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 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’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