Why JRPGs are a dying breed

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Anatana

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#51  Edited By Anatana

After I played FFXIII and Eternal Sonata, I swore I'd never play a JRPG ever again. The grinding aspect of the games has actually decreased significantly as the technology has moved forward (e.g. being able to remove random encounters) but the stories are just the same old tripe recycled again and again. To be fair I haven't played some of the more obscure titles, but in games that come out of Japan, it feels like there is always a gang of 20 somethings that fight against ultimate evil and quite easily prevail. FFVI remains one of my favorite games because the bad guy actually GETS what he wants, and the story is stellar, given the limitations of the system. I'm really waiting for someone to make a truly unique RPG, and I think that if they do there will be a huge response to it.

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MikkaQ

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#52  Edited By MikkaQ
@mutha3: Yeah but sales aren't a great yardstick of quality, which is what I talk about when referring to your average JRPG. They lack in quality. The voice acting and dialogue is usually poor unless you're an Atlus game. The gameplay is usually very samey... they feel like adventure games, but instead of object finding puzzles and dialogue trees, you get long dungeon grinds and no real means of interacting with the story. It's basically like a novel with gameplay interruptions... and my problem is the gameplay isn't really great these days. Once again, unless you're an Atlas game. They seem to be making the only interesting JRPGs anymore. 
 
I also didn't mean "Actually reading the post"  as in people weren't, I just mean that I didn'T read the post before saying that snarky thing about putting the RP and G into J.
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Sin4profit

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#53  Edited By Sin4profit
@Fajita_Jim: alright, thanks, still leaves some questions. 
..and , "  PC/Mac boxed: includes pre-owned and rental markets."? I don't think those are called "markets" i think they're called "rackets", aren't they?
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gamer_152

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#54  Edited By gamer_152  Moderator

It seems to me that this thread is more about the decline of the RPG than the JRPG. Also, I wouldn't by any means describe the MMO genre as "niche", especially not World of Warcraft.

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Fajita_Jim

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#55  Edited By Fajita_Jim
@Sin4profit said:
" @Fajita_Jim: alright, thanks, still leaves some questions. 
..and , "  PC/Mac boxed: includes pre-owned and rental markets."? I don't think those are called "markets" i think they're called "rackets", aren't they? "
There is actually a used PC game market, and I think they're just lumping the term together as pre-owned/rental.
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Seraphim84

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#56  Edited By Seraphim84

I just felt like if this conversation included WRPG, there'd be a whole other can of worms to open up there.  How it remained small but persistent on PCs, the very real resurgence it's seen with Fallout, Dragon Age, and the like.  I personally feel like WRPGs have reinvented themselves in a way that it's easy to see how they'll continue years from now.  But JRPGs have yet to break out into something that feels like modern gameplay. 
 
Also in NO way belittling the success WoW's had.  It just seems like alotta people talk about the environments, the dialogue, the social aspects, but not so much the leveling-up gameplay.  I'm not gonna sit here and say Blizzard's doing a damn thing wrong.  I guess it just feels different when it's in a single player experience.

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mutha3

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#57  Edited By mutha3
@XII_Sniper said:

" @mutha3: Yeah but sales aren't a great yardstick of quality,

That is true. But when people talk about something "dying" its usually referring to the place JRPG's have in the market.
 


 
which is what I talk about when referring to your average JRPG. They lack in quality. The voice acting and dialogue is usually poor unless you're an Atlus game. The gameplay is usually very samey... they feel like adventure games, but instead of object finding puzzles and dialogue trees, you get long dungeon grinds and no real means of interacting with the story. It's basically like a novel with gameplay interruptions... and my problem is the gameplay isn't really great these days. Once again, unless you're an Atlas game

 
Dude, I'm a huge Atlus whore, but....
 
