Easily, I don't know why people are mentioning sales and all this other stuff, it has nothing to do with that on a person by person level. People will play a game that looks interesting, reviews can tip this, but honestly, not everyone bases their opinion off of these things. You're more likely these days to have someone pick up a game because a streamer or YouTuber made a video/stream dedicated to the game and they enjoyed watching them play it.
Hence why SE has sought out these people a lot in marketing lately, even though people seem to be confused by this, it makes complete obvious sense to me.
And yet, there's a shield even in the demo which plays very similar to how you might play in a game like Dark Souls, and I imagine more things like that will be present in the final game.
I'm not sure what you mean by the first part; we're talking about sales because FF15's ability to reach a Western audience outside of its core base will determine the game's sales-at-large. There's a core base of about 5 million (at a guess) who are fans and will buy an FF anyway unless it's truly terrible; the difference between this and FF7 numbers is the casuals. This is the audience that Sony's 100 million (not inflation adjusted either) marketing campaign reached - the incredible thing about FF7 is it sold to the kind of audiences that now buy Fallout or something, plus COD or Madden, every iteration. (Of course, this led to FF7 supposedly being the most returned game of all time in the US at that point, because the game is very different to what Sony's CG-driven trailers depict), but I digress.
Anyway, the reason people are mentioning sales is because this'll be a hugely determining factor on them. I think that's obvious. Reviews can tip this, but let's not just talk about scored reviews: let's talk about Critical Perception in general. That includes YouTube. I don't think you need to be on metacritic to be influential. On average - Nielsen has a great study out on this - the youtube consensus around games from youtubers and personalities matches up roughly to the metascore, so the quality of the game will determine that. Hopefully it's great; one way it can capture this Western audience is to just be incredible and have excellent word of mouth. The Witcher had a 40 million ad campaign (or something like that), which these days is fairly modest for a AAA game, but the thing that really catapulted that to 10 million sales in a few short months was incredible reviews (93 metacritic) and to go with it an incredible reception from YouTubers. What followed that was amazing word of mouth.
That said -- that's what I was saying earlier, I'm just not convinced with the way the combat feels right now it'll have an easy time converting over fans of those games. I think that's fairly well encapsulated in the response to it across the board, which is mixed. I don't think anybody thinks it's terrible, but it's just doing a specific thing in a certain way that isn't necessarily going to massively, broadly appeal. The shield is one of the most satisfying weapons to use in the demo, alongside the shuriken, but the presence of the shield alone doesn't make it remotely like Souls, that's laughable. It's a very different flow and pace to any of those games that focus on sword-and-board - Skyrim, Souls, whatever, just by nature of the way the camera moves, the way they put a heavy focus on animation priority, etc.
Just saying "It has feature X" doesn't mean people who like that game are going to like it, obviously, because any given feature can be executed in a multitude of ways. Plenty of people I know who hate shooting games in all their forms like Mass Effect because of the RPG-ish way it's executed with stats and stuff, and plenty of fans of Halo hate Destiny because the enemies are stat-driven RPG bullet sponges that numbers pop out of. That's a reductive example, but you see my point, it carries here.
It's an interesting debate, anyway. I do think this - the battle for Westerners who probably haven't bought an FF game since the PS1 or 2 era, or the few of that group who bought FF13, compared it to [insert WRPG here] then traded it in, is where this game's battle for growth for the series will be truly won or lost.
I think the prevalence of Japanese pop culture hasn't declined, but there has clearly been a shift in perception. Anime especially has largely faded from the public scene compared to the boom days in the early 2000s (in part due to the circumstance that outside of big names like One Piece there's very little anime on TV nowadays), but settled into a fairly self-sufficient niche to the point where there's now a market for more obscure fare like visual novels and even eroge (erotic games). I think the reason for the decline in perception of JRPG outside maybe the Final Fantasy, Tales and Persona franchises is because a lot of the "B-list" contemporary JRPG are even more focused on the now-popular moe style than they were during the PS2 era, which is a fiery hoop to jump through, especially since a lot of western JRPG fans consider themselves to be "oldtaku", i.e. fans of the anime iconography of the 80s to early 2000s. This is actually the reason why I want SE to give Dragon Quest a second chance - they might hit that place that is now mostly run by indies like Zeboyd Games.
Isn't what you're describing - being less on the public scene - precisely a decline in the prevalence of
that side of Japanese pop culture? I think there's plentt of Japanese culture that hasn't declined, and things like J and K-pop are starting to find a newfound popularity in the West, but I'm just specifically referring to the piece of culture that's mostly defined by anime and RPGs like FF and the like; I think the prevalence of that
has declined somewhat (measurable in things like a drop in anime sales and in those of more niche Japanese games that aren't things like Mario or PES). FF is swimming upstream rather well in the face of that, I feel, even so far. For all the talk of FF13 or the series 'failing to succeed', I think its sales were ultimately admirable.
I agree about Dragon Quest, but the problem of course is that Zeboyd (and their ilk) are making games with a fraction of the cost and so have to sell a fraction of the copies for it all to be worthwhile. Would SE make a stripped-back, super cheap Dragon Quest? Or would they view it as beneath them and the brand? Either way, there's a solid audience for that sort of game, it just doesn't support a huge, huge AAA game. For all the belly-aching people do about Persona 5 vs FF15, for instance, they're not even in the same class. FF is a completely different beast. The Persona games have a very modest team and budget, because Atlus knows their audience is a couple million at most.
