What happened to JRPGs and will the Genre ever dominate again?

[noname2200]

BenVTrigger said:

noname2200 said:
Is this really that much different than what's happened before? I submit that JRPGs have largely been a niche market outside their home territory (Japan), and that even at the height of its popularity few JRPGs outside the mainline Final Fantasy titles ever went much beyond 1 million.

While I somewhat agree the real difference is hype and excitement as well not just sales

 

stuff like .dot hack, Xenosaga, Chrono Trigger, Persona series, etc used to have huge World wide followings and it was often a major event when a big name JRPG was announced.  This generation literally Final Fantasy is the only brand that still carries any weight outside Japan and even it seems to be shrinking 

I disagree. Perhaps we simply had radically different childhoods, but when I tried to talk to my gaming friends* about Chrono Trigger, for example, the collective response was "what"? Even post-FF VII, RPGs tended to be extremely low on folks' priority lists.

The other titles you list were also only large in small subsections of the internet; perhaps you're simply visiting different places today than you did in the PS2 days, or perhaps fans of those games have largely self-segregated themselves into more specialized sites? Equally likely, the JRPGs have retreated to handhelds, as their niche audience is too small to support large-scale HD games, so most bloggers' interest has evaporated as a result.

 

 

*This excludes my closest friends. But then, we bonded over the nerdery of liking games like Robotrek, Phantasy Star, and the Soul Blazer trilogy, so we're not exactly representative...