Not me either… 
Although I get what you mean, I feel we should stop making such definitive statements “will never be the place for that genre”, it’s especially naive when Xbox is no longer a plastic box. There’s gonna be a lot of reach they’ll have on pc and cloud. Did you see how wild P4G success was on steam? Somehow it took that game for atlus to be surprised that significantly more people accessing their game would bring them more success, much wow. Moving forward, Persona is no longer a franchise tied down to one platform. Almost every franchise but Final fantasy is going multiplat.
I would surmise Yakuza LAD wouldn’t be as successful without Microsoft helping them globalise its launch last year, which was precisely the reason Sega gave for the next gen patch being timed on Series consoles. Judgment 2 is gonna probably be the franchise’s next biggest launch and it’ll be global and multiplat day 1 (except pc for some reason but oh well).
If I go on twitter now, the Yakuza brand is more associated with game pass than anything else, which is ironic considering the game had been on playstation for over a decade and never got the kind of attention it’s getting now. Whenever someone asks about where to start with the franchise all I hear is “start with Yakuza 0 and go up from there, they’re all on gamepass”.
The era of being tied down to a plastic box is over. Sony is holding on to dear life for these timed exclusivity deals with Square Enix right now because everyone else has moved on or is in the process of it. It just sucks that they’re not willing to have an in house Japanese developer that can work on their own IP like say Legend of Dragoon or whatever and choosing the safe route of just moneyhatting one or two franchises from a few third parties. Their in house is pretty much all western focused action adventure games, outside media molecule and team Asobi. Imagine a proper JRPG with the kind of tech that Sony has for their first party devs, but yeah when even Sony doesn’t want to actually invest in their own JRPGs anymore, no wonder every major jrpg dev is going multiplat, especially when Nintendo switch is destroying them in Japan every single day. They shall no longer have Persona to boast about and outside some mad obscure JRPGs that only come on switch or playstation because of funding or porting issues, yep, JRPGs shall be more ubiquitous moving forward than ever before and Xbox can certainly be a place for that to happen.
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I never said this was not the case, but one day a console for just one platform will be obsolete. It will be interesting to see how sony adapt to this new reality.
I definitely think things are improving, it appears a lot of that is because Microsoft is bank rolling a lot of these games for Game Pass.
If you take what I assume are the big 3 JRPGs, one is “locked up” by Sony"by Sony, two came to Game Pass a year+ after release, and three is rumored to come to Game Pass. If JRPGs are important to you, you are going to want to be on a platform where a platform holder is not required to provide financial incentive just for the games to come.
That said, the exposure that the games have gotten through Game Pass could mean their next releases come to Xbox without Game Pass. We’ll see when the next Dragon Quest, Project RE, and Persona are announced.
Its not that complicated. Sony is paying for FF exclusivity that`s it. Basiclly every major jrpg is currently hitting the xbox too and Persona soon to follow. If we believe Nick. Tales is coming Yakuza etc…
I dont see Ryza, Trails, Ys or the digimon slate of games hitting xbox.
I said major.
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Xbox got Dragon’s Quest like 2 years late, likely with Microsoft bankrolling it for Game Pass.
Yeah they doing this recently, same with yakuza. The next dragon quest will release regular
We’ll come back to this when/if it happens. Same for Atlus. All of the top JRPGs are a “maybe” on Xbox. Not a great place to be if it is a genre you’re really interested in.
I would bet on Persona coming this year to xbox.
Those ARE big and are the games xbox needs to go and bring to the console to continue offering depth in the JRPG genre. If we go and limit major you just end up with Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.
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they have to fix a whole generation completly ignoring the japanese markt this wont be fixed in a week.
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Thats why you shouldnt only aim for the big fish only. You have work to do with the localizers to get all those middle to upper tier games onto xbox.
but they are the most important games from there you can go in other direction.
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This sucks, but also just it is what it is. best thing Microsoft can do is just keep building their relationships with other Japanese developers/publishers because I think Square is very much so a lost cause.
I’ve been thinking a lot about when I’m gonna get a PS5, and I was debating on this year, but the more I think about it the more I remember the reason why I bought an Xbox in the first place was because of gamepass, and how unwilling I am to buy stuff day 1, so me buying a PS5 will probably coincide with when the 1st party games that dropped this year drop in price a good bit, alongside doing the same with any JRPGs I wanna play.
In the meantime I do hope that Bandai Namco and RGG games continue to launch day 1 on the Xbox side, as honestly, From games, and Yakuza are the only Japanese games I care about atm. My interest in final fantasy goes up and down, but I think FF16 looks pretty neat.
So we are going to limit back the jrpg library based on the availability of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest? Xbox has this backwards.
No. Befor you get the small stuff assure the big guns are coming and the one last big gun missing is Persona. FF is out of question for obv. reasons. From there it will expand. Nier is on Xbox Kigdom Hearts, Octopath Traveler etc… They will come. Tales is coming Scralet Nexus. Etalia and Trails are small in comparision. Until recently Trails wasnt on switch. Its just not that simple.
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Square Enix as a company has been created as timed exclusive to serve Sony.
Everything else is a mirage.
To me it sounds like Xbox is guaranteed 0 of the big guns and they other platform is guaranteed all of them.
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