twesterm and JRPGs are like this:

Trolling
With
Extra
Sinister
Techniques
Elaborating
Red
Mannerisms

JRPGs are not dead... yet :P For some reason, developers aren't making as many JRPGs as they were during the PS1-PS2 era (at least not on PS3).

There are about as many of the things floating around now as there were back then, they're just not on Playstation systems.  If you want your fix, you'll need a DS.  Production costs have pretty much pushed the genre off of consoles.

I hope production costs start dropping fast because I want to see more JRPGs on the PS3. Maybe Sony should do something simillar to what Nintendo did with the Wii and create a PS4 that's basically a PS3 just with a very small upgrade and a change in design. That way production costs should be way lower than they would be if they created a new system 10x times more powerful than the PS3 and we would have more JRPGs on the PS4 :D

I'm with you on that one: production costs really need to go down, for the good of all of us.  If there's another big leap in terms of graphics/horsepower, I hope the console manufacturers have some fantastic development tools ready first.

So I'm playing FFXIII and watching the opening cut scene.  We have all this fantastic crap going on and I'm sitting there thinking damn that's cool, can't wait to do that!

And then I get control and I get two basic attacks and whatever the hell blitz (which looks just like a basic attack).  In the meantime the guy I'm not controlling is doing cool stuff, meanwhile, I'm not.

So while I was bored tapping the X button picking auto-battle because there really wasn't much else to do I started thinking-- what would I be doing in a good game?

I started thinking about Uncharted 2.  In Uncharted 2, all that fantastic stuff going on in that cut scene at the start of FFXIII, I would be doing that shit instead of sitting there with my hands behind my head watching it happen and then doing boring stuff when I do get control.

Now, so why do I say JRPG's are dead?  They love to rely on those crazy cut scenes doing fantastic stuff because that was just stuff you can't do in games.  Now, we can do that.  That means we're sitting there watching Lightning be some sort of action hero asking ourselves why we aren't the ones doing that.

Instead, I get to do auto-battle and then I'm greeted with 30 pages of a datalog?  This is the best JRPG's have to offer me?  JRPG's can't even tell me a story anymore, they have to have me read it in a datalog?

Does Twesterm ever not complain?

So I'm playing FFXIII and watching the opening cut scene.  We have all this fantastic crap going on and I'm sitting there thinking damn that's cool, can't wait to do that!

And then I get control and I get two basic attacks and whatever the hell blitz (which looks just like a basic attack).  In the meantime the guy I'm not controlling is doing cool stuff, meanwhile, I'm not.

So while I was bored tapping the X button picking auto-battle because there really wasn't much else to do I started thinking-- what would I be doing in a good game?

I started thinking about Uncharted 2.  In Uncharted 2, all that fantastic stuff going on in that cut scene at the start of FFXIII, I would be doing that shit instead of sitting there with my hands behind my head watching it happen and then doing boring stuff when I do get control.

Now, so why do I say JRPG's are dead?  They love to rely on those crazy cut scenes doing fantastic stuff because that was just stuff you can't do in games.  Now, we can do that.  That means we're sitting there watching Lightning be some sort of action hero asking ourselves why we aren't the ones doing that.

Instead, I get to do auto-battle and then I'm greeted with 30 pages of a datalog?  This is the best JRPG's have to offer me?  JRPG's can't even tell me a story anymore, they have to have me read it in a datalog?