Jason Young, you’re my new best friend. Not only do you openly declare yourself a bishoujo-gamer, but you point out a lot of the issues happening with RPGs lately. I’m finding myself looking back to NES and SNES for RPGs again, finding so few on modern consoles that scratch my itch for immersion. The Star Ocean translated ROM, for instance- not to mention the first two Shin Megami Tensei (Persona) titles that never made it here. The fact that Japanese game developers for RPGs are no longer hitting 1 million marks for sales on their name alone isn’t necessarily a sign that they need to continue innovating, but rather I think a sign that they’ve innovated too much already. Sure, turn-based RPGs using 2D sprites are ‘trite’ these days, but those of us who loved them aren’t necessarily in love with the ‘evolutions’ in new FF titles OR newer Star Ocean games. Release new ones for handhelds if you like, if it makes it more cost-efficient, but don’t write classic RPGs off as ‘dead’ just because they aren’t being made any more.

A lot of people still scream for them. If people had actually KNOWN about the Atelier Iris and Ar Tonelico titles, I think their sales numbers would’ve been massive. I didn’t even hear about them until Atelier Iris 3 hit the market, because the ‘classic’ RPG had already mostly died out. Why continue looking for them only to be heartbroken? The goal of RPG developers has been ‘innovate’, ’innovate’, ’innovate’ from back in the mid-90s when classic RPG sales were still massive, the fact that sales have gone down seems to indicate to me that they moved themselves out of the genre before everyone was ready for the transition.