I am not immune to propaganda. Show me a trailer for an indie JRPG featuring scripted encounters on the field maps, dual techs, and guest tracks by Yasunori Mitsuda, and I'll go "oh, a Chrono Trigger inspired indie JRPG, I sure hope they actually learned the right lessons from the classics" and drop $30 to see if they did.
They didn't.
(Full spoilers for both Sea of Stars and Chrono Trigger under the break.)
A lot of Western-made attempts at "classic-style" JRPGs stumble in similar ways. I feel like, had we actually received more localized JRPGs in English in the 16-bit era, our perceptions of what a "classic" JRPG is would be tremendously different. This was the era of Romancing SaGa (non-standard progression and levelling), Shin Megami Tensei (Monster-gathering and post-apocalyptic fuckery), Live A Live (experimental multi-character storytelling and unique grid-based combat), and Dragon Quest V (emotional rollercoaster of melodramatic story that will kick you in the genitals several times over its playtime). All stuff that was pushing the genre forward in Japan during a time when we were getting generally standard-fare stuff. Good standard-fare stuff, mind you, but what's the most "non-standard" JRPG that got localized around that time? Robotrek? Probably Earthbound, but that also has its own issues of "people not getting why that game worked and their wacky modern-day turn-based RPG doesn't."
I think a mistake that a lot of people understandably make with Japanese RPGs when trying to parse them overseas, whether it's just as a casual player, a critic, or, indeed, someone making one of these sorts of homages, is that with such a developmentally mature and robust genre, for the most part, within their native context, pretty much none of the standout releases that people have latched onto overseas were singularity events that just spontaneously appeared fully formed independent of external forces and influences. These are games that were in constant dialogue and responding to one another, and like Heidi mentioned, the conversations these games were actually having tended to be really different than what players overseas were realistically able to perceive, which just comes naturally with the hindsight afforded to that direct access to genre history without the filter of spotty, piecemeal localization efforts. If you sit down and read old interviews or game of the year lists from developers operating in that space, you'll quite often find a canon of games that can be pretty starkly different from the one that's formulated among players, but if you take the time to play them, they can be very instructive and illuminate what that real conversation taking place among these game developers and their games actually is and who's setting the topics.
It's why I think a lot of the games of this ilk that identify primarily as homages to other games first and foremost have an, at best, muted reception when they're localized and brought out in Japan. It's not that it's a bad call to make per se, but, knowingly or not, they're entering that conversation with talking points that have long since been hashed out domestically without necessarily bringing any new food for thought. "Game that's like X, but with prettier sprite art" isn't necessarily the most compelling pitch when you're talking about a market that's not only likely had literal decades to consider and mull over X game already, but also saw how it emerged onto the scene in its heyday and impacted that scene in its wake. That's not me saying there's no value in games where developers are clearly trying to make another Thing That They Like That Nobody Makes Anymore; just that it's important to be cognizant that what that thing means to people in one part of the world isn't necessarily 1:1 with how it's perceived elsewhere, least of all its native market.
And that's to say nothing of games like, seemingly, Sea of Stars that fail to recognize that there's a certain underlying sincerity to the games that they're riffing on in terms of the developers' belief in their design, etc. When they include elements of those inspirations whole cloth Simply Because or to poke fun at, there is almost always a failure to fully parse those original intentions and, in turn, the conversation surrounding that game in its native language. If I had to say why I don't personally gravitate towards a lot of such homages as someone with that ready access to genre history and the fluency (linguistic, but also Japanese game design specific), that tends to be the primary culprit.
