interesting article for consideration from Polygon writer Kazuma Hashimoto. here’s the opening:
In February, Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida sat down in an interview with YouTuber SkillUp as part of a tour to promote the next installment in the Final Fantasy series. During the interview, Yoshida expressed his distaste for a term that had effectively become its own subgenre of video game, though not by choice. “For us as Japanese developers, the first time we heard it, it was like a discriminatory term, as though we were being made fun of for creating these games, and so for some developers, the term can be something that will maybe trigger bad feelings because of what it was in the past,” he said. He stated that the first time both he and his contemporaries heard the term, they felt as though it was discriminatory, and that there was a long period of time when it was being used negatively against Japanese-developed games. That term? “JRPG.”
I’m not sure I agree, to me the difference between JRPG and RPG is like the difference between anime and animation. In a western audience, the label has been coopted by games closer to home with tropes we’re more familiar with. That doesn’t make the labeling of Japanese media othering in that sense, so much as it allows us to understand what contexts it is both from and for.
I can see how, to some people, it might be a turn-off (just see all the people that turn their nose up at anime conceptually even if they’d like it) – see the people that may have seen edge of tomorrow in theaters and enjoyed it, but would likely sneer at being told to read all you need is kill, differences in media notwithstanding. But as the media landscape changes and grows it’s useful to have different ways to sort of illustrate the differences in audience as well as the differences in creative context.
Is there a possibility that the usage of anime is also othering? In Japan, “anime” means animation, and if you ask a Japanese person what their favorite anime is, they might say Disney movies. If you translate “anime” into Japanese, it will become “Japanese anime”
However, it seems that there are some animators who think that there is a difference between anime and animation.
I don’t think his position is reasonable. JRPG does describe an RPG subgenre, just like CRPG or ARPG do. They have specific formats, structures and tropes that they all adhere to religiously.
He also omits the fact that not all RPGs coming out of Japan are called that. Once they stray enough from the trope of the genres, they are no longer included in it. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck…
Finally, acting as if people have a racist or discriminatory slight against those games because of the term… I don’t think I’ve ever seen people do that, other than disliking the general style and anime aesthetic which is entirely fair?
I don’t get him.
Also not all JRPGs are developed in Japan, and not all RPGs developed in Japan are JRPGs.
It just happened that the subgenre started out in Japan.
It’s a way to communicate what you expect from a game not some conspiracy to brand all Japanese RPGs lol. Like saying a game is a soulslike or roguelike. I mean Elden Ring is sort of an RPG and never heard anyone call it a JRPG. For JRPG I expect, anime art style, party system, turn based combat, probably a lot of drama lol.
Honestly feels like a bit of a gross misuse of the word “othering” given what material horrors are associated with the process. Especially bitter coming from Mr Naoki “economics justifies transphobia” Yoshida.
I feel like there’s an important point in the valence of the word shifting as the American games industry and its colluders in the gaming press started trying to cut foreign and indie developers out. I think I completely missed out on the process of the word becoming pejorative, because I was mostly playing Nintendo and retro games during that era and not really talking about them online outside of people that also liked those kinds of games.
I do think it’s interesting and sad though that negative valence can be attached to an entire region, and specifically a region outside “the West”. “Slavjank” would be another example; meanwhile the endless litany of very poor quality games coming out of the UK in the 80’s and 90’s was never given a simple and catchy term…
But that leads to a point that there’s also something to be said that valence can be contextual. “Jank” means different things to different people and can be meant appreciatively or pejoratively.
Within my friends with the same background and from the same (console) generation as me, and who like the same kinds of game as me, there is definitely a subgenre of RPG with a high degree of mechanical depth and novelty, typically made in Japan, that we crave more of; so some kind of catchy subgenre term is useful.
Half serious but I think the real solution is to start describing mechanically over-streamlined Hollywood wannabes as WRPGs.
This is a very valid point that I don’t care about Yoshi “Black People can’t exist in FFXVI”-P bringing up lol
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I have, in fact, talked to people who are insistent that any RPG made in Japan is a JRPG and any game not made in Japan isn’t. They argued that Dark Souls is a JRPG. They were entirely serious.
Dark Souls is a JRPG
Did they also argue that a hot dog is a sandwich?
That would be a ridiculous position to hold.
Amusingly, Dark Souls seems to have spawned its own mini-genre, with people now calling games “Souls-likes”.
I’ve met such people before.
I disagree with them though, as the tropes and presentation of a game are more pertinent to genre labels, than is the nationality of its creators. There are many western-made JRPGs, and there might even be Japanese-made WRPGs as well.
Yuck, I just looked up his statements about that. Yeah, I don’t know if I will be playing FFXVI. There are plenty of games that don’t have that problem. Diablo 4 is a good example.
Oof. Thanks for mentioning this.
