There's something odd there, but I don't think it's either malicious intent on the part of the publication or incompetence on the part of the reviewer. It looks to me like they just gave the review to someone who's not a huge jRPG fan.
Because, let's face it, the appeal is very, very hard for someone who doesn't feel it to understand. The gameplay is always awful, and mostly consists of menu navigation. The plots are comparable to those found in long works of fan fiction, or in soap operas. The characters are often cookie cutter works of juvenile wish fulfillment. Playing these games isn't really about playing a game, and isn't really even about experiencing a story. It's mostly just about being exposed to certain characters for so long that you grow attached to them, with just enough interaction along the way to help you feel like you're part of things. Quasi-interactive soap opera is probably a pretty good way of characterizing them.
There are people who like that sort of thing. I'll play one from time to time myself, and my mother used to watch several soaps, but it's very hard to maintain that any of these works have objective value comparable to other, similar works. You can really only rate jRPGs from the inside, as jRPGs. If you're outside, you're rating them as games, and there's really no way they're stacking up if you're trying to be at all fair.
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