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.”
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.