Quote Originally Posted by Laddy View Post
To be honest I would say up until this generation WRPG's were a bit niche and it wasn't until the genre released game more accessible to general audiences that anyone bought them in large numbers.

As for JRPG's, there has simply been a lack of innovation and quality and the genre needs to realize how they're going to evolve and adapt to survive in the West. Most Japanese RPG's that did well over here really WRPG's (Dark Souls, Dragon's Dogma). And with the exception of Xenoblade Chronicles, there's been a relative lack of innovation to keep audiences interested.
DkS and DD are action RPGs not WRPGs.
Xenoblade Chronicles is your grindy Korean MMO style.

As for innovation, I usually find this criticism to be filled with hypocrisy. Truth is JRPGs took off in late SNES/PS1 era and started getting bigger budgets and more development teams. This led to a wider variety of rpgs and lots and lots of high quality rpg titles. Then the Japanese video game market crashed and became more fragmented with PS3/360/PSP/Wii/DS and budgets took a nose dive and everyone just wanted to make cheap as possible rpgs for DS/PSP, then slightly less cheap rpgs for PS360wii. We reached point that specialized studios like Tri Ace and Game Arts don't get any contracts to make a major RPGs some even moved to work on social games and free to play games.