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Originally Posted by Benoit
Simple. The release of Final Fantasy VII was accompanied by a big marketing blitz. Add to that the impressive graphics (at the time), and casual gamers were sold on it. Once a brand is known, just keep up the eye candy and they will keep buying.
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Well, obviously it's not that simple, or certainly some other company would be able to emulate the sucess of FF & Squaresoft in the west. Yet for the most part, other JRPGs have not been made mainstream in the west.
Quote:
Originally Posted by WanderingKnight
I wouldn't know about that... I'd be willing to say that Japanese RPGs in general cater more to the "casual gamer" rather than to the hardcore RPG fan. In my mind, hardcore RPG fan equates to "Western RPG fan". No Japanese RPG is a true roleplaying game in any sense of the word, since they focus more in a predeterminate story and in narrative flow. You're not the character: you're merely watching the character. Western RPGs, on the contrary, try to make you feel you're the character, much more akin to classic tabletop RPGs like D&D (and, incidentally, those are the games the term "RPG" comes from).
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By "casual gamer" I actually mean gamers who don't specifically like JRPGs. Those who usually play 1st person shooter and other mainstream genres in the US. These people tend to know FF, but little else.
I do agree with your definition of RPG. It's just that the word gets thrown around so much as a general term to mean much more than it should be. So I tend to use it like that.
