But as these artists express more, the odds of saying something that clashed with the audience's expectations increases. Japanese RPGs added sweeping scores, cutscenes, massive scripts, detailed characters, and voice acting. And westerners hated about 95% of it.

Some of the most fondly remembered JRPGs had this. Final Fantasy, Xeno-series, Persona, Suikoden, Tales of.. This isn't something new.

The only Japanese RPG series to get any amount of praise for its story in recent years was the souls series- and it's no coincidence that their story is told as minimalist as possible.

Xenoblade Chronicles? Persona? 'Tales of' series to its niche crowd? They were all extremely well received.

I like to use Breath of Fire as an example.

It's strange you would bring up Breath of Fire because BoF3-4 are also spoken of highly, even if they might've not been huge commercial successes. It was the 5th game that really let it down.

Japanese players loved the characters in FFXIII, westerners hated them, but they all liked the gameplay.

Everybody liked the gameplay in FFXIII? As far as I'm aware, it was one of the reasons why the game was so poorly received by the public. That the gameplay was too easy and on rails for 20+ hours into the game with a poor story and unlikeable characters.

My opinion is that JRPGs have always been a niche genre outside of a few series. Even to this day many of the best JRPGs are still unknown such as Xenogears, Legend of Dragoon and even Suikoden compared to the likes of Final Fantasy and now Persona. It's only because in recent times that gaming has exploded that a combination of factors have made them become more 'niche' relatives to other genres. Such as the emergence of 'action RPGs' like Souls, Kingdom Hearts and etc. Turn based combat just isn't very appealing to the mass market in general, especially when it's moderately shallow and not the focus of the game like in almost every JRPG.