I respectfully disagree with Yoshida. I never considered JRPG a “discriminatory” or “othering” term. JRPGs have their own style that’s distinct enough to warrant identifying, like the industry distinguishes between “first person shooters” and “third person shooters”. To a non-gamer, the difference may seem trivial, but to people who actually play the game, it’s huge.
That being said, I’m surprised that someone so closely involved with gaming would make such a statement. If anything, it sounds unnecessarily defensive.
This is interesting because I can see where he’s coming from, but like others I see it as more of a distinct genre from Western RPG. There is no general RPG genre which a game can be categorized as to represent “the norm” which jrpgs are aberrant from. That being said, labelling western rpgs and jrpgs doesn’t indicate the design philosophy which is actually indicated by those terms. The west has produced many jrpgs and Japan has produced many western rpgs, and that doesn’t make sense unless you know what those terms actually mean.
I wonder what these genres could be called which would be better indicators? Dragon Quest-likes and Ultima-likes?
I disagree, it’s the same as distinguishing romance novels from other fantasy novels.
I hear what they’re saying, but I’ve just never heard of anyone trying to dismiss a game for being a JRPG. Sure, they have their style and tropes, and they aren’t for everyone, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who seriously claims that a particular game is bad because it is a JRPG, as opposed to a game simply being a bad JRPG.
It seems to me that between Sony, Nintendo, From Soft, Bandai Namco, Square Enix, and even, yes, Konami, Japanese gaming culture has had a huge influence on so-called Western gaming culture.
I noticed this in the 90s and 2000s. The Japanese perception of Western tastes was massively different than actual Western tastes. There were a lot of games that never made it here because they thought we would not like it and it later turned out to be a hit.
I’m curious, do you have any examples?
Ryu Ga Gotoku (“Like a Dragon”, formerly “Yakuza”).
The devs feared that the game was too Japanese and would confuse and alienate Western gamers. Over the past decade they’ve been working on being less heavy-handed with localization and allowing the game to just be what it is now that they’re getting all these feedback from players that bursts their bubble.
~I’ve just never heard of anyone trying to dismiss a game for being a JRPG~
And I remember the 2000s where that was common among gamer culture. So what now?
A duel to the death, obviously
While I totally understand this devs point, it’s kinda hard to separate this genre from the name at this point. I’d happily ditch JPRG in a heartbeat but it doesn’t have a good alternative. Turn based doesn’t describe all games that fit in that genre and can be mixed up with card games and such. Calling it a FF or Pokémon clone would be worse imo.
Typically I tend to just skip genres in general for all media. It’s really all fluff and I find the best media tend to blur the line between so many genres that you can’t describe it easily.
I’ve heard some people try to use “eastern RPG” instead, but I’m not sure it’s caught on.
For what it’s worth, “western RPG” (or “WRPG”) seems to have caught on; some people call this style “computer RPG” or “CRPG”, but I’d say that even more inaccurate of a label. So yeah, WRPGs and JRPGs.
And meanwhile, we also have action RPGs, which can be subdivided into games that are more similar to something like Diablo (action WRPGs) vs. games that are more similar to something like Ys (action JRPGs).
And then we have strategy RPGs. And then we have MMORPGs. And then we have dungeon crawlers. And then we have roguelikes, which are distinct from dungeon crawlers despite also involving going around a dungeon.
Okay let’s be frank here, “role-playing game” itself was never a great name to begin with in the first place. There’s the famous comment that if you’re playing any Mario game you’re playing the role of Mario. But rather, “RPG” is just the broad umbrella for games that are descended, however distantly it may be, from D&D. Kinda. (I’ve heard that at one point Zelda 1 was called an “RPG”, though obviously the meaning of the term has become a little more specific since then.)
I dunno I find the JRPG tag akin to the anime tag. If you get down to it anime as a category covers a wide range of genres, art styles, animation styles , and so on. That said there is a DNA throughout that does unite a lot of anime. Series and creators are inspired by other older anime and manga and games and even the non japanese pop culture that influences the creators is filtered by the impact that thing had in Japan.
As a category JRPG used to refer to a very specific story heavy game with turn based combat and usually random battles and leveling up that originates in japan. There are many modern games that have evolved beyond that old school system and look, but the DNA is still there. FFXV despite being open world, having action based combat, and realistic graphics still feels more like a classic final fantasy than it does like Fallout or elders scroll.
I also feel like that there’s a bit of revisionism towards bias against JRPGs. I was chronically online in the 00s on gaming message boards and RPGs were held up as a gold standard among a lot of gamers and I bet even today you’d find quite a few “BEST GAME EVER” lists that would put FFVII and VIII and chrono trigger up there as some of the best of all time.
In the console space at least in the US the default RPG was JRPG for the longest time. There were some western RPGs on consoles but they were few and far between and not nearly as popular. It wasnt until the xbox into the 360 and ps3 gen that C-RPG devs started releasing on consoles. After years of being low sellers on PC this subgenre hit the mainstream and felt like a breath of fresh air especially with this not being the best year for many landmark JRPGs like Final Fantasy.
