Speaking of just consoles. Hmm I don't know. I played Resonance of Fate, Tales of Xillia, Vesperia, Graces, Lost Odyssey, The Last Remnant, Magna Carta 2, Eternal Sonata, Blue Dragon, Infinite Undiscovery, Star Ocean 4, White Knight Chronicles 1, Ni No Kuni, The XIII games, Enchanted Arms, The Last Story, Xenoblade, and Arc Rise. Plus other stuff that gets associated with the genre like Valkryia Chronicles, Pandora's Tower, Dragon's Crown, and so on.
I kind of honestly think console jrpgs started off pretty well this gen. I don't think any which one was offensively bad. Maybe not earth shattering good and missing something from previous gens, but they were all ok games. Lots of them had decent budgets as well. Eternal Sonata, Vesperia, and Infinite all look pretty decent.
I feel like after XIII though, jrpgs on consoles really died and became playground of NIS/Gust/IF. Now I've never played these games because I do have a filter and the filter says I'm not the audience for those kind of games. Whatever it is, when I look at them they just aren't the kind of things that intrest me. I got into anime because I liked action and sci-fi. I didn't get into anime for cute girl stuff. Maybe that explains what I look for when it comes to Japanese games/anime.
People claim the Gust stuff is good. Maybe it is, but I'm too ignorant about that stuff to care. Hey, being willingly ignorant about things is my specialty and well whatever it's saved me some money and time. So I won't bother with thier stuff even if it's not the moe/pantsu stuff I think it is. It's still dealing with subject material I find unappealing.
What do I think is the worst console jrpg?
I don't know.
I found White Knight Chronicles 1 just kind of boring. Like Ni No Kuni it kind of just feels thoughtless in the end. Both of these games battle systems and progression systems just kind of feel there. Without any interesting twists or takes on them. Same with the stories, predictable and uninteresting things happened. Ni No Kuni is me traveling through the typical fantasy places(fire, ice, foresty complete with eccentric forest creatures) with a wondrous little boy who I'm supposed to find enduring simply because he's a little kid. White Knight Chronicles, well I simply don't remember what happened in the first one. There was a typical jrpg lead who wants to be a hero, a girl who likes him, but can't tell him, the wise old dude, the playboy rogue, and the uptight female. Yeah not winning any originality awards. Not bad games, but they are just kind of there.
Tales was Tales. I don't think I'd really nominate them for worst jrpgs.
People know how I feel about XIII games, but did you know I don't like XIII-2? I remembet it was either Troth or Pefro on GAF(whoever's taken up the XIII defense force, put please I was never like them or that MRA guy with the Drakengard 3 avatar) said I was a traitor for not liking the game. He wasn't being ironic either.
Magna Carta 2 is a krpg, but whatever. It would appeal to the same people. It's also not too terrible. Nothing great, but decent. I guess thats the tale of the first half of this gen for the genre, "Nothing great, but decent". Same with Enchanted Arms, Infinite, Blue Dragon, Arc Rise, SO4, and so on. A lot of these games may have something meh to bad in them(Infinite's story, Blue dragon's story, Arc Rise's localization, So4's story), but they may have something that certain people could latch unto and push them through the game(Infinite's big open world and on the field battle system, Arc Rise's traditional jrpgness, BD's job system, SO4's battle system).
Honestly for me the worst jrpg I played was Eternal Sonata. I curse the name of this game. First, for some reason it has a Battle System that progressively gets worse as it goes on. I don't remember the specifics, but the game takes away aspects of the battle system. Some of these things you may actually like, but in some sort of way of attempting to artificially challenge the player(in a game that is easy no matter what) it will take away nifty mechanics. In the end, you might as well play it as a "just mash the a button game". It's what works most of the time. Add in a terribly told story that is inane in it's conflict and character development and some of the most stilted cutscenes available and you got yourself a pretty shitty game.
Best? Well I liked Xenoblade, Resonance of Fate, The Last Story, and yes Final Fantasy XIII.
