Mikami: JRPG's were never popular in the west -- is he rite?

[Riachu]

A203D said:

60Hertz said:

Yeah mikami is right... every other JRPG has struggled to have the penetration in the states that they enjoy in japan with the exception of Pokemon and Final Fantasy. As to the bioware idiot if he actually played some JRPG he would see they do have innovations, Valkyria Chronicles comes to mind but Persona as always been edgie, 30 minute hero is another, vagrant story, final fantasy 12's gambit system... but i guess when innovation means ripping D D rule sets and adding tons of dialogue trees what can be said... all of this smells of xenophobic paranoia to me... funny how there's all this doom for the jp's but most of those companies pulled a profit while the west were happy to reduce their losses... and last time i checked the charts are dominated by JP games, even though they all stem from nintendo, i guess they are too big to be considered Japanese o.

Hey man, Super Mario is Italian, lol. just kidding, yeah i agree theres a lot of innovation in JRPGs and even JP developed games. at the end of the day these games take a lot of time and i suppose it can be difficult for the typical western gamer to get used to it. 

by the way i think the biggest problem with these types of games is the pacing, i mean you can spend hours in a dungeon and then watch a cutscene for 30 mins. and thats why i think WRPGs are more popular here than JRPGs. its really hard to get into them. and thats why Demons Souls is so highly regarded by reviewers here, its just a pure assult course!!

@dweli, it is partly patience, but when i compare FF12 & FF13 (polar opposites) i can see that even though the battle systems in Japanese games (Bayonetta, DMC) and JRPGS has evolved, the pacing hasnt changed, theres still a lot of cutscene to get through, and gamers dont want that, they want gameplay. i think that a lot of people who play GTA probabily just skip the cutscenes, where as the pacing in something like FF12 was fantastic. these days with voice overs and stuff, you cant read the text boxes like before, you cant control the pacing, your forced to watch a movie like thing, and at thats where the JRPGs are losing ground i think.

I highly doubt that.  The cutscenes in GTA are nowhere near as long as the cutscenes in something like MGS or SO4.  From my experience, GTA IV's cutscenes lated maybe 5 minutes at most.  This applies with the other GTA games and RDR.  I don't think they hate cutscenes.  I think they just hate ploddingly paced cutscenes that endlessly repeat the most basic plot points into the ground.  SO4 is a legend for having the most pointlessly lengthy cutscenes for a reason.