The ‘JRPG’ label has always been othering

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."

sandriver,

Honestly feels like a bit of a gross misuse of the word "othering" given what material horrors are associated with the process. Especially bitter coming from Mr Naoki "economics justifies transphobia" Yoshida.

I feel like there's an important point in the valence of the word shifting as the American games industry and its colluders in the gaming press started trying to cut foreign and indie developers out. I think I completely missed out on the process of the word becoming pejorative, because I was mostly playing Nintendo and retro games during that era and not really talking about them online outside of people that also liked those kinds of games.

I do think it's interesting and sad though that negative valence can be attached to an entire region, and specifically a region outside "the West". "Slavjank" would be another example; meanwhile the endless litany of very poor quality games coming out of the UK in the 80's and 90's was never given a simple and catchy term...

But that leads to a point that there's also something to be said that valence can be contextual. "Jank" means different things to different people and can be meant appreciatively or pejoratively.

Within my friends with the same background and from the same (console) generation as me, and who like the same kinds of game as me, there is definitely a subgenre of RPG with a high degree of mechanical depth and novelty, typically made in Japan, that we crave more of; so some kind of catchy subgenre term is useful.

Half serious but I think the real solution is to start describing mechanically over-streamlined Hollywood wannabes as WRPGs.

HappyMeatbag,
@HappyMeatbag@beehaw.org avatar

I respectfully disagree with Yoshida. I never considered JRPG a “discriminatory” or “othering” term. JRPGs have their own style that’s distinct enough to warrant identifying, like the industry distinguishes between “first person shooters” and “third person shooters”. To a non-gamer, the difference may seem trivial, but to people who actually play the game, it’s huge.

That being said, I’m surprised that someone so closely involved with gaming would make such a statement. If anything, it sounds unnecessarily defensive.

exohuman,
@exohuman@kbin.social avatar

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”.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@kbin.social avatar

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.

azureeight,
@azureeight@beehaw.org avatar

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?

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@kbin.social avatar

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.

Hammy,

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.

Quentinp,
@Quentinp@lemmy.ca avatar

It's a way to communicate what you expect from a game not some conspiracy to brand all Japanese RPGs lol. Like saying a game is a soulslike or roguelike. I mean Elden Ring is sort of an RPG and never heard anyone call it a JRPG. For JRPG I expect, anime art style, party system, turn based combat, probably a lot of drama lol.

Kwakigra,
@Kwakigra@beehaw.org avatar

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?

AnonTwo,

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.

Deceptichum,
@Deceptichum@kbin.social avatar

But many CRPGs are turn based without having tactical movement.

AnonTwo,

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)

Skray,
@Skray@kbin.social avatar

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.

AstralWeekends,

Really well-done article, thanks for posting.

Sami,
@Sami@lemmy.zip avatar

Dark Souls is a JRPG https://neverendingrealm.com/opinion/the-new-debate-is-dark-souls-a-jrpg/

Otome-chan,

>calling zelda an action-rpg
>calling zelda a jrpg

this is worse than the "a hotdog is a sandwich" thing.

Sami,
@Sami@lemmy.zip avatar

Every game is an RPG

Otome-chan,

I hate when people do that. like no, just because you play a role in a game doesn't mean it's a rpg. though honestly genre names are so horribly named. like wtf even is an "action adventure"? aren't most games adventures where there's action?

Otome-chan,

or "simulation" games. like every fucking game is a simulation!

LennethAegis,
@LennethAegis@kbin.social avatar

or "music" games, what game doesn't have music?

DaSaw,

Most games aren't simulations. The difference between a simulation and a game that isn't a simulation is that... the game is usually way more fun, and a simulation is usually very difficult to play. Take racing games. Cars handle way differently in racing games than in real life, which someone will find out if they try to drive a race car simulator and find themselves quickly spinning out. (Hopefully they learn it on a simulator. I've seen people learn it in real cars; it is an expensive lesson.)

