So going full old man mode, I want to tell you youngin about how back in my day companies like Square Enix and Nintendo seemed to think very poorly of the American Audience. While the Nintendo itself did take off in the US, and many games were huge successes, we have the odd tail of Final Fantasy.
Yes, Final Fantasy was a success, a big enough one that saved an entire company from bankruptcy. And then there were the 700,000 sales it got in the United States, so it was a runaway success with a foreign audience. I'm not going to say it's strange the original FF II and III on the NES never came stateside, the time it takes to localize a game mixed with how close the SNES was to launch were huge factors, but what happens next is strange.
Final Fantasy IV released in the US on the SNES under the name Final Fantasy II, since we didn't get the first two. And the strangest thing happened... the game was dumbed down. FF I was changed in the US in ways that were unrelated to the mechanics or difficulty of the game. Certain things were changed because of censorship on the part of Nintendo USA (Another story) and some names changed to account for space limitations, but the game proper was left untouched. So it's not like the US was unreceptive of RPGs.
But then the strangest thing happened when someone decided Final Fantasy IV was just... too much for American audiences. The game was simplified and made easier, and the abilities of many characters were straight-up removed. This isn't your typical early-day censorship of games, this was Square Enix actively deciding that US audiences just couldn't handle the game.
This is further exacerbated by the existence of Mystic Quest, a game made with the intent of easing American audiences into RPGs. Well, here in the States it not only sold less than FF IV did, which even in its dumbed-down state was more complex than Mystic Quest, it sold less than half of what the Original FF did, a game that wasn't at all simplified for Americans. It leads to the question as to why exactly there were these views we couldn't handle RPGs here in the states.
It wasn't until the success of FF VII that companies realized that RPGs could succeed in the West (Regardless of the fact they already were succeeding) and we started getting a larger percentage of the games in general. But at the same time, they never really got over the idea that things needed dumbed down for Americans. Frankly, the turning point of that could be traced to Demon's Souls. Famously Sony didn't want to publish it in the West because the president thought it was too hard for the Western Audience, so it was instead published by Atlus to much success.
Where did this idea that the West just couldn't handle RPGs or difficult and complex ones come from? From the beginning with Final Fantasy it was shown that was simply not the case, and it wasn't until an absolute blockbuster of an RPG that they started to realize they might be wrong about that. It's like when a person who thinks their audience is stupid ends up being stupider than the audience they criticize. It blows my mind this was ever a thing companies thought.