During Bandai Namco's RPG panel at Anime Expo, Tales of Berseria Producer Yasuhiro Fukaya, Sword Art Online Producer Yosuke Futami and God Eater Producer Yosuke Tomizawa shared a few interesting thoughts about their games and JRPG in general.

Futami-san shared that while developing Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization, the team had issues with some skirts that weren't long enough, showing a bit too much underneath. On the othe hand, Tomizawa-san mentioned that they didn't have the problem with the God Eater series, since they already gave up on solving it, so you can freely check out under the skirts.

Fukaya-san feels that JRPGs and western RPGs are now fusing together. For instance The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has a really huge open world, but still has really deep character stories. Even in Fallout 4 they added personalities to the characters.

On the other hand, looking at JRPGs, In Xenoblade Chronicles X you can enjoy the character drama, but the main character is a player-created avatar. There are also really large open world like Final Fantasy XV. Those are examples of JRPGs that lean towards the western market. Because of that, he feels that JRPGs and western RPGs are getting a lot closer to each other.

Futami-san mentioned that he really loves video games. When he looks back to old-time JRPGs, he feels that fans all over the world awere really excited to play those games. He really loved old-schoold JRPGs like Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy VI. According to Futami-san many Japanese producers working on JRPGs are trying to develop that kind of excitement and experience with current technology, and convey it to fans all over the world, not just in Japan.

Tomizawa-san feels that in JRPGs the characters are the most important elements. JRPGs delve deeply in the relationships between characters and between characters and player. Some complain that in JRPGs there is only one long storyline, but that allows to define the personalities of the characters with a lot of depth, showing how they change and how they communicate. A lot of resources are used on the characters while making a JRPG.

According to Tomizawa-san, a key element for the future of JRPGs is improving the graphics, not towards the realistic style western games use, but the visual style should be improved towards the "hentai style."

Tomizawa-san actually did not explain what he meant with a "hentai style" for visuals. The term in Japanese means "pervert," and it's normally used (almost exclusively in the west) to identify anime with erotic contents. My guess is that Tomizawa-san meant to indicate a visually appealing anime-like style, but this is just my speculation, at least until I get a chance to (hopefully) ask him.