Anti Fantasy? Or anti Final Fantasy? I was actually coming in there hoping this would be a discussion about sci-fi RPGs or alien landscape RPGs (extremely rare) Now I'm sad

But yeah. In Japan it probably is either Tales or SMT. Now I'm wondering if Final Fantasy XIII or Skyrim sold better in the West. Pretty good point, Spuuky

And I never noticed that Tales games make a habit of deconstructing tropes. I should pay more attention, because that means they're doing exactly what I've been complaining the most about Japan's other games. Too married to tradition, tropes, and archetypes, and relying too heavily on those alone to carry the story and game without any addition or adjustment to make it unique and interesting. Just a bunch of cookie-cutter characters and plot devices. Hurray for Tales

But then again, SMT does a lot of that too, and puts most tropes and cliches on their head, when compared to Final Fantasy. As pointed out in another thread, they still use tropes and archetypes, but not in a cliche fashion. They mold them to their own design in fairly unique and interesting ways. At least so far as compared to other generic JRPGs. They admittedly do tend to stick to their own devised formulas (People have said that Persona 4 is just Persona 3 in a new setting, and the Devil Survivor games are generally identical with the cast just being the same personalities with new faces pasted on, but you can't really easily compare either of them to any other generic tactical JRPG)