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.”
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.
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)
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