IndustryGamers - Japanese RPGs Are Dead.
Games are nothing without their interactive mechanics, and the JRPG genre has suffered from its own stagnation. JRPGs where combat was turn-based with enemies standing in a row and players in another row was perfectly acceptable when that's all the computing power of the time period could handle, but now it seems like tradition merely for tradition's sake or (even worse) simple laziness. Despite spanning four DVDs, Hironobu Sakaguchi's (creator of Final Fantasy) Lost Odyssey's basic combat did little to evolve beyond the turn-based combat of its JPRG predecessors and just seems stale and laborious compared to something like Mass Effect 2's dynamic, real-time combat.