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What's preventing other Jrpgs from selling as well as Final Fantasy? Low quality?

Mr.Phoenix

Member
RPGs outside Jrpgs have a much higher average sale through rate.



There's nothing flawed about either, they came from different styles and game design approaches historically when both were mostly found on separate platforms, and formed when that ended.

It has nothing to do with being turn-based that nonsense came later. Plenty of turn-based Wrpgs were contrasted to turn-based Jrpgs. When a Wrpg in the mast used the Jrpg formula it was obvious and noted in reviews or preview coverage.
Because that's what they did, or how it was done... doesn't make it right.

All I am saying is that turn-based RPGs, make up a majority of the kinda RPGs the Japanese make. And the market for that type of RPG has been shrinking. Its just like that phrase rouge like... this is something that's done a lot in this industry. Whereas, what we are calling rouge like today, is basically what an arcade or even a simple scrolling shooter was 20 years ago with some procedural elements sprinkled in.
 

yurinka

Member
First off, FF15 as of May 2022 has managed ~10M in sales, using your tier system that puts it in Tier 4.
As I said I didn't have the real current sales, it was just a guesstimate.

What is important here is that the monicker of JRPG or WRPG is inherently flawed. Because it speaks more to where a game comes from as opposed to the genre. Whereas,we can have a Japanese developer making a an action RPG just like most western developers do.


It should be TBRPG (turn based/strategy), MMORPG, ARPG (action/adventure)....etc.
Totally agree. I think it makes more sense to use instead 'action RPG' and 'turn based RPG', MMORPG, 'strategy rpg' etc. to define subgenres or rpg types.

As it stands,the best-selling RPGs these days, are the ARPGs (be that first-person or third-person subset). This is why I said the problem here is that the kinda RPGs most Japanese developers prefer to make are Turn-based. Even your tier ist proves this, the `majority` of the games in the 4th and 5th tiers, are turn-based. And Majority in the Tier 1 are MMORPGs or ARPGS.
Yes. After many decades the Japanese developers finally realized that the NES-like combat was boring and outdated for most mainstream players prefer the action -non turn based- combat, which also always existed between the Japanese games. They realized that action adventures were the most popular genre so moved more in that direction.

Big commercial games tend to copy what it works from other games, which makes AAA games tending to blend genres and make more similar to each other. So that distinction between WRPG and JRPG makes less and less sense over time, specially because some that was common amoung some of the best selling Japanese RPGs is no longer in most of the currently relevant. It was a bit nonsensical decades ago, but it's totally non-sensical now to use WRPG and JRPG.

On top of that, nowadays big companies have workers from many places around the world, and also outsource part of their work to many teams from around the world. So it isn't even accurate that a certain game is from X country because their lead dev studio is from there. That was more accurate in the 80s or 90s were it was more rare to hire foreigners or to outsource part of the development.
 
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FeralEcho

Member
Americans bought an assload of Switches and got Mario and Zelda for those.
If i tell you to show me some random Korean show you wont know where to start but If I say show me Squid Game You know exactly what I'm asking ..Same applies with videogames.Everyone's heard of Mario,Zelda and Final Fantasy but ask some regular bloke about Gravity Rush or a Tales game and they wont know wtf you're talking about.
 

Azurro

Banned
If i tell you to show me some random Korean show you wont know where to start but If I say show me Squid Game You know exactly what I'm asking ..Same applies with videogames.Everyone's heard of Mario,Zelda and Final Fantasy but ask some regular bloke about Gravity Rush or a Tales game and they wont know wtf you're talking about.

That has more to do with familiarity of the IP than anything else, which is directly related to marketing. If your point is that Americans need to see a crying bald eagle on every product, that's wrong. If your point is instead that people need to be familiar with the IP before consuming it. Well, duh.
 

Myths

Member
Probably the art style/direction first followed closely by the tropes that frequent material coming out of JP.
 

DonkeyPunchJr

World’s Biggest Weeb
First off, FF15 as of May 2022 has managed ~10M in sales, using your tier system that puts it in Tier 4.

But that's not even what is important.

What is important here is that the monicker of JRPG or WRPG is inherently flawed. Because it speaks more to where a game comes from as opposed to the genre. Whereas,we can have a Japanese developer making a an action RPG just like most western developers do.

It should be TBRPG (turn based/strategy), MMORPG, ARPG (action/adventure)....etc.