It is at THIS point in the late 00s into the early to mid 10s that things start getting toxic because gamers are gamers and have abrasive and bad communication skills. I feel like even then these kinds of dickheads werent in a majority and sales of big name Japanese RPGs along side the slow trickle of formerly japan only RPGs like Dragon Quest show that the demand and success is still there. At most there was a brief dip as many Japanese “style” games in general fell out of fashion with western gamers as western devs started getting more and more of the console pie.
I dunno it feels more like there was a blip in sales and the dev is trying to rationalize it as racism based on toxic gamer culture. Which is a fair assumption to make towards gamers but they still sell millions.
Dark Souls is a JRPG
https://neverendingrealm.com/opinion/the-new-debate-is-dark-souls-a-jrpg/
You can’t determine the meaning of a word or phrase just by interpreting its linguistic roots. Yes, Dark Souls is Japanese, and a Role Playing Game (I guess; I haven’t played it), but the term “JRPG” doesn’t merely mean “Japanese Role Playing Game”. It refers to a particular style of game that, until quite recently, was exclusively made in Japan. This is what puts the “J” in “JRPG”, but the term wasn’t invented to split Japanese RPGs off from other RPGs just because they were Japanese (as the linked article suggests). There’s really no reason to do that. If that’s all it was, we’d just say “RPG”. It was invented to describe a particular aesthetic that was very distinct relative to other CRPGs.
I can see the logic behind redefining the Legend of Zelda as a JRPG. That said, it would have been an invalid classification at the time, as there was a world of difference between something like Dragon Quest and something like The Legend of Zelda, and the entire point to the acronym “RPG” was to distinguish the two. Weirdly, we called LoZ an “adventure game”, though there is no relationship between the term “adventure game” on the console scene, which described what we would now call an “Action RPG”, and “adventure game” on the PC, which described what we would now call by names like “Object Hunt” and “Visual Novel”. Words are weird, and their meanings can’t be deduced simply by breaking apart their linguistic roots.
I mean, it’s not the rest of the world’s fault that Japan produced enough Final Fantasy clones to create a whole genre. But I guess we can try to call them something else. FFRPG? Linear RPG? Grindy-RPG? Not-Really-RP-RPG? Semi-Open-World Turn-Based Narrative? What would be preferable?
Lol, yeah this is such a bizarre take. Like, no one calls Elden Ring a JRPG even though it’s made in Japan. JRPG is a genre, full stop.
The WRPG is also a thing. There is a very clear difference in how developers in the West versus the East approached the adaptation of the TRPG to the video game format, which is what all RPG’s are rooted in. Square/Enix/Falcom and others used prebuilt parties and turn based combat, with a heavy emphasis on story, while western developers put way more control into players hands with character creation and role play (and often real time rolls/gameplay), with less developed stories and side characters. No approach is the “correct” one.
What would be really interesting to hear reported on is whether this was rooted in player preference. Like, did Japanese TRPG players gravitate more toward prebuilt campaigns and characters? Did Western players indulge in more varied self expression and try to break the game while disregarding the story the DM was trying to tell? Tbf, the former sounds much nicer to DM.
Seems kinda whiny. I’ve never heard jrpg used in a bad way.
I’d like to see a poll or something to hear if most japanese devs feel this way. I bet it’s just a vocal whiny minority.
I love jrpgs, chrono trigger is one of the best games ever made, and I’ve put a big chunk of my life into dragon quest games.
JRPGs definitely did get dunked on sometime within the past couple decades. There was definitely commentary going around about how JRPGs were somehow bad because they’re too linear and tended to have too many similar story tropes/character archetypes and random battles were bad, yadda yadda. Some people even speculated that the genre was dying out. (That prediction obviously turned out to be wildly inaccurate.)
I guess it could be argued that some people did dunk on it for culture-specific reasons, especially for the anime art.
Not really shocked to read the reaction in these comments.
People always get irate when someone points out that language they’ve been using for a long time is actually inherently problematic and perform all kinds of mental gymnastics to avoid admitting it.
I mean, I do understand that JRPG is somewhat problematic.
The problems it’s not going to change because it’s too deeply ingrained, and if you try to introduce another term it’s just going to end up being either nobody understanding what you mean, or what is already happening where we try to briefly describe JRPGs as something else and people point to this other genre with that one mechanic that is still massively different from JRPGs.
Like we could just say “Dragon Quest-Clone”, or “Final Fantasy-Clone”, or “pokemon clone” but that’d be significantly more insulting to devs I feel, but really what people want are the kind of turn-based combat you’d see in Pokemon, Earthbound or Final Fantasy. But like the only way it’s changing 30 years later is if you use a term that’s much more “There’s no way you don’t know what this is” than JRPG.
