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Yeah, for sure. It has a weird stigma, where people might use the word "anime" as a derogatory (eg. "Fire Emblem has gotten too anime."), when all it really boils down to is that they personally don't like certain tropes.



Truthfully, America in the 1980s was a little bit averse to Japan. Perhaps it was a hangover from World War II, combined with Japan's economic prominence of the era, that caused some Americans of the time to take pause. So, even Nintendo back then made an effort to downplay the fact that it was a Japanese company. (Hard to do with a name like "Nintendo.")

But as I see it, the kids back then that grew up watching anime or playing Japanese games (even as altered as they were) were the ones who gained the appreciation for it, and later as adults, allowed it to be more acceptable. By the time the Wii came out, Nintendo's advertising even leaned into its Japanese origin.

But yeah, even now, some people in the West still view things that are "too Japanese" as this weird foreign thing that only "weebs" are into.



This is a perception that actually goes back a long way. Another term that isn't really used anymore is "CRPG" for Computer RPG. Western RPGs were something that appeared more on PCs and were more complex, whereas JRPGs appeared more on consoles and were more streamlined.

Another thing to take into account is that RPGs on consoles were a *very* niche market in the West during the '90s. We look back on the SNES as a great haven for RPGs, but in reality, in North America, the genre didn't break into the mainstream until Final Fantasy VII came out on PlayStation. Before that, the few JRPGs that got localized were sometimes watered down and made much easier in an attempt to be more accessible to the Western audience. This fueled the perception that JRPGs were shallow experiences compared to WRPGs. (There's an old joke that goes, "How do you beat a Final Fantasy game? Press the A button until you get to the end.")


I appreciate your perspective on this, so thank you.

I mean, I'm not trying to sound entitled or impatient, but the relative silence is conspicuous at this point.

Rationally, I know Nintendo has been been working on the game for at least five years, and if there's some big twist they don't want to telegraph, that's fine. Frankly, I don't expect the gameplay demo to be much more than a closer look at what's already been shown in previous trailers, plus maybe an extra detail or two.

My suspicions about the dev team vs the marketing may not be entirely off base, though. Here's what former NoA staff member Kit Ellis (of Kit & Krysta) tweeted:

Here's an English trailer for Ys Memoire: The Oath in Felghana, but it's not an announcement for a Western release. Rather, it seems that it's just for the Asia region outside Japan. The scheduled release is May 25.

So, Nintendo Life decided to rank every Atelier game currently available on Switch.

From what I've seen in regards to Atelier, this kind of thing varies greatly depending on the individual (as can be seen by the comments section), so it's not worth taking too seriously. But it was fun to compare it to YL's ranking.

I've heard mixed things about Tokyo Xanadu. It's supposed to be like a mix of the dungeon crawling of Xanadu with the combat of Ys and the involved storytelling of Trails/Kiseki. Whenever I used to watch someone streaming the game, all I saw were endless cutscenes with verbose dialog. It seemed more like a visual novel with some occasional dungeons.

The game was originally localized by Aksys Games, so not sure what this version's chances are of being released outside Japan.

This news is a week old at this point, but I wanted to bring it up to hear what any of you guys might have to say about it.

Basically, during an interview, the producer of Final Fantasy XVI, Naoki "Yoshi-P" Yoshida, took issue with the term JRPG, saying that when it first started being used around 15 years ago, many Japanese developers considered it discriminatory. They didn't like being compartmentalized from a more general use of the term RPG because they didn't see the games they were making as separate from RPGs made anywhere else.

You can see the full quote in this Eurogamer article.

This caused debate about whether the term is really discriminatory, and a lot of people pointed fingers at games press in the '00s for sometimes using the term in a negative way, thus creating a stereotype.

This got me to thinking about how I've used the term over the years, but looking through old posts here on the forum, as well as on Twitter, I was surprised to see that I actually haven't used it much. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) Instead, I usually just used the general term "RPG."

In my mind, however, "RPG" is more of an umbrella term that encompasses all of the subgenres, such as action-RPG and strategy-RPG, as well as JRPG. (Plus, "WRPG" and "European RPG" are also terms that exist.) Furthermore, I always used to think of the term "JRPG" in a literal sense: an RPG made in Japan. More recently, however, I've come to think of it more as a stylistic distinction. For example, Elden Ring is an RPG made by a Japanese developer, but it's not necessarily what comes to mind from the term JRPG. On the other hand, you have indie games like the upcoming Sea of Stars, an RPG made by a Canadian developer, but it's specifically modeled after classic Japanese RPGs like Chrono Trigger.

Even during the time I decided I didn't want to play RPGs anymore, it wasn't about Japanese RPGs specifically. Indeed, the few RPGs I did play at that time were things like Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles.

And when I got back into RPGs properly, around the year I played Ys Book I & II and Xenoblade Chronicles, I also played through a couple of games in the classic Ultima series. Not long after that, I became a fan of the Quest for Glory series.

Kit & Krysta had a good discussion of the topic on their podcast here. Basically, they understood where Yoshida was coming from, but also made note that a lot of people would consider their favorite genre to be specifically JRPGs. They also felt that Yoshida brought the topic up because Final Fantasy XVI is intended to reach an audience that might not like the typical JRPG stereotypes, and thus he wanted to distance it from the term.

Anyway, what are you guys' thoughts? Is JRPG a dirty word?

I'm not sure what I expected from this, but given how it was hyped up as the final trailer, I feel like it wasn't that exciting.