As it stands,the best-selling RPGs these days, are the ARPGs (be that first-person or third-person subset). This is why I said the problem here is that the kinda RPGs most Japanese developers prefer to make are Turn-based. Even your tier ist proves this, the `majority` of the games in the 4th and 5th tiers, are turn-based. And Majority in the Tier 1 are MMORPGs or ARPGS.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the name JRPG. It’s a genre that is named after the place where it was popularized. That name is no more problematic than stuff like “Dijon Mustsrd”, “Bourbon whiskey”, etc. If someone tried to tell you that any mustard made by someone from Dijon is Dijon mustard by definition (and that anything else, isn’t), you’d just tell that person they’re a dumbass and move on with your life.

The problem lies with the pedantic gatekeepers in the JRPG community who get so hung up on the literal meaning of the individual words. Or who oscillate from one definition to the other depending on what argument they’re trying to win.
 

Elysion

Banned
I think one of the big reasons why FF became so popular (especially starting with FF7) was that at that time there were very few other games that offered similarly grand, exciting stories and memorable characters. I mean, the typical videogame of the 80s and early 90s had barely any noteworthy story beyond providing some barebones context for the player. But jrpgs, and FF in particular, provided an actually interesting, layered narrative and compelling characters, something you didn’t really get in other kinds of games. But equally important was the fact that these games didn’t present their stories just through textboxes, as rpgs had done in the past, but also through epic FMV cutscenes that looked amazing at the time. An awesome, orchestrated CD-quality soundtrack was the icing on the cake. There was nothing like it back then. FF games on PS1 were the ‚cinematic AAA games‘ of their era, basically.

And that leads us to the main reason why jrpgs other than FF have become so niche in the west: they are no longer the only genre to offer a grand adventure with an epic story. Almost every game these days has a ‚deep‘ story of some kind, as well as voice acting, and cutscenes with motion capture, and a cinematic presentation etc. More importantly, most other genres actually evolved over time, especially in the gameplay department, in a way that most jrpgs outside FF never really did.

There were other jrpgs in the style of FF7-9 that saw some success during that time, but none of them were ever as big as FF (in the west at least). I think a big reason for that is that FF is to my knowledge the only jrpg series that doesn’t use anime-style graphics and character designs (post FF9 at least). I have no idea why no one else ever tried to make a non-anime jrpg, but FF games have been – and still are – the only ones to do it. It‘s also one of the few jrpg series with stories and characters that aren‘t utterly groan-inducing and cringe.
 
Because it only makes sense that WRPGs are more marketed and mainstream in the west, while JRPGs are more marketed and mainstream in Japan.

Gaming didn't start in 2009.

Also the thread is about globally outside of Japan. That should be obvious.
 
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Lethal01

Member
At this point trying to define JRPG as anything other than Japanese RPG, is just silly.
You can be a jrpg and an action rpg, a jrpg and a tactical rpg, a rpg and a strategy RPG.
 
Gonna be blunt. Total normie vibes from OP post, all but conflating popularity with quality.

It's either hype (almost everything aside from Final Fantasy 7) or cultural appeal (i. e. Dragon Quest).
 
Or you can read the op.
I did. Maybe I overreacted a bit. But quality being the only possibility made it appear a little shortsighted.

A lot of it has to do with built in brand loyalty over the years, and apparently a degree of aversion to trying something different in a genre known to be a timesink.

Though personally I disagree with the "weeb otaku" rationale in this thread. Even if true, it's their loss for skipping, say, Etrian Odyssey (unless dungeon crawling isn't their thing) or Ys.
 

NahaNago

Member
Budget, style, and name recognition are the reason they don't sell as well. Final Fantasy's budget I'm sure is several times larger than the typical budget of a jrpg. Final Fantasy isn't really the typical anime style so western audiences are more willing to take a chance on it. Squareenix has managed to keep Final Fantasy's name as something big and somewhat known.

So in summary, a new jrpg will need a large budget, a style that more than the otaku audience will at least like, and they need to market it like crazy. They also need to make the world look graphically impressive and large in comparison to most AAA games.
 

nush

Gold Member
It's got yearly update automatic buy status. I know they don't come out every year but it's built a brand where it's going to sell because Square jumped from Nintendo to PlayStation at the right time. Then they jumped to Xbox and PC. They stopped being a Nintendo game and followed the audience.

Other JRPGs are pretty much format locked.
 

GHound

Member
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the name JRPG. It’s a genre that is named after the place where it was popularized. That name is no more problematic than stuff like “Dijon Mustsrd”, “Bourbon whiskey”, etc. If someone tried to tell you that any mustard made by someone from Dijon is Dijon mustard by definition (and that anything else, isn’t), you’d just tell that person they’re a dumbass and move on with your life.

