Final Fantasy XVI producer Naoki Yoshida has sparked a discussion over the term JRPG, and how it makes certain Japanese developers uncomfortable due to its history of negativity.
As someone currently on an RPG kick, I’m finding the debate pretty fascinating. As the corn in the basement cries, let’s discuss the term JRPG!
#JRPG #FinalFantasy #RPG #SquareEnix #FinalFantasyXVI #JimSterling #Jimquisition #StephanieSterling #Games #Gaming #Videogame
Loved the new intro ^_^
now that you have real tits its getting hard to take you seriously.
a bloke with tits knows his shit, but a woman talking about games is just a hilarious. am i a sexist?!!!
anyway, if they hate JRPG we should stop using. i thought they used it for pokemon and other turn based RPGs
but where do we stand on the souls-like genre. its sounds like calling the work derivative ans uninspiring
59% of this video makes no sense.
Seeing that panel of white dudes speak like that was disgusting.
Maybe TBRPG (turn-based RPG) does work a bit better. It’s definitely something that’ll take a while to change if it ever even does. I’d ask the Cornflakes Homunculus what it (?) thinks but it (?) seems busy at the moment.
I remember when Japanese dev’s responded to western criticism as “American’s being dumb” and “We can’t have open world games cause American’s won’t finish the story”. Where are the videos on that?
I missed the whole derision aspect, don’t understand it, but certainly intend to strike the ‘J’ going forward seeing as it seems to have disturbing similarities to certain other race based prejudices.
Also, you’re younger than me so no you’re not old.
As an interesting parallel, in boardgames, you have the classification of Eurogames, which had a particular focus on resource management, and less emphasis on player interaction. Those were contrasted with “Ameritrash” games, which would be more about following a particular theme, having more player conflict and relying more on chance, usually by dice.
As you might expect, there’s been a lot of online discussion about which side is “better” and both styles have their hardcore fans, but in recent years, as boardgames have gained popularity, you have the lines blurring, with American designers doing euro-style mechanisms and everyone just generally implementing ideas from everyone else.
Japan is not the only country that makes jRPGs. Septerra Core, released in 1999, is a jRPG.
My eyes are bleeding from the new color scheme.
This always happens when genres are invented in a non-western place. They get the [location][genre] label, then they get bad, because genres always have cycles, which makes the term derogatory for the [location], and then the label becomes problematic and political.
Genres should always be descriptive. ARPG is a good example, Turn-based RPG would be good too: city-builder, point-and-click adventure, even rogue-like (which describes the genre based on a game of that genre) are descriptive names. JRPG is just useless for someone who hasn’t played or read about it. If you ask someone who knows nothing about games if they think they’d like JRPGs they can’t even begin to guess.
This brings up so many interesting thoughts. I can understand that JRPG may have gone through a usage shift similar to how gay at one time was only seen as derogative, but had since found a more respectful meaning to many people, albeit not all. I feel that as such, we should be following the preferences of Japanese game developers as to if and how the term should be used.
Following that thought, I could see other, less divisions terms being used to categorize RPG video games. There’s already the action vs turn based, but also the team focused RPG vs the solo player RPG, which is something that informed how the narrative is shared without calling it out directly.
Admittedly, these thoughts are coming from someone who regrets not being able to get into a heavily narrative driven game due to ADHD affecting my focus. It’s the same reason I’ve moved away from watching TV series: I find it hard to dedicate myself to a large length of time to get through a story, because it’ll feel more wasteful of my time if I don’t make it through. Then again, that’s my issue, not the issue for game developers or TV series writers, and I need to decide if I’m going to try to change or if I will find joy in my consumed content another way.
I really want to echo what others have said. In my life I’ve never once known JRPG to be a bad term? western RPGs were one way and JRPGs were another. And in all honesty JRPGs have and continue to absolutely demolish god awful, pandering, and greedy western RPGs. to me JRPGs have always been the GOLD standard.
I’m pretty sure that I missed this entire boat because I’ve never given a hoot about game reviewers or what they have to say. Once it became known that the game review industry is hot garbage I felt so vindicated. but yeah this is wild to me. Final Fantasy IX is my all time favorite game and I did not like FFx-15. With the exception of FF12 which had a great story and mechanics that didn’t suck ass.
but yeah the fact that people used JRPG as a derogatory term, breaks my heart.
Jrpgs are to rpgs as anime is to cartoons
I used this term since I played Grandia 2 on PC back in the day and I never ever understood how you could view these game elements as objectively negative. Thanks game journalism for alienating the very cradle of videogaming
If japanese developers find the term jrpg uncomfortable, then I’m okay retiring the term.
i see this after the twitter hash tag about how Xplay shit on jrpgs…. well shit on a lot of things but it was also the 2ks