@GuetaMinute:
If you notice, most of the developers struggling to play catch up with the industry are Japanese.
I'm looking at you in specific, JRPGs…
Yeah it's really interesting how the mighty have fallen. But more disheartening is the fact that most haven't even tried to catch up. A lot have migrated to handhelds with cheaper developement cost and lower skillset requirements. A lot have just stuck with their styles and began catering to fetishist of various kinds. And when we talk jrpgs even our frontrunners(square, level-5, atlus [don't even have a hd rpg on the system yet]) for jrpgs haven't arguably dealt that well with the transition.
At this point I don't really expect to be blown away anymore by jrpgs, I just want a few of them :P to get my dose of weird japaneseness and grinding. That said Xenoblade has been kind of a revelation in that respect, but albeit it was sd and I doubt I would have turned out the same if they had to up their presentation for a more powerful system.
@Cyber-Robin:
And when they do they've been Westernised with elements taken from WOW, Morrowind etc and end up being meh. There's been tons of JRPGs out this gen but I can probably name all the really good ones on my left hand. And some of them (Xenoblade, Nier, Valkryre Chronicles) are some of the best games this gen.
I just wish they went back to their more traditional routes. No battle system that takes 5 hours to learn. I was happy when it was turn based. But I'm likely in the minority.
I think like with everything to limit yourself only to the things you know is always bad. The golden age of (j)rpg was quite glorious indeed but one can't deny that there was undoubtly extreme stagnation and oversaturation for the genre. Problem is now that the trend has changed and rpgs aren't the most popular thing anymore most still seem to believe that turn based is a boring relict of the past, when the problem wasn't necessarily the system just it's oversaturation.
We get so few of them anymore and turn based has vanished in the west. So in that sense I also miss them, but I still remember that I got kind of sick of them during the ps 1-2 times (well at least during ps2 the experimentation really began).
Since games are kind of a very trend defined industry we can interestingly see many similar things happen right now to the current trend of "modern military shooters". Lot's of stagnation, oversaturation and imitation. Hope we can move onto a new trend soon. I'll predict something with elements of minecraft…