Let me put it this way. I just finished Balrum, and i'm thinking about giving it a 2-star review, because it honestly needs one. The game starts off really nice, and there's this really cool feature that you can build your own farm and stuff that you can teleport to at almost any time (when not in battle or haven't in the past minute and a half, effectively), which is like having a portable home mod in skyrim, oblivion, or morrowind. The problem? You can't build that, without the appropriate crafting level, and it's something that is all looks no function. How do i get the level? I make a choice between that and something functional. So, the coolest part of the game, i have to make a choice between something that i need to beat the game, or the ability to have fun with a cheap gimmick that actually makes the game unique from others of it's genre (it's an isometric RPG that's similar to divine divinity). Enemies don't respawn (unlike most games), but like the witcher, a good 90% of your XP for leveling up (which gives you the learning points to spend on your choices) comes from quests (not a bad choice, actually, as it greatly incentivizes side-quests, even if you're playing the game for a second time and really aren't interested [great for first time players of a game, though, since many people today like to skip the sidequests and such, and you get punished for not doing them]). Game starts out with this mystery you need to solve, and slowly builds, as you question everything anyone has ever told you, but ends like the drop of a hat. Clearly, the devs got sick of developing the game half-way through, and the beginning of the game is awesome, but the ending of the game happens so fast you see plot points that were never made coming together, and the ending itself is a suggested objective to complete that isn't even part of the main game (and you probably can't even do it, but i haven't checked for sure). Documentation in game for the importance of your choices is nil, and there's so many loose ends in random events, where clearly content was never finished. In order to make up for lack of content, they pushed to make the choices harder, to force you to play it multiple times just to try out every mechanic. The latest patch of the game fixes a bug (and other things that needed fixed) that was highly praised on steam for allowing people to end up with infinite learning points (worse yet, the games' not hard, really [the balancing is terrible, and there are things that can wreck you that you stumble across randomly even after you beat the final boss], so you don't need the learning points to break difficulty, but rather just to do the cool things that you want to do). I think they might've had a really cool story with huge plot twists and such in the works, but you're way, way better off never going beyond chapter 2.

What does Balrum have to do with this? Japan probably didn't see Balrum much, if at all. When games are written in another language, and have to be translated, usually they have to sell really well to get the funding necessary to have it translated to english or least to justify the translation, since that's hard and expensive, especially with legal teams involved on what can and can't be sent to another country. In other words, these things do well here, or at least seem to, because we're basically getting the cream of the crop. There might be some awesome japanese games out there that we don't get, because they don't sell very well or they don't think they'll sell well outside of Japan (DS Air was really cool for it's time, but i was glad that I got the original Japanese release on my DS, because they canceled the american release). So, you miss out on alot of cool games, but you also miss out on all the duds. Non-asan releases are heavily curated, even in the few instances where there isn't censorship (which we discovered over the past year, here on gog, is a problem even in companies that we trust not to censor games).

Final Fantasy is enough top notch to make multiple games that are mixed with Disney's characters and meet disney's standards for their top quality stuff (even though disney has abysmal standards for some things, the stuff you see in Kingdom Hearts is stuff disney has only the most respect for). Dragon quest, also top of the line, even final fantasy's main rival (until the parent companies merged). What do you know about Ambition of the Slimes? Great game, not on the radar. But! It was good enough to come here at all. I don't know what kind of train wrecks we don't get from Japan, but Japan did manage to get Duke Nukem Forever, and that monstrosity didn't go over well with them, even though everything that duke represents is pretty popular there.

But there's the counter-argument: AAA titles often get translated and localized, even if they suck, but we usually give them a pass, because "it's foreign" usually has us judge things with totally different standards, which is why some women go gaga over foreign guys that couldn't pick up women in the own country, or Psy being popular in the west, when people were saying he wasn't even popular in his own country. But, hey, that's another angle, too. Would we feel the same about Hyperdimension Neptunia (makes fun of really popular girly and cutesy RPGs from japan) like we do about Duke Nukem (makes fun of really popular masculine and badass first person shooters from the west, which is our equivalent)? How many people feel different about Huniepop when they realize it's not actually from Japan?

Overall, i think it's just a mix of the fact that we think they do really well here, simply because we like what we're getting, and it's hard for the critics to criticize the cream of a foreign crop. It's more than just "ew, anime, that's weird" that keeps the games from putting western companies out of business, but it's harder to see it since it's harder to judge stuff in the west that comes from people in the east (without taking racism/reverse racism into account, since i think it's less about political correctness [since asians aren't protected], and more to do with it being hard to criticize something made with totally different objectives and standards than your own). I'd be willing to bet this conversation occurs in Japan, too, but they have the added comment of "english is like a college education, and we can practice our english better with games that were made originally in english."