The ‘JRPG’ label has always been othering

polygon.com:

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.”

JRPG is short for “Japanese role-playing game.” Though the term simply refers to RPGs made by Japanese developers, it has also become a label prone to stereotyping. Over the years such stereotypes have led to both discriminatory media coverage and conversation around such games. And as a kind of “Japanese aesthetic” has become popularized, especially in recent years — as Japanese cultural exports have become sought after overseas — studios have attempted to recreate the look and feel of such titles, with a tokenizing preference for specific eras of Japanese history. This aesthetic has become commoditized and repackaged — but it is ultimately still “othering.”

How the term “JRPG” came into existence is less than clear. Though RPGs had been developed in Japan since the 1980s, the term “JPRG” seems to first appear as early as 1992, as seen in an archived conversation on an