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The Fury on 30 July 2013
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I was putting a little more thought into this and in my opinion, I can see where there are issues.

In my view, it's not about whether the games are good or not, Japan is one country, yes it has more games studios than most but compare country to country and you'll probably get similar results. However, it's a matter of what they have put out and how their industry is developing in Japan which may mean for western markets, what they produce is no to our liking. Here are some examples:

1) Development costs have gone up, especially for home consoles, Japan is pushing for handheld market, this is evident with Dragon Quest IX being on DS and selling exceptionally, while Dragon Age X on Wii hasn't.
2) I'm currently playing Valkyrie Profile 2 and Front Mission 3, both games have storylines and styling that are, in my view, grown up themes. The story telling is good. In FFXIII, story telling was bad, it felt more like all characters were there had teenage angst and issues yet they weren't teenagers.
3) Questionable character interactions, see Star Ocean 4 for that... seriously, I know she was meant to be like 15 but Limmel (sp?) was like a little girl and having some sort of romantic relationship forming was cringe worthy. It put me off the game.
4) JRPGs traditionally have a lot of character interaction (or did), with modern voice acting I feel a lot is lost as characters no longer keep talking, voice acting takes time and sound files and a lot of story telling can be lost in that time. So story is left to short scene and 'datalogs', usually you learn about the world via the characters talking in text boxes.
5) Abandonment of some traditional RPGs, where is Valkyrie Profile 3, Persona 5... heck looking back on games I've liked, what the hell is tri-Ace working on?

This said, all this is about JRPGs, it's just wasn't the JRPGs gen at all. If of course we were talking about fighting games, well, Japanese developers have no problem there. They make the best and will probably always make the best fighters.



Hmm, pie.