I'm starting to adapt to calling all of them RPGs lately, i know its a broad term that houses a lot of different games but i honestly feel its better, its just easier than all these nuances.Īs for your question, i believe its a mixture of things.ġ- IP legacy: Sometime the name of a product alone does boost sales, imagine how lower sales Ubisoft will have if they changed the name of Assassin's Creed recent trilogy to something new, because lets face it, those are not AC games at all. Square themselves giving Nomura unbridled freedom over the designs and the plots of their top IPs didn't do any favors to them, as well. The bottom line is, JRPGs were never really that big outside of FF in its PS1 and early PS2 days, and when they stepped heavily into anime territory they quickly lost what had briefly made them interesting for the western audience. Seeing Toriyama's designs shine with modern tech was a big boost for the series. I doubt even Dragon Quest would ever have generated so much hoopla if 8 wasn't so pretty and the earlier games were never remade for the DS. But the series itself quickly lost what had made it big in the west, and the others were never that big even at their zenith. With FF7, FF became the zeitgeist for a few years and got a few people into the genre. The shift in tone from the PS1 JRPGs to the garish designs of FFX and the unquestionably anime look of Tales of Symphonia and such is incredible. No wonder the JRPG fad of the PS1 era ended quite abruptly and the genre never really recovered and it's been tainted ever since. Even Japan was just waiting for the tech to bring anime to video games, and they got it with cel-shading and the high polygon count of the 6th gen. The game was state-of-the-art and exactly the kind of mature content the PS needed, plus the artstyle was cool and not the unashamedly weeb stuff that would flood the market with the PS2 and has been the staple of the genre since then. When western devs got the tech and the budgets to make the games they had always wanted to make, Japan was relegated to a side seat so fast.įinal Fantasy was at least partially brought to fame in the west thanks to PlayStation getting it and Nintendo getting a fuck you from Squaresoft, which generated some buzz and got people interested. What are other Jrpgs doing wrong? What's keeping them niche or preventing them from growing?Ĭlick to expand.This is true to an extent, imo. But even that couldn't meet Final Fantasy's consistently high sales output per release. It just seems strange after all this time the closest Jrpg to get near Final Fantasy's pedigree was in the past, Kingdom Hearts, a series with a Disney license and Final Fantasy characters in it. Is it quality? Are Jrpgs for the most part lacking in key areas that only Final Fantasy is meeting? Are the users who like those lesser Jrpgs easily pleased but the general population aren't interested and not willing to overlook the lack in quality? Are Persona and Tales fans playing for the theme and not for good gameplay? How is it that there hasn't been any improvement outside Squares flagship franchise? What are the other Jrpgs doing wrong that's limiting their audience? Yet for two decades we have had countless releases in the Jrpg category, that rarely can reach even 5M copies 99% of the time. Pokemon aside, Final Fantasy has been the only real Jrpg to sell a large number of copies comparable to Wrpgs, Souls, and other major game genre big boys.
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