I think we have seen several problems for JRPG: weak games, not enough games (remember the days of 3 good final fantasies per gen instead of 1 poor one?), poor promotion and a fragmented user base. Mistwalker put out two games on X360 which had no market in Japan. Then it put out one on Wii. Many RPG fans own a PS3 since PS2 was the former home of JRPGs. Mistwalker has two of the key members from Square, so who do you follow...Square or Mistwalker? Then there's Xenoblade, which barely got a release in the west even though it was possibly the best of the generation. So as a fan, what system to do you buy? What games can you trust to be good? Is it worth getting hyped for a game when it may not come west? The days of Sony publishing and promoting FF7 as a system seller seem so long ago.
I think there is hope on the horizon. WiiU could potentially bring the fan base together. We know Monolith's next game is coming, and is being hyped as a worthy opponent for WRPG's. We know Mistwalker is making a WiiU game. We know DQX is going to be on WiiU. With the system's early launch and Nintendo's popularity in Japan, and since the WiiU can produce high-end graphics for a well produced JRPG, we may see a concentration of JRPG games and fans on the system. If square launches a real good FFXV, and especially if it's on WiiU, we could see the fan base picking up all of those games and driving the genre, back to relevancy worldwide. I hope so, and big reason I picked up wiiU was Monolith and Mistwalker.
