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 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.