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.”
Lol, yeah this is such a bizarre take. Like, no one calls Elden Ring a JRPG even though it’s made in Japan. JRPG is a genre, full stop.
The WRPG is also a thing. There is a very clear difference in how developers in the West versus the East approached the adaptation of the TRPG to the video game format, which is what all RPG’s are rooted in. Square/Enix/Falcom and others used prebuilt parties and turn based combat, with a heavy emphasis on story, while western developers put way more control into players hands with character creation and role play (and often real time rolls/gameplay), with less developed stories and side characters. No approach is the “correct” one.
What would be really interesting to hear reported on is whether this was rooted in player preference. Like, did Japanese TRPG players gravitate more toward prebuilt campaigns and characters? Did Western players indulge in more varied self expression and try to break the game while disregarding the story the DM was trying to tell? Tbf, the former sounds much nicer to DM.
I’m guessing the divergence came from one set of games being designed for a console controller that had only a few buttons and the other set being designed for computers with keyboards and mice. The original Final Fantasy was much closer to D&D than modern entries, but modern entries still have a lot of DNA from the first Final Fantasy.