Most of the anime fandom tends to like videos. Out of all the video game genres most of the anime fandom likes JRPGs. Now with knowing this it almost seems surprising that anime based off jrpgs don’t do well.
JRPG stands for Japanese Role Playing Game. Most of the time these games have a detailed plot, character development, and some sort of fighting portion of the game. The dynamics of a video game is not only the plot, but the game play. Gameplay is a time where the player can get to know the world around them and it also adds details to the character development as the main story progresses. When developing an anime from a JRPG a lot of details tend to get missed.
For an anime, the directors try to get as much detail as they can for each episode from a JRPG that could have over 100s of hours of gameplay. With a show that might be budged for 26 episodes, that would only be enough to cover the basic storyline of the game.
With less detail and more basic story, that doesn’t mean all JRPG inspired anime are horrible. Take a look at Tales of the Abyss anime. The show has the basic story down but they add important character details that allow you to connect to the characters despite not having much time to tell us every little bit about the world around us or the people that live in it. But in the end, it gives some justice for anime fans to take a look at the show and hopefully be able to play the game later and really experience what the creator wanted the player to experience.
Sometimes small editions from the game can be added to an anime that is 100% like its game counterpart. Like Pokémonthe anime is a world of its own but even so, the creators still find a way to have some of the games plot be developed inside the show so that when you watch the show and follow Ash’s journey, you can notice the encounters he makes with the villains of the region. Though the detail is small, it is a nice shout out to all the players.
JRPGs are very complex. So much time is put in when creating the game that sometimes it takes over 3 years to get a game that would be released “soon”. But with the less amount of time to work and even minimum episode amounts I think the creators of the anime version do a decent amount to try to please us gamers on our favorite franchises.