Maybe we're going through some kind of weird loop where we've essentially “rebooted” market trends back to the early days when more people were making games to appeal to a wider audience etc. Slowly, the awareness of Japanese games will rise, and before you know it, there'll be another boom just as developers in Japan stabilize themselves. :D

(One can always dream)

BTW, I cancelled my Amazon order and imported Uncharted 2 instead, just couldn't resist the Jpn cover and dual track. People thought Drake's voice is too deep and funny in Jpn, you know the manager w/ the afro and suglasses in that bread anime “Yakitate! Japan”, yep, that's him voicing Drake. And Tsunade from Naruto is voicing that other girl, hot!

Oh, and thanks! It's a bit sad that ME didn't do better. I know quite a few Japanese and there IS a Market for Western games there, but it almost reminds me of the 90's when the Eastern Market was laughed at by many gamers over here.

My main problem is at this point it's less of a genre and more of a generalization about the games. You don't see arguments on why “SRPGs are terrible, ARPGs only!” I don't know about you, but I see a lot of JRPG vs WRPG.

And yes, Console vs PC RPG is definitely something I'm more familiar with.

Gears of War: 68,270
Gears of War 2: 61,860
GTA4: 59,893
Assassin's Creed: 55,261
Modern Warfare: 54,752
Fallout 3: 49,543
Fable 2: 43,682

(Might want to note that these are all probably a little higher since Enterbrain last released numbers for them)

And I will correct myself. You're right, JRPG is a more recent term (but I'd still say much much older than a year or so, and I've been online since '96 talking about games on Gaming Age back before it was known as a forum and Sam Kennedy was running it).

We did still have a distinct name for it that more or less had the same connotation though. We called them console RPG's vs. PC RPG's. with console RPG's being more or less synonymous with JRPG and PC RPG being with WRPGs.

I don't understand the desire to not label. Labeling gives you a very good idea what you can expect the game to be like. It's the same reason ratings exist, to give you an idea of what is inside. Calling a game a JRPG or a WRPG does the same thing. Sure, not everything is exactly the same from JRPG to JRPG (or WRPG), but I have a basic understanding on what I'm getting myself into.

The problem with separating them is that there's a fine line of where and how to do it. What about games like Growlanser II that are non-linear, have free choices that heavily affect the story and the way characters react to you, and multiple endings, like in a “WRPG?” Everything else in the game would “define” it as a JRPG, such as style decisions and a RTS-SRPG hybrid. Langrisser is similar, to an extent. Under which “genre” do they fall?

Or what about Wizardry? It's practically D&D embodied, just in a different way than something like DA. But is it a JRPG or a WRPG?

If you're going to separate WRPGs and JRPGs, you'd best separate games like Borderlands and make them “Shooter-RPGs” or something silly.

And I've been using the term JRPG at least since the late 90's and I know I'm far from the only one who did the same.