Yeah. It's a pickle.
The common observation is that Japanese games with great combat are focused entirely on the combat, whereas stuff like Witcher, AssCreed, Skyrim, etc. are open world games with tons of mechanics.
But Dark Souls is a big, open world exploration game with rpg elements, etc. and it's combat manages to be simple but intuitive and viscerally rewarding.
But off the top of my head, almost all the buttons on a controller are for combat in Dark Souls, and I can't for the life of me think how you'd do that in Skyrim and still keep all the other functions, so maybe there's merit to that prior argument.
Maybe the problem is western publishers are always trying to appeal to everybody at once, and don't want to make games with such a tight combat focus. There is that upcoming Ubisoft game whose name escapes me. We'll see if that's any good.
It's also that western games tend to want to be grittier, meaning less bombastic and more 'realistic' combat, and if you ever got into a real sword fight, you'd probably find it's not that much fun. But again, Dark Souls tends to be pretty grounded with its suite of movements.
