Gilgamesh said:
It didn't have to, the JRPG's were thriving in the West last gen, not so much this gen. |
Ah, well, in that case the Final Fantasy series is what is killing the JRPG's then.
It's not that they're bad, it's that they are setting the bar too high. SE can handle taking five years to make an insanely high budget game but when FFXIII is released, good or bad, a bar on the look of the game will be set.
JRPG's are a funny breed because gameplay doesn't matter so that means the game relies on graphics, story, and characters. Since you cannot see story and characters (well, character design I guess, but whatever) that means people are left to look at graphics.
Lets jump back for a second-- look at your general shooter game, a major genre these days. There are without a doubt some shooters that look better than others, but the major ones are all in the same league. The ones that aren't are instantly compared to those top tier ones and seen as inferior. If you don't keep up with the cutting edge game or beat it in some way, you get no attention and do not sell.
Ok, so knowing that lets jump back to JRPG's. SE with their infinite budget and dev time are free to complete their graphical masterpiece. You see a commercial and see their quality in their graphics and instantly know that's going to be good. Looking at almost any other non SE RPG it's instantly apparent they do not meet that bar.
Since those other non-SE JRPG's cannot meet that bar, they are instantly in the lower tier of an already low tier genre.
That's the first major strike.
The next major strike is to even make a modest JRPG it's a huge budget. It's hard to make a AAA game and it's hard to find someone to fund a AAA game. If they do fund that game, they want something that they know is going to sell. This doesn't really have anything to do with SE, but, JRG's don't traditionally sell well because, as you said, they are in need of a revival.
So the fact that SE is setting the bar so unrealististly high and the fact the genre is already a high risk, RPG's are no longer on the forefront. They are doomed to sit in the background with the point and click adventures.
