The term’s historical baggage lives on today

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.”

  • ampersandrew@kbin.social
    10·
    1 year ago

    The article presents a lot of evidence for this othering, but I still think back to my own aversion to the genre at the time. To this day, I still don’t play a ton of JRPGs, but I played Chrono Trigger back in the day, and I’m finding some fun in the old-school FF7 for the first time lately. If I were to attribute reasons to the general distaste for JRPGs in the 6th gen, it would be a couple of different things:

    • a wide gap in production value between the average non-Final-Fantasy JRPG and the average action game (even Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts would flip flop between several different levels of production value, and that’s a problem I still have with games today like Yakuza and Street Fighter 6’s world tour mode)
    • tedium with random battles AKA trash mobs, that drag out a game too long
    • difficulty understanding what makes this JRPG different from the last couple JRPGs

    And while I’m sure that 20 years ago we absolutely had trouble in the west accepting Japan’s fashion and gender norms, charitably, the best I can say from my own recollection is that those protagonists were frequently just very unrelatable and/or uninteresting. You can call it something like an obsession with masculinity, but people think Dante is cool and want to be him, which makes it fun to live out that fantasy of virtually being cool like Dante, but no one really wants to be Tidus.

    • Azure@beehaw.org
      3·
      1 year ago

      So you’re saying it is use derogatorily by people who dislike the mechanics?

      • ampersandrew@kbin.social
        3·
        1 year ago

        Kind of, but none of those complaints define modern JRPGs, for instance. You can hear people, including myself, groan about open world games and then still enjoy an Elden Ring when it comes around.