I somewhat agree with the sentiment behind the article, but…

And when you actually pick up the controller and play one of them, you begin to feel like you’ve been through the same gameplay loop as many other games this generation: Tales Of Arise, Scarlet Nexus, Nier Automata, Valkyrie Elysium, YS 8 and 9; they’re all essentially the same action game with different spices and aesthetic fluff.

Games like Tales and NieR (both long-running franchises) have never tried to be anything but action RPGs—not to mention NieR, which I’d honestly just call a straight up Platinum action game. I’d actually call NieR closer to Elden Ring than it is to Tales, and yet the author isn’t out here calling Elden Ring a JRPG. What more does NieR have in common with Tales or Ys than it does with Elden Ring besides country of origin? Does JRPG mean “game with anime-ish art style”? Maybe it’s the art style, but even that’s a bit of a stretch to me.

Which I think strikes at the heart of the matter: what defines a JRPG? Is it the country it came from? Obviously not. There’s a very specific style of game that “JRPG” refers to, and it’s a style that was very popular in the 90s and 00s. Obviously games are still made in that style: I could just as easily show a JRPG renaissance by namedropping Dragon Quest XI, Xenoblade, Yakuza: Like A Dragon, Persona 5, all the Trails games, etc. But the author is basing his notions of what a JRPG is solely on trends from 20+ years ago. Trends change. People change. Maybe in 20 years, people will be whining about whatever Japan is putting out then and saying “WHY CAN’T JAPAN GO BACK TO WHAT THEY DID RIGHT AND MAKE ANOTHER TALES GAME LIKE TALES OF ARISE?”.

Yes, I think developers, studios, and even industries should take pride in where they’ve been creatively, and that’s where I agree with the author. That said, why can’t we let new games be new games? People are still making plenty of traditional JRPGs whether they’re made in Japan or not (hi chained echoes and edge of eternity), so why bother the developers who don’t wanna make those games and essentially tell them “you need to get over your internalized xenophobia”? It’s possible they don’t have internalized xenophobia like this article is suggesting, maybe they’re just tired of people putting them in a box.

Final Fantasy doesn’t “look Japanese”, according to this guy. If that’s a joke, I’m not getting it, and if it isn’t… wat?

I’m old enough to remember these terms developing. I can remember when the first Diablo came out and called itself an ‘ARPG’. There was some controversy over this term and simply the use of the term RPG. As video games developed, there was some prestige around the ‘RPG’ label. By the late 90s, you were looking at a lot of well loved and top games using the term. Gold Box Games, Bard’s Tale, Ultima, JRPGs like Phantasy Star and Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, etc.

Diablo is the first game that I can recall that really prominently advertised itself as an ARPG. They did this of course because it wasn’t really as deep as the rest of them. There weren’t a lot of ‘choices’ to be made in this game. You set up your character and ran through the dungeon. They wanted to use the ‘RPG’ label because it was well regarded at the time and helped move units. It was a lot like calling an RV a sports car because sports cars have wheels, doors, can drive on the road. ARPGs had RPG mechanics, in that there were things like stats and you could choose abilities/spells on level up. But they really weren’t RPGs.

Around that time in PC Gamer there was a great column about what made an RPG an RPG and it was clear that games like Diablo weren’t it, the key from that was an RPG had players making meaningful choices that had a lasting impact on the game world. Whether you threw fireballs or lightning bolts wasn’t exactly a meaningful choice that had impact on the game world.

When it came to JPRGs vs RPGs, the difference was always fairly clear. RPGs were of the D&D variety. While they featured magic, the system itself was somewhat grounded in reality. JRPGs had a distinct style. Big numbers, wild combos, certain aesthetics, etc. To me the JRPG label makes sense, because it is a different style of game. I would note that JRPGs though really didn’t fit the definition of RPG for the most part, a lot of ‘RPGs’ didn’t because there was very little decision making. They were quest style games where you had a party that levelled up, but you weren’t making many decisions in the game that had much an impact.

I think the labels are absolutely important for distinguishing the type of game it is. People want to know what they’re getting into when they play it. If I’m expecting Baldur’s gate and get Diablo, I’m probably going to be a bit disappointed.

The fuss seems to be mostly just the Japanese developers getting butthurt that people in the west got bored of their simplistic combat systems and random encounters, and came up with a term to differentiate the games that, at the time were entirely developed in Japan, that fit this style.

It’s not the Japanese part that made them disliked more. It was the style of gameplay they offered. If you played one, you played them all, basically. They are barely RPGs, taking a more linear, choiceless approach to not only character creation, but dialogue options if even offered, are generally “yes/no” responses to questions that don’t have any real impact.

It took the big developers of these games way too long to actually listen to fans’ very valid criticisms and make changes to these systems, and they still very much keep so many more traditions that the term endures.

Seeing Nier Automata on this list makes me think the author hasn’t finished it. I’m not sure how you finish a full playthrough and come away with “2B’s combat was kind of basic” while ignoring everything else it was doing.