Topic: Retail RPG games?

On the Wii U rental side you have

Mass Effect 3
Dues Ex: Human Revolution
Monster Hunter Tri
Xenoblade Chronicles X
Shin Megami Tensi X Fire Emblem

On the digital aide you have

Child of Light
Pier Solar and the great architects
Earthlock: Festival of Magic
Soul Saga episode one
Shines
Y2K
Citizens of the earth
Dear Alpha Gensis
Wonder Flick
Leigie
Dex

Point is that it sold worse than Vesperia. Vesperia, a JRPG on 360. That's what prompted Bamco to put western ports on a temporary hold of sorts.

Though yeah, Namco clearly mostly cares about their Japanese audience. Which is upsetting, as I think, if advertised well and given a large scale budget, the series could be really successful. Nothing about the series is so distinctly Japanese that it wouldn't do well, definitely not any more so than Final Fantasy.

Though it does seem that they are trying. Hearts R, Xillia, and Xillia 2 got decent attention here.

...Have...have you ever played a Tales game before? Have ever seen one?! They are Anime: The game! That alone is what keeps the games in such a niche over here. Unless they somehow make anime mainstream again, I highly doubt there's anything they could do to make it more than a modest success.

Yes, a lot of JRPGs are heavily anime influenced, and some of them have gone main stream like Ni No Kuni. Anime can be perfectly accessible to a western audience. What I mean is that I haven't seen anything major in a Tales game that was so distinctly Japanese that I either didn't enjoy it or didn't understand it. Nothing in the advertising makes me think "ugh, not interested in that".

On the other hand, I both of the Guild trilogy games I own really have a lot of things that just confuse me. Okami, while excellent, has a lot of things that just confuse me or I find foreign. Hatoful Boyfriend is probably this most obvious example though I've only seen gameplay. With Anime, I look at anything One Piece related, and it just looks weird to me.

Though you do have a point. I just wonder if they will ever try to get the series closer to Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest in terms of western appeal.

Well Tales of is more anime in that if you know basic things about anime, it's that. Not interested? ...maybe don't play it.

also how is Okami confusing? I mean, yes it's very Japanese but...much of it you can kind of take as it being a fantasy world as much as any other fantasy world. And One Piece is more cartoony looking than most anime in a way...One Piece has very little connection to Japan honestly.

And Ni No Kuni got popular partially because Ghibli is anime that people who don't watch anime will watch and love.

Lol, someone on the somethingawful forum once told me to go and kill myself because I claimed Final Fantasy was a bit less "Japanese" than the Tales series. A lovely corner of the internet.

As far as I'm concerned, MH3U is a Wii U game. It wasn't clear to me he was looking for future releases only, though.

I was asking about upcoming Wii U retail games beyond Xenobalde and FExSMT. Seems there aren't any as I suspected. Is it that hard for some people to read posts?

I'm talking about abandoning fanbases (Tales of Graces for Wii, Vesperia for PS3, Tales of Hearts/Innocence for NDS), making terrible ports (Abyss on 3DS, Symphonia Chronicles on PS3), and stuffing terrible spin-offs on smaller consoles for the hell of it (Tales of the World on PSP, Tales of Turn-based Strategy on 3DS), increasingly low-quality writing (Xillia is the Twilight of Tales games), and forced gimmicks that limit gameplay instead of expanding it (FoF in Abyss, spame encouragement in Vesperia, 8 non-leveling party members in Symphonia 2, double-check for artes in Xillia).
Should I go on?

Please, do. I find this very interesting.

...Pokémon. One of the single most popular games and one of the single most popular TV shows ever, especially when I was younger, is anime styled. The west can do more than accept anime, they can embrace it if done right.

Well the problem is that beyond that there isn't much announced for the Wii u, due to no third party support. That list is pretty much all you have and if you want more, well the other systems are probably going to get them.

Except the Japanese got that from Looney Toons and other American comedies, Disco. What makes it "weird" to Americans is that they're used to only seeing it in children's comedies, or at least comedies people have come to associate with children, even though most of those were meant for a much broader audience...

Also slapstick works in Japan, just slightly different slapstick. And Manzai works in America, we have our own take on it already and it used to be very popular.

