This is mostly true.  Look at my game collection for both the DSiXL and the PSP.  I even own an RPG for both the 3DS and VITA each, and I don't even own either one of those handhelds yet.

Are they really more popular?

Outside of Bethesada and Bioware WRPGs, none of them are very popular. Only other one I can think of is The Witcher.

And most of those WRPGs have heavy emphasis on gameplay elements that tie them closer to FPS or TPS than RPGs.

what? The golden time for the western produced RPGs were the 80s, they are in a two-decades-long decline. The situation is so bad, that they started to produce the games for console too, to make up for the lost sales on PC. That worked for Skyrim at least. But you don't have the immense number of games that were produced in the 80s.

Japanese produced RPGs are doing not too bad on handhelds. There is a lot of them. Not all comes to the west though.

Not at all, next year is huge for rpg fans.

I'd say, we're in 3rd Renaissance of WRPGs (2nd being late 90s/early 00s with Might&Magic and Elder Scrolls open world games on one side and Black Isle/Bioware story driven on the other). I think we'll see lot of games in the future coming from both directions, plus hopefully, more Japanese devs like From with Souls and Capcom with DD will move toward WRPG alike games...plus, of course, old school inXile/Obsidian Kickstarted games...think cRPG fans have lot to look forward to.

I'd love to berate you right now, but I bought a used Vita exclusively to play Dead or Alive 5+, which is kind of the other side of the spectrum...

Not to mention RPGs have sort of just had their design aped.

I mean back in the day practically everything with stuff like leveling and customation through it was an rpg.

Now adays it's standard in most genres.  You don't consider Infamous an RPG even though you would of in the PS1 era, or Borderlands.... or hell even call of duty has a leveling system.

i dunno... all my favorite games this gen are RPG's

Deus Ex: HR
Dark Soul's
Fallout: New Vegas (with mods)
Dragon Age: Origins (with mods)

There's a lot of other RPG's that I find pretty good Xenoblade, Witcher Series, FF13-2, Mass Effect Series, Elder Scrolls, Trails in the Sky, TWEWY, Radiant Historia, Valkyria Chronicles, Pokemon, Persona sort of counts since it was released well into this gen. There's less though, but not so much that I care...


For me there's a lot less merely good ones like 7.5-8.5 range. Where you could walk to steps last gen and find one. This gen, they're much more scarce.

They're not dead, but quality is severely lacking compared to quality on previous consoles and handhelds.

JRPGs released now are, on average, worse than JRPGs in the past. There are good JRPGs that came out, but not on the level and consistency that they did in the past.

I'm not a fan of the "innovations" RPGs receive today though either. WRPG developers give a first or third person shooter RPG elements and it's innovation. Mass Effect and Fallout 3/New Vegas are crappy first and third person shooters with some RPGs elements that do nothing to make the gameplay more enjoyable. This is in comparison to actual innovations to the RPG series in the past. The ATB system, Parasite Eve's action based ATB system, Vagrant Story's combat system, Grandia's combat system, the SMT press turn system, the tactics system brought about by games like Fire Emblem on the NES, etc.

If that's not enough, Square Enix is milking the Final Fantasy series so hard that I wouldn't be surprised if they're attempting to kill it themselves. Capcom wants in on the action and kills the Breath of Fire series with the announcement of the sixth game. You should have just left the series to die on a good note, Capcom.

*edit*

I'm not against WRPGs, just garbage overrated ones.  I like Dragon Age Origins, Baldur's Gate, Might and Magic, etc, etc, etc. 

You buy games for a system you don't own and I buy exactly 1 game for a system I own. I just think that's funny and something wouldn't be able to wrap my mind around if someone told me :D