I'm VERY skeptical about Final Fantasy XIII. In one way, I am hoping that it'll breathe life into the genre and make it less stale. On the other hand, I look at the teenage melodrama trailer and I seriously wonder if I'm no longer the target demographic anymore. The convoluted teen melodramas that were FF7 and FF8 were fun when I was young but so was freakin nu metal. Doesn't mean anything. Final Fantasy and most jrpgs haven't grown up and cater mainly to pre-teens and teens and hardcore grown men fanboys who still seriously believe that FF7 had a masterpiece of a story even though it was pretty just pop corn entertainment with some pretention. Or it could just be that they've been fooled by the nostalgia illusion (which is probably more likely).

That said, Final Fantasy deserves the success they had because they were willing to take the risks necessary to bring attention to the genre while companies like ATLUS stubbornly cater to their already-converted echo chamber fanbase.

What teen melodrama trailer did FFXIII have? I've certainly not seen one.

Oh god. You mean to tell me small publishers can't compete with large publishers? Jeez...who would have ever thought that? Those are the breaks sir. Indy studios have trouble also getting their movies to sell 100 million in theatres, and indy books have trouble, and indy music has trouble, and anyone without enough capital to market to millions usually doesn't see millions in sales in return. This is life.

Maybe if Atlus was making those amazing games when the RPG genre was on the upswing at the tail end of the 4th generation and the beginning of the 5th, they would have garnered some attention like Square and Enix did. Instead they were making extremely niche first person JRPGs that didn't have nearly the content, music, presentation, etc. you name it while Square was making Final Fantasy VI, Super Mario RPG and Chrono Trigger. When Sony decided to put all the freaking eggs in FF VII's basket, I don't think it was hard for them to choose between that and something like Persona 2, after seeing what Square did for Nintendo the previous gen and how Atlus did nothing.

I dont get twesterm's point. The way I see it if Final Fantasy games would have had smaller budgets it would reduce their sales - yes. But by all means, it would NOT increase the sales of other jRPGs. I dont get how you can claim otherwise.

ditto

what the hell is he going on about?

twesterm has a long storied history of going off on a negative Final Fantasy rant at a whim. I'm sure those instances and his argument here are in many ways connected.

The TGS trailer.

yes and?

I saw no teenage melodrama in the TGS trailer

there was melodrama, but this is Final Fantasy, so thats nothing to moan about.

If anything the trailer proved to me the characters in an FF will not be boring & will rule again (after FF12's unlikeable characters, barring balthier).

He is talking about the TGS 2009 trailer.  Melodrama is associated with soap operas.  Soap operas are for the most part poorly written so if anything has melodrama in it, it will be ragged on by a select few people.

Well what were the ages of the people involved in the melodrama? If they were between the ages of 13-19, then it's teenage melodrama.