Is JRPGs dying?

[lestatdark]

Mr Puggsly said:

AOvechkin08 said:

Home Console JRPG's are dying unfortunatley. Japanese developers just don't seem to be making them very much this gen, I blame all the shooters.

I blame JRPG developers for not creating innovative or interesting JRPGs. Graphics aside they are basically the same old crap we've been playing since the 16-bit days.

Deveopers of shooters have greatly raised the bar in that genre.

This post is kinda counter-productive.

First you say that the JRPG genre is stale and hasn't evolved since the SNES days, yet you say that FPS have been constantly evolving. Aside from finally being able to work well and adjust to the needs of console gaming, FPSs haven't evolved that much.

It takes more than just adding a regenerating health mechanic to call evolution in an entire genre. If that were the case, then JRPG's have evolved much more than FPS's, since there are at least a dozen more mechanics to different JRPG games than FPSs. 

If you take a look at games like Suikoden, Xenogears, Final Fantasy, Persona, Arc the Lad, Parasite Eve, Chrono Trigger, Lost Odyssey, Blue Dragon, Lufia, Terranigma, Golden Sun, Grandia, Wild Arms, Kingdom Hearts, Shadow Hearts, Dragon Quest, Mario&Luigi RPG, etc, you'll see that their underlying mechanics are different, be it battle systems, how the story develops and how it is structured, heck there are only minute similarities between all those games.

Now, if you look at the FPS genre, starting from the PC days and not just the console days (heck if you want to make that kind of comparison, you can't put JRPG's in the 16 bit era and forget that FPSs have been around since the early 90s), and you see that only minute additions are added to the genre and in a very low quantity/time ratio.

Advanced AI? Half-Life AI or F.E.A.R AI's are still amongst the est in the genre, if not the best.
Competitive online? Counter-Strike is probably still the granddaddy of the genre and one of the best competitive games ever.
Regenerative health? It isn't quite a positive evolution to  the genre, rather it only made it more accessible, just as it was the introduction to consoles, with the added aggravation of making a lot of FPSs that rely on that system too easy.
Introduction of Melee attacks? Those have been around almost as long as the genre exist.
Online Character Customization? Has been around since Quake, Doom, Unreal and so on. Heck, Unreal Tournament had some of the best customization options ever.
Application of slight RPG mechanics, such as levelling up, in FPSs? Also has been around way before the recent implementation in consoles. Hexen, Heretic, Hexen 2 had them way before it became popular to have those rudimentary RPG mechanics in other genres.

I could go on and on, but it would be rather pointless. It just tickles me the wrong way, when someone calls JRPG a stale genre and then goes on saying that FPS, of all genres, has been evolving. Becoming a popular genre is not evolution, especially when most of the current FPS games are only becoming more accessible to the mainstream by downgrading most of their functionalities or their overall difficulty/time span, in detriment of the online experience.