Yoshiya

" Nier became something very special towards it's end, I hope you go through with it. "

" @moondogger said:

" I think that one of the things that is good about Giantbomb is that they are pretty responsive to their community. That's what happened here.  "

From the sounds of it, what happened here is the community proved how selfish some of them are and Whiskey Media was kind enough to throw them a bone when they should have told them to get stuffed. "

Nier, and Resonance of Fate. Nier has a great, unconventional but facinating story, and THE SINGLE MOST INCREDIBLE GAME SOUNDTRACK IN A DECADE. Seriously, if you're put off by what those idiots at Joystiq did, you're just as bad.

How about Square continue on the path of sanity and continue to disregard the demands of an all too vocal minority.  Considering the resources required to satisfy these people it simply isn't worth it (HD, likely fan backlash over  'streamlining').  Perhaps a FF4-style portable remake could be profitable, but that is what PSOne classics on PSP is for, yes?  How about Square continue to invest in developing new games and sound business decisions.  You are vastly overestimating the demand for such a remake, just as you are inflating your sense of entitlement and self-importance.

The problem is that you restrict 'Action RPGs' to a set of games more accurately described as Diablo clones.  That is, they are like Diablo as they were created with the intention to be like Diablo. Perhaps if you tried games like The World Ends with You, Nier or, to a certain extent, Assassin's Creed II, you'd find the Action RPG genre (ie. elements of action based games and RPGs combined) is far from stagnant.
 
Edit: I suggest you check out the recent episode of Active Time Babble, 1up's RPG podcast, where they discuss exactly what defines an action RPG.  Interesting for any fan of the genre.

Lena, the winner from Germany, linked for the lazy.  For a Eurovision winner, it's not THAT awful.

Sort of strange how everyone is bashing FFXIII to make their point, yet Square have just announced their best financial performance since the merger.  See here.  I'm no FFXIII fanboy (I neither have played nor own it, the design descisions taken put me off) but the Japanese industry is far from dead.  Capcom might have a weak lineup, but this can, in part, be blamed on poor performances from their western devs (see Bionic Commando, Dark Void).  Clearly the problem for these companies is more complex than that they are based in Japan.
 
Edit:  To make things more clear, FFXIII has shipped 5.55 million units worldwide since release.  Hardly a sign of a dead industry/company.