Otome-chan,

so it's a simulation of a car that works a bit different from real life

barsoap,

The opposite of simulation is arcade, "simulation" meaning "as close to real life as we can get it" and "arcade" meaning "let's optimise this for gameplay instead".

Don't try to dictionary your way around genre descriptors that's not how they work.

neotecha, (edited )

Action games and adventure games used to be two separate genres, but their similarities caused people writing magazine articles to group them together, under a single term "action-adventure" but they were often grouped together. You can think of it as "either or", rather than some weird neologism

[Edit: i can't back up the statement that they were merge by magazine writers, that's just where i first saw them merged]

Otome-chan,

That's actually not the case. Action adventure games are neither adventure games nor action games. Adventure games refer to text adventures. "action adventure" then is an adventure game, but that isn't turn/text based (hence "action"). Similarly, an "action game" is something like pong.

It's just an unfortunate name due to the weird history of game genres.

thingsiplay,
@thingsiplay@kbin.social avatar

Correct. But the genre names usually have a history how they originated. Problem is, while the games changes, the names of genres did not. It's a mess. To be honest, it was a mess from the beginning, but it got worse over time.

I personally see "genres" like tags grouping a game in a few words. With the possibilities and variety of games of today and the ancient genre names of the past, classifying games based on a single genre name does not workout always, especially with terms as broad as Action/Adventure. We even have genres or "game types" named after games titles, such as "Metroidvania", "Souls-like" or even "Breath-like" (yeah, some use that term too...).

Some even classify GTA as a racing game; it's ridiculous! But on the other hand, sometimes genres are descriptive of what the game is about to a certain degree "Fighting", "Racing" or "MOBA" are examples of useful groups. That does not mean games can't be classified in multiple groups (hence why I said it makes most sense to use these like tags).

Otome-chan,

the fact that people started using "breath-like" as a genre just shows botw isn't a zelda game. if it were sufficiently similar to other zeldas, they'd say zeldalike but they don't.

Hubi,

Chaotic neutral

DaSaw,

You can't determine the meaning of a word or phrase just by interpreting its linguistic roots. Yes, Dark Souls is Japanese, and a Role Playing Game (I guess; I haven't played it), but the term "JRPG" doesn't merely mean "Japanese Role Playing Game". It refers to a particular style of game that, until quite recently, was exclusively made in Japan. This is what puts the "J" in "JRPG", but the term wasn't invented to split Japanese RPGs off from other RPGs just because they were Japanese (as the linked article suggests). There's really no reason to do that. If that's all it was, we'd just say "RPG". It was invented to describe a particular aesthetic that was very distinct relative to other CRPGs.

I can see the logic behind redefining the Legend of Zelda as a JRPG. That said, it would have been an invalid classification at the time, as there was a world of difference between something like Dragon Quest and something like The Legend of Zelda, and the entire point to the acronym "RPG" was to distinguish the two. Weirdly, we called LoZ an "adventure game", though there is no relationship between the term "adventure game" on the console scene, which described what we would now call an "Action RPG", and "adventure game" on the PC, which described what we would now call by names like "Object Hunt" and "Visual Novel". Words are weird, and their meanings can't be deduced simply by breaking apart their linguistic roots.

barsoap,

Action adventure would be fair for Zelda as the RPG elements, at least in the SNES era (haven't played anything else) were, well, not really present, from what I gather the series evolved towards puzzle/action adventure. More like Tomb Raider. We certainly didn't perceive Zelda as an RPG back in the days. Things like Secret of Mana are more clearly RPGs, but also not JRPGs. I'd firmly place it as an ARPG.

And, just to give my own disparaging take on JRPGs: They're Visual Novels for Excel-fans.

SkepticElliptic,

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

Tamlyn,
@Tamlyn@feddit.de avatar

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.

AnonTwo,

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)

Tamlyn,
@Tamlyn@feddit.de avatar

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

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