Final Fantasy 16 producer Yoshida sparks debate over use of JRPG term
eurogamer.netFinal Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida has criticised the term JRPG, sparking debate among players online.
In an interview with Skill-Up following previews of the game, Yoshida was asked about how JRPGs have advanced in comparison to action games. According to the interviewer, Yoshida was visibly uncomfortable with the phrase.
«One thing [Yoshida] wants to get across is that when we create games, we don't go into them thinking we are creating JRPGs, we are just creating RPGs. The term JRPG is used by western media rather than users and media in Japan,» said localisation director Koji Fox.
Yoshida went on to explain that for many Japanese developers, the term was considered discriminatory when it first appeared 15 years ago.
He said (as translated by Fox): «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. 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. We understand that recently, JRPG has better connotations and it's being used as a positive but we still remember the time when it was used as a negative."
He continued: «I remember seeing something 15 years ago which was basically a definition of what a JRPG was vs a western RPG, and it's kind of like Final Fantasy 7, and it has this type of graphics, this length of story, and compartmentalising what we were creating into a JRPG box, and taking offence to that because that's not how we're going into creating. We were going in to
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