Where would the jrpg genre be if FF7 was never made?

[johnsobas]

Well i guess RPGs would continue to be fairly niche, but FF would have still found fair popularity in the west, the big budget and cutting edge graphics guarantee decent sales in the west. Back in the NES/SNES days many Japanese games couldn't get attention, but the internet has helped. Even FF6 got 400k sales in NA, and most RPGs were starting to get enough attention to get released in the US at least. RPGs were on their way up heading to FF7, just that FF7 accelerated things very quickly.