Oh wow Snooze is late to some news but still wants to cover an aging topic? Just a normal day on the blog as far as I’m concerned baby. A bit ago video game director and producer Yoshi-P conducted an interview that caught some attention due to his views on the term “JRPG”. The term has been around as long as I’ve been alive and longer, but Yoshi has stated he hopes society is about to move away from it for good. Now I initially had a knee-jerk reaction to this of “wtf why my guy”. I’ve used the term all my life and thought it was an apt descriptor to quickly let someone know you’re talking about a Japanese RPG and all of the connotations and quirks that go along with it. Yoshi however implied a somewhat muddy history with the term and claimed it used to have some racist undertones, or at least undertones that implied these games were lesser because of that “J” in front of them. Again I thought this man was full of shit, until I put my thinking cap on and considered my history with the fighting game industry and community.
You see, these days anime fighting games are near the top of the damn food chain. Guilty Gear Strive, Dragon Ball Fighterz, Melty Blood, and Blazblue have all received a huge amount of recent popularity compared to prior entries in the series (minus Fighterz). It wasn’t always like this. The word on the street used to be that anime fighters were a lesser, “fake” sort of fighting game where players could just “do whatever” and that these types of titles would never achieve the level of craftsmanship as a Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. Anime games were for lame weebs and the cool bro’s played a real man’s game. As you may be thinking, “wait a minute… Street Fighter is also a Japanese fighting game tho” and you’d be correct. However, the distinct non-anime artstyle is what protected it from this hatred. So in my time I’ve essentially seen a shift to where ANIME fighters are respected and even embraced by the overall community. So while I never lived to see this shift happen with JRPGS, I can definitely see how the same trend could have taken place in the RPG space. I think what Yoshi may be describing was more so a hatred against anime-related RPGs and with the sheer amount of those bad boys that Japan has produced, I could see how people years ago would have basically merged “anime” and “Japanese” into the same thing in their minds.
You would of gotten thrown out of the tournament venue with this one.
Regardless of the past, one of Yoshi’s main arguments was that nowadays it’s hard to even say something is made by one culture, citing Elden Ring as a prime example. Elden Ring was a smash hit Japanese role playing game… but how Japanese is it really? The vast majority of the world’s storytelling and lore was created by George R. R. Martin. And let’s not forget that on a game of this size, there’s probably people from all over the damn globe who worked on it at least in some department (art, coding, QA, music, marketing, etc.). If you actually sit through some modern game credits, that shit will read like: George Foreman, Johnny Goldhand, Yoko Kawakashi, Jeongyeon Park, Josephine LeCroissant, and then you quickly realize how globally involved big games tend to be. Is calling the entire project Japanese a fair assertion at that point? So after hearing his arguments and thinking about my own dealings with communities who were against “anime” games, I am much more convinced that it may be time to retire the term. Of course society will have to decide that for itself, cause that’s the only way it dies out over time (similar to the insult “nerd” actually).
JRPG or not, I'm down for this fantasy.
That’s all I have on this for today, I hope someone out there found it as interesting as I did to consider the history behind a term I consider to be part of everyday vernacular. Is Yoshi-P compelling in his suggestion that JRPG has become an inaccurate term? Did you ever witness people hating on an RPG simply because it was from Japan, or simply because it was in an anime artstyle? Do you think any other modern gaming terms are becoming outdated? Make your character, dodge enemy attacks, and play your role in the comments below!
