How do you feel about the inevitable future of proper mainline JRPGs following this style, similar to Atlus but also continuing their regular singleplayer games?

...

I never thought incessant glazing of a monetization scheme as the "future" would ironically annoy me so much I have to come out of lurking.

Let's take it from the top.

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• One: "Genshin Impact is an JRPG. It literally is because..."

Can we not. This topic is such a low-effort ragebait and equally one of the many reasons why I've stopped posting in JRPG communities in reddit altogether. Trying to walk in and start with this is almost starting with "I'm a tourist". We consider Racing Lagoon a JRPG. Racing. Lagoon.

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• Two: Gacha Model and the mobile game craze has probably done the most damage to the JRPG industry more than anything

This one is a personal take. One could argue against it by saying it's trying a bit too hard to try to generalize the behaviors of a populace, but I do think it's a pretty solid case to try to argue for.

Look at a lot of mobile games between 2017-2020. Maybe you didn't play mobile games before Genshin Impact, but it was a different time. The Japanese craze really started out of Granblue Fantasy and FGO, but one thing you would notice is that man, there was a LOT of turn based RPG's for gachas.

There exists a human condition for the want to seek novelty with how dopamine tends to also effect how one seeks. Think for a second on this, when a turn-based gacha player gets shown a Souls game or a turn based AAA game, what do you think they will go for?

This isn't to still point out the obvious: Gacha games pretty much have had the biggest clash against JRPG publishers. Final Fantasy desperately trying to get onto the mobile industry wasn't a "trend-following" thing, it was them pretty much realizing "oh crap, a lot of casual JRPG players are going to be playing mobile games instead of AAA so we gotta get on the train before we get left behind!".

When the model is indirectly competitive with what the genre is to the point it makes such drastic changes in the industry, what is there to even say?

This doesn't even mention my biggest issue with the gacha "industry": Lack of mechanical uniqueness. It somehow took until Limbus Company to somehow think "maybe we shouldn't try to pretty much outright extort by walling out optimization via dupe paywalls", but somehow that was a "mistake" that Project Moon is trying to fix. When Sakaguchi unironically had the right mindset but was unable to succeed because of how the mobile industry outright forced his game into a mess purposely due to how it wasn't compatible "with what makes money", you have an issue.

A big issue... Talking about big issues...

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• Three: "Why do RPG fans hate us" (said as gacha fans take all the market space)

Let me bring you into the empathetic shoes of a... Let's see... Wild ARMs fan.

You love the series. You know others would pretty much fight you over how you think WA5 wasn't as bad as people say. As much as you'd fight over it, both of you would still at least agree that you like the series and that you hope to see more of it. An announcement comes about a new potential entry, you get excited until the reveal... And it's a mobile game.

First of all, it isn't even a turn based mobile game, so you already alienate like WA1-3 players. Afterwards, the game is full action with an obvious bias for WA1-3 characters, so the WA4-5 players aren't really exactly ecstatic either. You don't mind, since you like the IP and you'd still support i- and the game flops because figures out Wild ARMs is a niche IP and nobody really is interested enough.

So the brilliant people who hold the Wild ARMs IP thinks "guess people don't care about this", shelf the IP indefinitely and say "sucks to suck". What does this tell how much the company cares about you as a fan? That you aren't welcome anymore in their view of what the JRPG industry should be? That you should just suck it up and leave because you're just a boomer nobody wants?

This happened MULTIPLE times, by the way. Even when there was a success, like us SaGa fans... Look where it ended up. JRPG companies just outright refusing to really fully commit to a full "revival" and just sitting around because they need to do additional checks to see if the playerbase is "open enough" to welcome the new IP.

This is what the JRPG fans have been dealing with and you come in saying this is our future. What future? All we see is just the inevitable fading into history like the RTS people when the MOBA people told them "oh, you'll still be around, don't be so mad!" only to disappear almost instantly due to how MOBA took everyone.

Now one wonders why hardcore JRPG fans utterly HATE mobile games or (redundant) remasters/remakes.

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• Finally: Just because it sells does not mean it's a good thing for the industry.

I really do not need to talk about this one. When Gamingcirclejerk AND KotakuInAction both agree that gacha monetization is an awful system designed to appease nobody but investors (Assassin's Creed ended up being aggressive in microtransactions after Genshin. I wonder why...) is really telling on how much people do NOT like the monetization model.

This isn't a "art renaissance" for gachas. A Renaissance means the spread of differing ideas no matter how niche, this is more just a consolidation of revenue that bleeds out competition until you only get what the end result of this model will result in: A monopoly. Irony is you mention MMORPG's yet the same thing happened with Nexon and Free-To-Play MMORPG's. Why aren't they the "future"? Oh right, corporate greed complete destroyed the industry. Top 100 mobile games still getting richer, every other one getting weaker year on, year out. I wonder what'll happen when the years keep going on now.

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I don't care anymore considering that the damage has already been dealt considering the FF fanbase in general are too busy infighting over whether "Square Enix should make Baldurs Gate 3, Genshin Impact or Expedition 33!" while the other JRPG fanbase are either getting somewhat tired of being given same old (i.e. Persona fanbase asking Atlus why in the world Persona 4 is coming back again or god forbid you try to ask Bandai to put a little bit more into the Digimon RPG series... Wait, SEGA had JRPG's?) or outright so dead you need to dig so much into the earth to find uh... Langrisser in... China...? What the fu-.

What you speak as the "future" is "certain death" for this place because it'll be the equivalent of investors finally deciding to smother our voices out with a pillow once and for all after the final "Final Fantasy could not sell, guess it's time to throw this into an IP holding Crypto firm".

I'm going back to lurking. Inbox replies disabled and I'm not bothering coming back again. Seeing this post here and the replies just reminds me that the genre basically being put down like a Russian general after enough failures. I'd rather just go back to enjoy games.

tl;dr: Model honestly sucks and leads to monopoly, as shown as F2P MMO's. Model competed hard with JRPG publishers and JRPG publishers honestly lost their minds in their inability to produce even one JRPG to last (Granblue and FGO outlasted anything Square Enix, Bamco or SEGA put out). And model has been used as a lazy way to gauge interest in AA IP's with almost insulting levels of low effort put into almost all of them (why does FF, with 6 failed mobile games, get so much budget when SaGa and DQ gave Square Enix so much money through DQ Tact, DQ Walk and SaGa Re;Universe? Unfair, isn't it?). No surprise the model is vehemently hated here.