Definitely a much more insightful response in that post, Willco. Didn't know you actually liked some of the games, must've missed those posts, mah bad. And any fan of Skies of Arcadia is good people. But the FF series is pretty different between games, hence why people have such strong convictions of their favorite/least favorite games. I have to clear this up - I don't hate all FPSes though, since there are a number of FPS and FPS-spinoffs I truly loved. I'm just getting rather fatigued with the genre.
I don't think S-E has failed to recognize the Japanese industry has fallen far behind (though I would argue it's more of a "switched gears", as they focus mostly on handhelds nowadays while the west don't really care much about handhelds), they just don't really know what to do to mitigate it, and thus they end up alienating both audiences. Like, look at that game with a different lead character depending on the JP/West versions - Nier I think?. In fact, plenty of interviews with Wada talk about S-E wanting to break into Facebook gaming, put more money forth towards mobile gaming, etc. And naturally, the people who get pissed about this are the longtime S-E fans who want more new-IP RPGs out of them, not browser and iPhone stuff.
A lot of the core pieces of the Japanese RPG experience seem counterpoint to what is in vogue at the moment (which I argue is more realistic graphics/settings, online multiplayer, more action oriented, more simplified, much less abstract). So to push for mainstream sales in the US would require a whole modification of the genre and IMO not worth the financial risk. Hell, for me, it'll be a sad day when turn-based strategic gaming and convoluted systems go the way of the dodo. Eliminating some of the more wacky jappy elements would be a start (I could personally give or take it, it doesn't immediately turn me off like some people...) to mainstream US acceptance, since Lost Odyssey and Demon's Souls I think did decent here.
And no, with the exception of the FF games post 7 and a few random one-offs like Xenosaga and Star Ocean 3 (both
), most Japanese-made RPGs fail to crack over 100,000 copies sold, in America. For the longest time, Europe got screwed out of many of the genre's classes, too. Hence why RPG devs want to cater to their diehard constituency instead of taking a risk on expanding their market. It seems to be working for Atlus, at the very least... They are still open (and have been really prolific in the last few years), while plenty of studios focusing on more mainstream-friendly titles have closed their doors.
It's the same thing that has happened with 2D fighting games, shmups, graphic adventure games, and lots of other genres that have been around for a while. Japanese RPGs are 25 years old, and still kicking in their homeland (DQ9 = most successful Japanese third party game ever in Japan). And I'm sure there are plenty of oldskool WRPG fans who lament the "simplification" of something like Mass Effect in a bid to gain sales, you don't need to look further to what happened with Fallout 3 to see this.
I've never found people to care about my taste in games, as far as social acceptance goes. More people know me as "that dance music kid" than a gamer. Saying you're a DJ (even a bedroom one, like in my case) will definitely get you more ass than saying you're the top ranked MW2 player on Live
Armitage: nearly every game is adolescent, poorly written and poorly acted. And there are still a ton of really creative ones on the market that are anything BUT "archaic". Demon's Souls, Valkyria Chronicles, TWEWY, Bowser's Inside Story, Avalon Code, Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume, just in the past 2 years alone.
