Stumpokapow said:
Hell, Front Mission fucking 5, the last bomba installment of a longtime bomba franchise, would beat every 360 RPG and be #4 on the PS3. Valkyrie Profile 2, which I think we could agree was big but not huge, would be #2 after FF13. Unlimted SaGa beats VP2. Tales has collapsed. A half a dozen SRW games would beat everything except FF13.
Now, I think FF13 shows that there are still roughly the same number of people willing to play RPGs in total as there were last generation, but that success absolutely hasn't trickled down to anything else.
Now, I don't disagree with your overall opinion. I too agree that this generation has a poor showing of support for JRPGs in general across all home consoles. But what I want to dispute is the claim that it is so bad that nothing is matching up to PS2 levels. I feel that your comparisons here are somewhat skewed.
The main problem here, is clearly that there are so little console JRPGs being released that we can't really properly compare anything in a direct sense aside from FFXIII. But I think if we look at where each RPG falls within a give category fitting the sort of game it is, we can see that if all these PS3 and 360 games were on the PS2, they would have actually still sold within expectations.
PS2 Tales games:
Tales of Destiny 2 - 762,861
Tales of Symphonia - 390,414 (combined with ToS GC = 701,887)
Tales of Rebirth - 596,493
Tales of Legendia - 342,779
Tales of the Abyss - 556,465
Tales of Destiny - 367,998
vs
Tales of Vesperia - 337,783 (combined with ToV 360 = 498,853)
It that terrible? By no means. It sells within the range of 3 of the PS2 Tales titles, and when compared with ToS PS2, which is in many ways very similar (year old port, first 3D Tales on PS2), it is very close.
Here's another thought. On the PS2, Sega released Phantasy Star Universe. It sold 188,961. In comparison, Sega has released 2 RPGs on the PS3 selling in a similar range (over 100k). This certainly can't be bad for Sega at all, although it's more of an indication that Sega just isn't a very high profile JRPG publisher. If you want to include Ryu ga Gotoku as a "RPG" series, then that's a whole other ball game, but let's not get into that.
Now for another comparison.
PS2 Level 5 IPs:
Dark Cloud - 70,471
Dark Chronicle - 250,038
Rogue Galaxy - 356,192
vs
White Knight Chronicles - 339,690
All 4 games are published by Sony, and developed by Level 5. This is the best comparison outside of FFXIII. Again, here we see the game performing very close to the top-tier of what they could achieve on the PS2.
This is a solid example that it's not so much a great decline from the PS2 era, but more of the fact that what is out on the 360 and PS3 are either a) new IPs that might not have survived well on the PS2 anyway, b) releases limited severely by the 360's lack of user base, c) not stuff that could be compared well with PS2 sales because of weak publishers or just weak software in general.
