Lmao man sometimes your love for JRPGs is just real sad. The first FF game I played was FFIX and FFX, which really got my into FF is one of the best games I've ever played, probably played it over 10 times. I even bought and FFXIII and XIII-2 and actually enjoyed them. And I played a bunch of FFXIV. Crisis Core FFVII is probably my favorite  FF because of the story. And I actually bought FFXV day 1. So don't you go tell me im not a FF fan, I'm just not a mindless fan. And if anything, I'm 100% sure you haven't even played the Witcher 3 because it's obvious you just hate WRPG.

That last sentence is just embarrasing and wrong. The Witcher 3 has a clear cut story. The Witcher also has better quests than FFXV, by 100x. FFXV quests are filled with fetch quests or barely have any story at all.

And the difference between FFXV and Witcher 3 world is Witcher 3 is condensed and filled with things to do while FFXV is open and barren. That was one of the worst parts of FFXV, I was driving and running so much, filled with nothing. 

Yeah, sorry, beside being gross generalization, it's pretty much apples and oranges - Nier's combat is something that would instantly turn me away from WRPG...Witcher 3 has pretty decent combat, especially for the genre it is.

But it's matter of taste in the end - for example I find Dark Souls to have pretty average combat system (though I'm quite fond of the games) and much prefer something like Severance: Blade of Darkness.

You can't be serious? The general consensus only talks about FFXIII because of how shit it was. and you're only really looking at an online perspective. 

Setting aside the irrelevant commentary on the game's quality, there are numerous bosses towards the end deliberately designed to punish button mashing (i.e. Sundowner, where simply rushing up and mashing the attack buttons will result in you eating explosive shield, or a more spoilery example that comes equipped with a counter and command grab). The game is by no means difficult, at least on normal difficulty, but it's not a game you can simply beat by button mashing without giving the reload checkpoint option a serious workout. 

This sad state of combat in western games has been known for decades.
How about character design in western games, a little generic...anyone else noticed?

There is a famous saying that applies to text in bold "Better to Remain Silent and Be Thought a Fool than to Speak and Remove All Doubt". Unless your post was satire, you have no idea what you are talking about.

And yet I did without much reloading. Any reloading would be mostly due to Platinum Games wonky design.

I feel like this thread has forgotten about God of War. Isn't that game's whole foundation its combat system? And yeah, Nier looks great, but that comes from Platinum, the kings of action games. Not sure you can draw an east-west distinction from that.

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.

Then I am going to conclude that you did not engage in nearly as much button mashing as you claim to.