"SHOULD 'JRPG' BE RETIRED AS A TERM, OR DOES IT HAVE MEANING?"

Naoki Yoshida makes a valid point, but what should we all do?

So, you might wonder, what’s the problem with saying ‘JRPG’? In a recent interview with SkillUp, Final Fantasy XVI and XIV producer Naoki Yoshida took umbrage with the term: “When we create games, we don’t go into them thinking we are creating JRPGs, we are just creating RPGs. The term JRPG is used by Western media rather than users and media in Japan”. It’s true that, as a genre term, it kind of doesn’t make sense in the games’ own country of origin. After all, it literally means ‘Japanese role-playing game’, so why the distinction?

JRPG has clearly come to define more than where a role-playing game was made. These days, as indie devs take inspiration from childhood favourites, there are plenty of games developed outside of Japan that feel like JRPGs, such as Chained Echoes, Undertale, and Cross Code, to name just a few – and it does make you wonder about the name of the genre given that’s the case.