but persona 5 is the game the broke the "niche" in a big way (persona 4 already did that, kind of), i mean it's sitting at 2 millions
Except... not really.
https://personacentral.com/persona-5-best-selling-release-atlus-history-japan/
It is their best-selling game, but not by as much as people seem to think. By a similar account, you could argue that Xenoblade Chronicles 2 broke out of its niche, but I'd say both seem like they're approaching their upper limit.
And I reply a few pages later...
I just really like the 2D pixel art on a 3D plane. If it weirds you out, though, fair enough!
She doesn't look like an outlier in-game at all. Colors in general are muted, and she's not a bright red spot on the screen or anything. I don't know if she's an outlier in the group, but I found her and her story compelling and different from the typical JRPG mold. Hopefully they can keep it up in the rest of the game. The other demo character was much more typical, but still more grounded and on the "serious" side compared to lots of other games in the genre (and he's older, which is nice) so I had no objections to him. We'll see how the full game is, but I'm optimistic.
I'll have to take a second look and dive a little deeper.
I don't disagree that a lot of anime has poorly written characters, but I feel the conversation has gotten a little ephemeral. I think it would help if people used examples. It's one thing to say "anime characters don't behave like real people and have no internal consistency or motivation", but I can think of plenty of example where that isn't true. I watch plenty of anime and keep up with new seasons, which typically means I watch one or two shows because I think a lot of it is boring or crap. So I have a feeling I agree with most posters in here, but it would help my understanding to have some concrete examples.
I have a real fondness for melodrama, which can be found in media from all countries and from different time periods (gotta love the Victorians). Melodrama doesn't mean characters are written inconsistently, though. They can still follow the rules for their world. Heightened reality can be an interesting tool in storytelling, and it's one I enjoy a lot. What I do not enjoy is characters who do things only for plot convenience or seem to have no internal life. Flat, cardboard characters.
I still think shounen manga almost epitomize characters with no motivation (or one motivation). Aside from saving Sasuke, what are Naruto's motivations? I really, even after reading a ton of that manga as a kid, have pretty much no picture of who he is as a person except that he really wants to save Sasuke (like he was picked on as a kid because of the Nine-Tails thing, but that doesn't seem to affect him nearly so much as it's used as a plot point to show that he understands Sasuke). And that's really weird, because even the other characters within the manga often have more varied reasons and lives. Naruto's singular obsession is the central thrust of the manga pretty much right up until it ends. And this is the case for pretty much all shounen protagonists. Black Clover and One Piece - become most powerful wizard, become Pirate King. It's this one note, repeated over and over and it is an acceptable justification for just about any behavior or scenario. And it's also why, even as a kid, I didn't get very far in most of these. I basically gave up or started skipping massive portions (either because huge chunks were explained in single paragraphs by online databases, or they were marked as filler). The idea that One Piece is actually about running through corridors is probably the most accurate description I can think of for a lot of action battle manga. Effectively, a huge portion of most of these is dedicated to chasing the plot (i.e., the battle of the week, or month, or however long this arc is going to go on for), and the result is typically a lot of characters running around with little of consequence happening, in some cases occurring for months of episodes at a time or many, many manga chapters.
And a lot of this started in the anime community with Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. The big transition from multi-episode power-up scenes to running through corridors, or hallways, or open fields... or, in general, running instead of powering-up, makes a lot of the dramatic stakes get lost because while Dragon Ball at least presents a looming threat that is looming larger, it's vague as to whether the plot that's being chased in other shounen manga is of consequence at all. Unsurprisingly, it's not infrequently the case where a battle or confrontation is of no consequence, either because it's negated by some other event happening at the same time, or because it's retconned.
One shounen manga that doesn't fall into this trap is Jojo, but it's also an extremely atypical shounen manga. Interestingly enough, I'd say this is because the structure is built with definite starts and stops, whereas these same points of conclusion in other shounen manga (the transition from Naruto being a kid to a young adult, or the transition of One Piece into the Grand Line and the New World), do not have these nearly so well-defined. They do occur occasionally, but with Jojo these points divergence of are much more structured, much more regular.
The result is manga and anime that go on for too long, as was the precedent set by Dragon Ball, with a big payoff at the end for sitting through a much longer arc that's also largely unnecessary. Something that can largely be explained in a paragraph via a fansite is probably not telling a story that has characters who have... well, much character. This is probably also a result of there just being so damn many characters in these shows as well, but I think that's probably best saved for another discussion (though it is quite ridiculous to have 5 or more characters introduced in a single manga chapter and expect the reader to care about them - especially when even the most dense reader knows they don't really matter and exist for the sake of the plot).
edit: It's kind of ironic, but thinking about it, I think the first time we actually see Naruto as a character is in Boruto, and there we essentially see him as a father who abandons his child for his work.
