Over the past year, discussions about the accuracy, validity and relevance of the term JRPG, used not unusually primarily among English-speaking audiences as shorthand for not unusual themes and design sensibilities and incubated in the games of role created, have gained momentum in Japan.
The term JRPG can be traced back to the likes of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, but today encompasses turn-based games like Persona 3 Reload or Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth as well as action games like Tales of Arise or Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, extending beyond an anime aesthetic or specific combat styles. Millions and millions of people seek out JRPGs looking for a specific experience, and it seems like every year the term’s umbrella gets wider.
Final Fantasy 14 boss Naoki “Yoshi-P” Yoshida isn’t a fan of the term and once considered it “discriminatory.” In a comment (via translator) last year, he explained that “we don’t go into them thinking that we’re going to be creating JRPGs, we just go into them thinking we’re going to create RPGs.”
Bayonetta director Hideki Kamiya is sometimes warmer about JRPGs and says Japanese developers deserve to be proud of them. “It’s more about the unique differences in our culture and how our creativity influences,” he said, “that we Japanese creators have this sense of uniqueness when we create content. “
Final Fantasy veterans Tetsuya Nomura and Yoshinori Kitase, two of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s production executives, have been parted ways, and Nomura said he’s “not too excited” about it.
“When we started doing interviews for the games I started doing, no one used that term; they just called them RPGs,” he told The Guardian. “And then, at some point (I don’t forget exactly when), other people started calling them JRPGs. And I’m not really sure what the goal is behind that. I found it a little strange, and a little strange, I never understood it, or why it’s necessary.
Kitase, on the other hand, sees no challenge in it and moves closer to reading Kamiya. ” If [JRPG] is only used in terms of otherness, perhaps to show another gaming technique or a unique flavor in terms of gaming made in Japan, that’s fine with me,” he said.
JRPG does not exist in a vacuum and is never the only, or arguably even the best, way to describe a game. There’s definitely a lot to unpack here, including the term’s documented, once-derogatory usage. In previous console generations especially, it was sometimes used to pigeonhole Japanese games perceived by some to be of a lower quality. Oppositely, praise for JRPGs might be weaponized to say a game is good ‘for a JRPG,’ or to imply that this is the only type of game that Japanese devs are capable of – both patently ridiculous arguments.
Then there’s its connection to real-life Japanese developers, as opposed to developers around the world who can emulate the same style, as is the case with games like Sea of Stars, powered by Chrono Trigger. What about role-playing games created by Japanese developers that are more like Western role-playing games?FromSoftware’s Elden Ring and even Final Fantasy 16, which is proudly fostered through Game of Thrones and is clearly action-packed, are applicable examples. (Aside from any negative connotations, our own Dustin Bailey did a clever job of addressing the question: if developers don’t like the term JRPG, what do we use instead?)
Intrigued by the ongoing debate, I really wanted to pop the question to the author of Astlibra Review, a solo Japanese developer named Keizo. Regardless, I was excited to tell the guy what has quietly become one of the top-rated JRPGs (there it is back) on Steam, and I asked him what he thought of the term as a general descriptor and as a description. of Astlibra Review in particular. Array: I made this query in large part because the game boasts of returning “to the golden age of JRPGs” on its Steam and Nintendo Switch store pages. It was a translated email interview and unfortunately I wasn’t able to delve into it, but I’m very interested in your response:
“This is a term I’m hearing for the first time because it’s not used in Japan. If it’s referring to a game created by Japanese, then I think Astlibra fits that description. “
It’s a literal interpretation, but a fair one, and one that highlights not just important regional differences, but also how much meaning is prescribed, assumed, and potentially lost whenever JRPG is used. Keizo very specifically made Astlibra Revision “simply because I wanted to play an action RPG,” and as a bit of anecdotal evidence, “action RPG” is the most-used user-defined tag on its Steam page. But it’s swiftly followed by JRPG, and in my mind the term is a fair fit in the same way that you could reasonably call the Ys games both JRPGs and action RPGs. The whole thing is a mess, clearly, but I think it’s a permissible mess as long as the term is used to describe, categorize, and recommend games in good faith, even if we never reach a perfect definition of JRPG.
After writing one of the wildest narratives I’ve seen in a game, Keizo agrees “it was a miracle that the story came together in the end.”
Austin freelanced for PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and many more while completing his career in journalism, and has been with GamesRadar since 2019. They have not yet learned that his position as leader is just a cover-up. for his career-spanning Destiny column, and kept up the ruse by focusing on existing occasions and casual feature films, while going for as many roguelikes as possible.
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