gyrobot said:
Well lets think for a moment why people hates JRPGs? Because it doesn't fit the current standards expected by the current attitude towards the fantasy genre.
But what do people expect from the fantasy genre now? To emulate ASOIAF, the political intrigue, the brutal cynicism and ultimately be as mature as possible. The funny thing is that JRPGs at one point was like that with Ogre Battle, Valkyrie Profile and Xenogears which served as the greats of JRPG. When JRPGs made the shift to making stuff lighter in content, WRPGs picked the ball up, using ASOIAF rather than Tolkien as their inspiration and has sold well compared to JRPGs which is becoming mostly kiddier.
So for JRPGs to be liked again, I recommend tossing in a bit of ASOIAF, some mature content and call us in the morning. We will dismiss the Turn Based stuff as part the genetic makeup of the genre. But the childishness is a disease that needs to be cured
I disagree, to be honest "people" don't hate JRPGs, mainstream casual gamers do. The JRPG market, like the RPG market in general, hasn't changed much in terms of size or profitability, but the market for other games has eclipsed it. Where RPG fans and "serious" gamers represented the majority at one time, we now represent a minority, profitable, but relatively small compared to what can be achieved by grinding out shooters and various kinds of immediate
gratification games.
To be honest if anything JRPGs tend to get more flak for being TOO gritty, I mean one of the big stereotypes is all the emo, angst ridden teenage protaganists, combined with all the intentionally "edgy" buckle and strap costumes that fill out some of the wardrobes... and involving plots where pretty much everything sucks and your trying to decide which eventual resolution will suck the least for you as you engage on a quest to kill the literal biblical god or whatever. That isn't all there is, but yes, it's out there. Some games like "Lost Odyssey" got attention for being almost wrist cuttingly depressing a lot of the time... things looking up, well here is a past memory that will suck that out of you!
While I can appreciate this, and enjoy it, I confess that I play games to escape depression, so I do enjoy an upbeat change of pace, and some JRPGs do indeed deliver that.
Generally speaking the biggest marketing problem with JRPGs has to do with the length, and gradual progression. To your typical core, casual, gamer, people want to sit down and start doing awesome stuff. You put in your average shooter and you'll be blowing away terrorists left and right, and in most brawlers like "God Of War" you don't exactly start out as a humble peasant, your pretty much ripping nightmarish monsters to pieces right off the bat. To a JRPG gamer, starting out weak, and then gradually seeing that pathetic little kid develop into a god slaying badass over a hundred or more hours of gameplay is the point. Ditto for the numbers and stats, and the idea that the game doesn't directly involve YOUR performance, but tends to largely be an intellectual exercise, where what a character can do is far more important than your abillity to squeeze off a headshot on a moving target, or perform air combos.
When you look at something like "Wrath Of The White Witch" you'll notice the complaints some people make, basically that 17 hours in they are STILL adding more depth to the game (new systems) and your only just starting to see your hero become powerful.... to a JRPG players that's a good thing, and exactly what a lot of people want.
The thing is though that there is more money to be made by localizing a stylish brawler or action game/hybrid than a JRPG, not to mention that JRPGs usually take a lot more work to produce right given the intended pacing and depth, and all that dialogue and depth amounts to more text and/or voicework that has to be translated. Heck, it can even be argued that your core action gamer might not even give a crap if everyone speaks Japanese as long as they get to start spitting out awesome non-stop from the beginning. You can make *A* profit off of JRPGs, but not the greatest profit for the amout of work, and as companie sthink increasingly internationally and re-orient more and more towards casual gamers every year, your seeing less and less focus on the genere. The demand hasn't changed, the fans haven't gone away, but the potential flow of money HAS changed to the point where to a corperate mentality there are better ways to gouge cash
out of gamers.
Some will say this is wrong, patronizing, and insulting towards the casual, core, gamer, but there is no really nice way to point this out... and yes there ARE people who enjoy both JRPGs and shooters and such, but generally that tends to be an RPG fan, who branches out to other things, rather than someone who is an action gamer that also plays RPGs. You can pretty much see this in terms of what people claim when they are talking about turn based combat, stats, subsystems, and the pacing involved in needing to grind/hunt monsters/accumulate wealth over a period of time. If your problem is that you just want go out and beat on things, and see the plot advance pretty quickly, then by definition your not really a JRPG fan, or likely even an RPG fan at all, because that's generally the anti-thesis of the genere even if a few things have managed to pull that off (or claim to have to, a big part of this is things claiming to be RPGs that actually aren't... but that's an entirely differant discussion).
