Silent Hill 2,3 producer says America ahead of Japan in terms of game dev

[rocketpig]

Sorry Rocketpig. You can have your opinions about what makes an RPG good, but in diversity of gameplay there is no opinion involved. You're simply wrong. If you want to try for a side-by-side comparison be my guest, but you won't win that one. And yes, most of those changes were made within the last 5 years. New RPG combat systems and gameplay are added every year. To be fair, there are a lot more JRPGs than WRPGs so they have the opportunity to evolve faster, but thankfully they are evolving.

Well, as we mentioned, we're comparing a genre (JRPG) that gets 50+ releases a year across many platforms vs. another genre (WRPG) that gets 5 or so major releases and a handful of smaller ones across fewer platforms.

If we want to get into some of those genres you listed, I could start tossing out XBL/PSN games or smaller games on PC that fluff up the gameplay differences to a much larger number for the WRPG camp.

While some of the smaller sub-genres may be evolving, what major change have you seen in mainstream JRPGs over the past 10 years? I'm honestly curious because when I pop in FFXII, I see a game that take FFVII, puts a few minor twists on it (oooh, realtime! New stuff!), and is largely the same game.