- cross-posted to:
- ghazi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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.”
You can’t determine the meaning of a word or phrase just by interpreting its linguistic roots. Yes, Dark Souls is Japanese, and a Role Playing Game (I guess; I haven’t played it), but the term “JRPG” doesn’t merely mean “Japanese Role Playing Game”. It refers to a particular style of game that, until quite recently, was exclusively made in Japan. This is what puts the “J” in “JRPG”, but the term wasn’t invented to split Japanese RPGs off from other RPGs just because they were Japanese (as the linked article suggests). There’s really no reason to do that. If that’s all it was, we’d just say “RPG”. It was invented to describe a particular aesthetic that was very distinct relative to other CRPGs.
I can see the logic behind redefining the Legend of Zelda as a JRPG. That said, it would have been an invalid classification at the time, as there was a world of difference between something like Dragon Quest and something like The Legend of Zelda, and the entire point to the acronym “RPG” was to distinguish the two. Weirdly, we called LoZ an “adventure game”, though there is no relationship between the term “adventure game” on the console scene, which described what we would now call an “Action RPG”, and “adventure game” on the PC, which described what we would now call by names like “Object Hunt” and “Visual Novel”. Words are weird, and their meanings can’t be deduced simply by breaking apart their linguistic roots.
Action adventure would be fair for Zelda as the RPG elements, at least in the SNES era (haven’t played anything else) were, well, not really present, from what I gather the series evolved towards puzzle/action adventure. More like Tomb Raider. We certainly didn’t perceive Zelda as an RPG back in the days. Things like Secret of Mana are more clearly RPGs, but also not JRPGs. I’d firmly place it as an ARPG.
And, just to give my own disparaging take on JRPGs: They’re Visual Novels for Excel-fans.