucking "gradeschool-like" it hurts).
Well that's the thing,
they're not really good at it.
I mean, consider Yokai Watch, Little Battlers, Izuna Eleven, Ni no Kuni, the fact that your party in WKC eventually becomes a Super Sentai team (i.e. Power Rangers), and so on. They all have young, preteen male leads (except WKCs which only has a protagonist with the mental capacity of an eight year old), with gimmicky powers (a watch, mecha action figures, "SUPER ULTRA BURNING DELUXE MACH KICK MARK II TURBO KIIIIICCCKKK!!!", a Book of Spellings, a giant robot activated with a "Henshin-a-Gogo Baby!" sequence), fun lovable companions (ghost cat, probably the same mecha action figure as I don't know, the rest of the team, that cockney doll, that mute custom avatar you made to fill cutscene space with/for the lousy MMO part of the game), a rival (again don't know, probably that other guy with his red limited edition custom action figure, team rival, you'll probably have to fill me in on this one, the Black Knight (no not that one, the other one)), possibly a magical anime female companion to stand there in the background and swoon over him (or to do all the work while getting nothing but occasionally kidnapped; provided there is a female around to begin with) (the female PC?, a cheerleader in the background?, more cheerleaders, the blonde girl party member, the princess/the pink haired party member), and of course a dastardly villain (who probably got abandoned or something and thus has turned E-VIL!) (don't know, don't know, eventually aliens, White Witch/that other guy, an evil emperor).
As far as I'm aware, all of their games (save for maybe the first Prof. Layton game) follow this Saturday Morning Cartoons formula almost to the letter.
Also parental abandonment issues. There's
always somebody in their games who's parents either up and left them or died (yeah, I know, common trope) but that person will
always make an issue of their abandonment without fail (especially if that's their only characterization as they were unrepentantly evil half a minute ago or something).