Shooters are stuck in a rut. JRPGs are stuck in a rut. Non-BioWare WRPGs usually fail at the thing I play rpgs for: story and characters.
Both of them could easily get out. Someone could try to tell a decent story in a shooter, but the best we can get is Sci-Fi Channel Original. Once every blue moon you get a Deus Ex but I don't understand why it's so hard for these guys to tell a good story in a game. Golden Eye pulled it off and it's like we've only gotten worse since then.
Turn based JRPGs are like romantic comedies, there are conventions that will always be there. I don't think that will change. You either like them or you don't. I enjoy them because they usually have a good story. Every other genre usually considers story a worthless part of a game and they treat it as such.
Realtime JRPGs shouldn't have crap combat. The goal should be an action game that involves more strategy. Realtime in a JRPG usually just means button mashing, which is horrible. You pop in an old game like Phantom Dust and you see how they could make the combat MORE strategic but it plays as good as an action game. They should just blatantly copy that and throw in a cover system. You can still do all of your crazy over the top meteor launching spells, there are destructible enviroments and you totally control everything (movement, spells, blocking). That like the only game where you can do something like... Jump off of a highway overpass, shoot 3 fireballs as you're falling, land and send tree roots through the ground to attack your opponent... all in real time. Meanwhile, you're opponent dodges the first two fireballs, does a spell to cancel out the last one, then does a reversal spell on your tree root to send it crawling back at you . You dodge that by jumping 50 ft in the air and launching out 8 lasers from your body and at the same time your opponent cast a spell where it rains fire on you and you fall to the ground.
I have no clue why people choose brainless button mashing over something like that.
