Japanese gamers don't care about anything that's not handheld or called Wii.

Its nice to know(for me personally, at least) that Tales of Vesperia was at the forefront of this huge revival of the 360 in Japanese territory. It all started on that fateful day on August 7th...

I hope that this marks a turn for the 360, mainly for vesperia's sake(hey, I can't help it I'm more of a Tales fanboy then 360 one), but that it also helps MS gain a foothold(even if small) in the Asian market as well.

We shall see after MS restocks the stores with the 360 what will happen, shall we?

Okay, let's say the 360 comes in second this generation, but the jrpgs never really take off on the 360 in the USA and whereeverelse the 360 is popular.

If that happens, do you really expect MS to exert a lot of effort to secure jrpgs next time out or will we again see a situation where predominantly the only genres that sell on the next xbox are shooters, sports, and racing games. I am reminded of this year's E3 where Capcom was debuting Resident Evil 5 and Microsoft seemed to be getting impatient with them and rushed them off the stage to demo Gears of War 2. I mean who did Microsoft think they were and who did they think that Capcom was? The Resident Evil 5 team should not have been treated that callously especially when you consider the fact that almost 70% of Gears of War is just Resident Evil 4 for Dummies (the other 30% being ripped off from Halo, Madden, Max Payne, and The Thing the Video Game.) with slightly shinier graphics.

Explain to me which part of the bolded post wasn't a trolls post.

I think the issue with your statement is that Microsoft doesn't need JRPGs to take off in the West, because *gasp* they never have in the first place! There are very few JRPG series that have done well in the west, regardless of system they were on. I was part of that wonderful SNES generation that wound up seeing so many games not ported to the west due to bad sales.

Point is, JRPGs work in Japan. Because of that, if Microsoft wants to sell in Japan at all, it needs JRPGs. Translating JRPGs to English isn't a hugely massive deal, because even if they do "bad", there'd be enough sales to warrant the port. Look at the opposite end of the spectrum of the western games that get ported for 1 language in 1 country (Japan)...English is a far bigger langauge that'd provide good returns, so again, if MS wants to sell in Japan, it needs JRPGs, and in the end, the West benefits from it.
I don't really get the RE5 point. The fact was that Capcom's team only had a certain period of time, and didn't get their presentation done in time...Kind of like an awards ceremony that has a speaker that goes over their time.

And if you want to argue Microsoft's handling of Capcom, and correct me if I'm wrong but ---- Capcom wasn't even invited for Sony's big presentation, were they?

I really don't like your veiled flamebaiting, dragging Gears-bashing into this discussion, anyways. Because if you want to go that route, then Resident Evil 4 ripped off about 5 games itself, whilst RE5 is taking Gears control scheme.

The bolded part. It was an accurate description of Gears of War. The reason they put in the over the shoulder shooter features was because they didn't want Gears to directly compete with Halo and that is it. The four main characters in Gears Marcus, Baird, Cole, and Dom are no more inventive than your average American NFL players and are designed to appeal to the same types of fans that NFL players do with a little of Sam Fisher's personality thrown into the mix too on Marcus, the frenetic shooting action and experiences that take place in Gears are very similar to the same scenes in both The Thing and Max Payne (without the bullet time...and the way Marcus rolls, etc, is very much the same way that Max Payne moves); finally Gears is a dumbed down version of RE4.  The Thing was also a sci-fi horror squad based action-shooter and a better game than Gears.  They kept the over the shoulder viewpoint, removed all of RE4's adventure elements and just made Gears into another go straight ahead to the end shooter like Halo. The scene where you go underground in Gears following the minecart right is ripped right out of the similar underground scene in RE4.

JRPGs don't have to be immenstly popular to justify exclusivity, compared to FPS and racing sims the development budgets are much lower so the cost to secure exclusivity is likely less also.

"JRPGs don't have to be immenstly popular to justify exclusivity, compared to FPS and racing sims the development budgets are much lower so the cost to secure exclusivity is likely less also."

How much does a jrpg the quality of Final Fantasy XIII cost in comparison to other game types?

"JRPGs don't have to be immenstly popular to justify exclusivity, compared to FPS and racing sims the development budgets are much lower so the cost to secure exclusivity is likely less also."

How much does a jrpg the quality of Final Fantasy XIII cost in comparison to other game types? And if you add hollywood voice acting talent to the game as the Kingdom Hearts games have and if their is a huge amount of text in the game to be translated, development costs go up much more on them.

This is so shortsighterd it's not funny.

Buying up third-party IP's really makes little difference. If it mattered, then MS would be on top in every region considering that they've got by far the most money, but instead, they're in 2nd in the US and last in EU and Japan.

Nintendo and Sony don't need to buy up third-party IPs and developers because they already have a presence in Japan. The DS and PSP will most likely end up the #1 and #2 consoles in Japan at the end of the generation. The handhelds are are far more responsbile for the home consoles not lighting up the sales charts in Japan. The Japanese at the moment simply prefer the handhelds more. It's got nothing to do with a lack of money-hatting by Sony and Nintendo. As a matter of fact, all of the money that MS had fed to third-parties for such minimal gains is a big part of the reason that the 360 has failed to turn a consistent profit.

Why is this even in question? After all of the buying of JRPG's, all the 360 has managed to do is outsell a poorly-selling console a few times(the PS3) and outsell the Wii once after it had seen a drop in sales. This alone speaks for more than words can say.