You're playing the wrong RPG's, man. I can think of plenty of JRPG's with excellent gameplay released this year, alone.  Tell me: do you even play JRPG's? what JRPG's have you played this year which dissapointed?( Don't say FF13, everyone knows that's terrible)
 
You're right about story sucking ass in most JRPG's out there. But then again, that's true for all genres.

@odintal

said:

" @mutha3 said:

" @odintal said:

" @Mcfart said:

" Tales of Vesperia and Persona 4 prove that JRPGS are not dead. "
yeah, they're just on life support and the Japanese developers are ignoring the DNR clause. "
Both of the games he just mentioned are on the top of their respective developers lists of best-selling games.  Persona 4 has sold more then any other game Atlus has ever put out  and ToV is only outmatched by Symphonia. "
to put that into perspective, Persona 4 sold about as many copies as Too Human, Spectrobes, and Jade Empire. a blockbuster, it is not. "

Yes it  is. Its retarded to compare games with entirely different budgets, marketing campaigns and target audiences with each other. Persona 4 turned a very nice profit for Atlus. BTW, the games you just posted may have been pretty shitty, but with the exception of Too Human, they turned a substantial profit for their developers. I have no idea what fantasy land you're living in where selling half a million copies of a game is a bust. That's a lot more then most developers manage to do in an entire franchise. Unless you compare to huge franchises like Zelda, Call of Duty or Ass creed.
 
If you want JRPG million-sellers you've got Pokemon, Final fantasy,Dragon quest and.......not much else. The same way it was ten years ago. And again, Final Fantasy 13 sold more then Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 put together.
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deactivated-57aaaa9329732

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@mutha3:   
do you know what blockbuster means in entertainment industry terms?  it's all about widespread popularity and huge amounts of sales not profit. sure 700k is a respectable amount for a game to sell but persona has no widespread popularity. (also why would my fantasy world revolve around video game sales? thats just odd and nonsensical) FFXIII in comparison IS a blockbuster, even if it does lack in quality compared to previous titles in the series. 
as far as million sellers go there is also Star Ocean, Monster Hunter, Kingdom Hearts, Dragon Quest, and Dragon Warrior just to name a few.  
also ,interestingly enough, quite a few of the best selling RPGs came out over 5 years ago . at least according to the data on vgchartz.com, however accurate that is.
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pekoe212

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#59  Edited By pekoe212

I feel like they are still making a lot of JRPGs but few of them are coming to the west except the handheld ones because no one wants them over here. I am not a fan of grinding or some of the archaic and punishing design traditions others have pointed out. But I love RPGs and I don't want them all to be Oblivion or Fallout 3. I like a vivid color palette and something more fantastic and less gritty at times. I don't want to play them all on handhelds. I bought a PS3 expecting it to be the RPG console as the PS2 was, and that hasn't happened. There are hardly any RPGs of any kind except Bioware and Bethesda for the big consoles. I have three shelves of PS2 games, almost exclusively RPGs, mostly made by Japanese companies. Dozens of games. For my PS3? Three RPGs? Four if you count Fallout 3? I guess I just belong to the wrong demographic.

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mutha3

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#60  Edited By mutha3
@odintal: As a sidenote, VGchartz literally pulls their numbers out of their ass. 
 
 @odintal said:

" @mutha3:   do you know what blockbuster means in entertainment industry terms?  it's all about widespread popularity and huge amounts of sales not profit. sure 700k is a respectable amount for a game to sell but persona has no widespread popularity.

Then.....what was your point earlier? if smaller budget games can still pull those numbers(and 500k IS a big number going by the budget P4 had) and make sure smaller devs like Atlus can turn big profits.....how exactly is the JRPG genre dead?
 
Being a  "blockbuster" doesn't mean much when you're not turning profits.Besides...

