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The ‘JRPG’ label has always been othering (www.polygon.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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."

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Final Fantasy 16 is not really like a typical jrpg. As a dev the dev shouldn't really care about which genre a certain game has, just make a good game and don't care about jrpg, action game or whatever your game is. We player decide the genre to know which group of gamers are maybe interrested in the game.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To be fair, I think the reason they'd care about the genre is because they want to try (their best at least) to grab people who might've liked FF14 or 15.

It's kindof like how Yakuza: LAD turned off a huge portion of their playerbase because as much as people like the story, a good chunk of people who like Action games don't like traditional JRPGs which are more "take your time" kindof games.

(Note Yakuza: LAD is a great game)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Maybe they should gave Yakuza like a dragon a different name or make clear it's a different series as the kiryu series. I think someone should just change a genre of a franchise completly, but if they want do different games as spinoff of a franchise. Persona 5 is a spinnoff of the shinmegami tensei series and has some different approaches

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean, when people said JRPG, they were basically just saying "What game can I play that's like Final Fantasy?", which I feel would've been way worse for non-Square developers.

Or we could've said a game like Pokemon. I feel that would've been possibly worse.

And you can't really do turn-based RPG anymore because people would confuse it with tactics RPGs.

But really we just never made a language-neutral name for the genre of Turn-Based non-Tactics RPGs.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But many CRPGs are turn based without having tactical movement.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Right, but up until post 2000-2010 every JRPG was turn based. CRPG might be too broadly labeled (in fact a couple of the ones I found listed like PoE are also labeled Isometric RPGs)

It's more problematic when compared to tactics RPGs, because similarly every tactics RPG is turn-based, but to a dramatically different sense from the JRPGs.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Most, if not all, the RPG labels are insanely broad in a literal sense.

I've seem some now refer to CRPG as Classic-RPG rather than Computer-RPG which is much more fitting for the type of game that it is used to describe.
Similarly, ARPG is often used to refer specifically to Diablo-clones, although I've seen this usage start falling out of favor.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I disagree, it's the same as distinguishing romance novels from other fantasy novels.

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