Final Fantasy 16 Director Naoki Yoshida Considered JRPG A "Discriminatory Term"

thegamer.com:

When you think of a JRPG, you usually think of turn-based combat, a cast of colorful characters, and an 80 hour long quest to save the world from some kind of impending doom. Final Fantasy was one of the pioneers of the classic JRPG, though the director of Final Fantasy 16 isn't a very big fan, going so far as to explain it was once considered a "discriminatory term".

In an interview with YouTuber SkillUp (thanks RPG Site), Naoki Yoshida was asked whether he thought that the JRPG genre has advanced and adapted in the same way standard RPGs have, to which he responded by explaining the term is extremely disliked by some developers at Square Enix and in Japan as a whole.

Related: Final Fantasy 16 Has Earned The Right To Take Itself Seriously

"This is going to depend on who you ask, but there was a time when this term first appeared 15 years ago, and for us as developers the first time we heard it, it was like a discriminatory term," explains Koji Fox, Yoshida's translator and translation lead for Final Fantasy 16. "As though we were being made fun of for creating these games, and so for some developers the term JRPG can be something that will maybe trigger bad feelings because of what it was in the past. It wasn't a compliment to a lot of developers in Japan."

The idea is that many in Japan believed that the term 'JRPG' was used by the West and made a popular term to section off Japanese developed RPGs. It's a term that is very rarely used in Japanese game development, and many believed its popularity in the West was an attempt to put games developed in Japan into their own box to try and separate them from Western developed titles.

Of course, Yoshida himself doesn't think that way now and acknowledges that the term JRPG