In a recent interview, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth leads Tetsuya Nomura and Yoshinori Kitase shared their feelings on the term JRPG, both having different perspectives on it.
Earlier this year, Final Fantasy 14 and 16 producer Naoki Yoshida spoke about the term JRPG, and how he doesn’t like it as when it first started to be used it felt like it was “a discriminatory term.” It’s an understandable point of contention, as while the genre is quite popular now, go back a couple of decades you’d find plenty of people being rude about the games just because they were Japanese. Now, in a new interview with The Guardian, Nomura, creative director of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, and Kitase, producer on the game, have shared their thoughts on the term.
Quite notably, Nomura expressed distaste for the term, whereas Kitase wasn’t as put off by it. “I’m not too keen on it,” Nomura said. “Certainly, when we started doing interviews for the games that I started making, no one used that term – they just called them RPGs. And then at some point – I can’t remember exactly when – people started referring to them as JRPGs. And I’m not really sure what the intent behind that is. It just always felt a bit off to me, and a bit weird. I never really understood it – or why it’s needed.”
I don’t get how this is discriminatory - to me it’d be like saying K-pop, K-pop or French fries is.
Just a guess, but I would suspect it’s because it’s one of the few game genre’s that has a nationality tied to it and it probably feels like a box they can’t escape – just because of where they’re from.
To them, it’s just their own spin on an RPG. No matter how much they change to make it appeal to a broader audience, they’re always going to be a JRPG, which feels very limiting. It’s always going to be “it’s an amazing RPG if you like JRPGs”, which to someone making the game probably makes you feel less than. No other country has that.
It’s similar to splitting k-pop or even j-pop out. TO people making the music, they probably just want to be considered on a world stage as great pop music. Not just K-pop album of the year.
Even if people here don’t mean it negatively, doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel like a shitty box to people. We rarely apply the same sort of boxes to things from other countries. You don’t hear Abba or Robyn are the best S-pop artists of the last 50 years.
I mean that happens with basically every sub-genre. For instance, most people would treat kart racers separately from “pure” racing games. Not because they’re lesser, but because the appeal in the genre significantly differs. Sonic & all stars is just a fundamentally different game from forza horizon in the same way final fantasy is different from fallout. And as it stands, we have terms to refer to it. If we’re going to nitpick the details of the genre name, we might as well really take a deep look at how many kart racers actually race primarily in actual karts. Or how many rogue likes are actually like rogue.
But not every rpg from Japan is a JRPG. Not all JRPGs are from Japan.
If you don’t want to be put into the JRPG box, make something that isn’t a JRPG. They’re in a box for a reason, and it’s because they’re markedly different from other RPG formats.
Then again, maybe the question can be raised about FFVII - Rebirth. But still, I would say that the question is raised anyway because it’s a FF (a series which largely contributed to cement the JRPG genre) and a remake of a game which is indubitably JRPG, not because it’s an RPG developed by a Japanese team.