I wouldn't be surprised if the appeal of jrpgs has dropped in the west. But the appeal wasn't that strong to begin with outside of Final Fantasy. When I mentioned that I played rpgs to my ex-girlfriend (who doesn't play videogames), she said, "you mean like Final Fantasy?" People know what Final Fantasy is but the rest is pretty much niche status. Some of the non-geek male gamer acquaintances I went to college with have heard of Star Ocean. Probably because IGN or whomever might have had a Star Ocean piece on their front page during release week or maybe it was prominently displayed at their local GameStop. I know when I first walked into GameStop a few weeks back they had a stack of Catherine copies right in front of the store. I wonder if that kind of visibility had anything to do with ATLUS's solid (by their standards) North American numbers for Catherine. And Star Ocean pulls more figures than Catherine. So I'd imagine that the GameStop regular (who isn't exactly the mainstream gamer. These are the type of people who will buy or Gamefly/Redbox stuff like Wet, Alice and Just Cause 2. And I bet Star Ocean outsold those games) has at least heard of Star Ocean.
But it's only really the geeks who actually play that kind of stuff.
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