Quote Originally Posted by TaleraRistain View Post
American fans respected the genre just fine before it came out. It wasn't the first JRPG over here. Square (since they hadn't merged with Enix yet) was just trying to be more mainstream and get a bigger market share. And there is a vast difference between western RPG and Japanese RPG genres. A lot of triple A RPG games coming out are western RPG.
JRPGs were sales slogs in the Nintendo era, that's why a handful of the main FF games were skipped in English and also why we got the dumb Final Fantasy III = Final Fantasy VI ordeal. It wasn't until FFVII on PSone that really blew the lid on mainstream popularity in the US.