UNITY'S PROFILE

Let the joy of spriting lift you higher

Love it! And yeah, like GRS said that icon is awesome! :D

Glad to see this game getting some much deserved love :D

author=Roden
I'd definitely like to hear other Japanese devs opinions on it before I made a sweeping decision. It seems like he was talking about solely the past based on all the quotes of the interview, not that it was a current problem, but something that reminded older devs of how it felt back in the day.

This is a good point. Rushing to redefine everything after hearing one person's opinion may be a bit hasty (tho I don't doubt his claims that other devs felt the same).

I would also be very curious to hear what other Japanese devs think, but not only that, Japanese fans of the genre who aren't devs themselves. Do they just call them RPGs? How do they differentiate something like Final Fantasy 7 from something like Skyrim or Dark Souls? It would be interesting to find out.

author=Darken
Console RPGS would be apt until Bioware enacted a very simular trend but even started taking out a lot of the strategic aspects of RPGs. Which... is the same for the latest FFs not even bothering with turn based. So idk I think JRPG is still as useful as "anime" even if the animation industry is becoming more and more international. Genres are really just marketing terms. Some millennial weeb might not appreciate Warhammer 40k looking stuff but if you say JRPG its like oh okay I know exactly what youre talking about. I can see just Anime RPG since that includes in the Tales of franchise of games easily but term proliferation is everything.

Yeah this cuts to the heart of it. It's a useful term regardless. It's going to be very hard to find something to replace it with that will be widely embraced. Not ruling anything out, I just want to restate that once these things become solid terms for decades, it's unlikely that something new will replace them.

I agree, as someone who has used the JRPG term forever, in a loving way, it is a bit shocking to hear this news.

I'm of two minds about it. On one hand, I've never used the term with anything but respect to the people who make these games that I love. It's also been used so long that it's deeply established as a way to say "a character-driven RPG" or an RPG with a certain set of tropes/expectations.

On the other hand, it is a bit weird to label a genre after a country, esp as lots of devs outside of Japan (tho mostly indies) desire to create games that evoke that feeling. It's also not accurately descriptive of the genre. To steal an argument I heard elsewhere, Dark Souls and Elden Ring are, technically, JRPGs. They are RPGs made in Japan. But they are not part of the JRPG genre because they are different games who do different things (ie action rpgs, which are different from JRPGs despite the country of origin).

In the same vein, the term WRPG or Western RPG (tho I rarely hear the term used these days) is just as odd, people outside of the west can and have made games styled this way, so the name is also a little strange to me.

I definitely think examining all this is worthwhile at least to some degree, but it may be hard to change much at this stage. There are people who have disliked the fact that "Metroidvana" as a genre is basically just named after two games and have wanted it changed for years, but it's an easily recognized label that is quick to grasp and that people still use. Much the same, the name JRPG is now deeply entrenched, used as tags on Steam and elsewhere, so I'm not sure it's going to be changed so easily.

With all that said, my one takeaway is that it's legit sad that people like Yoshida and others who work and worked in the industry in Japan found this as a hurtful term. Even if it wasn't being used that way by many of us, the fact that they felt singled out by it sucks. I don't know if the label of JRPG will ever go away, but this did make me think hard about it and yeah I'm not 100% sure it's a good label at this point.

Will I use it in the future? Again, I can't exactly say I won't, as Steam uses it as a tag to find games like that, and if I want people to find my games, I need to label the genre, and there's currently not an alternative. But personally I think it's worth mulling over.