The term’s historical baggage lives on today

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.”

  • corm@kbin.social
    8·
    1 year ago

    Seems kinda whiny. I’ve never heard jrpg used in a bad way.

    I’d like to see a poll or something to hear if most japanese devs feel this way. I bet it’s just a vocal whiny minority.

    I love jrpgs, chrono trigger is one of the best games ever made, and I’ve put a big chunk of my life into dragon quest games.

    • alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      I’d like to see a poll or something to hear if most japanese devs feel this way. I bet it’s just a vocal whiny minority.

      i mean, beyond the fact that you’re calling a very established Japanese developer a “vocal whiny minority”… the article literally touches on how opinions aren’t homogeneous (because obviously they won’t be), and provides a link to how the Xenoblade Chronicles X developers feel about the term. here are their thoughts, for context:

      RPGs are the only genre I can think of where there is a designation between the country of origin. Why do you think that’s unique to RPGs?

      Takahashi: You may not be aware of this, but I think a lot of the time when people use JRPG in the Japanese market, they actually do have negative feelings that are building up behind that. Unless the rest of the world shares those negative connotations, then that’s not something I would worry about at all.

      Yokota: Certainly, it often designated to people that they might see a similar presentation style that they see in anime or manga.

      Takahashi: I like to think about the fact that even in the US market, you guys say “comics,” but you also say “manga.” The two words designate the country of origin, or the style, if it’s the case of someone emulating that. It’s the same in Japan where we say manga, but we also say american comics. I feel like this kind of usage is similar to what we’re seeing with “JRPG” being used a term outside of Japan.

      it just also thinks the balance of evidence supports its claim, even if some Japanese developers embrace it or are ambivalent to it: that the term is primarily used to other the genre. you can take or leave that claim—it’s not wrong to not agree with it—but this specific point is something that makes me assume you didn’t read the article, just the title or maybe a paragraph.

    • GlennMagusHarvey@mander.xyz
      1·
      1 year ago

      JRPGs definitely did get dunked on sometime within the past couple decades. There was definitely commentary going around about how JRPGs were somehow bad because they’re too linear and tended to have too many similar story tropes/character archetypes and random battles were bad, yadda yadda. Some people even speculated that the genre was dying out. (That prediction obviously turned out to be wildly inaccurate.)

      I guess it could be argued that some people did dunk on it for culture-specific reasons, especially for the anime art.