(also why would my fantasy world revolve around video game sales? thats just odd and nonsensical) FFXIII in comparison IS a blockbuster, even if it does lack in quality compared to previous titles in the series. as far as million sellers go there is also Star Ocean, Monster Hunter, Kingdom Hearts, Dragon Quest, and Dragon Warrior just to name a few.  also ,interestingly enough, quite a few of the best selling RPGs came out over 5 years ago . at least according to the data on vgchartz.com, however accurate that is. " 

You're kinda making my argument for me at this point. You just named 3 more huge JRPG franchises(I kinda already named DQ and DW is the exact same gameseries) which sell millions and millions to this day with the more successful ones being recent entries too. Doesn't seem like Japanese rpg development is on life support to me when all of the significant(sales-wise) RPG franchises are still coming from there.
 
 Add in the fact that smaller devs like Atlus have never seen better times, and it makes your previous statement even more odd.
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deactivated-57aaaa9329732

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@mutha3:  
well first off i was just pointing out that persona 4, by definition, isn't a blockbuster after you said it was. 
 
 " Doesn't seem like Japanese rpg development is on life support to me when all of the significant(sales-wise) RPG franchises are still coming from there. "
Then we have different ideas of what being on life support means. 3 franchises are keeping an entire genre relevant and as far as i can tell in critical terms, the best of all 3 of those franchises came out years ago. 
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#62  Edited By Enigma777

OP, you actually make a lot of sense. Still, I would say that the JRPG genre is a dying breed, but it has certainly fallen. 

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#63  Edited By Kyreo
@ChristianCastillo said:
" Dragon Quest IX was pretty huge in my opinion, maybe not in America but in Japan it sure was.  If they just keep importing such great games than there is no way jrpgs will ever die. "
I'd argue it was big in America.  There were more buzz and tweeting about that game than I've seen for a JRPG in a good while.
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mutha3

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#64  Edited By mutha3
@odintal said:

" @mutha3:  well first off i was just pointing out that persona 4, by definition, isn't a blockbuster after you said it was.

Stop getting hung up on semantics. My point was that Persona is a very profitable franchise for Atlus.
 
Profit=success=more Jrpg's=genre not dieing
 
The arbitrary term "blockbuster" does not change that simple truth.
 


   "Then we have different ideas of what being on life support means. 3 franchises are keeping an entire genre relevant and as far as i can tell in critical terms, the best of all 3 of those franchises came out years ago.  "
 

 3? I'm counting 6 if we go by the ones we just named(some of the largest franchises in gaming period). And for the umpteenth time: million sellers are incredibly rare. Outside of FPS' and platformers in their glory days you'd be hard pressed to find  a  genre  with more then 4 or 5 million sellers franchises. Especially if you start applying a arbitrary split between west and east.
 
This is incredibly silly, by the way, a game does not need to sell millions in order to be profitable or "stay relevant"(whatever that's supposed to mean).  Succes is not determined by popularity contests, its determined by revenue. Japanese rpg's still sell just fine.
 
Like, if Japanese RPG developers started closing left and right, and JRPG's dissappeared from sales chart completely-- then you can start talking about it being on life support. As it is now, JRPG's are in a better position then they were 10 years ago.
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jmfinamore

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#65  Edited By jmfinamore

I think, like other people have said, it's all a matter of perception. When people say things like "JRPG's are dieing", I don't think it's so much a reflection on their sales number as it is on their...relevance, so to speak. Despite how profitable some JRPG franchises are, they aren't influencing gaming as whole very much anymore. The current trend in gaming at large is not to be the next Final Fantasy, but really to be the next Mass Effect or Assassin's Creed. For the most part, JRPG's (and a lot of other Eastern games actually) aren't at the forefront of gaming trends anymore. They seem to be dieing because for a large percentage of "in the know" gamers (that is, Western gamers), JRPG's aren't in the news, they aren't making splashes at the big conventions (outside of a few franchises), and there's just a general lack of interest. Which, in a way, makes it worse for JRPG's. Instead of burning out and going away completely, they've become irrelevant to modern game design. 
 
Not that companies like Atlus care because, in the end, they can still make a profit by not investing too much and relying on a large contingent of people to buy their games.