StingingVelvet: Hahaha you're ridiculous. You and I both know what you were doing.
Oh, c'mon, personal insults now? You can do better than that. Take a deep breath and count to ten, i can feel your rage from here.
StingingVelvet: Anyway I have no scientific answer for you. I liked them when I was 14 but trying to play them now is like nails on a chalkboard... bad writing, horrible voice acting, embarrassing storylines, super linear, easy combat, etc. etc. I don't know what changed in between other than getting older and being exposed to Western RPGs, which I much prefer.
Are we talking about the same games? Bad Writing? Embarrasing storylines? Which games exactly did you play? Easy combat? Really? Are you kidding me? JRPGs are known for being difficult, especially earlier ones. You can't really say that games like Etrian Odyssey, SMT, Persona, Xenogears, Disgaea and Front Mission have easy combat. In fact, one of the issues i have with some JRPGs is that they require grinding because of how hard combat becomes later in the game. Bad writing and embarrasing storylines? Chrono Trigger, Persona, SMT, Xenogears, Suidoken 2, Nier, Earthbound, Panzer Dragoon Saga and many others say hello (even some FF are well written).
The only thing i can agree with is that JRPGs are usually linear (not always) and that they tend to have horrible voice acting (all japanese games in general suffer from the voice acting problem, especially older games). The voice acting issue has a pretty obvious reason, developers and publishers back then didn't have as much money to spend on hiring decent actors and translators. But i really can't see why this makes these games worse. The first RE and the PS1 Megaman X games are notorious for the horrible voice acting and they're still considered to be masterpieces.
And look at how ridiculous your argument is. You're trying to generalize a whole fucking genre. It's like saying that FPSes suck because COD and Battlefield are crap. It's ridiculous, to say the least. You've played one or two games and say: "JRPGs suck, hur durr". That's Crosmando level of logic and argumentation skills right there.