The problem lies with the pedantic gatekeepers in the JRPG community who get so hung up on the literal meaning of the individual words. Or who oscillate from one definition to the other depending on what argument they’re trying to win.
I'm feeling JRPGs are more like a Scotch really.
 

GeekyDad

Member
Super League Money GIF by Anderson .Paak

Consulting Make It Rain GIF by SHOWTIME
 

SF Kosmo

Al Jazeera Special Reporter
JRPGs used to outsell western RPGs pretty handily, but that started to change when Oblivion came out.

At this point it's a vicious cycle because JRPGs simply can't compete on production value. We're at a point where western RPGs have $100 million+ budgets, with detailed open worlds and lavish cinematics, and most JRPGs are lucky to get a quarter of that and struggle to even offer full voice acting. They're just not competing on a level field.

And of course sales impacts budget which impacts sales...

Final Fantasy exists as an exception somewhat because the brand is strong enough in the west to justify a massive budget, but that's not really the case with any other active JRPG series.
 

Woopah

Member
For the same reason no other FPS sells like COD or no other platformer sells like Mario. Genre kings exist.

The vast majority of Western gamers store don't play non-West made games. This is doubly true for Americans who generally only consume American media.

When's the last time you watched a TV show or movie not made in Hollywood? Yeah, gaming is the same.
Even without Nintendo sharing digital sales, 7 of the top 20 best selling games in American last year were made in Japan. US doesn't only buy games made in the US.
Japanese gaming is in decline in general as its native base has basically has forsaken console gaming in favor of mobile gaming. Most of the Japanese developers are thus in a position to either focus on mobile games. So there has been a steep decline in JRPGs being made in general. Those that are left either have become noticeably budget titles, since there aren't enough people buying them to justify higher budgets. Or they try to appeal to shitty western tastes, without really understanding what is popular here or why.
The market for dedicated video game devices in Japan is growing, not shrinking. Mobile is important just like in the rest of the world, but the dedicated device market is still very healthy.
 
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KungFucius

King Snowflake
Lesser name value maybe?
Not maybe, most likely the largest factor. FF has been around for nearly 4 decades and hit peak excitement during the PS1 era. FFVII was a legend and the remake made it popular again. Assholes like me buy the games day 1 and bitch about how much they have sucked since the PS1 days due to that name recognition and nostalgia alone. I haven't looked at more than 30 seconds of previews for FFXVI yet I have it preordered.

I don't understand why Dragon Quest wasn't allowed reach similar status in the US. The games were released for the NES but not for the SNES, but FF was (excluding V) and did reasonably well on that platform. I bought those expensive ass carts for 70 bucks as a teen in the 90s. When DQVII came to the PS1 it was basically a 16 bit RPG with no FMV or fancy graphics and a whole generation of no previous games competing with FFVII - IX. It was 2 gens in a row of missed opportunities.
 

Roberts

Member
This is coming from somebody who's been avoiding JRPGs all his life because of certain reasons:

- Pretty much every JRPGs I have tried have this weird inconsistency of cutscenes. Here is one with VA, then one with a text, One pre-rendered, one using different animation technique, one in engine, one using still frames.
- Terrible writing and VA. Things get repeated all the time. Over-explained as if you are 6 years old.
- Grinding. I don't remember any WRPG that forces you to grind so much to get somewhere.
- Repetitive. There is nothing more sleep-inducing than spending an hour in some boring looking corridor having a combat encounter on every corner.

That said, thanks to Game Pass I have tried many more over the last few years and I actually sat down and completed Like a Dragon and Ni No Kuni. Very good games despite these issues being present. And even now I would be hesitant to ever buy a new JRPG when it comes out.
 

Men_in_Boxes

Snake Oil Salesman
They haven't adapted to the changing market. The games are developed as if it's still 1994 and the genre is at its peak. Meanwhile, the rest of the industry has lapped the game type in a myriad of ways.
 
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kuncol02

Banned
What is important here is that the monicker of JRPG or WRPG is inherently flawed.
How many times that need to be explained that jRPG is very specific style of RPG game. Not every RPG game made in Japan is jRPG and not every jRPG is made in Japan. I would even argue that even new Final Fantasy games aren't jrpgs any more.
 

Roberts

Member
The most boring, grindy, and talkative jrpgs of all lol
Are they really? Never felt Ni No Kuni is all that grindy. I think I only had trouble beating Royal Jelly because my lvl was a bit too low, but other than that it wasn't bad. Like a Dragon made me do some serious grinding maybe twice during the whole game. Beat them both in around 50 hours. Aren't most JRPGs longer than that?
 
