I don't really know what I'm talking about, but weren't they more popular on PS2?
No.
There are tiers to jrpgs.
In the west, there's FF, Pokemon, Kingdom Hearts, Mario RPGs. Those are the million sellers. If you take out FF and Pokemon, you can count the amount of 1 million + jrpg sellers one maybe one hand.
After that, you've got the mid-tier. Suikoden, DQ, Xeno, Valkyrie Profile, Grandia, Chrono, Tales, Monster Hunter, SMT, all those classic franchises. Aside from arguably Xenosaga, which I can't find sales data on, pretty much all of these games sales top at 200-300k.
And these are the mid-tier jrpgs for the west.
Jrpgs have always been niche in the west. But the amount translated and brought over gave off the idea that they did better than people thought. It's just that we have brand and genre loyalty. For a time, these series could maintain 200-300k and still live on, because the budgets weren't so high. But that 200-300k number is consistent, and is largely the ceiling of a jrpg in the west that isn't going to rise that much. This is a problem if there's an expectation that graphics should get bigger. Besides the obvious Japanese population shift to handhelds last gen, this is why most jrpgs moved onto handhelds: smaller costs. But now the handheld market is fucked by mobile.
People thinking jrpgs at large were popular due to the rise of FF are sorely mistaken. Using FF as a barometer, most gamers have played at least one FF. But out of that number, how many played non-FF jrpgs? Very, very few comparatively.
They've never been popular. At least over here. People just thought they were because of the sheer number of games.