Pokemon is an exception because it has a very sterilized world in general. It's also meant for young kids who may not have developed any visial or story bias yet.

@iKhan - I was actually referring to everything about tales. Its look, its characters, its tropes, it's music and handling of its stories and skits. Not every anime is the same thematically, but there are often themes westerners have difficulty stomaching - Not just understanding, but willing to accept. I've yet to anyone open to playing Tales who genuinely hated anime, of which there are no shortage of such individuals.

But if you can handle Tales, you probably wouldn't have much trouble watching most readily-available anime. Just stay away from comedies (unless you get into them because of your lack of understanding). Most modern anime don't even really reference their culture too heavily in ways that would be difficult to understand that you probably haven't experienced in some way in Tales. Like, One Piece's story is actually Japanese influenced, but you don't _need _ to know all the nods, allusions, and allegories to Japanese culture and history, and even current events at the time, in order to enjoy the show. That goes for a lot of great works, actually, regardless of medium. Hell, even Naruto, which heavily entrenched in Japanese myths, is perfectly enjoyable as a fantasy series without having to understand where all these ideas came from.

In other words, maybe you should try anime if you haven't already. You've already been through initiation...

Isn't it mainly that final fantasy/Phantasy Star had s more old school anime look and had more in common with European Fantasy and Sci-fi. Looking back VII is super cyber punk.

I find it difficult to narrow down at times. The general character designs of both Final Fantasy and Phantasy Star were heavily influenced by the skyrocketing popularity of animé in the 90's, but by now, Final Fantasy is taking much more from japanese pop/music culture, while Phantasy Star kept it more typical fantasy style with a certain amount of animé influence.
But when it comes to architecture and environments, both gleefully embrace the magitek trope, which is a mix of industrial/modern-tech and medieval fantasy environments, though FFXII took it much more techno-centered for a good amount of time.

The next Phantasy Star game is by tri-Ace, so expect it to be very anime.

You're probably right. I've actually been wanting to get into Anime since I played Tales of Symphonia 3 or 4 years ago. I loved the humor, the character dynamics, and the music. Maybe it's because I grew up in the late 90's and early 00's where Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon, DBZ, Cardcaptors along with anime-influenced American cartoons like Teen Titans were all the rage.

That said, the story of the Tales game's I've played is anything to go by, I still largely prefer American animation like Gargoyles, Batman Beyond, and Young Justice.

As an aside, aren't most JRPGs pretty anime influenced? Don't series like TWEWY, Fire Emblem, and Final Fantasy all borrow heavily from Anime tropes? Why have some of those managed mainstream success?

TWEWY is an enigma that's constantly baffles me. Logic simply does not apply to that game.

Fire Emblem is as western as a Japanese product will ever get. It almost never uses tropes that you wouldn't see in American books or television.

Final Fantasy constantly changes. It used western tropes when that was popular. From 6-9, it used toned down Japanese tropes when that was popular. Then in XI & XII, it used western tropes again. X was visually excentric, which earned it a lot of scorn back in the day, and it's story is so far up its own butt, Evangelion would be jealous. XIII is so Japanese it hurts, seeing as its story is a thinly veiled allegory for Japanese society on a whole, but most westerner missed it and probably wouldn't relate to it, anyways...

Also, if you're looking for good stories, anime's got the goods. Story-wise, Tales games don't even try. They borrow the ideas from anime, but rarely give them the weight or thought they need. I'd give some recommendations, but I think it's best to start with Full Metal Alchemist and them branch out from there.

...as much as I would love for that to be true, none of that is. There aren't nearly as many mecha series as you make it out to be, and it's been years since I've seen a seriously good one that actually aired on Japanese TVs. This is coming from someone who used to watch mecha series exclusively until I was in danger of actually running out of mecha series at the rate I was going...

There are plenty of shows featuring school girls, but then again, there are plenty that don't have much of them, either. And a lot of those tend to be better story-wise, anyways...

I don't know about school girls in mechs, but they do have sci-fi teenage combat idols fighting mecha in AKB0048. It's as confusing and vaguely awesome as that sounds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f169h3_qaQ

It's like somebody said to themselves: You know what candy pop music videos need more of? Guns and bloodshed, of course!

Sakura Wars for Wii is an overlooked anime RPG where (some not all) underaged girls drive giant mechs.