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

[sperrico87]

gergroy said:

RolStoppable said:
The only publishers that could sell JRPGs by the millions were Nintendo, Squaresoft and Enix. Nintendo's Pokémon are still going strong while Squaresoft and Enix have merged. So what has Square-Enix been up to this generation?

They poured an enormous amount of resources into Final Fantasy XIII, so they didn't have much time and manpower left to do much else. They released a lot of remakes on handhelds to finance their FF XIII projects, but they weren't able to do many new things. They didn't even have time to make Kingdom Hearts III.

Beyond that, there was a period of time in the '90s when anime was somewhat "in" outside of Japan. We are long past that and smaller JRPG series aren't doing themselves any favor by still trying to look like anime. Those games aren't going to find big success outside of Japan.

square enix had time to make a lot of crap at the beginning of the gen.

last remnant

infinite undiscovery

star ocean

Don't forget Fire Emblem.  Amidst all the changing toward more Western-oriented games, Iwata allows Intelligent Systems to carry on as if SNES-style SRPG's never went out of style.   Not that I'm complaining!

Square is lost to me, though.  Those three games you highlighted are the worst offenders.  There are other stinkaroos too, but they're other publisher's faults.  Like Microsoft allowing Sakaguchi and Mistwalker to bungle Blue Dragon.  At least he was given a reprieve and Lost Odyssey made up for the mess that was his first foray into HD development.