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.”
There was a time JRPG meant anime characters and clicking through lots of text to get through the story. Also, the “role playing” portion of the story usually went around characters that were hard wired into the game with no customization beyond their name. That’s changing for a lot of games, but the classic JRPG still survives. Maybe the classic kind of JRPG just needs a new name to avoid “othering”.
The “J” isn’t othering any more than any other genre modifier. It sets up my expectations for what type of RPG it is, just like a “C” does. It also doesn’t mean that the game comes from Japan, because Sea of Stars looks to be a JRPG, and Anachronox already was back in the day; it just means it’s the Japanese style, which is neither inherently good or inherently bad.
But the developers have told you how they feel and literally the style isn’t about Japan at all anymore? I don’t understand why you would be do determined to keep it?
Because everyone knows what I mean when I say JRPG, and I’ve never used it as a pejorative. I’m not sure how you’d describe those games better or more succinctly.
This is going to sound really dickish and maybe it is, but people will keep it because it’s a helpful descriptor and the developers feelings about the term are less important than the term being helpful. Plus there’s no ill intent behind it.
It’s like if you built a ranch-style home then threw a fit when people called it that because you don’t like the term. Sorry, but people are going to call it that because it’s helpful and not intended to be disparaging.