It's not that they focus on story more than gameplay, it's that they focus on bad storytelling rather than gameplay, and the gameplay is stagnant across the entire genre. Why mess with the wheel if people still play with it the way it is?Sir John the Net Knight said:If you think about it, this is why JRPGs are failing. They've become too heavily focused on story and not enough on gameplay. This is something you could do around the time of the big three Final Fantasy games(FFVI, FFVII and Chrono Trigger.) because the medium hadn't evolved yet and story based gaming was a new interesting idea back then. Gameplay in JRPGs back then was simple and elegant, but it never bothered to evolve beyond that. JRPGs continue to scale back gameplay in favor of story, so much so that Final Fantasy XIII could more or less play itself and thus no one really liked it so much. I think if you took a game like Braid or Flower and tried to market it on equal scale as FFXIII it would have probably gotten similar results.
There's a certain, elegant balance with story and gameplay. You can easily have extremes on either side which is perfectly fine if that's what you're going for. Some games can gravitate towards the middle, but few games are able to balance the story and gameplay equally and to the degree they want to.
Nobody is really saying that it's the "correct" way. We all just want more diverse games with more diverse aspects to them. Wherever games will evolve to next I'm sure we'll all be in for a treat.I'm not saying people shouldn't do it this way. I'm saying that it's a bad idea to assume that it's the correct way.