Yeah, JRPGs in general are a separate evolutionary path parallel to western CRPGS that diverged around Wizardry, which apparently was very popular in Japan.
I just never really thought about linking modern “blobbers” to the modern Japanese iterations. I think of them as “dungeon crawls”. I think I probably separated them in my mind because the western versions were pretty dead for a long time and have seen a bit of a resurgence recently, while the Japanese versions have a more or less unbroken line.
I guess my point is, if people like modern blobbers, and haven’t played any of the Atlus/NIS/etc games, there’s a lot of options out there, with varying degrees of anime-fanservice.