Are they really? Never felt Ni No Kuni is all that grindy. I think I only had trouble beating Royal Jelly because my lvl was a bit too low, but other than that it wasn't bad. Like a Dragon made me do some serious grinding maybe twice during the whole game. Beat them both in around 50 hours. Aren't most JRPGs longer than that?

I mean like a dragon in particular has a massive grind in the final 3rd of the game, unlike anything I’ve experienced before, and the game is already pretty long in the tooth.

If someone was looking for a JRPG to get into the genre that wasn’t too fond of the typical tropes of JRPGs I’d definitely avoid recommending those two games. Although LAD does buck the trend of making the characters teenagers with no parents
 
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Neff

Member
It was the first RPG foremost associated with Nintendo in the West, when Nintendo ruled the West.
It had the highest production values of any RPG from V onwards, as did Square titles generally.
It was marketed out the fucking ASS on PlayStation, when PlayStation was on the rise to ruling the west.
Final Fantasy VII was arguably the first mainstream RPG and cemented the brand as the go-to series for the genre instantly, and nothing's changed.
And it depends on who you ask, but for my money and many others, it's the best RPG series.
 

Lethal01

Member
How many times that need to be explained that jRPG is very specific style of RPG game. N
It doesn't need to be explained, since it's wrong.
Their are action jrps, tactical jrpgs, strategy rpgs etc etc.
JRPG is a RPG made in japan, trying to make it anything other than that is just dumb.
 

Oof85

Member
There's been a few that came out and did very well.

Yokai Watch was hella successful before L5 ran it into the ground.

But that was handheld, so it might not count for gaf.

Ringfit is a jrpg that's outsold all the FF ever, iirc.

But that's a workout jrpg so it might not count for gaf.

Pokemon has always been a jrpg that's dwarfed FF.

But that's Pokemon and a handheld title so it might not count for gaf.

Hmmmm
 
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BreakOut

Member
The vast majority of Western gamers store don't play non-West made games. This is doubly true for Americans who generally only consume American media.

When's the last time you watched a TV show or movie not made in Hollywood? Yeah, gaming is the same.
Dude I watch TV shows and movies that are not out of Hollywood all the time. Probably a 5th of Netflix is in a different language right now. I don’t know what you’re talking about man. Parasite and squid games were awesome.
 

Blackage

Member
I'd say Persona 5 makes an argument for presentation mattering a great deal, 3 and 4 sold well enough, P5 sold something like 5x more, and the art-style & presentation definitely had a lot to do with that.

Final Fantasy has traditionally had a fantastic presentation even when the gameplay has been criticized(FFXIII).

I'm sure there's other examples, maybe Tales of Arise is another example? It's the best selling in the series right?
 

LakeOf9

Member
Persona 5 Royal has sold 7.5 million copies, which is more than FF7R.
Dragon Quest XI has sold 6.5 million copies, which is also more than FF7R.
Nier Automata has sold 8 million copies, which is more than FF7R as well.

Other JRPGs are selling fine, they just need to be actually good to do so
 
Quality does not directly correlate to sales lmao.

FF is very popular because FF7 which was a huge graphical and general game design benchmark which popularized JRPGs in the late 90s and it kept the momentum going for a good couple more years.
 

LakeOf9

Member
Quality does not directly correlate to sales lmao.

FF is very popular because FF7 which was a huge graphical and general game design benchmark which popularized JRPGs in the late 90s and it kept the momentum going for a good couple more years.
I disagree with this. Persona 5 is going to become one of the highest selling JRPGs ever when it finishes its run. It will be higher selling than most (but obviously not all) FF games.

And it did this while being a turn based anime style JRPG which had zero marketing and no awareness in the west, you would think it has the entire deck stacked against it.

But it sold almost 8 million copies with all of that, because it's an amazing game, and sheer word of mouth carried it.

Quality can absolutely help sell games. Its not a guarantee, but nothing is.
 
I disagree with this. Persona 5 is going to become one of the highest selling JRPGs ever when it finishes its run. It will be higher selling than most (but obviously not all) FF games.

And it did this while being a turn based anime style JRPG which had zero marketing and no awareness in the west, you would think it has the entire deck stacked against it.

But it sold almost 8 million copies with all of that, because it's an amazing game, and sheer word of mouth carried it.

Quality can absolutely help sell games. Its not a guarantee, but nothing is.
FF7R is also one of the highest selling JRPGs despite being a weak game, what's your point?
 
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Evil Calvin

Afraid of Boobs
Most JRPG's (all JRPG's) are so cliched and characters unrelatable, that in 2023 most people have moved on. Almost zero innovativeness. Very bland and often cringey. Stories are almost always the same ......and always 'amnesia'....geez
 
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