| ryuzaki57 said: Pokemon, DQ and Inazuma are no better as a JRPG barometer : they go well beyond the standard JRPG audience, you know that as well as I do. I must say you're quite wrong on PS3 JRPGs. EoE stands at 240K, which is really not that bad (52th best selling game of the year). Totori is at 138K and still selling 2-3K a week whereas Rorona stopped at nearly 80K. Tales of Graces F is at 306K and still selling 10K when Vesperia stalled at 350K (which is the 3rd best score of this gen). Even niche JRPGs like Neptune make the headlines and make it to the West (which, sadly, is not yet the case for most Wii JRPGs). We'll see what future holds for DQX and VersusXIII (hopefullly on Jan. 18th, the wait is killing me) and I keep faith on 3DS because I will probably get it, just for Tales of the Abyss and Professor Layton vs Ace Attorney! |
I'm not saying Pokemon, DQ and Inazuma are a better barometer, I'm saying the JRPG audience shifts differently for each platform, and the Wii/PS3 breakdown really very much mirrors the DS/PSP breakdown. Like I said, casual/mainstream is a better fit for Nintendo, niche/hardcore better for PlayStation. Dragon Quest; better for Nintendo, Tales; better for PlayStation.
As for the sales, I'm using Enterbrain/Famitsu for reference, so that likely has to do with the discrepancies (they have Graces well behind Vesperia launch aligned, despite the holiday push for Graces) but I was wrong on Rorona/Totori (75k vs 90k). Neptunia didn't do all that great either imo, considering the licenses it had and the fact Sega actually picked it up for publishing... it's basically low budget shovelware though, so it probably still made money for Idea Factory. Sega said EOE was disappointing too, they expected 500k across platforms (though they could've been talking worldwide).
Most Wii JRPGs have come west though, and gotten quite a bit of enthusiast attention from the usual suspects (1up, Siliconera, NeoGAF, etc), just not Nintendo's (so far). Shiren 3, Phantom Brave, Rune Factory Frontier, Little King's Story, Muramasa, Arc Rise Fantasia, Sakura Wars, Baroque, Chocobo Dungeon, FFCC Echoes of Time, Fragile, Opoona, Valhalla Knights, Spectrobes, Dokapon, Symphonia DOTW, DQ Swords, etc, etc... Wii's actually loaded with relatively niche and lower tier spinoff JRPGs, in fact the only the ones that don't make it over are the exact same things that wouldn't (and haven't) made it over on PS3 (SD Gundam, Super Robot Taisen, Tales of Graces).
