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.”

  • Addfwyn
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    1 year ago

    I definitely feel there is weird revisionism going on with attitude towards JRPGs back then. Maybe it is the company I keep, but I feel like CRPGs (I think I called them WRPGs back then) were more niche than JRPGs. There were definitely people who didn’t like JRPGs, but that was because they didn’t like the genre after trying several entries, not where the game came from.

    There was definitely a drought of JRPGs there in the early 2010s like you said, but I also think that was a general change in game development around then. Games were increasingly expensive to make, few studios could afford a Final Fantasy style budget for their games. Even Square, that had that kind of money, slowed their pace of development significantly. Since then, there has definitely been a rise in traditional style JRPGs (by both Japanese and Western developers) that cater to people who liked earlier games in the genre.